4A
NEWS / THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
RAUL'S STORY
Though it was only a year and a half ago, Raul says his life on the KU campus seems far away from his current life in the dangerous suburbs of Mexico City.
Photo contributed by Juan Izaquirre
As he focuses on complex moves that are traditional to step dancing. Raul sports his Sigma Lambda Beta T-t shirt. Step dancing, a vibrant dance form, is traditional to the culture of many black and Hispanic fraternities like Beta. Each year that Raul participated in the University step show, his family came to Lawrence to watch him perform.
Photo contributed by Raul
After being deported to Ciudad Acuña, a border town near Del Rio, Texas. Raul used the $40 given to him by the U.S. government to travel to his grandmother's home outside of Mexico City. The area where she lives is violent and dangerous, the site of frequent murder and theft.
Raul (center) celebrates his membership to the Hi-
friend center with Pablo Gordillo and吧 colleagues at
their event.
IN LIMBO (CONTINUED FROM 1A)
PART ONE: JAVIER
in high school, Javier felt lost. People noticed his flashy gold Supra high tops poking out from his school uniform khakis, but Javier himself receded into the shadows. The skinny kid with dark hair and glasses who speaks English without an accent was the only undocumented student at his private Catholic high school in Kansas City, Kan. The school had both rich and poor students, and he was from the poorer side. His parents take pride in their hard work that pays for their children's education. His father, Javier Sr., is a painter; his mother, Ester, cleans houses. His sister, Irerti, 16, a popular girl who plays soccer and swims for the school team, is also undocumented.
Like other undocumented teenagers, Javier was hitting the many restrictions of his status. He didn't have a driver's license, so he couldn't drive. He couldn't legally work, either. He used a fake Social Security number to get his first job as a lifeguard at Roeland Park Aquatic Center. The manager assumed the faulty digits were a mistake and asked Javier to go home and check it out with his parents. Javier walked out and never went back.
"It was the first time I felt like I was undocumented," Javier said. "It just hit me all of a sudden, like a wake-up call."
During his junior year, friends started talking about college. They would ask him about his plans, and Javier would say he didn't know.
He grew frustrated, but his mom was hopeful. Ester, 47, and Javier Sr., 46, came to this country so their children could get an education. Though they speak limited English, they dream of success in the United States for their children. Each night, Ester would ask Javier how his college search was going. She was sure there was a way for him to go.
When he visited his local college, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, the woman working at admissions gave a rousing speech about how the university welcomed people from all backgrounds. After listening, Javier felt hopeful enough to ask if that meant he could go too. She told him it be illegal for him to go to school in Missouri.
Sometimes the frustration would boil over. His mom would insist there was a way, and Javier would explode.
"You don't know anything!" he snapped at her. "You know nothing about the laws!
When he was done, Ester would calm him in Spanish: Have faith in God.
His parents started talking about sending him back to Mexico for college.
Javier hasn't been to Mexico since he was 5. His friends are here. His life is here. Border enforcement is strict. If he went to Mexico, he might never be able to return home.
In between the lines of his own name, Javier painstakingly stenciled: I feel anxious, confused.
"That was my plan Z," Javier said.
Worry about his future consumed his thoughts, but he found bravery through his art.
He spray-painted a canvas his senior year that now hangs in his bedroom. Standing bold against diagonal blue and red stripes is Muhammad Ali, poised and ready to fight.
"Muhammad Ali wasn't scared of anything," lower said.
In between the lines of his own name, Javier painstakingly stenciled: I feel anxious, confused.
--him to this visit
Then, in February 2009, Javier visited the University with his friend and classmate, Juan. Juan had already applied to the University and wanted to major in business.
As Javier walked around the campus, he told himself: If I could go to any school, this is where I'd go.
Now, the pair stood in a crowd of prospective students and parents outside Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union.
"Just ask," Juan nudged Javier
"I already know it's no," javier said.
As Javier looked at his feet, he flashed back to his visit to UMKC. Why would this be any different?
He had known lavier since they were in kindergarten — he was used to pushing his more reserved friend. He had already dragged
"Ask," Juan insisted.
"I don't care," said Javier, relenting so Juan would stop asking.
"Do you want me to do it?" Juan said.
Juan approached Greg Valdovino. KU's assistant director of multicultural recruitment.
"So, I have this friend who's illegal — can he go to school here?"
Only a few feet away,Javier heard the response and couldn't believe it.
"No problem," Valdovino said.
Kansas has made higher education possible for students like Javier since 2004. Kansas is one of only 11 states to grant in-state tuition to undocumented students who attend high school in state. Though opponents voiced fears that colleges in Kansas would be inundated with undocumented students, an average of only 251 students per year have received in-state tuition because of this law since 2005, according to the Kansas Board of Regents.
Javier's desk in his room in Kansas City boasts his many interests. He spray-painted the portrait of Mohammad Ali his senior year of high school, after finding inspiration in Ali's bravery. Javier is a dancer his favorite soccer player Javier Hernandez, who recently became the first Mexican player for the British team Manchester United.
Of the 316 undocumented students who received in-state tuition in Kansas in 2009, only 10 attend this University, the Board of Regents reports.
The bill, called the Kansas Dream Act, makes the dream of a college education possible for students like laver.
He couldn't wait to tell his mom
--move Javier into his dorm room.
When he heard his mom yell, "I'm home!" in Spanish, Javier bounded up the stairs from his basement room into the kitchen.
"I can go," he said in Spanish, smiling.
He launched into a description of the visit to the University. He saved the best for last:
Faint go, he said in Spanish, stifling Ester squealed with joy and grabbed Javier, squeezing him tight.
"I told you so," Ester said in Spanish, kissing her son.
"I was happier for her than I was for me," he recalled.
--move Javier into his dorm room.
Ester called Valdovino, and he explained everything to her in Spanish.
Javier would have to meet the same entrance requirements as any applicant, and he wouldn't be eligible for federal financial aid. That makes attending the University an impossible dream for undocumented students who fall below the poverty line.
All Javier had to do was sign an affidavit that he had gone to high school in Kansas and was attempting to pursue citizenship.
Then Ester asked the question she feared the answer to. Would lavier be safe from discrimination ... and worse?
Valdovino explained that the law required confidentiality. Immigration and customs officials could not come to the University and ask for students' citizenship information.
Javier applied.
Two months later, the TV was blaring in Irriti's room, but laver's younger sister could still hear the sudden screams.
Visions of what might have happened cloud her mind. She dashes into the living room. Javier is grinning. Her mother is hopping with excitement and yelling into the phone in Spanish.
--move Javier into his dorm room.
"Lo aceptaron!"
A letter lies open on the table
"Good job, son." he says
Javier's father comes in. "What's all the commotion?" he asks his oddy family.
Ireri starts shouting, too.
"otion?" he asks his giddy family
--move Javier into his dorm room.
"Javier got into KU!"
Javier Sr's van pulled up outside of McCollum on move-in day. Javier was both embarrassed and proud that the world could see Irelt's message painted across the windows; KU — here comes Javier
Javier Sr's eyes glisten. "Good job son."
Everyone in Javier's family wore KU gear to
JAVIER
When the family drove away, despite his vows not to cry, Javier Sr. was the first one in tears.
Javier watched his mom. Yeah, she spoke Spanish, but she was like every other mom there. On move-in day, all moms flutter around, worried. Ester was beside herself.
--becomes a legal adult, is what typically bars a person from changing his visa status.
"Are you in your room?" Ester's voice sounded upset.
"No," said Javier. He was talking on his cell phone, walking back from class on a sunny October afternoon.
"Call me when you are back there," his mother requested.
Javier suddenly felt sick to his stomach
He had been shot in the gang warfare consuming Mexico. The drug war killed more than 6,000 people last year and has prompted some security analysts to warn that Mexico is in danger of becoming a failed state.
Something bad had happened.
He called her back. His mother's 40-year-old brother, Javier's uncle Alex, had been murdered in Mexico.
Undocumented, the family couldn't go to Mexico for the funeral. If they did, they might never be able to return to the United States. In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security has put up 44 miles of tall fencing dividing the Juarez Valley from Texas and has doubled the number of Border Patrol agents.
Alone in his McCollum room, Javier hurled anything he could find at the wall.
His uncle had been the ladies' man, the life of the party. He made everybody laugh. He had just settled down — he was married, just had his second baby. Now, he was gone.
--becomes a legal adult, is what typically bars a person from changing his visa status.
Sometimes, javier thinks about being deported and about the violence in Mexico
Chihuahua, the Mexican state south of Texas where his family lives, is terrorized by the narcotics war.
Javier worries most about having to build an entirely new life in Mexico. His grandmother, aunts and uncles live in a tiny city in the desert.
When he talks to his grandmother on the phone, she describes hearing the pop of AK-47s firing outside her window.
"It'd be like starting over in a foreign country" he said.
He also worries about losing the relationships he has here. He started dating his first steady girlfriend during his senior year of high school. A year later, he is still dating Haley, the blonde and bubbly girl who charmed his family at his sister's *quencenera*, the celebration that marks a young Latina's 15th birthday and her corresponding transition to adulthood. The only *gringa* at the party, Haley kicked up her heels with his family and stayed to clean up afterward.
That night, he had his friends sneak outside to scrawl a prom invitation across the windshield of Haley's car. They started dating the day after prom.
"My parents have always raised me to be open minded and aware of other people," she said.
Haley is from the right side of the tracks. Her parents are professionals.Before Javier, she had never known someone who was undocumented.
The summer after they started dating, they talked about the big "what if" — what if Javier got deported? Javier tried to play it cool, like he wasn't scared so he could convince her it wasn't a problem.
But Halev worries.
"It's definitely in the back of your mind ...
you know what if... this happened?" she said
Her voice catches. She regains composure and says, "People think it's hard to do long distance relationships in college. Well, it's even harder in another country."
Javier knows Haley will be there for him. In his darkest hours, Javier plans how he might get back to her if it was deported.
--becomes a legal adult, is what typically bars a person from changing his visa status.
When lavier turned 18, he became an unlawful resident of the United States. Unlawful presence, which begins only when a person
Javier knows there is no practical way to legalize his status. His family came in 1995 on tourist visas. The visas expired, but the family stayed.
Javier's only hope to change his status would be if he had a spouse or a child who was a U.S. citizen.
The proposed DREAM Act could allow him legal status.
DREAM, an acronym for the Development, Relief and Education Act for Allen Minors, is bipartisan legislation that addresses the plight of young people who immigrated as undocumented children, grew up here, stayed in school and kept out of trouble.
Introduced in 2001, it stalled in Congress in
"People think it's hard to do long distance relationships in college. Well,it's even harder in another country."
HALEY
Javier's girlfriend
2003 and again in 2007. In Match 2009, it was reintroduced.
Javier holds out for that slim hope:
---
Haley is a regular visitor at the tidy burnt orange bungalow that stands out from the muted white and grey of its neighbors. In a row of yards where weeds compete with trash, the neatness of Javier Sr., and Ester's enclosed lawn seems to gleam.
Javier goes home to Kansas City most weekends to see his family and Haley, a freshman at Rockhurst. She keeps him motivated when the barriers of being undocumented trip him up, whether it is the embarrassment of having Haley drive everywhere even though she says she doesn't mind, the pain of his uncles death and the separation from his family in Mexico, or the possibility that he could be deported.
On the front of the house, a small sign proclaims, "Jayhawk fans live here."
Inside, Ester flips hot tortillas onto plates. She fusses over her children and husband, making sure everyone has enough to eat. Javier tells his father a story in between heaping bites of menudo, a traditional Mexican soup. Irieri glances up from her phone to grin at her brother. The family is talking and laugh-