Fighting for the Right to Come and Go |Pacific Updates

Pocha House is an unlikely name for a cultural center. The word pocha is a slur levelled at Mexicans whose speech and bearing show the traces of a childhood spent in the United States. Perhaps they don’t speak fluent Spanish; they may be accused of “acting white” by family members or suspected of gang affiliation by prospective employers. The word refers to a plant that has been ripped from its roots; it is a borrowing from northern Mexico’s Indigenous Opata language.

Lately, the term has been reclaimed. Pocha House, a cultural center for deportees and return migrants, was created in January, 2018, by the members of a nonprofit called Otros Dreams en Acción, or ODA, whose advocacy team works on two key fights: lobbying the Mexican government to provide support for newly returned migrants and pressuring U.S. authorities to make tourist visas more accessible to them. Immigrant activism in the U.S. has generally focussed on the right of immigrants to remain in the country, but pocha activism is different: it is about the right to come and go. The point of the DREAM Act was to create a pathway to American citizenship for undocumented individuals who arrived in the country as minors. ODA’s argument is that, if these same people instead return to Mexico, they shouldn’t then be shut out of a country they previously called home.

Tourist visas, which allow non-citizens to visit the U.S. for up to a hundred and eighty days each year, can be taken for granted among Mexico’s small upper class, as a necessity for shopping trips to Miami and ski vacations in Vail. But, for the rest of the country, they can be elusive. The U.S. State Department insists, on its Web site, that the “vast majority” of visa applications are approved for those without any record of “drug or criminal activities,” but through 2020 a quarter of Mexican applications were denied. These rejections were largely made not on account of past actions but on the basis of social class and speculation: in many of these cases, the consular officer believed that the applicant might overstay the visa in an attempt to migrate.

Such discrimination is particularly harmful for the pochas, return migrants who lived much of their lives in the U.S. This is not a small group of people. During the nineteen-nineties, some thirteen million so-called NAFTA refugees migrated to the U.S., a migration that was distinct in composition and geography from that of previous generations. New border-enforcement policies put in place in the eighties and nineties made circular migration increasingly difficult, and so whole families migrated, rather than individual breadwinners; owing to labor saturation in Western cities and changes in agricultural industries, many of them settled in the American South. Then the flows started to reverse. After 9/11, American immigration authorities increasingly targeted these undocumented migrants—and then a recession hit. By 2009, more Mexicans were returning to Mexico than coming to the U.S. Between five and thirty-five per cent of these return migrants are people who have been deported; the rest have made their own decisions to return. (The term “return migrants” encompasses both groups.) But even those who had not been deported later found that it was difficult, legally, to go back to visit their friends and relatives in the States.

Esmeralda Flores was born in 1991 in Iztapalapa, a Mexico City borough that has urbanized rapidly and haphazardly since the seventies, as a result of migration from within Mexico. (Flores’s father’s family moved there from the state of Puebla, and her mother’s from the region surrounding the capital.) In 2000, when she was eight years old, she crossed the border to the U.S. with her family, and they settled in a small town in South Carolina. During Flores’s adolescence, the Mexican community in her town grew from “two or three others” to enough people to fill the pews in a local church for a Spanish Mass on Sundays.

In high school, Flores was “the typical overachieving Dreamer,” she told me. Flores, who later went to law school, speaks in an artful and often wry mixture of Mexico City Spanish, Southern American English, and legalese. In her town, she said, “Everyone knew who I was, because I was both valedictorian and Mexican! It’s a little racist that they thought it was strange you could be both,” she added. “But, also, by then all the cool kids on the soccer team were Mexican, which added to my coolness.” During her senior year, Flores was offered a full scholarship to college. Then the school called her with bad news: they couldn’t give her the scholarship because she was undocumented. There was, however, a fix: she just had to go to Mexico and apply for a student visa. She got on a plane, taking with her a month’s worth of clothes. Before she left, she consulted with a lawyer, who told her that she needed a sponsor who would act as a guarantor for her living expenses while she was a student. She found one. But once she was back in Mexico, the sponsor fell through. “Suddenly I was in exile,” she told me.

She went through a long period of depression. “I hated the dirty streets, I hated that there was no running water at my grandma’s house, I hated that I didn’t know as much Spanish as I thought, I hated not having anyone,” she said. “I hated Mexico, and I hated myself for a while because I thought I was dumb for coming back.” Eventually, though, she had a moment of reckoning with herself. “I partied for three days straight. And on the third day I woke up completely hungover, and I was like, What am I doing, I’m twenty-three—which isn’t that old, but in my Dreamer mentality was unacceptable—and I told myself, I’m going to UNAM,” the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country’s flagship university. She paid for classes to learn Spanish grammar and Mexican history, passed the entrance exam, and began studying law. She did not reveal to her peers or professors that she was a returnee.

One day, she attended a forum on migration law. Among the speakers on the schedule was a woman named Maggie Loredo, whose background was similar to her own. Loredo’s family had also emigrated from Mexico to the U.S., settling in Georgia, and Loredo, like Flores, had done everything she could to get to college. But, in 2008, the year she graduated, Georgia passed Senate Bill 492, prohibiting undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition at its public colleges and universities. To go to college, Loredo would have to return to Mexico. Within a month of graduating, she was in her grandparents’ mountain village in San Luis Potosí, a place where, she later wrote, people “still wash clothes in the river on a rock, take a shower with a bucket, and heat water on a fire.” From there, it took Loredo five years to figure out the process for validating her American high-school transcript. At the time, the process required an apostille, or seal of authenticity, that can only be obtained in the U.S., where she couldn’t go. She had to ask her brother to travel to state offices in Atlanta. (Thanks to the activism of return migrants and a coalition of organizations, this requirement has now been dropped.) Finally, she enrolled at a private university in San Luis Potosí, studying tourism.

In 2012, shortly before she was finally able to enroll, a friend connected Loredo with a researcher named Jill Anderson, who was putting together a small-run book of stories from return migrants. It was called “Los Otros Dreamers,” or “The Other Dreamers.” The book’s contributors had been excluded or left behind by the Dreamer movement, either because run-ins with the law made them ineligible for its provisions or simply because they were back in Mexico. Many of them had not realized, before the book, how many others were in the same situation as them. “A lot of us were going through deep trauma when that book was made, and it was the tool that got us through it,” Loredo said.

Loredo and Anderson developed a friendship, and Anderson invited Loredo to accompany her on the book’s speaking tour in California. Loredo didn’t think she would be given a tourist visa. “I was working at Domino’s Pizza, earning three thousand pesos”—about a hundred and fifty dollars—“a month, I was still in school, I had ties to the U.S.,” she said. The interview lasted only five or ten minutes, as she remembered it, and the consular officer spent half of it consulting with her supervisor. But, in the end, the officer approved Loredo’s application.

During the book tour, Anderson and Loredo decided to form a collective. They called it Otros Dreams en Acción. After the election of Donald Trump, they incorporated it as a nonprofit. As Loredo started to become an activist, she received the invitation to speak at the UNAM.

Flores said she planned to zone out during the talk, thinking it would be just “another sad story.” She wasn’t prepared for the effect that Loredo had on her. “Of course it was sad—all our stories are,” she said. “But she was calling out the authorities, calling out the other speakers, calling out everyone. I realized that for all this time that I had been obsessed with getting a visa, I hadn’t dealt with my pain. And here was Maggie saying that it didn’t matter if I could magically get on a plane the next day—nothing was going to remedy what had happened to us. Nothing could give back those eight years of loneliness and identity crisis. But we could use our stories to make sure that no one had to go through the same thing. I had to go talk to her afterwards, just to be, like, Who is this person who made my head explode?”