Undocumented Sonoma Valley woman talks about life in the shadows
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.”
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