Thread: Young mom, 15, heading back to Mexico to marry

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Border Street: Young mom, 15, heading back to Mexico to marry
July 24, 2006

Maria the younger leaves one Border Street for another. She moves to the dense fringes of a southern suburb, off a street glinting with used car lots and chain restaurants and tiny storefronts, into a suffocating one-bedroom apartment, which she and her baby share with her mother, two sisters, three brothers and one of her brother's friends.

Her mother makes room for her in the bedroom. You and the baby sleep here, on the bed, with your sister. I'll sleep next to you on the floor. Everyone else is in the living room, on the couch, the recliner, the love seat, the floor. The sleeping arrangements change regularly and will change again soon. Maria the younger is going back to Mexico.

It has been two years since she crossed the border into the United States with her sister Cathy's passport. Cathy is the only one in the family born in the U.S., a 12-year-old who speaks English without an accent, covers her brown eyes with blue contacts, and who has, for years, been her mother's translator. She's mastered the task so that now she does it reflexively, simultaneously, as easy as breathing.

When she stumbles upon a Spanish word, Maria the younger and Maria the elder exchange glances and Cathy catches their smirks and she takes out whatever it is that she is feeling on her little brother, whom she hits, and her mother, whom she sasses.

Sometimes, she says, she feels sorry for them because she is here legally and they are not and she can do things they can't. This pity does not always take the form of kindness.

Maria the younger's mother would like to send Cathy back to Mexico, too, to her ex-husband, Cathy's father, the man who she says abandoned this family for another. He left me with five children I couldn't feed, Maria the younger's mother says.

She returned to the United States alone, leaving the children with relatives. That was in 1999, and the children did not stay behind long. First came Cathy, then Maria the elder, the brothers, until, finally, in 2004, Maria the younger. She was 13.

"I thought I would come and be with my mother and study and finish school," she says, "but . . ."

She shrugs and looks at her baby with his full head of black hair and his father's eyes and she smiles. Maria the younger is going back to Mexico because that's where her boyfriend, the baby's father, is. Or to be more accurate, that is where he has fled, a fugitive.

Maria the younger still cannot believe he was arrested. Neither can her mother or his brothers. They are a couple, one of the brothers keeps repeating. This brother let the two of them live with him and his family on Border Street. Yes, he says, his brother is 26 and she is 15, but of all the dangerous criminals, all the drug dealers and murderers and gangsters out there, why did my brother get arrested when they are together, in love, a family? His voice rises as he speaks. I understand it's the law, he says, but he's doing the right thing now and they were going to get married.

Maria the younger's mother, married herself at 16, echoes this opinion. In Mexico, she says, "the police would have worked to make sure he supported his wife and child. Here, they want to take him away from that duty."

So, the families consider it something of a miracle that the boyfriend - an illegal immigrant charged with sex assault on a child, Maria the younger - is allowed to make bail. It takes them two weeks to scrape together 10 percent of the $50,000 bond; one brother puts up his house as collateral. The boyfriend flees a week after he's released. Hops a bus to Juarez. Eleven days pass before his bail bond agent learns he failed to appear for his court hearing.

He will lose his house, Maria the elder says, of the brother who put property up as collateral. You don't understand, one of the brothers will say later. He is our brother. We had to help him.

In the one-bedroom suburban apartment, Maria the younger packs for Mexico. Baby blankets. Diapers. Clothing. Everything she owns fits in three medium-size suitcases.

Border Street replicates itself around her in the stained linoleum of the apartment building's stairwells and the battered windows that look out to other apartments where other young mothers live. There are so many of them, American, Mexican, that were you there, you might have found within yourself a ribbon of anger, a sense of the ways in which Maria the younger's childhood has been stolen from her.

But, she sits there on a picnic table in a grassy courtyard, beaming down at her son, happy, and so you say only that babies are miracles and that life will be hard. She has only one year of middle school.

I know, she says. I know it will be hard, and she tucks her hair behind her ears, as serene as she was the day you met, when she sat, in labor, on a couch on Border Street.

She says when she returns to Mexico, she and her boyfriend will marry. She says there is a school for mothers and that she intends to go. She cannot wait to leave, she says. Her boyfriend calls every night from Mexico. He tells her he is building them a house.



Border Street is an occasional portrait of a Denver street changed by immigration - legal and illegal. griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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I have read those posts , what about the poor of America , we have millions of them , what about us - the country is going into depression - is the country capable to handle the problems of the world ?
We are dealing with the reverse logic here .
I will bring tomorrow if it is needed many many examples of hard-working Americans who are citizens here , but can hardly meet their ends .
I have more than enough of those stories if needed .
I can use myself as a story - I came to this country with my education and $25 in my pockets - that was all , everything else came through hard work .
But I came here legally .
Sorry , those posters are trying to make the impression and the closer we come to the elections , the more of them will be everywhere , appealing to our hearts .
Wow , now this is a time to think - these Americans are soft , kind patient .They will handle everything .
I consider them as a political manipulation with good feelings
That is why it is important to follow the laws , not to get lost .
First they threaten , then cry , then again - until they get what they want .