Coffee with an undocumented neighbor

As fears of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests escalate, many Sunset Park parents go to work each day unsure if they’ll see their children again that night.

Between her home on Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park and her part-time job caring for two children in a comfortable South Brooklyn neighborhood, Rosa (a pseudonym) meets us at a café to discuss her life as an undocumented New Yorker, how she came to the neighborhood, and her hopes for the future.

Elephants on a spider web

Born in Puebla, Mexico, Rosa’s earliest memories are of the turkeys next door, of eating mangoes and avocados, and of the lullabies her mother sang to her.

When Rosa’s mother, we’ll call her Pamela, was just 14, her own mother, who suffered from diabetes, passed away. The disease runs in the family and with her own health on the decline, fearing she wouldn’t live to see Rosa, then just 18 months old, reach adulthood, Pamela and Rosa’s father made the difficult decision to cross the border to the United States without documentation.

Rosa’s father came first, settling with family in Oxnard, California. Rosa and Pamela would come months later. They crossed separately, and though only two-years old at the time, Rosa still vividly recalls the instructions her mother gave her.

“I remember being told by my mom that we were taking a big journey to go see my dad.” Rosa says, the cubes melting in her untouched ice tea. “She said that I had to be very quiet, not to speak, and that I should trust the strangers that I was just meeting.”

Those strangers would take her across the border while she closed her eyes, pretending to sleep and singing a lullaby silently to herself.

El elefante se columpiaba bajo la tela de una araña...

Bears and their cubs

Eventually she drifted off to sleep, and awoke on the other side in a mall parking lot to see her father holding a Winnie-the-Pooh teddy and a Tweety balloon.

“I remember a big beautiful mall with a water fountain, getting some ice cream, going to a store with lots of toys and being kind of scared at the same time because I wasn't sure if that was my dad.” Rosa explains. “I hadn't seen him for a while and I just remember crying. I remember him having to explain details of my mom, of my family, so that I could feel safe with him.”

Eventually her mother arrived and they settled in Oxnard. Rosa describes that time as some of the best years of her life.

“Everything just seemed so wonderful,” Rosa says with a wistful smile. “We were all together and I went to a school that had English and Spanish. It was very beautiful. The culture was amazing. I remember going to water parks and on the way we would see bears with their baby cubs.”

Although her mother disapproved, she fondly remembers attending rooster fights with her father.

“I would beg to go,” she says. “I was a fanatic of it somehow.”

Her parents sold floral arrangements from a van and Rosa insisted on going with them, wanting to be with and support them in some way. She would try to help by peeling off withered petals, but would often get carried away, peeling until they were unsellable.

“They wouldn’t yell at me.” She says. “They would just give me another flower that was probably already more dead than alive that I could just completely destroy.”

She returned to Oxnard a few years ago and says it’s still much the same as she remembered.

“It’s a place where you could go pick up strawberries, blueberries,” she says. “That’s probably one of the places all of America’s fruits come from. There are so many workers there.”

While her own family didn’t work at farms, they had friends who did and Rosa recalls visiting the farms and taking home baskets of fresh fruit.

However, as her mother’s health continued to deteriorate, Pamela visited New York more and more frequently to access the affordable health care available here for undocumented immigrants.

“I remember coming to Sunset Park, and visiting family members, going to hospitals, going to get my mom's insulin,” says Rosa. “And maybe less than a year after that my parents made the decision that we had to live in New York City.”

Tamales and roses

The family settled on Fifth Avenue with relatives and Rosa recalls the difficulty she had adjusting to her new life.

“You couldn’t play in the streets,” Rosa says. “In California, I remember the cars even stopping for the kids to play, something you would never see here.”

It was the first time she felt she was different from the other children. Her mother, who was now being treated regularly and in better health, instructed her to say she was born in California, not Mexico, even while telling Rosa she should be proud of her Mexican heritage. Though she did consider herself from California, having to deny her birthplace was painful.

“Is it a bad thing that I was born in Mexico?” She would ask herself.

She was placed in English as a Second Language classes because she tended to speak Spanish to her friends. She would see many of the kids from Latin America mocked in school because they didn’t speak English well.

Rosa carried the fear that she and her family could be sent back to Mexico. Seeing the police at her school frightened her, making her worry for her mother who sold fruits, aguas frescas and tamales on the corner of 46th and Fifth Avenue, and her father, who worked at a flower shop in the city.

“I would wonder, is everything okay?”

A Dreamer deferred

Rosa gave birth to her son while still in high school, a new challenge added to her difficult life. Her own father had left back to California years earlier and her mother’s kidneys were beginning to fail.

“I remember hearing all the stereotypes: that I wasn’t going to finish high school, that my life was over,” she says. “Sure, things had taken a turn that I wasn’t expecting, but I was excited to have a little friend, somebody that was actually okay with me and that is to this day the most important person in the world for me.”

Rosa considered college, even beginning to fill out forms, but applying to schools and for financial aid meant confronting her undocumented status, and with her mother on dialysis, Rosa couldn’t imagine paying tuition and supporting her new child.

Around this time Donald Trump came into office for his first presidency, moving to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program put in place by the Obama administration. Rosa scrambled to apply before the deadline, but she says her school failed to provide the necessary paperwork in time.

“I would love to say I resent them, but perhaps things happen for a reason,” says Rosa. “I can just keep hoping for the best and that at some point there is a better remedy for many like myself.”

Meanwhile, anti-immigrant sentiment around her school increased. Rosa recalls students celebrating the new administration, even some who were first-generation citizens.

“It was confusing. Did they not love their parents as much?” Rosa remembers asking herself. “Why would they be so happy about something that tears families apart?”

While she avoided any trouble with law enforcement, she was sometimes harassed by other Brooklyn residents.

“I remember being on the bus with my son and having an older American lady telling me to get my son away from her and to get off the bus,” says Rosa. “I was so shocked that that was even happening, that we were in public spaces and being called out that we didn’t belong here.”

Pamela wasn’t eligible for a kidney transplant because of her immigration status, Rosa says.

Just a week before she died, Pamela decided to fly back to Mexico to see her father one last time. As she was getting ready to leave she asked Rosa to come.

“I'm sure I would have gone, but I didn't have my son's passport during that moment to travel with him as a U.S. citizen,” Rosa says. “But now my son goes and he visits her grave with such beautiful memories that he has till this day.”

In with the old

While Trump’s first term was difficult, Rosa thinks things are much worse this time around.

“My son sees the news. He’ll go to school and he has that same fear I had when I was small,” Rosa says. “He doesn’t know if he’ll come back and see me. I don’t know if I’ll make it through the day and see him. And it’s just a terrifying life. And so inhumane as to what people are going through right now with ICE. And all we can do is just hope that that doesn’t happen to us.”

For Rosa, the fear goes hand in hand with anger. She’s angry at the administration and she’s also angry with Trump’s supporters. She says she wishes they could understand how hard she and others like her work, doing the essential jobs they take for granted, like harvesting the produce they buy; constructing the buildings they live and work in; preparing the drinks and foods they consume; and taking care of the children they leave at home.

“I think they should try to walk a day in our shoes, see the struggles that we go through, how we have to choose our families or work, how we have to keep pushing forward regardless if someone passes away in Mexico, whether it's your mom, whether it's your dad, and you cannot go visit them for nothing in the world because if you do, you'll leave everything behind,” Rosa says. “I wish everyone could just see things from a different perspective, not just from hate.”

A glimmer of hope

As Rosa leaves the coffee shop and heads to work, thoughts of her son’s future bring Rosa comfort.

“Sometimes it feels very limiting to not have many opportunities in this country, just because you're an immigrant, just because your parents made a choice that you had no say in.” Rosa says. “But I realized that maybe it wasn't for me, but everything that my parents worked so hard for was for him to have a better future, to have greater opportunities.”

As we went our separate ways Rosa wished to thank local organizations like Mixteca and The Center for Family Life, as well as Councilmember Alexa Avilés, for their support throughout many of her difficult times.