We are not ok... And we will keep resisting

By: Dr. Conchita Hernandez Legorreta

Edited by: Malena Hernandez

I felt the need to write something based on what has been happening with ICE raids and protests. I have been very open about being disabled and previously undocumented, and now in a mix-status family, and what that has meant for me. I have been hearing a lot of rhetoric about how protestors should and should not react to police and ICE. Many of the comments come from people who live in communities where the police are their safest allies and where the law has been to their benefit. Believing that the police keep people safe is a very privileged idea, and one deeply void of a historic and political analysis of policing and state repression within and outside the US empire. The ways in which folks experience “the police”/ state violence and the state is asymmetrical based on racial capitalism. I, like many in my community, have seen this reality firsthand, where we are constantly harassed, intimidated and racially profiled by the police. That is a reality that many people of color, disabled, queer, and poor communities in this country experience. 

My family of seven came to the United States through tourist visas when I was very young. For the first year and a half, we lived with visas, every six months having to go through the lengthy process of renewing them. When we first arrived, my father worked as a ranch hand and his employers provided us with a place to live. That family expected my mother to clean, cook, and babysit their children without any pay. They kept my siblings and I from attending school and isolated all of us from friends and family. They had our sleeping quarters separate from those of our parents. They attempted to take our personal documents away. They held onto my father’s wages, telling him it was for “safe keeping” since he couldn’t get a bank account. Yet, when he asked for his wages one day, they came up with excuses as to why they would not give him his pay and never paid him. Like many immigrants, my father was a victim of wage theft, the highest form of theft in the United States. This was our first experience in the United States, as de facto indentured servants for this family. With the help of family, we were able to leave this exploitative situation, and then constantly moved around looking for housing and work. During this time, we overstayed our visas. In our last visa appointment, my parents were told that if we planned on staying in the US, to not return to renew our visa again or we would be denied and deported. There were many reasons my parents decided to stay in the United States but one of the major factors was that my parents realized that my brother and I, as children with disabilities, would have educational and medical opportunities here that we would be denied in Mexico. From one day to another, we “became” undocumented, and this came at a huge price for all our family involved. The educational opportunities that we gained came at the cost of deep trauma, family separation, and state violence, to name a few. I grew up cleaning houses with my sister and my mom on the weekends, one of many odd jobs we worked to make ends meet. Other family members worked in the fields picking vegetables, cleaning stables, working at factories, in construction and so on. I remember playing by the fields while airplanes sprayed pesticides over our heads, the effect of which we may not know for years to come. Those experiences were woven with ones of exploitation, work injuries, undignified working conditions, low-wages, wage theft, you name it. On top of that my family had to navigate the potential that at any moment we could be arrested and deported. We constantly held on to this fear for our survival, hyper-aware when driving down the road, seeing a police car and praying they did not stop us, as we could have been deported for a simple traffic stop. Hearing the stories of family members who crossed the border on foot. Knowing you are being taken advantage of in situations, but not having a way to speak up, due to lack of documentation, or not believed, due to racism. As we grew up the experiences didn’t improve. My father, who was a victim of a crime, was investigated by the police as they believed he was involved in criminal activity simply for the way he looked. During this ordeal the police were brazen and unprovoked in sharing their racist opinions about Mexican men and why they didn’t believe my father. Many of my family members have been constantly stopped by police, weapons drawn on them, thrown on the ground, detained and arrested for looking brown, and they have been some of the luckier ones. The constant threat of the police state, with its hypervigilance, detention, arrests, deportation, family separation, and murder, was the real American Dream/Nightmare my family was and is living day-to-day. 

Over a decade ago, one of my siblings and their spouse made one of the toughest decisions of their life and decided that the crushing weight of racism and xenophobia they were experiencing was no longer something they would accept. With their small children they crossed the border back to Mexico. They left knowing that they would never get to see or hug many of us ever again; knowing they would never meet their nieces and nephews, they would miss countless weddings, births, graduations, and deaths. That when my sister hugged my mother goodbye, that could very well be the last time they saw each other. 

There is an unquantifiable pain that runs deep in our emotional psyche, one that history has shown us causes deep intergenerational trauma, and it is that of family separation by the hands of the state. Many Mexicans call the US, “la jaula de oro” this golden cage keeping us from being truly free. We grew up in the 90s, which meant we didn’t see our family in Mexico via video phone call. Instead, we communicated through sending letters and pictures, and phone calls paid using expensive calling cards that half of the time scammed you of your minutes to talk with loved ones. Days turned into months, months into years, years into decades, and we had not had the chance to hug our family. I was away in college when my mother received the phone call that her mother had passed, and 3 months later when her father passed. My mother was not able to go and say her goodbye’s, a pain that sadly too many immigrants know. Due to racialized capitalism enforced by the state repression of the border, police, and the migra (ICE), my family has been separated for over 35 years and some of my siblings have never met. This is what we mean when we say, “borders keep families apart”. This is the type of state violence that folks believe is an unintended consequence of borders and immigration policies. But the more I pay attention, the more I realize this is very much an intended consequence in the warfare the state wages and historically has waged against brown, black, indigenous, disabled, queer people. 

I do not share my personal story for people who do not want to understand. Instead, I share my story because I have a deep responsibility to my community to provide my truth, in the face of so many lies told about undocumented immigrants. Many people who have never experienced state terror at the hands of its enforcers such as the police or ICE are being the loudest voices, creating the narratives, chastising how people are resisting state violence, telling us what “appropriate” language to use and actions to take. 

I share this because my family is not unique. This is a reality that millions of other people living in the United States are experiencing. Working in education, I see the fear and anxiety in Latino students and their families. Students are worried for themselves and for their parents. Yet they are showing up to school and doing their best to continue to live the life they came here for. I will never forget the story of one family with a blind child. They have gone through a lot and moved to get the services they need in education. Someone asked them if the moves have been hard, to which they answered, “No, I walked here with my children all the way from Central America, everything else in comparison to that is easy.” Parents will do the unimaginable for their children, especially children with disabilities. 

Immigration, as all issues, is a disability justice one. Immigrants with disabilities will always be the most vulnerable. Many immigrants gained their disabilities in route to getting here, including at the hands of border officials and ICE officers in detention facilities. We are mobilizing and protesting because we will continue to fight for what is right, and also because we have no other choice. I am part of the first generation of college students that are unapologetic and will never forget the sacrifice our parents made for us to be where we are today. And because of this, my duty is to resist. To not only make a better life for myself and my family, but to build a world in which parents don’t have to make such sacrifices, where we’re not measuring our level of resiliency to the level of trauma the state has forced us and our parents to experience.   

Despite the pain we have endured, we have likewise experienced great joy. Quoting Yosimar Reyes, and disabled activists UndocuJoy, and Disabled Joy respectively. Our family has created deep, lasting relationships that have spanned nations and continents. I have a huge focus on community in all my work, as community is and has been the only thing that sustains us. We know we have each other, in a way that the state will never. Though my story is filled with trauma and state terror, it is also one of joy, community support, and resistance. The protests and actions against ICE are part of the work we’ve been doing, we have been protecting our communities and loving all immigrants as our own. These protests are an extension of that. 

When people ask me, “do you feel lucky and honored that you are in the United States and you have gotten to where you are, that you have these opportunities?” In the words of the iconic W.E.B. Du Bois, when he was asked if he felt lucky to be the first Black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard: “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s”. So, I assure you, the honor of having us here is yours.