HIS LIFE AS AN UNDOCUMMENTED IMMINIGRANT

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.html

It has been a while since I wrote. I haven’t had much more to add, my immigration woes remain the same.

I read this article however and had to re-post, just in case there is someone out there, someone of my handful of followers who hasn’t read it yet.

I was so humbled by the story I practically have no words. I was so lucky to come here and be surrounded with friends and family. But I know how it feels to live in secret; I know how it feels to carry that burden, that shame, as if you had done something wrong. That’s what we all feel, a type of shame, an apologetic fear. This overwhelming sense of having made the wrong turn somewhere and somehow there was a solution that we missed and this is all our fault.

Mr. J.A. Vargas was so brave I am in awe. And I think it speaks of how trapped he felt by his lies, how oppressing that feeling of not belonging can be that he risked everything he had ever worked for in order to escape that cage he trapped himself into.

“I contribute” He says. I wonder how many times I have said the same thing on my blog. Does it matter anymore if we contribute or not? Do our faces matter? Do our dreams? Our skills, our abilities? I don’t think they do matter.

I felt so close to him, this complete stranger who has spent his entire life leading a double life. His pains, his fears, his dreams, his sense of loss is so familiar it makes me want to cry for him and for myself. Mostly for him, for even though he had his Lolo and Lola and the amazing network of people he spoke of, he was ultimately alone in his deceptions.

We are all in the same situation, brought here at as toddlers, or teenagers and suddenly there is nothing here but uncertainty, there is no secure future, all we left behind was for nothing because the future holds nothing but more rejection.

And then what? How do we change it? Where do we go? Back to a country where we don’t feel we belong? After years of being here and building a life, making friends, falling in love, living…what do we do with it? Do we pretend the past decade, or in his case the past 18 years didn’t happen? Do we pick up our life as if was nothing to go back to a place that we no longer recognize and no longer recognizes us? We are all alone and landless, homeless, without a place to claim or that will claim us.

I wonder what the future holds for him, for me, for all of us.

What a loss for this country if he were to leave it.