When Gabriela left her home in Guanajuato, Mexico, in February of 2006, she brought four things with her. A black cap to cover her long, brown hair. A $6,500 payment to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border with her husband. A black sweater and dark grey pants to camouflage her on the dangerous, three-week journey.
She had nothing else to lose. Gabriela left behind her family in a small, ranch town and the only life she ever knew as a campesina -- Spanish for peasant. Gabriela, then-23 and recently married, thought moving to the United States would be easy. It would be just as her Mexican friends and neighbors had told her. A coyote would guide her and her husband to the United States. There she could work. Better herself. Have babies and send them to good schools. Then return to Mexico after saving money and repaying her debts from crossing the border.
“They didn’t tell us the truth,” says Gabriela, who does not speak English and asked to be identified only by her first name due to her immigration status. “The risks we’d run to get here, how we’d suffer here,” she says. “No one told me.”
The journey was long, but the drugs and prostitutes that scared Gabriela at the border were just the beginning.
After a year of living in Texas, Gabriela and her husband moved to Chicago where they had their first child, a healthy baby girl. “A blessing,” Gabriela says, “She is tremendous.”
The couple started to build a life. Gabriela worked as a waitress in a restaurant in Little Village, a largely Mexican neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. Her husband worked as a landscaper. They lived in a nearby apartment, took pictures of their daughter and bought her Winnie the Pooh toys -- which she loved. Things were going well.
On June 22, 2008, Gabriela’s husband was arrested while visiting his aunt’s house. For reasons unknown to Gabriela, Chicago police raided the home and inquired about her husband’s immigration status, she says. When he could not provide the proper documents, he was placed in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. He was housed first in the Cook County Jail and later in McHenry Country Jail.
It was then that Gabriela first met José Landaverde, a priest at Our Lady of Guadalupe Anglican Catholic Mission, a church at the center of Little Village known by locals as simply “the Mission.”
A short, friendly man, Landaverde left El Salvador in 1991 as a political refugee and has spent most of his time in Chicago helping other immigrants in precarious situations. A stack of papers on his desk several inches high reveals the scope of his work -- Landaverde helps about 30 to 50 people each week with legal cases ranging from criminal trials to deportation hearings. He found legal representation to advocate for Gabriela’s husband’s release, but an immigration judge fined her husband $6,000 and gave him four months to leave the country. He left Feb. 16 for Guanajuato. Right back where he started.
***
It is April 23 and the music is blaring from the West 26th Street storefronts in Little Village. Ice-cream vendors ring their bells. Children hold their mothers’ hands and watch the cars roll by in the streets. But inside the Mission, everything is quiet. The church, which looks more like one of the storefronts than a house of worship, is filled with 43 empty metal folding chairs facing the church’s altar, which is adorned with tall white candles and two images of the Virgin. Eight rows of delicate, white paper flowers hang loosely from the ceiling by paper clips, threaded on plastic straws.
The bell sounds at the entrance and a man wanders in. “Está el padre?” Is the father here? he asks. No, Father Landaverde is not in, the receptionist tells him. She listens to his story, gives him a recommendation and he leaves as quickly as he came. All day long, it is the same. Silence breached only by the coming and going of those in need.
It was here that Gabriela first came for help in June of last year and again this April.
Gabriela enters the Mission in a gray T-shirt and black sweatpants, comfortable clothes for a woman who is seven months pregnant and caring for a 17-month-old. She carries her sleeping daughter wrapped in a Winnie the Pooh blanket and lays her down on a couch in the back room of the church. Just feet away a gray sign hangs on the wall bearing the prayer, “Dios para esta injusta separación de familias. Amen.” Pray to God for this unjust separation of families.
Today Gabriela’s long brown hair is swept up into a bun. Brown eye shadow highlights her youthful face. Gabriela doesn’t reside at her Little Village apartment on South Springfield Avenue, where she lived for months after her husband’s deportation. Now she lives six miles north with her husband’s aunt. A fire destroyed her home.
At 4:14 a.m. on April 5, fire trucks were dispatched by the Chicago Fire Department to 3019 S. Springfield Ave., according to the department’s incident report. A call came in minutes earlier. The three-story apartment building was burning and strong winds had spread the fire to three neighboring buildings. Gabriela and her daughter were asleep in the attic of one.
Gabriela awoke to the sounds of falling roof pieces banging on her window. Afraid the sound was bullets from a gang fight, she ran to protect her daughter, only to realize people were screaming outside – her apartment building was on fire. She ran to the stairs, which were already engulfed in flames. She ran back to the window where police officers advised her to stay put and wait for help. The ashes and smoke clouded her vision. Soon, she couldn’t see the officers below. Holding her daughter’s hand, Gabriela contemplated the worst thing in her life, she says.
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“When I saw that everything was burning in front of me,” Gabriela says, “I didn’t want my daughter to burn to death.” Her voice is soft and broken by tears. “I thought,” she whispers, “about throwing her out the window. She was suffocating. And I thought no one was going to come to get us out.”
Moments later a fireman rescued Gabriela and her daughter from the third-story window. They were transported to a hospital and treated for smoke inhalation. Gabriela, her daughter and unborn son are all in good health now.
But everything Gabriela had is lost for the second time. First Mexico. Now Chicago. The photos of her family in Guanajuato – the life she left – and photos of her new-born daughter – the life she had – all burned.
Gabriela is working to regather her and her daughter’s birth certificates and evidence that she lived and paid rent in Chicago so the Mexican Consulate will help her. They won’t give her any financial aid until she gives them the papers she no longer has.
“There are some people that come here and it’s the key to [a better life],” Gabriela says. “They live here for 15 years and everything’s great for them. But for us, these last three years haven’t been like that. The only blessing is our daughter and our other baby on the way. Other than that, it’s been pura mala suerte.” Pure bad luck.
***
Back at the Mission, Father Landaverde is in his office tending to his parishioners. His cell phone rings in five-minute intervals. He is planning a rally to support children of immigrants who have been deported. His caseload is as large as ever. Gabriela, he says, is one of the lucky ones.
“I think that Gabriela is a very strong woman,” he says. “She has a lot of potential. [She is] facing a difficult situation, but she has been handling it very good. So many other cases are worse.”
Gabriela still has a roof over her head. Landaverde says he knows a mother with five children who lost her home due to the recession and her husband’s deportation.
It could be worse, Gabriela agrees. She and her daughter wear the clothes and shoes the church collected for them. The Mission even called a press conference about Gabriela’s situation and opened a bank account in her name, raising $685 in two weeks.
Gabriela vows she will never walk past her old apartment. It is nothing more than a vacant lot, emptied of the debris and ash that was once her home. It is a memory she can live without.
Now she goes to the Mission a few times a week after her pre-natal checkups to visit with the priest and church staff, who she thanks God for helping her.
“It relaxes me to come here,” she says looking around the small church as men and women drift in and out asking for the priest. “I come and sit and I think my problems are nothing compared to some other people’s.”
On the couch, Gabriela is silent as her daughter totters across the floor. “Padre, quiero ir a Mexico,” Father, I want to go back to Mexico, she says to Landaverde, her voice sad and distant.
Gabriela says after her son is born and her documents retrieved, she will go back to Mexico. It is only a matter of time. There is nothing for her here. Her husband, her mother, her father – they all want her to come home.
For now, she is grateful that her daughter has nothing but small burns on her fingers to remind her of the past few weeks. But those scars will fade.
“She’s little. Those first three days, she did [cry about the fire], but now she doesn’t,” Gabriela says. “Thank God she doesn’t remember it. I hope that one day God will let me forget everything that happened too.”