THROUGH HER STORIES, MY grandmother helped me imagine. She told incredible tales about her life and what might have been. As children, we tend to powerfully believe what the grown-ups we love tell us. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are real until your parents reveal them as imaginary. My favorite story that my grandmother Victoria told was a true story—that took place when she was a child in San Antonio, Texas. She saw a woman, dressed all in white with a small white dog beside her, who motioned Victoria to move closer, pointing down at a spot in the open field she had to cross on her way to retrieve water for her family. Victoria had seen the lady pleading in the field before. Scared, she always walked past. But she told some neighbors about the woman, and eventually one of them dug into the ground where the woman kept pointing and unearthed great treasure—enough to buy that very land.
That’s one story my grandmother would tell us every so often when she imagined the things that could have been. She was old by then, a heavyset woman who stood under five feet tall, whose salt-and-pepper hair never succumbed to total whiteness even at the age of eighty-two. By this point, she could no longer work. In fact, she could barely walk. Yet sometimes, in the first days of every month, just after her $335 Social Security check arrived, she would open her cordovan purse and look inside. The purse usually stayed under the sofa. I don’t remember where she bought it but it carried no designer label or tag. It snapped together with gold-colored clips, and the faux leather was chipped on the sides, giving it a look that might pass as antique in the hands of the wealthy women whose homes she used to clean. But on San Antonio’s west side, the place where we lived, it wouldn’t be mistaken for anything other than cheap. With what little she had, she would give my twin brother, Julian, and me, her only grandchildren, ten dollars to go to the store and buy whatever we wanted. It was Big Red and Cheetos for us. She always wanted Fritos and Fresca—or Sprite if they didn’t have Fresca. We would race back to the house and at least for the day didn’t complain about missing Diff’rent Strokes or The Dukes of Hazzard when she wanted to watch Cantinflas or Lawrence Welk—or some other show that ten-year-olds would never enjoy.
Victoria Castro was born in Coahuila, Mexico, sometime around 1914. She told us that her parents owned a small store during the time of the Mexican Revolution. Her father, Victoriano, left to fight in the war and never made it back home. Her mother, Anastacia, cared for my grandmother and her younger sister, Trinidad, until Anastacia developed tuberculosis, an especially lethal disease in Mexico at the time. Victoria talked often—wistfully but also angrily—about her final days by her mom’s side at the hospital. Throughout her life she never forgave her grandmother, who took her away from her mom days before she succumbed to the disease. Perhaps her grandmother didn’t want the young girls to see the final ravages of tuberculosis on their mother’s body. Maybe she figured they might get sick as well. Whatever the reason, Victoria never understood it or accepted it. All she could come back to is the goodbye she never got with her mother.
The closest relatives who could take in the orphaned young girls were north of the border in San Antonio, Texas. Like the Irish who, upon arriving in cities such as Boston and New York, were greeted by signs that read NO IRISH NEED APPLY, my grandmother encountered signs above Texas establishments that read NO DOGS OR MEXICANS ALLOWED. She settled with relatives on San Antonio’s heavily Mexican-American west side in a home that at times housed three generations of extended family. She never made it past elementary school, and spent most of her life working as a maid, babysitter, and cook.
By the time Julian and I came along she had raised my mom to be the first in their family to go to college. And after forty years as a legal resident, she become a citizen during the Camelot years of America’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. The young girl who came to America with nothing, disconnected from her origins and formally uneducated—taught herself to read and write in Spanish and English. I would watch her hunch over Agatha Christie novels with a large magnifying glass, and then I’d borrow it to burn candy wrappers in the Texas sun for amusement.
By a combination of historical accident and familial dysfunction, Victoria Castro was the only grandparent I ever knew. What I know of my other grandparents—which is very little—is just a precious inventory of random facts. My mom, Rosie, was Victoria’s only child—the product of a relationship with a man many years her junior. I don’t believe I ever met Rosie’s father, Edward Perez, but either in my memory or imagination he once gave my mom $200 to pass along to Julian and me. My own parents were together for ten years but never married. Legally they could not since my dad, Jesse Guzman, was married with five children when his marriage fell apart and he started a new life with my mom. His mother, Trinidad, died from liver failure—perhaps from drinking—five years before I was born. His father, whom I only met once or twice, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. People sometimes talk about the deep roots and long branches of family trees; they hold family gatherings with custom-made T-shirts where multiple generations share stories and quibble about the details. I wish I’d had a chance to know all my grandparents, but Victoria’s story is the only one I have to tell, a single branch disconnected from its roots.
My mom, Rosie, was the first person in our family to get involved in politics. By the time I was born, in 1974, my parents were deeply committed to the Mexican-American civil rights movement. They helped run candidates for office, organized marches, and stayed up all night at favorite hangouts talking with friends about the oppressiveness of “the system” toward people like us. I used to fall asleep to the sounds of a living room full of my parents’ friends laughing, arguing, and talking about issues I wouldn’t be able to grasp until years later. Choco, Danny, Irma, Bill, Lucille, Manuel, George. Some of them are still close friends, some have passed away or disappeared from our lives long ago. My mom’s fiery passion for politics, for taking injustice head-on through democratic means, was in stark contrast to my immigrant grandmother. Victoria never took much of an interest in politics.
She never could’ve imagined that her grandsons would someday lead the American city that gave her refuge as a young, orphaned girl. Despite having such a difficult life, with complicated roots, she always tried her best to just enjoy her everyday life. She didn’t concern herself with the daily grind of politics the way her daughter did, the way her grandsons still do. It is hard for me to imagine a life where public service was not my calling. Growing up with parents who lived and breathed politics, I came to believe that when government works right, it can create opportunities in people’s lives.
Many in government believe that America should fundamentally change its immigration laws. Rather than the poor and huddled masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty, many argue that we should measure a person’s value before admitting them. What can they do for us? That’s the new standard. By this logic, computer scientists, chemical engineers, laboratory researchers, and other “high-skilled” immigrants would predominate. Our nation undoubtedly benefits from the fact that brilliant, accomplished people want to make a life here. But our success has never depended upon it. America did not cherry-pick her way to greatness. Instead, we created a system—an infrastructure of opportunity—that enables the pursuit of the American dream through hard work. Just as there’s an infrastructure of streets and highways that helps everyone get to where we want to go on the road, in America there’s an infrastructure of opportunity that helps us get to where we want to go as a society. Good schools, a strong health-care system, and well-paying jobs are pieces of that infrastructure. My mom and so many others fought hard over the years in the civil rights and women’s rights movements, for example, to make sure that everyone has access to the American infrastructure of opportunity.
Today, many are afraid of immigrants, of providing them this access. But do they realize there is something far scarier than being the country everyone wants to come to? What if we become the country no one wants to come to? Fifty years ago, if you asked someone living in Europe, Asia—or anywhere else, really—where they would go if they had to leave their home country, the answer was clear. For all the work we still had to do on civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights, the answer was almost always the United States of America. Because here, the world saw an infrastructure of opportunity with ample room for the high-skilled and the hardworking; the refugees and the dreamers.
But under the standards many are proposing now, my grandmother would never have been allowed into the country. She would have been deemed completely worthless.
Victoria deserved the same opportunities as the rest of us. She belonged in a country that allowed her to pursue her dreams. Yet, her life also made me realize that we can’t just measure the American dream in material terms. Measured only by those standards, my grandmother and so many people never achieved the American dream. When my brother, Julian, gave the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention to urge his fellow Americans to reelect our nation’s first African-American president, he talked about the American dream exactly as Victoria’s grandson understood it:
In the end, the American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor. My grandmother never owned a house. She cleaned other people’s houses so she could afford to rent her own. But she saw her daughter become the first in her family to graduate from college. And my mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.
My grandmother sparked my curiosity and imagination through the stories she told me and the love she gave me. She was the branch in a family tree that left me otherwise disconnected from my past. My grandmother showed me that people who start out with nothing—those who would be considered worthless under new immigration standards—can be the seeds that bear significant contributions to American society. She passed the baton to my parents so that I could one day have it too. She helped me imagine a better country and believe in the dream for the next generation after me.
And she also continues to remind me that all of us here in this country are equally deserving of health and happiness—whether we are immigrants or indigenous people; whether our ancestors have been here for generations or whether we just arrived. For years I never knew whether my grandmother came to the United States legally. I never asked or even thought to. But the day before Julian spoke at the Democratic National Convention, a genealogist researched our family’s history and published what she’d found in the Huffington Post. A copy of the document that allowed Victoria to enter the United States demonstrated the thin line in the 1920s—and for most of America’s history—between documented and undocumented. Under the description for the purpose of her visit are scrawled the words To Live.