CHAPTER SEVEN
LIFE IS NO DISNEYLAND
Yunuen Bonaparte, twenty-seven
Uruapan, Michoacán/Azusa, California
AUGUST 5, 2016, marked a turning point in Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the press. Two hundred days into her presidential campaign, she had still not taken a single question from reporters. But on that day, the Democratic Party’s nominee broke her silence and answered questions from Latino journalists, even discussing her email account under FBI investigation, the sore spot in her campaign.
“Now, I think journalists have a special responsibility to our democracy at a time like this,” Clinton stated, her blond hair impeccably styled, wearing a turquoise suit and matching earrings as she addressed over fifteen hundred members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Washington, DC.1
While candidate Clinton fielded questions, Yunuen Bonaparte, a young NAHJ scholarship recipient and recent college graduate with a degree in communications, approached the podium. She raised her camera and took a photo of one of the most powerful women in the world.
Yunuen has lived more than half her life in Azusa, California. Originally from Uruapan, in Michoacán state, Mexico, she is a member of the “Dreamer” generation, young people who were brought to the United States undocumented by their parents when they were minors. They have grown up as Americans, with their lives and plans for the future rooted in this country, even though at this point they have no options open to them for legalizing their immigration status.
There are roughly two million young people in this situation in the US. The informal name for them, “Dreamers,” comes from a legislative initiative first presented in Congress back in 2001 known as the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act.2 If passed, the law would allow undocumented people younger than thirty years of age who arrived in the US before they were sixteen and who have lived here for at least five years to gain temporary residency, with the possibility of applying for citizenship in the future. For nearly two decades, the DREAM Act has been presented in Congress on five occasions, failing to pass each time. Young people such Yunuen have begun their adult lives feeling part of a country that legally does not acknowledge them.
Yunuen does not have happy memories of her early childhood in Mexico. She remembers her family living in a poor neighborhood and never having a proper house. They lived in a shack cobbled together with scrap materials. She remembers her father working all kinds of jobs: at a stationery store, managing accounting for a company, selling curtains. She describes him as “a multiuse kind of person.” But all of his hard work was still not enough to support the Bonaparte family. There was a time when they did not have any money to buy food and had to go to Yunuen’s grandparents’ house across the street to get something to eat.
When Yunuen’s grandfather died, in 2001, the central figure in her family was gone. Her father decided to go to the US, while her mother stayed behind to take care of Yunuen, then eleven, her nine-year-old brother, and her one-year-old baby brother. Yunuen went to elementary school, and took care of her baby brother while her mother worked. The excellent grades she had always brought home in spite of the family’s difficulties now began to drop. Around then, she failed a math test for the first time.
“I remember that was when my dad decided to send for us. The first thing I thought was that was good, because that way he wouldn’t know I was failing math,” she says without a trace of humor. “We had a small plot of land; my house was literally made out of cardboard. We lived in a big cardboard box, one bedroom, cots for me and my brother, the kitchen and bathroom combined. We didn’t have a shower; we had to heat up water to take a bath. My parents sold the land and used the money to pay a coyote to bring us here.”
Yunuen takes a sip of tea. She is petite but robust, with strong features, dark eyes with a sharp gaze, a smile that lights up her face, scrunching up her nose, making her look even younger and giving her a mischievous look. She wears her hair loose in a chin-length cut. We are at a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, Los Angeles. The neighborhood still bears traces of the Latino population that has largely been pushed out by the wave of gentrification affecting some areas of Southern California in recent years. Yunuen and I met through NAHJ, which we both belong to. Azusa, the small city where she lives, is forty minutes away from downtown Los Angeles.
She says that period of time is a bit fuzzy in her memory, and it’s hard to remember the exact order of events. “I remember we went to Tijuana. It was my first time in an airplane, it was really weird. My uncle and aunt picked us up when we got there and took us to a hotel. I don’t remember how long we were there, a few days or a week, I don’t know.”
The family spent those days or weeks at the hotel because the coyotes who were going to take them over to “the other side” were waiting for more people to show up. When enough people had arrived, around fifty, the coyote came and told them what time they would leave, and to be all packed and ready to go. From Tijuana, the group was taken to Los Algodones, a small town in the northwest corner of Baja California, right on the US border, where California and Arizona meet. There, they were installed in another hotel, shabbier than the first. Yunuen remembers it smelled like urine, with people packed in everywhere. She sat in a corner hoping that no one would look at her.
For the next leg of the journey, everyone was loaded into a pickup truck, “literally like sardines.” Lying on top of each other, there were five layers of people. The three Bonaparte children were piled on last, and the truck started to move. Yunuen saw swirls of dust rising up from the dirt road as the truck bounced along. The men in the pickup’s cabin yelled back at them to keep their heads down. When they came to a stop, they were packed into another motel, this time in the US.
Yunuen remembers sleeping with around twenty other people in a motel room there for one or two nights. Early in the morning, the group climbed into a refrigerated truck carrying lettuce. Shivering, they felt the truck start to move. Yunuen’s baby brother, held in his mother’s arms, started to cry. Yunuen tried to quiet him. Eventually the truck came to a stop. They heard voices outside, and then the door opened. It was immigration agents, “la migra.” All of that for nothing.
After spending the night in a cell with fifty other people with only aluminum blankets protecting them from the cold, and only a cup of soup to eat, the next day they were shepherded down a corridor and passed through a gate. Yunuen’s mother asked where they were. She was told they were in Tijuana.
Every year, approximately 175,000 people are detained and deported at the border, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data.3 Although there are fifteen points of entry along the two-thousand-mile-long border, 25 percent of all deportations are into Tijuana. Over half of those detained at the border have crossed before at least once.
When Yunuen’s mother found herself back at the starting point, she called the uncle who had picked them up before, and they started looking for another coyote. It was a woman this time. The family was taken to an apartment where some other families with children were already gathered, waiting. Everything seemed more secure, but it was also more expensive. The last coyote had charged $1,500 per person, but this one charged $3,000. Yunuen doesn’t know how her family got the money. After just a few hours in the apartment, they started out, but this time was different. One by one, each member of the family crossed the border in a car. Yunuen was taken in a minivan. A woman drove, and another woman sat in the passenger seat. Yunuen lay down on the floor in the backseat. As the minivan inched along in line approaching the border checkpoint, a vendor came by selling traditional woven blankets. The women bought a blanket and placed it over Yunuen. As they got closer, they told Yunuen not to move or make a sound, and to try to breathe very quietly. They pulled up to the booth, talked to the immigration agent inside for a minute, and then drove on through to the other side. And that was it.
Yunuen was the first in her family to cross. She was taken to a house in San Ysidro, a town right on the border, where some other families were already waiting. When her mother and brothers arrived, everyone was taken to Santa Ana, in Orange County, one hundred miles north of the border, between San Diego and Los Angeles. When Yunuen got out of the car, she saw that Disneyland was right across the street.
“Ever since then, I can’t be anywhere near Disneyland,” she says, not smiling. “I have never gone, because I was traumatized by all that. People get frustrated with me when I tell them I can’t even drive by it.”
Her uncle arrived, and finally the family reunited with her father.
“And we all lived happily ever after,” Yunuen says with a sarcastic grin.
Starting a new life in the US is hard. Deciding to migrate may be the hardest decision many people ever have to make: leaving behind everything they know, their family and friends, their culture and support network. Starting over from nothing in a new place where they may not know anyone, may not speak the language, and do not understand the local ways represents a tremendous challenge. And if people are undocumented, their vulnerability to workplace exploitation, discrimination, and human rights violations is heightened considerably.
Yunuen’s family chose to live in Azusa because one of her uncles already lived there. He had three children around the same ages as Yunuen and her siblings, which was helpful. For children, the hardest part of migrating is generally adapting to a new school system, in a new language, with a different academic structure and curriculum. Fortunately this was not too difficult for Yunuen, who had always been a strong student.
“I didn’t speak English, but there were other kids in my school who didn’t speak it either, so it wasn’t such a big culture shock,” Yunuen says. “I just had to try to pick it up. It took me two years to learn English. There were some other kids in my class who had been taking those classes for years, so that made me feel like I was doing pretty well. I was in seventh grade, and they were learning things I had already learned in fifth grade, so I didn’t have to worry about things like math or geography, because I already knew it. I felt good, because I had been failing math before, but now I didn’t have any problem, so I could really focus on learning English.” By the time Yunuen entered high school she had a strong command of English. When she graduated, she had high marks in science and math, and one of the highest grade-point averages in her class.
Even though the adjustment at school was going well for Yunuen, her family’s transition as a whole was more complicated. For families who arrive in the US with children, the period of adaptation is related to the children’s integration into the school system and the understanding that they have a new home now. For Yunuen, the second issue is still unresolved, fifteen years later.
“When I got here, I never felt like I missed my home, because I’ve never known where my home was,” she says. “I’ve always felt a little nostalgic for Mexico, but I know that if I went back, I wouldn’t feel like it was my home. The problem is, I don’t feel like here is my home either. But I think in my case that’s because of some other things.”
Those other things related to her family. When Yunuen was fifteen, three years after arriving in the US, her parents separated. As a result, Yunuen’s mother had a nervous breakdown, which affected her ability to take care of her three children, but at the same time, she took out a restraining order against her children’s father. The children were placed in foster care for three months.
“After that, I think we moved around about ten times in one year,” says Yunuen. “The court decided my youngest brother should live with my mother, and my other brother, who’s three years younger than me, and I went to live with my dad. The three of us were in one room, a garage.” Yunuen’s relationship with her mom has been strained ever since. “I think that’s why I have this feeling of not knowing where my home is. I had to go into therapy for a while, but now it doesn’t bother me so much. I live with my dad and that’s fine, but it’s not my home.”
When Yunuen graduated high school, she took entrance exams for three colleges in the Los Angeles area. Her guidance counselor, who did not understand why Yunuen, such an excellent student, had not yet sent in any college applications, gave her fifty dollars for the application fees. Yunuen was accepted at all three schools, but she did not know how to explain that, even though she had been accepted, she could not go because she was undocumented and therefore ineligible for federal financial aid.
“I think people don’t understand because they’re not informed,” she says. “This is happening; there are people all over the country in this situation. What they are going through should matter. But sometimes people just don’t know about it.”
In the United States, college costs $35,000 per year on average.4 Those who cannot afford this—the great majority of students—can apply for financial aid provided by the government. But undocumented students cannot access this financial assistance, even though they have spent most of their lives growing up in the US. If they decide to go to college, they have to pay the same tuition as foreign students. For most undocumented students, the costs are too great, and getting a higher education is simply not an option. Many young people end up working in fast-food restaurants or at other jobs that do not require a college degree. Even those students who do manage to attend college and graduate have a hard time getting work because of their undocumented status.
After Yunuen graduated from high school, she had to get a job to start saving up money to attend community college, which costs much less than a traditional four-year college. For students who cannot afford four years of college tuition or simply do not want to go to school for four years, community colleges provide the option of getting a two-year degree at a much lower cost, or attending for two years and then transferring to a traditional college to earn a four-year degree. For students who want to go to college but have no access to financial aid, two years of community college at the sharply reduced cost provides some relief while they figure out how to earn a four-year degree.
Yunuen started working at a McDonald’s when she was sixteen years old and still in high school. She continued working there after graduating, and added another part-time job at a photography studio. She enrolled in community college, taking classes when she could afford it, and worked at the photography studio for two more years after transferring to a four-year school. Later, when she was attending California State University at Fullerton (CSUF), she worked in a convenience store, first as a cashier, later stocking shelves in the early morning so she could take classes during the day.
Yunuen’s circumstances changed along with those of hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers in 2012, when a small measure of relief came along for undocumented students bearing the crushing burden of working and going to college. In June of that year, President Barack Obama signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order, which temporarily protected Dreamers against deportation, giving them Social Security numbers and temporary work permits, as long as they met requirements similar to those in the DREAM Act.5
The temporary protection under this program would be in effect for two years, and could be renewed, as it was in 2014 and 2016. But since the program was not a law passed by Congress, it did not offer its beneficiaries legal residency or provide a pathway to citizenship. And just as Obama enacted it with a stroke of his pen, a future president could rescind it just as easily.
Even so, in the five years DACA has been in effect as of this writing, more than 750,000 young adults have seen a big change in their lives and have been able to realize their full potential.6 Yunuen is one of the more than 200,000 DACA recipients in California. Before the program, she looked for jobs wherever she could find them, doing whatever was needed but not necessarily what best suited her. She finished two years of community college in six years, paying all the costs out of her own pocket, and enrolled in CSUF in 2014.
Once at CSUF, Yunuen found a Dream Center, a resource for undocumented students that many colleges and universities now have. These centers were mostly created by Dreamers themselves, with the support of some faculty, and have been formalized at some schools, receiving funds for their administration. Students can find information there on financial aid and scholarships, as well as local legislative initiatives that could help them—since the DREAM Act has not passed Congress, many states like California have passed their own measures, giving undocumented students access to financial aid—and in recent years they can get assistance in applying for DACA. Most important of all, they discover a support network.
“I was shaking when I walked in. I didn’t know what to do. It was really weird for me. Then these students there told me not to worry; they were there to help me. I told them I was studying communications and I wanted to work for a newspaper, and they told me the editor of the Daily Titan, the university newspaper, was interviewing people right then. That was so important to me! I was going to meet the editor of the paper!”
Many exciting things happened in the following months. Yunuen met other supportive faculty and students. By the end of the year, she was the president of the Latino student journalist group and had made connections with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Two years later, she found herself taking photos of Hillary Clinton for the organization at its national convention in Washington, DC.
“I think everything started happening when I said, ‘I’m a Dreamer. This is what I do, and this is who I am,’” she says. “I’ve never been afraid to say it, but I think the fact that some other people understood what I was going through really helped me.”
In May 2016, in her cap and gown, Yunuen graduated with a degree in communications. On her Facebook page, she posted a picture of her grades for her last semester, straight A’s as usual, with the caption “That’s a wrap.” She wrote that her goals for the future were to find a job, stop watching episodes of 30 Rock every day, and not get deported.
“Every day is a battle.”
Yunuen stares off in the distance as she says this with a serious expression that makes her look older than her years. “I’ve gotten to a point where I’m happy with myself for what I’ve accomplished, but it’s been really hard. My life plan was that I’d have a job by the time I was eighteen, and I’d move to my own place eventually, but that hasn’t happened because I can’t. I can’t move out of my dad’s place, because I can’t afford to pay my own rent. Luckily, my dad has supported me, but I’ve always had this little voice inside of me saying ‘You can’t do that.’ One of your friends is going to get a master’s degree? You can’t do that. When I told my family I wanted to be a photographer, it was really hard to talk to my dad about it, to tell him, ‘I want to get an education and not work in a factory being miserable for the rest of my life.’ My dad would say, ‘Why do you have to go to school to learn how to take pictures? Go to school so you can make money.’ I explained I didn’t want to be frustrated doing something else, and his answer was, ‘Who told you that you can do what you want in life?’ I was still in school, and he asked me to help out with the rent. He’s always taken care of us, but we’ve always had money problems. And I realized, you go to school and all your friends say my mom tells me I can do whatever I want in life. But for me, it’s always been different.”
At this point in her story, Yunuen can’t hold back the tears now streaming down her face, as if a faucet had been turned on. A waiter comes by and discreetly clears away her empty mug of tea. Yunuen sobs a little, then pauses for a while. When she feels ready to continue, she tells me there were times at community college when she was hungry but only had a dollar in her bank account. She tells me the hardest part about being undocumented goes beyond simply not having papers; the hardest part is the impossibility of earning money to do what you really want to do. You have to get accustomed to that idea and learn to live with it. If you stopped to think about all of the horrible things that could happen to you on any given day, you couldn’t go on living. She tells me that before she had a driver’s license—she has a temporary one now because of DACA—she could not let herself think about what might happen if she was pulled over: the cost of the fine; the cost of getting the car back if it was impounded, which was more than a thousand dollars at the time; the things that you can’t avoid when you’re undocumented. She tells me that once she had to go to court to explain to a judge why she had been driving without a license. The judge asked Yunuen why she didn’t have a license and she said, “Because I can’t get one.” The judge asked why not. She said, “Because I’m undocumented.” He let her go.
“You put it at the back of your mind and keep going, but that’s the hardest part. No one else has to live that way, worried they might get stopped by the police. No one else has to worry that their little brother won’t have a way to get to school, not because you don’t know how to drive, but because you’re not allowed.”
In October 2016, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, published a study evaluating DACA four years after it went into effect, which was prompted by Donald Trump’s campaign promises to rescind DACA as soon as he was sworn into office if he won the presidential election.7 Of the program’s 750,000 beneficiaries, of whom 77 percent are Mexican, 95 percent are currently either attending school or working, or both. Of those working, 63 percent say they have gotten a better job, 49 percent switched to a job that was a better fit for their education level and degree, and their average salary rose by 42 percent, meaning the amount they paid in taxes increased too. Of all the DACA recipients, 6 percent have launched their own businesses, compared with 3.1 percent on average nationally. Many of these entrepreneurs are creating jobs, including one who has nine employees. Overall, these young people have had to constantly face and overcome daunting challenges, and as a result have become successful—some might even say invincible.
I share this information with Yunuen as we talk at the cafeteria on Sunset Boulevard, and tell her that after hearing her story, I have this image of her: a twenty-seven-year-old woman, photojournalist, bilingual, coming from difficult financial circumstances, who has worked to support herself and pay for her education, first at community college, then at a university. After graduation, she has worked as a volunteer and has had her work published in several media outlets—in December 2016, her photos were included in an article on migrant women field workers that was published on the cover of El Universal, one of the biggest newspapers in Mexico. Against all the odds, Yunuen is successful.
“It doesn’t feel like that, though,” she responds. “I think if I didn’t have to go through all this, things would have been different. I don’t know if I’d be where I am now, but . . .”—she starts to cry again—“I think I would have been able to accomplish more. I think I would have my own place to live by now, the way I want to live. Now I always feel like it will never be enough. I focus on doing things I want to do, but there are always limits, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Even when I’ve come so far, it feels like everything just happened by chance, and something’s always telling me I don’t deserve it.”
When I ask her why she thinks that is, she shares an anecdote. She recently reconnected on social media with Anita, an old friend from grade school back in Michoacán. Anita’s mother has cancer, and Anita works in a Walmart to help support the family. “I have no idea how they got a Walmart there,” Yunuen comments, surprised. Anita’s younger sister is married to a drug addict, with three children. Yunuen can’t help but think her life would have turned out similarly if her family had not migrated.
“I think that would have been my life,” she says with a guilty look. “I’m so lucky to be here, to be able to do everything I do. But still I want more. I don’t want to have fight against all these obstacles all the time, because every day I have to think, Where am I going to be a few months from now? Will I have a job?”
Every time the issue of undocumented immigration comes up for national debate, with all the limitations it represents for undocumented people in the US, an obligatory question is raised that almost every undocumented immigrant has had to answer: Wouldn’t it be easier if you just went back to your country? Yunuen laughs when I say this, because it’s a question she has indeed answered many times before.
“We’re here for a reason,” she says. “When my family and I got ready to come here, we literally didn’t have anything to eat at home for a few months before we left. My mom planted vegetables out behind the house, but she didn’t have any money to buy tortillas. It was hard to survive. I don’t know what would have happened to us if we hadn’t come here, but we weren’t in that situation because my dad was lazy; it was because there was no work. I don’t think of myself as a brilliant person, but I’ve always done well in school, and at that time I was having trouble because I was distracted. I know that I probably wouldn’t have been able to go to school, definitely not to college. I know in Mexico there are free public colleges, but that’s not the problem. The problem is you have to survive financially to be able to go to school.”
Even though Yunuen is well aware of what her future would look like in her city of origin—her cousins who still live there have a difficult time finding work, and violence in the state has risen sharply as a result of the war on narco-trafficking—it’s a possibility she has been forced to consider. On September 5, 2017, Donald Trump announced that he would not renew the DACA program and would begin phasing it out within six months.8 If Congress fails to pass legislation protecting the Dreamers, young people like Yunuen will be vulnerable to deportation once again. And a deportation could happen at any time.
“I have talked about it with some of my friends, and they always say, ‘I have family there; you can always stay with them if that happens.’ Okay, even though I have a college degree, I don’t think it means anything. I don’t know if I could work as a journalist there—they kill so many journalists! I know with my network of friends I could find something, like a receptionist job or something like that. I haven’t been there in so many years, and things have changed. When I was little, I remember one day the newspaper published a story about finding a dead body a block away from my school in front of a butcher shop; that was in 2002. I remember the picture of the butcher shop and the body, and all the blood. It was a big story. Now that happens all the time; they find a body every day. I still have family there, and things have happened to them. They live their lives just hoping nothing else happens.”
Then, with an inner strength that has allowed her to keep moving ahead every time it seems like there is no way forward, Yunuen tells me in a rush that while she understands what this country has given her, she’s also aware of what she has to give back.
“As a photojournalist, how can you tell stories about minority women if you’re a white man? I know some people can be empathetic when they hear these stories, but if they don’t understand the experience, if you don’t understand where they’re coming from, you’ll never get the whole story,” she says. “I see that the newspapers appreciate the sensibility that people like me can bring to the work, that no one else can. I’m sure there are other documented journalists who can do the same thing as me, and I still have a lot to learn in my work, but I think that because of my experience, I have the right perspective to tell this story like no one else, through my eyes. How do you tell a Guatemalan child’s story? Are you going to ask him, ‘Tell me how it feels to be in a cell in immigration’? I’ve been in an immigration cell, I can tell you. I can tell you about the names on the walls, for example—a lot of people write their names in the cell and how many times they’ve crossed the border, and leave messages of hope. I remember the message of a woman who said, ‘I’ve tried twenty times and I’ll keep trying.’” Yunuen quotes this in Spanish. “And I thought, How many times am I going to have to try? There were double-digit numbers in there. No one should have to try something in the double digits to have a better life, and people don’t do it because the United States is so wonderful, or because they want to get rich. It’s because they need to provide for their families because they have no other way to survive. So I think I can tell this story a little better. If we don’t tell their stories from that perspective, they will keep on being just numbers instead of people.”
Yunuen knows that DACA has been, as she puts it, “a Band-Aid.” Although she has always been careful, she has felt much freer with DACA. Now she knows that under the Trump administration, the risks will be much greater, but she refuses to hide.
“I’m not going to hide anymore,” she says. “My dad has the attitude, ‘Don’t tell anybody; don’t tell the neighbors you’re undocumented.’ I’m just being more careful. Now it’s not so much about what will happen back there if they deport me but the fact that they would take away the place where I belong. Even though I still don’t feel like this is my home, I feel like I do contribute to society in some way. I don’t have a criminal record and don’t wish anyone harm. I’m just a person trying to live. Why can’t I have the chance to make a living?”
Yunuen’s latest photography project is a series of portraits of DACA recipients, like her, along with the answers they gave when asked what they would do if they lost the program’s protection. But she has not been very public about her immigration status before, until this year. On January 27, a few hours after President Trump signed an executive order banning people from certain countries from entering the US, known as the Muslim ban, Yunuen posted on her Facebook page: “Here’s my revolutionary act for the day: I’m #UndocumentedAndUnafraid and I’m #HereToStay.”