Though I was banned from Sweetness and Light for attempting to educate esthier on the broader issues, I still support our troops and the Pres. My hubbie was a Viet Vet. Anyway, just saw this story in NYT and it really pissed me off...they come in, keep having kids at taxpayer expense, and now I am supposed to have my heartstrings tugged at.. after my husband's ill treatment by the VA and the poor treatment the children and I received when we needed assistance, I am really pissed off.
After reading it, I realized that I ended up living quite a bit lot that sans the "affordable" health care, illegal part, and homeownership part. Where is my bandana, I want to look the part of a "refugee".
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December 20, 2006
Three Sisters
Fear and Hope in Immigrant’s Furtive Existence
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
SAN ANTONIO — Verónica keeps her foot steady on the pedal. She turns onto a side street, where trouble is easier to avoid. A yellow traffic light flashes and she stops; running it is not an option.
Verónica, 31, does not take chances. In her mind, she already took the biggest chance of her life by moving here illegally from Monterrey, Mexico, with a husband and three young children. Now she has too much to lose.
Border Patrol agents routinely monitor the main roads near her house on the outskirts of this sprawling city in south-central Texas, so Verónica and her friends and relatives have informal alert networks in place. “My husband just called to tell me he saw them right now on the street,” she said, clicking shut her cellphone, before leaving the house.
Spanish-language radio also does its part; “limones verdes” — or green limes — “are sprouting” near the highway, an announcer warns over the radio, using shorthand for the agents’ green uniforms.
“We’re careful,” Verónica said.
And why not. After six years in America, her list of accomplishments would be the envy of most everyone in the ramshackle neighborhood where she grew up.
There is the little house, stone and stucco, with a browning yard, a battered trampoline and rusty plumbing. The family’s two used cars (a minivan and a Ford Focus) sit in the driveway.
Her common-law husband, José, has a job other immigrants covet, $15 an hour working for a boss who offers no benefits but gives generous presents: a refrigerator, a washing machine, tickets to SeaWorld. Her children speak to each other in English and bring home mostly A’s and B’s. Her eighth grader is in the National Honor Society, and a son was recently rewarded with a GameCube for doing well in school.
It may not seem like much, Verónica says, but in Monterrey’s working-class “colonias” she lived in houses with cardboard walls and zinc roofs. Growing up, she shared a single damp box spring with eight siblings and coffee cans. The cans were there to catch the rain. And Verónica was the lucky one of the bunch, she said: she
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