P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

When I was six, my family left Mexico to immigrate to the United States. At that time, I craved only three simple things in life. I wanted to eat lots of candy, attend school with my friends, and work on my family’s farm with my dad. My parents never had money for candy, but I found ways to fulfill my other two desires. Whenever hard times hit our family, my father would say, “Deisy, you are de jinetes. You must be strong.”

In these moments my dad was asking me to tap into the strength of my jinete ancestors. As legend has it, I come from a lineage of Maghrebian horsemen, Northwest African men and women who crossed three continents in search of fertile land. This legend would continue with my great-great-grandfather, who brought my ancestors to Mexico in the era of the Mexican Revolution. During this time, the rural elite of the country buried barrels filled with gold coins called reales in the ground. They had hoped to dig up the currency and regain their wealth once the revolution ended. In 1914, after Pancho Villa had defeated the federales in Zacatecas and was making his way to Mexico City, my great-great-grandfather found one of these mythical barrels. He changed our family’s name to Del Real, after these gold coins.

While the legend of my great-great-grandfather’s riches lived in our hearts, there was no evidence of his wealth in our lives. The North American Free Trade Agreement made it impossible for my family to compete with the government-subsidized agribusinesses in the United States. My parents could not sell their crops at a competitive rate, and poverty struck our family. Farming could no longer sustain our livelihood, so like the Maghrebis before us, my parents started their search for better land.

I was only six years old when, after a long day of working in the cornfields, my father dyed my blonde hair black to prepare for our migration to the US. A few days later, his siblings arrived from California. They separated my immediate family into strategic units for the border crossing. I was sent with an aunt whom I had never met before, and I was instructed to call her Mom. My two younger siblings were given to other aunts and uncles.

We were too poor to ever qualify for a US visa, so we immigrated to the US the only way we could: without authorization. When my family set out to cross the Mexico-US border, we did not know if we were going to see each other on the other side. We did not know whether one of us was going to be discovered and detained. My dad’s siblings were risking arrest, and my dad was risking death. “Suffering is necessary,” my father told me before we parted ways; it was the only way that we would find our own reales.

Over the next few weeks, my immediate family slowly reunited in Los Angeles. The last one of my family members to arrive was my father, who had crossed the border by foot. Two immigration officers had chased and beat him, but luckily he had escaped their detention. As a family united, we began to live in my aunt’s small garage, where we would remain for several years. 

I started out talking to reporters and college groups. Then, one afternoon, Angelica asked me to join a social justice bus tour that CHIRLA had organized for tourists visiting Los Angeles. I explained to the tour group that I was just a nerdy student—just a human being who had struggled to get into college and wanted to stay in the country to get my degree and give something back. If I got deported without a degree, I had no idea how I was going to survive in Mexico by myself. I was scared.

At the end of my talk, an elderly man with silver hair introduced himself to me as Craig Clark. He was a priest from New Mexico. “Your story really moved me; we need to keep you in this country,” he said as he handed me his business card. “Please contact me and count on my support,” he told me as he hugged me. Later that week he wrote to tell me that he was mobilizing several religious congregations under the campaign he had named Saving Miss Deisy. In case I received a deportation order, they were getting ready to fight to keep me in the US. In that same tour, a lawyer also offered his services to help with my case. A second lawyer joined my family for our immigration interview, and it was there that our legal counsel successfully convinced immigration services to grant us permanent residency.

I have been a legal resident of the US for nine years now. In 2014, I became a US citizen. Over the past decade, I have been searching for ways to heal from the scars of my undocumented life and to find ways to share what I learned with other immigrants. My search for healing and for solutions to improve the broken immigration system has led me to work in other countries that are recovering from political oppression.

I have worked with the children of the Khmer Rouge survivors in Cambodia. Additionally, I have lived among former political refugees in Argentina, and I have worked with immigrant rights organizations that serve migrants across the world. Through my work and travels, I have met many other oppressed people who are also struggling to find ways to take care of their loved ones.

The 16 years that I was undocumented taught me that even in the most fertile soil, not everybody can have access to opportunities. Arbitrary legal, immigration, class, and ethnic boundaries leave millions of people barely surviving in the margins of society. My father was right that suffering is inevitable, but suffering should not be legalized. I also understand that I could not have thrived in this country if it were not for the kindness of people I met along the way.

So instead of searching for my own barrel of gold, I am dedicating my life to finding policy solutions that will expand the rights, protections, and opportunities of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless people around the world. I hope that my work and the work of other immigrant rights activists will help the millions of other jinetes find a place where they too can thrive.

Story by Deisy Del Real (2011 Fellow), PhD candidate at UCLA