I Don't Cry, But I Remember: A Mexican Immigrant's Story of Endurance

Chapter 3. Crossing the Frontera, 1940s

55 3 Crossing the Frontera 1940s Really I am suffering doubly. There must be several thousand women like me in the fields. —Unidentified migrant worker1 by 1946, viviana’s nomadic marriage, the bearing of nine children, and the balancing of her own values and needs against her husband’s unpredictable temper had forged her remarkable strength. Now she was about to experience another major life change—immigrating to a new country. For what she and the family were about to endure, she would need every bit of that strength. The Salgueros would make the passage at a time of high demand for agricultural labor in the United States, but their situation was still precarious. Jorge had been born in Texas, but after moving to Mexico with his father in 1916, he had never documented his US citizenship. He had returned as a laborer without papers in the early forties, crossing and recrossing the border undetected. With the war over and the world agricultural market thriving, many laborers were entering the United States under the legal auspices of the Bracero program. Texas farmers, however, wanted to avoid what they considered the bureaucratic controls of the government-sanctioned program and sought politically powerless labor over which they could exercise complete control.2 Even when 56 chapter three Texas governor Coke Stevenson did request some Bracero labor, Mexican authorities refused to send braceros to Texas because of egregious racial prejudice in the state.3 Workers were often shunted into colonies or camps, inadequately housed, poorly fed, and severely discriminated against.4 Indeed, such discrimination would become a significant focus of Viviana’s concerns as she described the family’s lives in the following decades. Either unaware of or undeterred by these drawbacks, Jorge decided to resettle the family in Texas. By selling what few possessions they owned and sending four children to live with the elder daughter, Mercedes, who had married by this time, the family managed to scrape together enough cash to travel 340 miles northeast to the border. Migrating families often had to separate, leaving all or some of their children behind with relatives or older siblings.5 Jorge and Viviana brought the three oldest boys and the baby, who was still nursing. Leo Chavez has compared the migrant experience to more conventional rites of passage, with their three phases of separation, transition, and incorporation.6 The first stage, the actual leaving of one country and moving to another, requires leaving behind not only family but also any sense of security and structure one might have known. According to Viviana’s eldest son, Roberto, the six Salgueros rode the bus from Torreón through the states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas to the crossing point,7 and then resumed the trip on foot.8 Viviana never mentioned the bus trip, however. Her memories were of endless walking with a baby at her breast, hiding from immigration authorities, and enduring the harshness of the elements. Some oral historians maintain that “reminiscences can rose-color or soften the past,”9 but that didn’t seem to be the case with Viviana. Perhaps her sorrow and anger were reinforced by the knowledge that things could have been different. It is possible that Jorge was not aware of his citizenship status, but Viviana clearly believed he just didn’t want to bother going through official channels. Basing many of his hopes on finding his siblings in Texas, he made no effort to go to the American consulate in Mexico, either to obtain papers for himself or to register his children as US citizens. He chose instead to bring the family over the border in stealth, a decision for which his wife never forgave him. They crossed Crossing the Frontera: 1940s 57 to the new country quietly, shrouded by secrecy, braving the frontier “we dare to cross only at night,”10 as Carlos Fuentes describes the border between Mexico and the United States. Jorge may have harbored a long-standing distrust for the authority of governmental institutions. He had grown up in a border culture where rules were often flouted,11 and his father, who did not always stay on the right side of the law, lost most of the family property through failure to go through legal channels. Jorge may also have feared not having evidence enough to prove his citizenship and therefore losing face as well as the opportunity to work. Viviana...