Manuel (left) and Valente Valenzuela wore their uniforms at a recent presentation at UTEP. (Brenda Armendariz/Borderzine,com)

Vietnam veterans fight a new war against deportation from the country they served

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EL PASO — Manuel and Valente Valenzuela have been fighting a war all their lives. The U.S. military veterans fought for America in heavy rain under enemy fire in the Vietnam War but now the country they fought for wants to kick them out. They wore the Army and Marine uniforms, laced-up their boots, loaded their weapons, and protected the soil they stand on today. Now they are engaged in a different kind of war, defending themselves against their own government in a protracted fight for citizenship and the right to remain in the U.S.

On November 2008, Manuel Valenzuela, an Army veteran, received a removal notice from Homeland Security stating that he was being deported from this country. A few months later in January 2009 his brother Valente, a Marine veteran, received the same notice.

La Casa del Migrante alberga sufrimiento, ofrece esperanza

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TIJUANA — Pasa la media noche y una camioneta blanca ahuyenta a los perros callejeros mientras se estaciona a dejar más migrantes que llegan cansados, hambrientos y otros hasta moribundos a la Casa del Migrante en Tijuana, Baja California. “Pedro” es un migrante que vivió por 14 años en Van Nuys, CA y prefirió guardar su identidad. Al tratar de regresar a California por Tecate, Baja California, con un grupo de ocho compañeros sus planes no fueron como planeaba. “Traían pistolas, inclusive me pusieron la pistola en la cabeza, una 3-57… ellos querían que dijera que yo era (el) guía y lo tuve que decir para que no me siguieran golpeando”, afirmó. Al intentar cruzar La Rumorosa, todos fueron secuestrados por un grupo de delincuentes.

Deportation looms over some young Americans

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NOGALES, Ariz. — U.S. citizens can be deported, so says the law, if their non-citizen parents are deported and they are under 18 years of age. That’s what almost happened to Maria, one of my students, and her 10-year old brother. Keeping her spot at our school was so important to them that when her mom was deported they decided to leave Maria, then a high school junior, and her brother here. Her mom was making pretty good money cleaning the houses of Anglos in Nogales, Arizona, where a domestic cleaning-lady employment underground thrives.

El difícil camino de regreso a… ¿casa?

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CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Méx. — Después de la odisea —de México a una vida construida sobre un sueño americano— el retorno a su país natal, ahora desconocido, es un reencuentro desafortunado para un inmigrante de Zacatecas. Con más de 10 años de residir en los Estados Unidos, Julio [pidió que no se usara su apellido], fue deportado de vuelta a una tierra que ahora resulta más ajena que la nueva. Él se vio forzado a dejar a su mujer y bebé de nueve meses en Kansas luego de ser detenido por las autoridades y tener que enfrentar un proceso de repatriación. “Tuve una vida de aventuras, anécdotas buenas y malas, sorpresas y humillaciones, fue difícil”, confesó Julio en una noche fría luego de su ingreso a la Casa del Migrante en Ciudad Juárez.

You can’t go home again

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CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico –They’re back, still tired, still poor, still yearning, huddling in line in the hundred-degree sun in the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert not far from the nearly dry cement ditch that splits the heart of a bicultural community into two alien political entities, El Paso to the north and Juárez to the south. Still tired, still poor, still yearning, on this fiery afternoon in early June several dozen men and one Maria linger in line outside the ground-floor office of Coordinación de Atención a Migrantes at city hall, an office Juárez mayor Jose Reyes Ferríz opened last November to orient repatriated migrants and keep them safe from an established industry of cheating money changers, hookers and other swindlers. This modest and very transitory halfway-haven, a single room with two cubicles, a dozen chairs and two telephones on a corner table, welcomes the disoriented deportees back, gives them temporary identification papers, lunch money and a bus ticket away from the preying lure of Juárez, away from the tempting border, further down into Mexico, back to their home towns. The faces in the queue are not waiting faces. Tired eyes tighten into lizard eyes in faces that strain to make an effort to look for cover in case they need shelter.