Illegally Yours by Rafael Agustin

Author:Rafael Agustin [AGUSTIN, RAFAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538705940
Publisher: GrandCentral
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

The American Revolution

My mom gently knocked on my bedroom door. She had just gotten home from work and wanted to talk to me. It was a few months after they told me the big news. Knowing her, she simply wanted to lift my spirits. But I was starting to like this new brooding version of myself. If you thought having no direction in life was hard, try having no direction while not being allowed to be in the country.

My mom walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. She looked at me and, with a twinkle in her eye, said, “I tried to tell you the truth about our status before, but then you wet the bed so I thought against it.” I didn’t think that was funny at the time, but I now appreciate a well-structured joke. My mom apologized and said she and my dad had had no choice. They thought it was best that I didn’t know the truth. “Because,” she said, “we didn’t want you to grow up feeling different. Because dreams should not have borders.”

Damn. That shit hit me hard.

“Please don’t be so hard on your father. He’s doing his best. He always wanted to make sure that you valued our sacrifices and hard work. But this one thing, we didn’t think it was necessary for you to know so young.”

My mom’s pep talk worked. She and my dad had sacrificed so much to come to the United States and had been living with this distressing reality for so long. I had only been dealing with it for less than three months. I woke up the next day with a tiny spark under my ass. It didn’t quite resemble fire—thank God because I would’ve had to get that checked!—but the spark was there. In 1997, nobody I knew referred to themselves as “illegal” or “undocumented.” We simply said, “We don’t have papers.” That was me. I didn’t have papers. But it didn’t matter. I was still determined to be that all-American high school student I’d once aspired to be. My dad and I were still at odds, but that was okay. Whatever love I wasn’t getting from him at home, I would just have to figure out a way to get from my fellow classmates at West Covina High.

My mom’s pep talk forced me to put things into perspective. Anywhere else on the planet I might have been doing child labor in a sweatshop, or been a child soldier in some meaningless war, or worse—I could have been stuck all alone inside a cold, desolate cage separated from my parents. Again, it was 1997 and expressions such as “child migrant” or “DACA” or “don’t @ me unless you’re nasty” had yet to enter our lexicon. Beyoncé had not yet taken over the world, and having Bill Clinton in the White House was considered diversity in politics. I was a junior in high school, a promising sixteen-year-old student that looked like an aspiring MTV VJ, and the world could still be anything I made of it.

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