SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL May 4, 2006 Immigrant waiting for the White House, Congress
WATSONVILLE — Meet 33-year-old Margarita Diaz-Rivera, mother of three, taxpayer, co-owner of a Watsonville house with her husband and former hard-working, low-paying employee of a local cannery for 13 years. A Mexican native from a small agricultural town in the northern state of Durango, she ran through the hills of Tijuana before her quinceañera, a traditional celebration honoring a Mexican girl's 15th birthday. Eventually in 1987 she met up with the rest of her family in Watsonville — all of whom eagerly awaited her arrival and listened to her stories. She hasn't been back to Mexico since. Everyone in her family is legal. She is not. She was the last in her family to arrive and missed the amnesty passed a year earlier under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Now she's left with two options: She can obtain legal residency through one of her two brothers or she can wait for one of her American-born children — citizens by birthright — to petition residency for her. It's a trend that's playing out these days among many illegal parents whose children were born here. If Diaz-Rivera wants to gain legal residency through one of her siblings, she'll have to return to Mexico and wait at least 10 years for the process to take effect. That would mean picking up and leaving town with the family and moving to what now amounts to a foreign country. If she chooses her children as the path to residency, she has to wait until one of them is 21, which won't be for another 14 years. The savior? None other than Luciano Jr., a feisty little kid who's learning English along with a host of other subjects at Ann Soldo Elementary School. "I'm stuck," says Diaz-Rivera in Spanish as she holds Emily, her 6-month-old baby, with demonstrations unfolding on all sides of them in the town plaza earlier this week. "The thing is, I don't have anybody in Mexico anymore. I don't have any familia over there any more. We're all over here. I really don't know what I'd do if I was sent back. I really don't. Even though I'm Mexican, it's not really my country. It's not. "This is home, but some people think we're just garbage." For Diaz-Rivera, it's all coming down to how Congress decides to reform a system that is widely regarded as broken. Will Congress legalize the likes of Diaz-Rivera, of whom there are an estimated 11 million in this country? Will it decide to make them all felons? Or will the compromise lie somewhere in between? Diaz-Rivera understands the severity of her situation. It's the cost and nail-biting, nerve-racking consequences that came with crossing through those hills just the other side of Tijuana back in the summer of 1987. That's why she joined the throngs of others in the plaza in Watsonville on Monday as businesses closed to show solidarity for people like her. Students marched for her. Workers walked off their jobs for her. La casa blanca, or the White House, has suddenly become a beacon in the night — like the coyote, or smuggler, who led her here. "Please, Presidente Bush," she says innocently. "Please." Meanwhile, her grandfather, Ramon Diaz, 94, can't help but worry about her welfare, uttering the same sort of mantra, watching President Bush on the Spanish-language news stations, decked out in a cowboy hat on his ranch in Texas. A Pajaro resident, Diaz came to Watsonville in the 1950s under the Bracero program, a migration that prompted the rest of the family to follow but has now left his granddaughter in illegal limbo. He grew up in Soledad, Durango, Margarita's hometown, a town surrounded by apple orchards. Now retired, he made his mark in the artichoke fields of Castroville. He's also a U.S. citizen. It took him decades to earn it, but the sad fact, say those versed in the complexities of the immigration process, is that he can't pass that privilege on to his granddaughter. He can, however, pass the privilege on to his daughter. That would be Diaz-Rivera's mother, Antonia Diaz. She died three years ago at the age of 54 due to complications from smoking. Her grandfather had just begun the process. "When her mother died, everything stopped, the process stopped, and Margarita's chances are now slim," said Leticia Shoemaker, a citizenship consultant with the Santa Cruz County Immigration Project, which deals in matters such as these. "Unless there's a new law," she added, "she has little hope at this point." If Diaz-Rivera could rewind anything, she said, she'd rewind it to the point where she'd tell her mother to remind her grandfather to get the paperwork rolling. But hindsight is 20/20. She's lost nearly $1,500 over the course of the past year to a pair of notary publics in Santa Ana in Orange County who falsely promised her residency with the right amount of paperwork that documented all her years here. They take the money, but the residency cards never arrive, Shoemaker said. "They're ripping her off," Shoemaker said. "They did it twice. She's fine right now. I just told her to not pay anybody anything and just wait for something to happen in Congress." So Diaz-Rivera waits. She's the illegal alien we hear so much about who lives in the shadows and in fear. She raises her children as her undocumented worker husband, Luciano, puts in his 40-plus hours at the cannery and the pair struggle to make their house payments on Dogwood Drive. To help out, she sells tacos and tostadas out of her catering truck at the corner of Highway 101 in Aromas near the Big Red Barn every Sunday. Being illegal, she doesn't drive because the state won't let her, but she does have the permission to cook and sell. "My friend drives," she says. "She has permission, and she's legal. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be legal. It seems like out of a dream."
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