At least half a million US citizens have enrolled in Mexican schools since 2010 amid a wave of deportations and voluntary repatriations

by Nina Lakhani and Monica Jacobo

SANTIAGO JUXTLAHUACA, Oaxaca – After 14 years as an undocumented farmworker in the US, Julia Aguilar returned to Mexico last year with her two sons, both of whom were born in California. The boys, then seven and 10, had never previously visited their new home town of San Martín Peras in an isolated corner of the southern state of Oaxaca.

The move was not easy: the two boys spoke English and the region’s indigenous Mixteco language, but barely any Spanish. Life was hardest for the eldest, Jorge, who was unable to make friends or participate in classes at school.

“The children called him names and laughed at his Spanish. The teacher didn’t care, he just sat in class unable to understand or speak to anyone. He cried every day and begged me to send him back to the US,” said Aguilar, 39.

Jorge is one of at least half a million American citizens to enrol in Mexican schools since 2010 amid a rising wave deportations and voluntary repatriations driven by the US economic downturn and family obligations.

Since 2010, 1.4 million Mexicans have been repatriated by US migration officials, and more are likely to follow after last month’s supreme court decision that will block legal recognition of 4 million undocumented parents.

It’s unknown how many others have returned voluntarily, often taking their US-born children with them.

Whatever the reason for their return, the transition is tough for many American-born children who face a shock of cultural and language changes, as well as delays accessing basic education and health services while their families tackle the expensive, onerous bureaucratic process of claiming Mexican nationality.

Integration is particularly hard for children who return to indigenous communities rife with poverty and illiteracy.

Many indigenous families return home to comply with traditional indigenous laws which oblige them to take up rotating community roles such as mayor or policeman, or risk heavy fines – or even losing their ancestral land.

Yucunicoco is a cluster of eight Mixteca communities in Juxtlahuaca, reached by an undulating road through pine-covered mountains patchworked with apple orchards and maize, pumpkin and potato plots. Food is plentiful, but money is scarce as there is no market to sell the abundant produce.

Isabel Mendoza, 28, and Salvador Leyva, 29, were just married when they travelled to Oxnard, California, in 2004 to work on berry farms and save enough money to build a modest house in Yucunicoco. In 2011, they reluctantly returned home because it was Leyva’s turn to run the school committee.

Their two American-born children came with them. Now aged eight and 10, they have forgotten English completely.
“I want to send my children back to learn English and study so they will find better jobs and life for them won’t be so tough,” said Mendoza in broken Spanish.

Mendoza obtained her children’s dual nationality documents before leaving California – something the US is trying to encourage as its process is much more straightforward than Mexico’s complex requirements.

But this is rare. Many parents don’t know what documents are needed; others are afraid to undertake the process because they are in the US illegally. Those who are deported often return without any documents.

Karla Ramírez, 16, was born in Oregon where her mother Rosa Rincón had travelled looking for work. It didn’t pan out, so they soon returned to San Juan Yuta, another isolated Mixteca campesino community, where Ramírez grew up with her Mexican-born sisters. (Names of all the family members have been changed to protect their identity.)

At the age of 11, Ramírez went to live with relatives in Texas where she learned English, ate pizza, went to the cinema, and dreamed of becoming a police officer.

But when she returned for a summer holiday in 2014, Ramírez decided that despite the hardships, she wanted to stay.

Her birth and school certificates were still in Texas, however, and the community school refused to accept her. She stayed home to look after her newborn niece while the others worked in the fields or went to school.

Then in February 2015, she was raped by her brother-in-law. She was too scared to tell anyone, and the truth came out only after she gave birth to a baby girl last October.

When Rincón took her daughter to report the rape, the police refused to register the complaint until Ramírez’s birth certificate arrived from the US with an apostille, or official certification. Then officers asked for 3,000 pesos ($180) for petrol to investigate the crime, which the family didn’t have. Meanwhile, the perpetrator fled.

Authorities have refused to register the baby because Rincón’s Christian name is not spelt correctly on Ramírez’s American birth certificate. The community health clinic, where the baby was born, is threatening to withhold health services including vaccines because she doesn’t have Mexican identity papers.

The family has been torn apart. Ramírez, who has not attended school in two years, is deeply traumatized.

“If only the school had accepted her or I’d made her go back to the US, none of this would have happened,” sobbed Rincón.

Ramírez wants to go back to Texas to finish high school, and the US consulate is helping her apply for a passport and citizenship for the baby, but her future remains uncertain.

In years past, returning parents often paid for a Mexican birth certificate to enable immediate access to school, vaccines and other basic services, instead of applying for dual nationality. This is illegal and makes it difficult for children to later reclaim American citizenship.

Since 2011, Rufino Domínguez and his team from the Institute of Migrant Attention has helped about a thousand families every year register their children as binational.

“Identity is a human right, it’s the key to accessing many things, but this population remains invisible,” said Domínguez, whose term ends in December. “The truth is, violence, poverty and discrimination will eventually drive many back to the US.”

Back in San Martín Peras, Julia Aguilar explains how her son Jorge was so miserable that in the end she sent him back to California to live with his older – undocumented – siblings. He’s happier at school, but separation is painful.

Aguilar said: “He won’t speak to me, he keeps crying because he wants me to go back too, but it’s too expensive and dangerous. It’s the same for everyone here, we leave children behind to find work, and send others away to study. I’ve never had all my children with me at the same time.”

This reportage was produced with funding from the WK Kellogg Foundation, as part of a research project on invisible discriminations by the Journalism on Public Policy Program at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (cide), in Mexico City.

by David Bacon

It took two days on the bus for Catalina Cespedes and her husband Teodolo Torres to get from their hometown in Puebla – Santa Monica Cohetzala – to Tijuana. On a bright Sunday in May they went to the beach at Playas de Tijuana. There the wall separating Mexico from the United States plunges down a steep hillside and levels off at the Parque de Amistad, or Friendship Park, before crossing the sand and heading out into the Pacific surf.

Sunday is the day for families to meet through the border wall. The couple had come to see their daughter, Florita Galvez.
Florita had arrived that day in San Ysidro, the border town a half hour south of San Diego. Then she went out to the Border Field State Park, by the ocean two miles west of town. From the parking lot at the park entrance it was a 20-minute walk down a dirt road to the section of the wall next to the Parque de Amistad.

At 11 that morning, Catalina and Florita finally met, separated by the metal border. They looked at each other through the metal screen that covers the wall’s bars, in the small area where people on the U.S. side can actually get next to it. And they touched. Catalina pushed a finger through one of the screen’s half-inch square holes. On the other side, Florita touched it with her own finger.

Another family shared the space with Catalina and Teodolo. Adriana Arzola had brought her baby Nazeli Santana, now several months old, to meet her family living on the U.S. side for the first time. Adriana had family with her also – her grandmother and grandfather, two older children and a brother and sister.

It was very frustrating, though, to try to see people on the other side through the half-inch holes. So they moved along the wall to a place where the screen ended. There the vertical eighteen-foot iron bars of the wall – what the wall is made of in most places – are separated by spaces about four inches wide. Family members in the U.S. could see the baby as Adriana held her up.

But only from a distance. The rules imposed by the U.S. Border Patrol in Border Field State Park say that where there’s no screen the family members on that side have to stay several feet away from the wall. So no touching.

I could see the sweep of emotions playing across the faces of everyone, and in their body language. One minute the grandmother was laughing, and the next there were tears in her eyes. The grandfather just smiled and smiled. Adriana talked to her relatives, and tried to wake the baby up. Her brother leaned on the bars with his arms folded against his eyes, and her sister turned away, overcome by sadness. On the U.S. side, a man in a wheelchair and two women with him looked happy just to have a chance to see their family again.

Some volunteers, most from the U.S. side, called Friends of Friendship Park, have tried to make the Mexican side more pleasant and accommodating for families. The older children with Adriana sat at concrete picnic tables. While family members talked through the wall they used colored markers, provided by the Friends, to make faces and write messages on smooth rocks. Around them were the beginnings of a vegetable garden. Later in the afternoon one of the volunteers harvested some greens for a salad.

Members of the Friends group include Pedro Rios from the U.S./Mexico Border Program of the American Friends Service Committee, and Jill Holslin, a photographer and border activist. On the U.S. side, another of the participating groups – Angeles de la Frontera, or Border Angels, helped the families that came to the park. “We’re here seven or eight times a month,” said Enrique Morones, the group’s director. “People get in touch with us because we’re visible, or they know someone else we helped before.” Border Angels helps set up the logistics so that families can arrive on both sides at the same time, often coming from far away.

Weekend visiting hours, from10-2, are the only time the Border Patrol allows families to get close to the wall for the reunions. Once a year they open a doorway in the wall. Watched closely by BP agents, family members are allowed to approach the open door one by one, and then to hug a mother or father, a son or daughter, or another family member from the other side. To do that, people have to fill in a form and show the agents they have legal status in the U.S. During the rest of the year, the Border Patrol doesn’t ask about legal status, although they could at any moment. For that reason, Border Angels tells families not to go on their own.

Such carefully controlled and brief encounters are the ultimate conclusion of a process that, at its beginning, had no controls at all. Before 1848 there was no border here whatsoever. That year, at the conclusion of what the U.S. calls “the Mexican War,” the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico was forced to give up 529,000 square miles of its territory. The U.S. paid, in theory, $15,000,000 for the land, but then simply deducted it from the debt it claimed Mexico owed it. U.S. troops occupied Mexico City to force the government there to sign the treaty.

The so-called “Mexican Cession” accounts for 14.9 percent of the total land area of the United States, including the entire states of California, Nevada and Utah, almost all of Arizona, half of New Mexico, a quarter of Colorado and a piece of Wyoming. Some Congress members even called for annexing all of Mexico.
At the time, the city of San Diego was a tiny unincorporated settlement of a few hundred people. It was considered a suburb of Los Angeles, then still a small town. San Ysidro didn’t exist, nor did Tijuana. To mark the new border, in 1849 a U.S./Mexico boundary commission put a marble monument in the shape of a skinny pyramid where they thought the line should go. A replica of that original pyramid today sits next to the wall in the Parque de Amistad. On the U.S. side the road leading from San Ysidro to Boundary Field State Park is named Monument Road, and the area is called Monument Mesa.

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