Family  /  First Person

The Lucky Ones

I told her we were brought over the Rio Grande on a raft. I never called it a smuggling.
Jia Sung/Guernica

In early 2017 while working for ProPublica, I went on assignment with senior investigative reporter, Ginger Thompson, to the border, to the site of a brutal massacre in the town of Allende, Coahuila in 2011. Ginger had woven together a monumental oral history of the days that led up to the devastation of a small town just forty miles south of the stretch where Mexico and Eagle Pass, Texas meet.

Ginger and I took a break from reporting and sat at a park on the banks of the Rio Grande River on the Mexico side. The park was filled with families like mine on both sides. Couples were out for a run and a group of kids sat on the edge, listening to music and attempting to fish. On the US side, kids played soccer and men enjoyed an afternoon of golf.

It was the first time I had returned to the stretch of border where my family had crossed almost thirty years earlier. I never called it a smuggling. Smuggling felt dangerous. The sense of normalcy I felt there, no more than 200 feet from the river, fed my immediate need to sanitize what had happened to me. I told Ginger the story that I always repeated, with the same details that obscure what happened.

I told her we were brought over the Rio Grande on a raft, that it was scary only because my brother was three months old and my mother was afraid to get wet. We crossed the inland border via a vehicle checkpoint where luck had us fully in the United States. We then boarded a plane to Chicago in a single attempt. I told her about the blonde doll my parents gave me—a chubby, dark-skinned, four-year-old—to blend in. I talked about the bag of chips they gave me to make me appear busy.

The story I told Ginger about that day was idyllic—lucky—because we eventually had a path to become legal immigrants and then citizens. As much as I thought about it over the years, I never imagined going back anywhere near the actual stretch. Confronted with the sight of the stillness of the water on that night, the sounds of families going about their evening, my version of the story started to fall apart. By every measure, the scene was one of happiness, but we were on break after visiting the site of a massacre less than an hour away. Blasting over the news were President Trump’s statements about building a wall, a wall that would split that scene in half, a space long contested as the beginning and the end.

I wanted to call it luck, to draw a straight line from that kid crossing in the late ’80s to the woman there on assignment. But after that trip, my version of the story wasn’t good enough. A discomfort was cemented by the gut punch I felt and will never forget, crossing back over that particular stretch of border for a second time—when the border patrol asked, “Reason for travel?” and Ginger replied, “We’re journalists.” The agent gave us the go-ahead, no questions asked, just like that. That luck felt particularly unfair.