Introduction
Artifact One
What people often do not realize is that immigration puts a hole in people's lives and it can tear families apart. To immigrants this is all worth the life they will have in the United States, as well as other countries. I recently came across an article in the opinion pages of the New York Times about the often over-looked toll that immigration takes on a family.
The Heartache of an Immigrant Family re-tells the story of a mother, Lourdes Pineda, immigrating to the United States from Honduras in 1989. The single mother left her kids to make money in the U.S., to give them money for food and school tuition. One heartbreaking thing is that Lourdes' job in America was to care for another family's children, she became close to these kids while supporting her own, one thousand miles away. Lourdes' kids, Enrique (5 years old) and his sister, not named (7 years old), were split apart between their grandmothers. Enrique was constantly bouncing from relative to relative until one day he decided to go after his mother, whom he hadn't heard from in a long time. Enrique, himself ended up leaving his infant daughter until he brought her back with him, years later. This story seems all too familiar to Reyna Grande's own story of a broken family.
The memoir The Distance Between Us is the epitome of a family torn apart, it's right there in the title. The book starts of in status quo, it's 1980 in Mexico and Reyna's father has been in El Otro Lado, the other side, for two years. All too soon Reyna and her older siblings, Mago and Carlos, were saying goodbye to their mother who was summoned by her husband. From square one, the Grande - Rodriguez family was separated, just like Pineda family. Two and half years later when Reyna's mother returned, Mago hated her, she had broken her promise of coming back after a year and on top of that had comeback with her new baby, Betty. When the Grande children crossed the border to join their father, they were distant. Carlos, Mago, and Reyna were estranged from their father, Betty grew up never knowing her him, the last time she saw him she was three years old. When Enrique came to America from Honduras he found his mother in a federal detention center, he barely recognized his parent either. Also, 47,000 child immigrants crossed the border this year, and are flooding detention centers in the United States. If that isn't a terrible was to break up families, I don't know what is.
I personally know a woman who had to do the same thing as Reyna's and Enrique's mothers. Sabitri left Bhutan in 1999 leaving her five year old daughter and her ten year old son with distant relatives. Sabitri had had her children young and wanted to come to America to send money back and eventually bring her children with her. She came on a three month travel Visa and started to work as a nanny -- exactly like Lourdes. Sabitri did this for ten years until she procured her green card and left to retrieve her children. Bringing her children to the U.S. took five years, Sabitri said it was the hardest thing she's done on her own. When Sabitri settled her children in New England with her, they showed no gratitude, and are not close to their mother. Sabitri says the she feels more connected to the children she'd nurtured for ten years, children that are not her own.
I never understood why Sabitri's children resented her. I always thought, your mother did amazing things to give you the life you have now, why are you so ungrateful?, what I didn't understand was how abandoned they must have felt, and the distance from their mother they must feel now. I never thought this feeling could outweigh everything these people have now, what their mothers have done for them. I never had my father, but at least I still have my mother, I live in "The Land of Opportunity" don't I? I can never fully understand the hardships these families went through, but I can try.
