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A sister and brother,one undocumented, one legal,live starkly different lives

Editor’s note: The names of the family members have been changed to protect their identities.

ince getting his green card, Gustavo likes tomake jokes. Bad ones. He’ll say somethinglike, “What are we gonna do with all theseillegals?” and smile. In 2001, the 25-year-old fromColombia entered the country on a six-monthtourist visa and spent a long time on the wrongside of the law. He knows all about the sacrifices,the hustles, the dead ends. So it’s OK, he says, tolaugh about it now.Tonight, however, at the Carrboro apartmenthe shares with his mother and younger sister, his jokes aren’t going over well. The problem is thatboth of them are still undocumented. BecauseGustavo is legal now, his mom could soon haveher green card. But for his younger sister, Julia,who graduated from high school last June, thesituation is more complicated. Without the properdocuments, Julia, 18, can’t get a driver’s license,board an airplane or apply for a decent job. Andbecause undocumented students are charged out-of-state tuition at North Carolina colleges anduniversities, her education plans are on hold.Though they came to the United States on thesame flight, Julia and Gustavo have adapted to thecaprices of immigration policy and undocument-ed life in starkly different ways: she, by workinghard in school and trying to attend college; he, by marrying an American citizen.And while Gustavo can laugh about it, Julia islooking for someone to blame. “I know other kids,American kids, they’ve been here all their life,” shesays. “They could care less about going to college.But I can’t go to school. I can’t work. I can’t dopretty much anything.”

Nearly 270,000 undocumented immigrants,the majority from Mexico and Latin America,live in North Carolina. While more immigrantsarrive each year, increasing numbers of them havegrown up in the state. “They speak English witha Southern accent,” says Marisol Jimenez-McGee,advocacy director at El Pueblo, a Latino-rightsgroup in Raleigh. “They don’t even rememberwhat their country of origin is like.”Though undocumented students often attendpublic schools, play on sports teams and go toprom, legally they remain separate from theirAmerican friends and classmates. Reluctant out-laws in their own communities, they lead lives rid-dled with uncertainty. A routine traffic stop alongInterstate 40 could mean deportation. A knock onthe door during breakfast could be immigrationofficers, waiting with handcuffs.Choices, too, are painfully limited. Jobs tendto be low-paying, menial and sometimes hazard-ous: roofing houses, picking tobacco, washingdishes. College is out of the picture: Like Julia,few immigrants can afford out-of-state tuition.Undocumented immigrants can’t legally drivein North Carolina, since to obtain a license they must have a valid Social Security number.

Julia is applying for a scholarship that wouldpay for tuition at Duke and other universities.

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North Carolina’s undocumented com-munity inhabits an uneasy limbo. Formany, home countries are a distant memo-ry. But once inside the United States, thereare few good options and no easy exits.Some choose to wait and hope for laws tochange, attitudes to evolve, a door to open.Others, however, are not so patient.

“Wanna see it?” Gustavo asks. Hereaches into his wallet and pulls out hisgreen card. Actually, it’s white. His pictureis on the front, next to his thumbprint. Onthe back, an official-looking magnetic stripholds his personal data and immigrationhistory. The card is real, not one of the$100 fakes.“It’s a big door that opens,” he says.“Everything looks different. You get a tasteof what everybody else has.”With his permanent resident card,Gustavo is relatively home free. Providedhe doesn’t commit any major crimes,cheat on his taxes or try to overthrow thegovernment, he can live here as long ashe pleases. He can apply for any job andenter and leave the country at his leisure. Thoughhe’s not a citizen yet, with enough money and theright lawyer, Gustavo could be an American in just a few years.Securing the card wasn’t easy. “If there wassomething I regretted,” he says, “getting marriedwould be the part.”“But I wasn’t given much to deal with,” headds, shrugging. “Those were just my options. It’slike you’re waiting for a bus, and that’s the bus you have to get on. If you miss it, you don’t knowwhen the next one is gonna come.”

As usual, this afternoon, Gustavo is busy. He just finished his shift, working part-time in a labat a local university. He is only a tech, but it’s astep up from his previous jobs: Think deep fryers,not test tubes.Gustavo has set his sights on medical school.But now, he’s concentrating on being acceptedinto UNC-Chapel Hill next fall as an undergradu-ate. A partially filled-out federal financial aid formis in his backpack.A few years ago, his prospects looked consid-erably less rosy. “For the longest time, I was sobitter,” Gustavo says. “A lot of doors shut in yourface if you go knocking on them according to theprotocol.” To help explain how he opened thosedoors, Gustavo begins sketching a timeline on apiece of paper:2000—arrived2001—met Erica2003—got married2004—filed for green cardThey met at work. Gustavo was waiting tablesat an Italian chain restaurant in Durham. Only a year into his life in North Carolina, he had already worked at a half-dozen restaurants. Employersrarely demanded documents, often acceptingbogus Social Security numbers, no questionsasked. Starting off making biscuits for minimumwage, he worked his way up. Waiting tables at theItalian restaurant, he could bring home $200 on agood night.But he was burned out on restaurant work.“People treat you like shit,” Gustavo says. “Andeverything I earned went to pay expenses.” He hadother things to worry about, too. Plans to seekpolitical asylum in the United States had fallenthrough. A lawyer explained to him that sincehe was in no immediate danger back home, hewasn’t eligible for special status. Gustavo was justanother illegal.He was ready to give up and go home. “I real-ized it wasn’t going to get any better here,” he says.Gustavo broke the news to his girlfriend, Erica,over the phone.It wasn’t a great match, he says. Her par-ents, white-collar professionals, didn’t approveof him. And, he thought she was too young tobe trusted, too wild for a serious relationship.He phoned that night planning to break up.“I told her I wanted to go to school,” Gustavosays, “but I couldn’t because I didn’t have thepapers.” At least in Colombia he could get intocollege and find a real job. The more they talk-ed, though, the more Gustavo thought aboutsomething a lawyer had once said to him.After ruling out political asylum, the lawyerhad suggested another option. “Why not getmarried?” he asked. “Find yourself a wife?”Gustavo doesn’t remember how the phonecall with his girlfriend ended that night. They didn’t decide to get married then. But by thetime he hung up, he knew he wouldn’t bereturning to Colombia.A year later more or less—Gustavo doesn’trecall the exact date—he was standing in theDurham courthouse with Erica at his side. Nofriends or family attended; the wedding was asecret. As Gustavo and Erica prepared to exchangethe rings, the judge made their union official.“It was like, ‘Do you accept so and so forthe rest of your life?’” Gustavo says. “The wholespeech.”A few months later, Gustavo started the paper-work for his green card.

Whereas Gustavo is dark, with close-shavenblack hair and deep brown eyes, Julia is fair, withlong, light brown hair that she often wears pinnedback. With her rimless eyeglasses, the hairstylegives her the look of a librarian or a scholar,which is not too far off the mark. Julia, accordingto everyone in the family, is smart.“She’s always been the intellectual one,”Gustavo says. “I like to go out, to party. She likesto stay in with the books and read.” Julia carriesherself with impeccable posture, chooses herwords carefully and is as comfortable talkingabout cell biology as social justice. “She’s alwaysbeen real mature for her age,” Gustavo explains.Still, her braces give away her age. Julia is justout of high school. Her dreams change with hermoods. She wants to travel, to be a lawyer, to ownher own business, to act. And like lots of teenag-ers, Julia can be moody, anxious and defensive.Sometimes, she says, the whole world seemsagainst her: close-minded teachers, uncaringguidance counselors, cruel classmates.Because she is Colombian, Julia was teaseda lot. Kids would ask her if she had cocaine ormarijuana to sell them, or if she knew PabloEscobar, the Medellín drug kingpin. Even praiseveiled prejudice.“I used to hear all the time, ‘Wow! You’re LatinAmerican and taking AP classes,’” Julia says. “Isthat a compliment, an insult or what?”But by her senior year, Julia was ready to put it behind her. Talk had turned tocolleges, and she had a transcript many of her classmates could only dream of. By the time she graduated, Julia, a member of National Honor Society, had earned creditfor seven college-level classes, or almost awhole year of university coursework.Those accomplishments were listedin Julia’s application for admission toUNC. Julia dutifully filled out the 15-pageapplication, wrote the essays, signed thehonor codes and got the references fromher teachers.Yet the most important part forundocumented students is the first page.Below the spaces for name and addresslooms a section titled “Citizenship.”U.S. citizens check one box. Permanentresidents, i.e. green card holders, checkanother. For undocumented students,there’s a third box: “Non-Resident Alien.”And, right underneath her name and heraddress, she checked the box for non-residentalien. In the space provided, she wrote that shewas Colombian.“I didn’t see a reason for me to lie,” Julia says.“If anyone asks me where I’m from, I’m gonna say I’m from Colombia.”UNC accepts applications from anyone,regardless of their legal status. But undocumentedstudents—no matter how many years they’velived in North Carolina—are treated like out-of-staters. This means it’s harder to get in: Only 18percent of spots go to people from outside NorthCarolina. Tuition is also considerably steeper. Forexample, at UNC-Greensboro, for out-of-stateresidents yearly tuition and fees—not includingroom and board—total $15,246, almost fourtimes the in-state rate of $3,978. (Annual tuitionand fees for UNC-Chapel Hill are more expensive:$20,824 for out-of-staters, compared to $5,176 forNorth Carolina residents for the 2007-2008 school year.)Yet even the $45 application fee to UNC-Greensboro was a luxury she could hardly afford.“I couldn’t see myself spending all that money just applying to college,” she says.She knew, however, that finding money fortuition could be a lot harder. Julia says she hada mantra: “As long as I work hard, paying fortuition’s not gonna be a problem.” There wasfinancial aid, after all. And scholarships for thebest students. More important, she knew thatwithout college, her prospects were dim. “I wasafraid if I didn’t give the effort, I’d stay like this,”Julia says. “That was one of my biggest fears.”Julia was accepted into UNC-Greensboro,but she didn’t celebrate. Just a few paragraphsbelow “congratulations,” the acceptance commit-tee explained that as an undocumented studentshe had no access to federal or state financial aid.Where was she going to get the money?“I have to think in a cold way and kind of cal-culate things,” she explains. “I asked myself, ‘Do Iwant to get my family in a debt like that right now?’Faced with few opportunities, Julia was nocloser to being a U.S. citizen than when she got off the plane in Raleigh six years before. In her ownmind, however, she was more American than

’

”

—Julia

Gustavo became a legal U.S. residentafter marrying an American.

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Colombian. She hadn’t been back to Colombia. Shehad no friends left in Bogotá. She had no idea whatmusic was popular, or what kids her age talkedabout or what they watched on TV.And there were all the milestones, the note-worthy and routine, that Julia had lived throughin North Carolina: trips to the coast on herbirthdays; a broken wrist in the ninth grade; theThanksgiving the family spent in Washington,D.C.; acting classes; middle school graduation,all grown-up in a black dress and make-up; highschool phys. ed.; the SATs.And, of course, all the late nights spent in herbedroom cramming for biology and chemistry and statistics and English and psychology. As Juliarecounts her time in America, it’s clear that many of her memories are from the classroom.Suddenly, the long days of cramming for tests,applying for colleges and racing from one after-school activity to the next, ended. Without college,Julia has been plunged deeper into the shadows of undocumented life.“During the week, sometimes I stop and thinkthat everyone from school is in college right now,”she says. “And it’s kind of weird.”

Julia and Gustavo first glimpsed NorthCarolina on an August morning seven years ago.They had boarded a plane together in Bogotá,their lives winnowed down to apair of suitcases. Julia, only 11 atthe time, brought a book of fairy tales. Gustavo, then 18, foundroom for a tennis racket.On that first drive from theRaleigh-Durham airport every-thing was new and strange: thesmells of summer flowers in theSouth, the deep-green forestsbordering the interstate, the mazeof lonely highways leading intoCarrboro.But Gustavo’s strongest mem-ory is wondering who the womanin the front seat was. It had beenthree years since Gustavo andJulia last saw their mother—sinceAna fled Colombia seeking refugein a country she’d never visited.“I remember feeling like Ireally didn’t know that personwaiting for me anymore,” Gustavo says. Therewere few tears on that first ride, no desperateembraces. In fact, Gustavo remembers they hardly spoke at all.Ana, the matriarch of the family, has a kindface and smiles easily. She likes to wear bright-lycolored dresses and makes excellent arepas,Colombian hotcakes made from corn flour andfilled with cheese.The problem is that Ana, and Julia andGustavo, too, bear a stain so indelible they had tocome halfway around the world to escape it: theirown blood. “My family belongs to the history of Colombia,” Ana begins. Depending on whom youtalk to, her father was either a Colombian revolu-tionary fighter or a bandit. What’s clear, however,is that by the time he died, Ana’s father had madeenemies, inside Colombia and out.During the 1950s, a time in Colombia’shistory known as “la violencia,” Ana’s fatherdefected from the Colombian army with a smallband of soldiers. In the lawless countryside, hebuilt a 20,000-strong militia and carved out aprivate enclave nearly half the size of RhodeIsland. Along the way, he earned a reputation asa “matón,” a killer’s killer who brutally dispensedwith enemies. Eventually, the government caughtup with him. Ana’s father was killed, along withmost of his family, in a violent showdown at his jungle plantation.Ana and a few siblings survived and wereraised by relatives, but their family heritageproved to be dangerous. Ana’s first husband wasgunned down when Gustavo was just a baby.Authorities called it random violence; Ana sus-pects otherwise. Around the time Julia was born,a brother of Ana’s was assassinated. Anotherbrother was shot in a small town outside Bogotá.When Ana traveled there for the funeral, she saysthe taxi driver warned her: “Why are you here?They’re going to kill you.”Ana was running out of options. In October1997, she bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles.She had no time to worry about visas or politicalasylum or bureaucrats at the embassy. She enteredthe United States as a tourist, planning to findwork and a place to live.She would send for Gustavoand Julia when the time wasright. But weeks turned tomonths, then years.“At times,” Gustavosays, “we wondered if we were ever going to seeher again.”But, speeding west from the airport toward anew life in Carrboro, the family was finally reunit-ed. And, maybe for the first time, they were safe.Ana thinks about Colombia often. More thanher children, she’s a product of the country. Itcomes out in her accent, thick and lyrical, filledwith pauses and improvisations. “I like to care forchildren,” she explains, “but medicine is what I’m

apasionado

for.” Colombia also lives in her memo-ries. Earlier this month was the anniversary of her first husband’s murder. Ana keeps a picture of him in small a silver frame. He looks like Gustavo,only a little younger. Ana has another daughterback home, too, older than the other children andwith a family of her own now. She worries abouther and wonders if her grandchildren are safe.“When you’re young, you don’t care about thedangers,” Ana says. “But, when you have children, you’re not only thinking about you.”Ana’s apartment is cluttered with boxes andsuitcases and stacks of papers. A few months ago,the family moved from across town because elec-tric bills were too high. There are few furnishingsin the new place: a couch, a coffee table, little onthe walls. Ana explains that they’ll buy real furni-ture once they settle down.But it’s been seven years.Once upon a time, Ana had plans for herself and her family. She was going to get a job, savemoney and get her nursing license so she couldwork in a hospital like she did in Colombia. Butalmost from the moment Ana set foot in thiscountry, her life has lurched along on its owncourse, and she has struggled to hang on: pay thebills, keep the family fed and find time to go tochurch.Ana nannies five days a week and cleanshouse; she’s paid in cash, under the table. Thisroutine has become the rhythm of her life. Sheworries about Julia finding a way to go to school.“Sometimes, I’m very sad about my daughter’s sit-uation,” she says. And she worries about Gustavo’smarriage. “He doesn’t talk a lot about the thingshe had to go through,” she says.Ana is taking English classes but will probably never lose her accent. She fought to get out of Colombia, and she fought to get Julia and Gustavohere. But in a country where she’s still a stranger,Ana is no longer in control of her destiny.“I’m very confused sometimes,” she says. “Iask, ‘Did I do the best or no?’”

Gustavo has one more item to add to histimeline: the next milestone. “The whole fact of us being young was hard,” he explains. But it’sthe right thing to do, he says. Then he cuts a newslash through the line: 2007—divorce.

Above: Raised Catholic,Ana now sporadicallyattends church becauseshe feels like an outsider.Left: Violence forcedJulia, Ana and Gustavo toflee Colombia.

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