Undocumented Parenting: The Talk

Editor’s Note: For today’s post, The Latino Newsletter is honored to feature the work from La Cuenta, a Substack community that explores “the costs incurred by roughly 11 million individuals in the United States who are labeled as undocumented.”

The following is a personal essay that La Cuenta published on Thursday. The full post is here.

By Christián 

My son is sitting on the trampoline. He has put on his noise-cancelling headphones. He sits in a lotus position. His eyes are closed. He’s breathing deep and slow. My daughter is crying on my lap. The Google Earth map on my laptop terrifies her. “I don’t want to talk about borders. It's scary.” She sobs into her hands.

I have gathered my kids outside to talk to them about my undocumented status and the criminalization of my body. I am dysregulated and exhausted. I can feel how impatient I am being with them, but I just want to get this conversation over with. The sun is warm on our backs, and there is a soft breeze. We watch a few birds fly into the lime tree. I ask them what they remember about our last discussion of borders. I tell them that this conversation will be more difficult than the last but that it is important that we have it.

I read La Frontera: El Viaje con papá ~ My Journey with Papa. We discuss borders again, we talk about border patrol agents, we talk about the laws criminalizing my body. Their dad and I hold back tears, the children cry into our chests. My son balls his hand into a fist. “I will punch the border patrol so they won’t take you, mom.” Then he cries into my shoulder.

The world becomes a tight fist in my belly, a huddle of warm bodies surrounding me. Their tears could form a moat around us. Shelter us. Keep us safe. They try to place these concepts into simple boxes, Good or Bad. Why are we brown? Why don’t they like us? We tell them they are Mexican, children of an immigrant, and that they should be proud. We tell them our culture is beautiful. We tell them that there is nothing wrong with us. The laws are wrong.

At bedtime, my son yells from the bathroom, “You’re a citizen now, mom. There. You don’t have to worry now.”

About La Cuenta

La Cuenta is an ongoing exploration of the costs incurred by roughly 11 million individuals in the United States who are labeled as undocumented.

Each week, we offer an itemized breakdown of some of the unseen costs that slowly burden immigrants with debt—financial and otherwise. We invite you to join us in this recounting by subscribing to our newsletter or by getting in touch if you have ideas you’d like to share.

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What We’re Reading

Musk and Undocumented Workers: On Friday, Bloomberg published the following story about Elon Musk and his companies. We will let the tweet speak for itself.

Happy weekend.

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