Rosas-Salas 1

Danny Rosas-Salas

English 2010

Dr. Haslam

February 24, 2022

Crossing With a Stranger

In 1999, I was 20 years old when I was trying to enter the U.S. because I wanted to see

my mother who was in Utah. After my first attempt at crossing the border I was caught by the

border portal, and I was later released into the same city that I was staying at before crossing.

Where I was in Nogales, Mexico sleeping in a stereotypical motel. After I was released I went

back to the motel, and I saw a woman when I entered the motel's reception. She was in her

mid-forties, average size, and had light brown skin. As I was talking with her she asked me if I

could accompany her to a place that would help her get into America. I decided to go with her

because I didn’t have anything else.

We arrived at a small poor house that was located in Canea, Mexico, and we stayed in a

room filled with other people for a couple of days. After five days, everybody in the room had to

cross the border by walking through a desert during the middle of the night. We were walking for

hours through the border where it was really muddy, and there were multiple puddles that our

feet would get wet and dirty as we stepped in them. The woman got exhausted and was not able

to walk as much, so I helped her throughout the rest of the walk until we arrived under a tree.

As we were waiting under the tree for hours a van arrived, and the driver was filling it up

with the people that were walking with us. The driver approached the woman and told her, “ Is

he with you?”

“Yes, he is my nephew,” the woman said.

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“He can’t come with us, the van is already full.”

“I can’t leave without him.”

“ What I can have him do is wait for a second van that will come and pick up another

group.”

“As I said before, I will not leave without my nephew. I will not go if he is not coming

along.”

The driver agreed to take me. As I entered the back of the van I saw people laying down

on their backs. There was no more room left for me, so I had to lay on top of all of the people in

order to fit in the van. That was one of the most uncomfortable experiences that I had in my life.

After two hours of driving the van arrived in Phoenix, and we would stay in an apartment

for the night. There was this guy who would bring food and other necessities for the people that

were staying at the apartment, and that day he brought pizza for us to eat. We called all of our

families to look for us the next day, and the woman told me that her son was going to pick her

up. In the night we slept in a cramped room filled with other people, and as I woke up the next

day I noticed the woman was gone. She left without saying goodbye. Later that day the guy, who

brought us food, joined me when I was going to meet my mother. Before I left he told me that he

did not pay for his trip to come over to the United States, and I decided to pay for his trip. I also

saw that he had torn and dirty shoes, so I decided to give him the shoes that I had on as well.

To this day I’m very thankful for the woman, and I would sometimes think that she was

an angel that was meant to help me get to where I needed to be. If it was not for her I would not

be where I am right now.

There are millions of other immigrants that have crossed the border, and had different

experiences. The Pew Research Center has stated, “The nation’s unauthorized population grew
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rapidly between 1990 and 2007, reaching a peak of 12.2 million. Since then, the population

declined to 10.5 million in 2017,”. Unfortunately, many immigrants have lost their lives trying to

cross the border. According to a website called the Wall they mention the amount of bodies

found by saying, “Illegal crossings along the southwestern border have claimed 7,209 lives over

the past 20 years, according to official Border Patrol statistics, but the actual number is far

higher.” They had their own network reporters complete a count of crossing border deaths from

2012 to 2016 in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. What they found is

shocking information, where they say, “In three of those states, the USA TODAY NETWORK

found anywhere from 25 percent to nearly 300 percent more migrant deaths over five years.”

This demonstrates the issues of the United States immigration system because many immigrants

see this as the only option to get into the country. There needs to be a change to the point that

undoumented immigrants can be able to come to the United States safely, and will not have to go

through the terrible conditions of crossing the border that could potentially lead to death.

Word Count: 874

Letter of Goals and Choices

The goals that I wanted to accomplish for this project is to discuss about the experience

of an undocumented immigrnant coming into the United States. By bringing this up I wanted to

bring awareness to the conditions that immigrants go through when they are crossing the border,

for doing this project I learned that going through the border is a terrible experience. Where

people crossing the border go through exhausting and dreadful conditions that could potentially

lead to major injuries or even death. My goal in the flash narrative was to write a lot of memory

based information with adding as much detail and descriptions from the perspective of this
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person's story. With writing this memoir it deals with my social issue about undocumented

immgrants, and when I was doing research I wanted to get as much as information about

immigrants coming into the United States. Where one of the most common options for

immigrants in Latin America is by crossing the border. How I connect this story into my personal

experience is with me meeting multiple people who are undocumented immigrants, and after

doing this flash memoir I was reflecting on their experiences and how they came into the United

States. Where I couldn’t imagine what they went through if they crossed the border. The choices

that I made in this memoir was to structure my writing well enough that it made sense to my

reader as they were reading. Then I also decided to provide a lot of information and details that I

could because I wanted my reader to envision what the characters were going through and

thinking.
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Citation

Budiman, Abby, et al. “Immigrants in America: Key Charts and Facts.” Pew Research

Center's Hispanic Trends Project, Pew Research Center, 1 Oct. 2020,

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/.

O'Dell, R., González, D., & Castellano, J. (n.d.). The border's deaths, and how many are

never known. USA Today. Retrieved February 25, 2022, from

https://www.usatoday.com/border-wall/story/mass-disaster-grows-u-s-mexico-border/100975200

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