Eduardo Burgos Quezada
Spring 2022
Waiting for hours in line at the U.S. embassy in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Marisela, and I nervously watched as the applicant before us received a salmon-colored slip. This person would walk away, tears running down her cheek, unable to return to the U.S. Marisela did not know a similar cruel fate awaited her. Remembering one of the most painful days in her life, the day she was separated from her family, my sister Marisela recounts how “They had decided before I even walked up, the paper was printed in in my file before I had even looked this man [embassy interviewer] in the eye. He said that I had been denied and that I was barred from entering the United States for three years, because I had turned eighteen inside the United States, and I had six months after turning eighteen to leave the country.” For almost two years after, a piece of my family would be missing, and my sister would endure the violence of the U.S. immigration system.
Marisela was born in 1999 in the Sierra Madre Mountains in the state of Chihuahua. Here, she was surrounded by bountiful mountains and her extended family, regularly spending time outdoors playing with her cousins. Marisela was only three years old when her family migrated to Wyoming from her home in the Sierra Madre mountains. Marisela arrived to the plains of Wyoming, far from her extended family and the close relationships that are fostered in tight knit farming communities like Chuhuichupa.
As a three-year-old, Marisela attended pre-school and began to learn English before advancing into Elementary School. Growing up in Wyoming proved to have its own challenges, particularly due to her undocumented status. She remembers how anti-immigrant rhetoric would frequently infiltrate into the conversations at school and her peers would extensively use the derogatory term “beaners” as a label for Mexican immigrant students. As a young child attempting to integrate into a new education system, Marisela often felt embarrassed by this label, embarrassed that her father grew bean crops for a living. Six years after arriving in Wyoming, my family returned to Chuhuichupa for seven months. Marisela has few memories about this time in her life but remembers feeling relieved when her family decided to re-apply for tourist visas and return to Wyoming. As a nine-year-old, she missed her friends and her kittens, and was excited to see them again.
Back in Wyoming, and as she grew older, she solidified her friendships, joined athletic teams, and felt like Wyoming was her home. Marisela excelled in the Original Oratory category of Speech and Debate, earning scholarships to continue competing at the collegiate level. Despite the barriers faced as an undocumented student, after graduating Greybull High School in 2017, Marisela began her college career with hopes of studying Psychology and establishing a career. Shortly before beginning her second semester of her first year in college, she received notice from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) requesting that she attend an interview in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua as a last step in receiving her permanent resident card (green card). She could not believe that after living undocumented for her entire life, she would finally gain legal status.
Ten years from the last time she was in Mexico, on February 20th, 2018, Marisela learned her naturalization application was denied simply because she was 18 years old and had been inside the borders of the U.S. without legal status for more than six months. She would not return to her college dorm; she would not have the ability to continue growing her friendships, and she would lose herself in the process of waiting for a pardon. Frustrated with her previous immigration attorney who assured that traveling to Juarez was not risky, Marisela and her family sought advice from a new attorney. This new attorney specialized in immigration pardons and assured Marisela would only be in Aldama, Chihuahua for six months. Time passed and Marisela was still stuck in Mexico. For more than eighteen months, Marisela lived with her maternal grandmother in a country she did not know. Marisela’s mental health experienced the greatest toll of being away from her family, her friends, and the life she had cultivated throughout the years after her migration to Wyoming.
“My life had been on pause while everyone else’s life kept going. Mine was on pause. I did not say goodbye to anybody before I left because I wasn’t expecting to be gone. I was expecting to leave for two weeks and come back, so I left without saying anything to a lot of people.”
“My life had been on pause while everyone else’s life kept going. Mine was on pause. I did not say goodbye to anybody before I left because I wasn’t expecting to be gone. I was expecting to leave for two weeks and come back, so I left without saying anything to a lot of people.” Marisela felt hopeless in Mexico. Her life was centered around her family and friends. Without access to them, she felt isolated, lonely, and like no one could understand the pain she was experiencing. Being far from her life in Wyoming and the person she was before the interview in Juarez, Marisela was living a nightmare. In Aldama, Marisela would spend her days helping her grandmother with daily tasks, communicating with her boyfriend that lived in Wyoming, and slowly working towards finishing her first two years in college. Eventually, Marisela completed her Associates degree from Casper College while in Mexico and shortly after, during July 2019, she received a notice for USCIS to attend a second interview at the U.S. embassy in Juarez. She was terrified that she would receive the same news as the last time she was in that space. Marisela said “That was hard because I had to go through that again after already being denied once, and like just the feeling that it could happen again, and this time it would be permanent, because they would have reviewed my case more than once, that was scary. But then they pulled out the green slip, that was on July 1st of 2019, when I got approved.”
Although Marisela was eager to return home, she feared what this would mean. She lost her sense of self throughout the time she was forced to be away. She says, “coming back, it felt like, like, my life had been traveling at maybe two miles an hour, and now I was coming back, and I was going 120, and there was a brick wall right ahead of me as soon as I came back. I came back and I realized everything I had lost in that year.” Returning to Wyoming, she feels like she no longer belongs. Her parents could not understand how being home didn’t alleviate her mental health. Marisela was no longer the same person that left Wyoming in the winter of 2018. Her ambition as a student had disappeared, she no longer knows what she wants to do. Marisela said, “It is hard to come back and to not do well in school, and to struggle with my mental health. That put pressure on my relationship with my parents because they could not understand. They could understand when I was in Mexico, why I would be depressed, but they could not understand why being here I’m still depressed. That’s because I feel like I don’t belong either here or in Mexico. It’s like I’m living in this space between where I’m too Mexican to be American, but I’m too American to be Mexican in Mexico. So, it’s just, I lost myself there, and since coming back, I still feel like I haven’t found myself. It’s just suffocating to be an immigrant, to be from two different worlds, to experience two different hardships that a lot of people can’t understand.”
“It’s just suffocating to be an immigrant, to be from two different worlds, to experience two different hardships that a lot of people can’t understand.”
My sister lost so much during the time away and did not have the space to talk about her emotions or how restricted she felt. Marisela continues to struggle to adjust to her new life in Wyoming. Her life was turned upside down and she received little support to heal from the violence of family separation that the immigration system produced in her life and the lives of her family. When I asked Marisela what she would change from the immigration system, her response focused on its inhumane nature and the categorization of people as numbers. Marisela said, “the immigration system is very inhumane. You are nothing but a number when you are an immigrant. That is it. And, if they just started to give them even an ounce of humanity, to every individual person who has applied, I think it would be very different, as far as the number of people who get accepted, because I should not have been denied. There are so many people in the system, who should not have been denied. There have been so many people who should never have been deported from the United States. So, I think if we were more humane to one another, and actually treated each other as human beings, I think that would help the immigration system.”
