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| 77 4 “I Had to Leave My Country One Day” Entering through the Back Door Reyna Gómez was perched on a cozy sofa in her small Miami, Florida, apartment, eagerly and passionately reciting the details of her biography : “It was hard to come here. I had a good life in Honduras, working in a school. It was a rushed decision; I had to leave my country one day. They tried to run me over, kill me, so I had to leave. I didn’t want to come.” Her journey to her eventual home in Florida took her over the Guatemalan border , across El Salvador, and through the hot deserts of Mexico—a journey she described as “a very hard experience”: “I never thought I would experience something so terrifying.” Reyna continued walking across Mexico on this journey to the other side, fending off advances of the coyotes who were arranging her passage and weighing her current troubles against the risk of returning to more certain violence in Honduras. Her perseverance paid off, and she found herself face to face with the mighty Rio Grande river—the one remaining obstacle between her and the solid ground of the United States. Although Reyna was familiar with the river’s mythical grandiosity, as she stood and surveyed the opposite bank in a dim and distant horizon, the river’s actual physical scale caught her completely unaware: “I have heard about the Rio [Grande] River, but I thought it was just a little stream. I couldn’t believe it.” Reyna remembers the waters’ oppressive darkness, obscuring the rushing currents that repeatedly pulled her toward the muddy bottom. As she frantically treaded to keep afloat, her eyes caught the sight of a fifteen-year-old girl, seemingly frozen from fear, midriver. She reflected, “She reminded me of my daughter, so I couldn’t leave her behind. It’s like leaving my daughter behind. So I just went underwater, took her by the waist, and pulled her up.” Reyna’s dive made so much noise, however, that the nearby border patrol 78 | “I Had to Leave My Country One Day” took notice. Reyna pulled herself up on the river bank through layers of mud and roots so deep that she continued to feel as if she was being submerged by the elements. She helped the girl to the banks, and, resigned to her new fate but with no alternative options, Reyna surrendered to the border patrol and asked their help. As she dug further into her memories to convey the painful details of her saga, Reyna began to cry. At that moment, the entire life-or-death sojourn appeared to have been in vain. How did the border patrol answer her pleas for help? By rounding up Reyna and her cosurvivors of this tortuous swim and delivering them to a detention center near Brownsville, Texas. Clearly, these agents were performing their required duties. Reyna, however, described a place that sounds more like a site of punishment than a temporary holding center: “They held us there for two days. We were in wet, dirty clothes. It was super cold: like a freezer. They gave us one blanket for two of us. Two times a day we got bologna on bread and juice. We made a system; men wouldn’t eat their morning food and would give it to the children.” At the time, the border patrol practiced a policy of “catch and release.” They freed both Reyna and the girl; Reyna eventually made it to Miami, where she pieced together a living through several strenuous low-wage jobs; today she works as a labor organizer. Her story continues in chapter 9. Despite the public image of the undocumented immigrant as male, irregular immigration to the United States also has a female face. Just as there has been a feminization of immigration through the American front door, similar claims can be made about the growing number of women entering the United States through back doors: swimming rivers, crossing deserts, or overstaying the terms of a valid visa—the latter of which accounts for approximately 40 to 45 percent of undocumented immigrants.1 Immigrants who enter through irregular means can be said to occupy two extremes of the continuum of agency in the immigration process. On one end is the woman who is coerced or forced and thus the least free; her agency is, therefore , severely restricted. At the other extreme is the woman who has crossed a...

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