Undocumented Sonoma Valley woman talks about life in the shadows

‘Gabriella’ is one of around 35,000 undocumented immigrants in the county|

Editor’s note: The following is the story of Gabriella – a wife, mother, and hard-working housekeeper who calls the Sonoma Valley home. She is also one of the more than 35,000 undocumented immigrants estimated to live in Sonoma County. Gabriella (not her real name) spoke with the Index-Tribune’s Kate Williams on the condition of anonymity, to share her thoughts and emotions in a time of increasing anxiety for American immigrants, documented and undocumented alike. – Jason Walsh

The first time Gabriella crossed the border illegally she was on foot, moving with a column of other walkers across Tijuana’s busy pedestrian walkway into San Ysidro, San Diego.

“My husband, when he come, he cross from the desert,” Gabriella said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to cross from the desert because I hear a lot of bad things.”

Instead she and her two small sons spent a month in Tijuana, staying with strangers and moving from house to house. When the coyotes she had hired told her the time seemed right, she gathered her things and awaited instructions.

“My children are so blonde, they pass for American,” Gabriella said.

She was instructed to hand the boys off to a couple, and follow their movements from behind as they walked. “They say, ‘if we move lines, you move.’ But I was so afraid – they’re going to see me! – and I think I look suspicious, so at one point I just stay in my line, and of course they take me.”

Her children disappeared into the throng moving northward, and Gabriella felt the earth shift under her feet.

A week passed. Then another. “Then they say, ‘Next week we’re going to try again,’” Gabriella said. This time she was placed in a car. “By that time, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I am just desperate to come see my children.”

The coyotes placed Gabriella in the back seat of a vehicle and put a pretty young woman in the front. But the young woman was so scared that her hands were trembling. “I think, Oh no good!” Gabriella remembers. “I know how to be a good actress if I have to.” She begged the coyotes to put her in front, where she smiled at the border guard, who waved them through.

It’s been 16 years since Gabriella left Mexico, and she hasn’t been back for a single day since. “Most people like me, they don’t come back to Mexico,” Gabriella said.

Returning from such a trip would be both costly and dangerous. The border crossing Gabriella paid $2,500 to make in 2001 can cost $10,000 or more today. Even when an individual really, really needs to go home, without legally documented permission to return, the risk is too great. “My poor husband, his father died, and he couldn’t go. After that, my mother-in-law is very sick, and he can’t go to help,” Gabriella said.

She folds her hands on the kitchen table and allows a quiet moment to unfold. “That is a very high price to pay,” Gabriella said softly.

She was born in a small town near Guadalajara in Jalisco, a quiet little village not unlike Sonoma. The 13th of 15 children born to her parents, she grew up without seeing much of her Dad. He had come to the United States in the late ‘50s as a bracero, laboring through Sonoma’s harvest each season. Eventually, he managed to secure citizenship for himself, but his efforts to legalize his children failed.

“Because he doesn’t know how to read or write, he paid money to a man who just take it instead,” Gabriella said.

He did manage to get Social Security numbers for his kids, which Gabriella thought gave her permission to work here.

“When I was in Mexico they said ‘you can go and you can work because you have a Social Security number.’ But they never show me the card.” Gabriella’s American Social Security card is stamped with the words, “Not valid for work.” Friends advised her to appeal on the chance that the U.S. government might change her status, but it was 2001, the towers had just fallen, and the American attitude toward immigrants was changing.

“The first month, every time I see a police car I want to run.” Gabriella said. “That year was the two towers. Before that, they give you ID, but after that: no.”

So she works as a housekeeper with entrepreneurial zeal. “I love my job. I like to clean, I like what I do. My job is not like a job, it’s like a bless,” Gabriella said. She pays income taxes like everyone else, and contributes to the economy with every purchase.

“I want to earn my money. Most of the money we spend here. I don’t feel I am a charge to the city, and I don’t want to teach that to my children. They see me go to work every day.”

When her daughter was born in 2006, Gabriella’s already complicated situation grew even thornier. Now, she and her undocumented husband and their two undocumented boys had an American family member with the full faith and credit of citizenship in her pocket. What does an undocumented mother feel when she considers being separated from her American child?

“Oh… it’s too bad,” Gabriella said, her face contorted by the thought.

It is some comfort that her boys are in DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and identified as “dreamers,” though that designation costs $1,500 every other year to maintain. And their tuition at the community college is charged at the international rate, too, set at a price even middle class families would struggle to meet. Additionally, the boys must each pay $500 for permission to work. It’s a punishingly expensive state of affairs.

But her family members have trained themselves to work for the best and prepare for the worst.

“My husband always say to my boys when they are teenagers, ‘Be good and do right. But if you have a problem with the police, you can’t call me. If I go there, maybe we both have to go to Mexico,’” Gabriella said.

Sixteen years is a very long time to live in a state of uncertainty, and in the last year, it’s gotten much worse. “Sometimes, when we are in the street, you can feel people looking at you, like, oh boy,” Gabriella said. “Trump did that. Since Trump we are outside and we are feeling like a little-little-little thing.” She pinches her thumb and pointer finger together to demonstrate.

“We try to survive and be happy, but deep down we know we are having trouble. Every day I go to work and I’m like, ‘Please God, let me go back to home.’ Every day is like an adventure here. You go to the doctor and they say, ‘How do you feel?’ But how can you say, ‘I have a pain in my head every day and my stomach and I feel so tired?’ You have to live like that, but it’s a hard way to live.”

And so the days pass, one after the next, every errand and outing tainted with peril.

“Even if they don’t want to give me residence, I just want permission to work and permission to go out and inside when we want. My dream is the papers. If I have the papers I know we can buy a home. We can give more money for the taxes. I will work hard to have a big home and I will go to Mexico and see my friends and family, and see my mother-in-law.” Imagining these things brings a smile to her face.

In the middle of a dark night just a few months ago, Gabriella was awakened by her husband. The tidy mobile home they live in was cast in deep shadow, and in the blackness she could not make out his face. He called her name urgently, and she reached for a light.

“He say, ‘Gabriella, I think I’m gonna die.’ He was shaking,” she said.

She asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, but he said no, he just felt so bad, sickened by fear. She told her husband that she had the same feeling sometimes. Then she reached for her phone and googled “anxiety attack,” where she learned that laughter was often the best medicine.

In the middle of the dark night she put a “Pink Panther” movie on the TV, and together they laughed until light breached the horizon.

Contact Kate at kate.williams@sonomanews.com.

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