El coste de ser indocumentado: El ajuste de cuentas de una mujer con las matemáticas inhumanas de Estados Unidos

Excerpted from The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia. 

The Cost of Time

A healthy life should have a past that can be cherished, a present that offers challenges and joys, and a future to look forward to. However, because of my circumstances, my past has nothing for me. It is just a house that used to be my family’s, ransacked of my childhood belongings, sitting in a now unfamiliar city. My present is filled with mounting costs, all to live in a country that does not always tolerate me. And my future is a series of bleak prospects and dead ends.

People very rarely ask why I am living in the United States in the first place. It frustrates me that the circumstances that bring the undocumented community to this country are overlooked or depicted as problematic stereotypes. It is convenient to not have to know me and my truth. It’s easier to keep me in an exploited position that way. The United States profits from not acknowledging why I am here. But as I share in this chapter the costs of my past, my present, and my uncertain future, I will begin with the painful story that brought me from there to here, from then to now.

The Past

I grew up in a very wealthy family in the Mexican state of Sinaloa during the 1990s and 2000s. If you were walking the streets of my hometowns of Culiacán and Navolato during those years, you might have heard delivery trucks playing the jingle for my family’s chain of tortillerías: “Tortilla’s Alix!” The chain was named after me, and the tortillerías were a cornerstone of my family’s wealth. My sister and I grew up working in several of the nearby shops. Before becoming entrepreneurs, my father practiced business law and my mother was a private school director and teacher. By the time I was a young child, they had both left those careers to focus on building their grocery empire.

My family had multiple houses and a collection of cars. I grew up among nannies and housekeepers. We were raised with conservative, Apostolic/Pentecostal Christian values. My parents instilled in me and my two siblings, alongside lessons of humility and respect for everyone, the fact that money was an illusion that could disappear. This is why my parents felt it was so important for my sister and me to work in our family’s business from an early age. Sinaloa had long been a center of drug cartels. The escalating violence in my city and the threats of extortion directed at our family’s businesses meant that we never took our comfort for granted.

These lessons were shared quietly and deliberately. My dad was a natural introvert, though also an energetic and exuberant person. He would speak only when he had something important to say. He talked and moved slowly. He was a calming, steady presence for me, an angel. He had so much peace in his heart that it overflowed into the corners of our home. My childhood is soundtracked by my dad playing hymns on our family’s piano. He loved me and my siblings more than anything.

In 2008, when I was in college, my dad started to invest in projects that involved collaborating with people beyond his established network. A family friend introduced him to someone interested in partnering to expand our chain of stores across Mexico, perhaps even internationally. My dad took on a substantial loan from this investor. The opportunity, however, came at an unfortunate time. The global economy took a turn for the worse, and our lives started to go downhill. Sales went down as people in the city were forced to make do with less money, buying fewer extra groceries or tortillas. My dad began working endless hours, as longtime employees had to be let go.

It seemed like everybody in my country was losing money. Businesses were shutting down. Many people around us were losing their houses and cars. The particularities of life in Sinaloa made this situation even more adverse. At the time, 90 percent of the cocaine in the US was being smuggled in from Mexico, much of which was controlled by cartels in Sinaloa. Escalating feuds between cartels and with the Mexican and US governments made life in Sinaloa all the more dangerous. Gunfire in the streets, robberies in broad daylight, and kidnappings were daily occurrences. Families that had the means fled the area. My family, too, had plans to move and open shops in Cabo. We also knew that our family’s debt would follow us to another state. We delayed our departure, hoping to first make a substantial dent in the money we owed. And yet, despite his efforts, my dad found himself unable to make payments to his new business partner.

One of my parents’ biggest fears was that my sister, my brother, or I would get caught up in the life of the cartels. Because of those fears, they perhaps protected us too much. We weren’t allowed, for example, to listen to the popular narcocorridos that glorified the gruesome cartel crimes on the streets of Culiacán.

Corridos are a genre of narrative ballads in Mexico, and narcocorridos focus that form on cartel violence. Cati de los Ríos, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, explained to me over a Zoom call, “Narcocorridos were blowing up in the late ’90s and 2000s. Around 2010, the [Mexican] government started banning them, prohibiting them on the radio. Kids were basically not allowed to listen to them. And that’s also kind of why, a lot of corridistas in Mexico would come to Los Angeles and find refuge with certain record labels because they felt like, ‘Okay, we’re less likely to be sued for defamation or killed on this side if we sign with [record labels in the US].’”

Explaining her years-long work listening to, interviewing, and observing Mexican youth writing and listening to corridos within California, de los Ríos is careful to make clear that the violent narcocorridos were only a portion of the corridos that circulate more widely: “A lot of the kids, yes, would listen to narcocorridos. But it would also not necessarily be a blueprint for how to live life. It was, for them, a kind of reading and learning about the horrors of capitalism and the drug war.”

This glorified drug war was front and center for my family. The stress of the new financial reality brought on by that war, in addition to the global downturn, weighed heavily on my father. The house grew quieter as he retreated into himself, trying to find a way to dig us out of mounting debt. Within months, his hair went gray, and his once lithe figure became alarmingly thin. By 2009, an old man had replaced the person I’d known as my dad.

This was when he started selling our cars, our businesses, and our houses. Things started getting tense at home, but I was too young to understand that my dad was in a living nightmare.

Two years later, in late 2010, when I was nineteen years old, my father gathered us for a very hard conversation. It was the five of us: my dad, my mom, my older sister, Cindy, my eight-year-old brother, AC, and me. At the table where we’d shared Christmas dinners and laughed as a family, my father slouched in a seat diagonal from me, not at his customary position at the head. He breathed out slowly, controlling his voice. He told us that he’d found out that his new business partner had been laundering money for one of the major drug cartels in Sinaloa. This meant that the business partner was an incredibly dangerous man. Fuzzy details of our lives became clearer to me; the new bodyguards my father had suddenly hired as security for our house now made sense. My family had hired bodyguards before, when I was younger and cartel-related violence had gotten especially bad, but the appearance of this additional security had been a surprise. At the time, we didn’t know that the debt we owed would become the breaking point for us as a family. That we would be broken apart.

As my father spoke, it became clear that the heaviness he was carrying was killing him. We kept our emotions in check for one another, no one wanting to cry, as we listened to my exhausted father. I broke down silently, wiping away my tears so that my dad would see me as strong. I stood and paced anxiously in the dining room, too agitated to stay seated, as my dad said, “You know what? We’re going to have to sell the other houses. We’re going to keep this house because this is our home. We’re going to sell all the cars. At the end of the day, I don’t care if we lose material things. I’m just really scared that our lives might be in danger.”

The danger turned out to be greater than my siblings and I could have known at the time. My parents were hiding from us the fact that cartel members had been in regular contact with my dad, and that he had sold some of our cars and our houses to keep them away from us. While Cindy, AC, and I could see our wealth draining, we couldn’t see how desperately my dad surrendered our belongings in an attempt to protect us.

At the end of the conversation, my dad said something that has stayed in my heart: “We’re losing everything. But look, it’s the five of us. We’re not going to focus on what we don’t have anymore, which is money. We’re going to focus on what we have left: the five of us."

He said that two more times. We’re going to focus on what we have left: the five of us. We’re going to focus on what we have left: the five of us.

I think of that sentence every single day of my life.

When I heard that, I realized that we were probably going to end up homeless. But hearing my dad say “the five of us” gave me comfort. I was reminded that hardships happen in life. We might lose all the luxuries of wealth, but that was okay. We would still have each other. That night I slept, knowing I had my family.

The Day I Lost It All

I am eighteen months younger than my sister, but we were both always treated like “older sisters.” If you are an older sister in Mexico, you are like a mom. We pretty much had to raise our little brother as a team, because that was the cultural expectation. As a result, I developed a lot of the skills I rely on today. My parents might have worked hard, but so did we.

One of my tasks at home was cooking. I loved cooking because my dad appreciated it so much. He was always so grateful when I cooked a special dish just for him. One afternoon in December 2010, I decided to make him camarones en crema while he was at work. He loved seafood.

I had done a really nice job preparing that dish and was excited for him to come home.

But he never came home to eat that meal. Just before six o’clock, one of his employees began shouting outside for my sister: “Cindy! Cindy! Cindy!”

Cindy and I went to the window. The employee told us our dad was going to the hospital in an ambulance. He had fainted.

My sister and I grabbed our keys, went to the hospital, and waited for hours to see him, as my mom stayed by his bedside. Finally, she came out and told us something I didn’t fully understand: “Your dad fainted, and he woke up without his memory.” I had just seen my dad that morning. How could he have no memory?

For three days, the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong. On the third day, a doctor told us that my dad had five cancerous tumors in his brain. They were the reason he didn’t remember anything.

The doctor then added that the effects of the tumors on his brain and his perception were why the doctors had been forced to tie my dad to the bed. My mom had been hiding that information from us. She had been protecting us from the reality that my dad had been trying to escape the hospital, screaming that he had to go home.

My dad stayed in that bed for thirty-two days. On January 2, 2011, he regained his memory for three minutes. He told us, “I’m going to go with God very soon.” He was crying. And he said that things might not get easier right now, but that we had to trust God that at some point things would get better. He told Cindy and me, “All the time, I have been telling you girls how to be strong, wise, and brave. The most important thing that you need to do is to protect your brother and to protect each other. Your lives are in danger, so you have to be careful with every single move that you make. You have to stay safe.”

That night, I slept on the cold hospital floor next to his bed. Even though it was uncomfortable, I was so grateful to lie next to my dad one last time. When I heard his breathing go ragged at six in the morning, I stood up. He was struggling to breathe. I held his hand because I thought he might be having a bad dream.

What happened next was one of the biggest blessings in my life. I saw my dad pass away. I saw how he took his last breath. Even though it was a nightmare to go through, it was an honor to witness.

There was no use trying to collect myself. I walked into the hallway and everybody was there: my grandparents, my mom, my sister, and the doctor. As soon as they saw my face, they knew he was gone.

I followed them back into his room. I now wish I hadn’t done that, because I regret seeing what I saw. The doctors tried to revive him by putting all these things on his chest, but nothing helped. I knew nothing was going to bring him back.

I was the person who had to tell the rest of our family and friends that my dad was dead. And then came the moment my dad had prepared me for: telling my brother. When I hugged him and told him the news, he was destroyed completely. So was I. He told me, “Hey, we’re going to be okay. We are going to be just fine.” He grabbed my face with unfamiliar confidence. I think his firm grip was God reminding us that, like my dad had said, things might be bad, but we would be okay. At that time, my sister and I were in college. Now we would not be able to finish. We still owed lots of money and our lives were in danger. My father’s death did not wipe away our balance and we had no more money to pay for security or bribes. An unspoken law of Sinaloa is that if you cannot pay cartels back with money, you will eventually pay with your life.

Seeking help from friends or family in other Mexican cities would be putting them at risk. Because we had no money or resources to hide in any other states, we had to leave the country.

Outsiders don’t understand that in Mexican states like Sinaloa, if somebody wants to kill you, they can hire an assassin for $100 and that person will kill you. Finding a hit man is as easy as going on Amazon and getting a package delivered. I love Mexico with all my heart, but I cannot deny how easy it is to commit crimes there. The US, on the other hand, runs background checks on Mexicans wishing to enter the country, making it impractical for those with a criminal record to cross the border. The surveillance that I went through in order to get a tourist visa to the US meant that violent criminals would not follow my family here.

I had a life in Mexico. I had friends, family, school, and a church. I had a favorite restaurant. I had a spot at the beach where the sun kissed my nose all year long. All that was taken away from me because I needed to stay alive. If I had stayed in Mexico, I can assure you that I would be dead.

We had a family friend in Georgia who offered to hide us from the people who wanted to kill us. AC and I would go to live with them. At the time, I was twenty and he was nine. My mom and sister were going to stay in Mexico to try to pay our debts by selling what remained of our houses, cars, and belongings. They would move from city to city as they did this, never staying in one place for long.

Years have passed, each one bringing new surprises. My mom is still trying to process our collective losses. As for me, I never got the chance to grieve my dad. I was in the United States trying to make a living and learning how to be a mom for my little brother.

Befores and Afters

Our lives are divided into a series of befores and afters—moments that irrevocably alter the terrain of where we’ll go and who we’ll become.

Before my father died. And after.

Before loss and drug cartels sent me across geographic borders and time zones. And after.

Before the US saw me as “illegal.” And after.

There are also events that cleaved the world long before I was born. Before borders made people illicit. And after. This cleaved world may still unite at some future point, if borders are abolished.

As I unwillingly face the cost of the uncertain future I was handed, I think about the millions of other undocumented people in this country and wonder how they are dealing with this same anxiety. We collectively exhale a black cloud each day, trying to keep this stress inside of us. Lately, I’ve been wondering what the future looks like if I continue to stay in the United States. I don’t know how much longer I can live like this.

Being in the United States is a battle with time. I left all of me in the past and had to rebuild myself through therapy, networking, and careful steps to avoid deportation. Regardless of how much I disagree with this country and how much it dehumanizes me, I retain love for the possibility of what America might become. Even though I don’t feel safe, I know I’m alive because I came here. I am a resident who loves this country, yet I am only harbored here, not even tolerated by most people. I want this place to shelter me safely.

Recently, I was catching up with some of my LA friends on a Zoom call. Back when the pandemic started, they’d decided to rent a beach house so they could surf while isolating. They lived there for much of the worst of the pandemic, surfing every day.

Now they’re all back at home. They have well-paying jobs, futures secure. So while we were on Zoom, they began talking about how perhaps, when they grow older and are ready to retire, they could buy a house together in Hawaii or at the beach here in California. Then they could “just be free.” It was the kind of playful daydreaming backed with real financial and legal possibility. It certainly could be a reality someday if they wanted it to be. For them.

I love these friends. But they just have no idea what my life is like. Sure, they know I’m undocumented, but in our conversations, it’s always clear that no one fully understands what that means for me. They always assume that it’s a small legal loophole that will be easy to fix eventually. I don’t think of myself as a jealous person, but the truth is, I am jealous—of my friends’ ability to visualize themselves in the future.

It terrifies me that I’m not even able to dream of a future for myself when I’m older. It’s one of the reasons I keep asking myself, “Is it even worth staying in the US?” But I do not have other safe options for living right now. I’m caught in the double bind of undocumented living: a perilous past is forcing me into an uncertain future. I don’t know what the decades might throw at me. But I also don’t know where I’ll be a year from now, or in six months. The future is five minutes from now, and in that time, my world could suddenly collapse, again.

Excerpted from The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia. Copyright 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.