Imperfect Paradise: Return to Mexico

O La Latino USA listener, Gomo Tuta, So today we're gonna shure an episode from Imperfect Paradise A Return to Mexico, a show by our colleagues over at LAist. The show tells the story of Danielle Samora, who remade his life

Back in twenty twenty one, reporter Lorena Rios traveled to Suda Juarez to meet up with a man named Danielle Samora in a small cafe.

And the place is tiny a super cozy, a little bit dark, so Danielle and I sat by the window so that we could get a little bit of light. I wanted to meet Danielle because he's a returnado or returnee.

A returney can be someone who either by force or by choice, goes back to their country of origin after being a migrant somewhere else. This is a global concept, but in this case, Lorena was interested in how return migration happens for Mexican migrants between the US and Mexico.

I was interested in the return ye community from a journalistic standpoint, But once I met Danielle and I started asking questions, I realized that the questions that I had for him were questions that I had about my own experience of return.

In d Nielle's story, Lorena heard echoes of her own. Lorena grew up in Monterrey, Mexico, until she was seventeen. For economic reasons, her family had to move to Texas in two thousand and seven. She would go to college in the States and then grad school where she pursued journalism, but eventually, at the age of twenty eight, for a complicated mix of reasons, she would find herself back in Mexico for me.

Ever, since I came back to Mexico five years ago, I felt disconnected from my home country, from my hometown, and unsure about where I want to be and my relationship to Mexico.

So in that cafe in Juarez back in twenty twenty one, Lorena was wrapped by d Nill's story. In a lot of narratives about immigration, there is an underlying message that migrants come to the US because life is better here, that it's more economically comfortable, more fulfilling, more free. But Danian's story questions that assumption.

Can you describe your relationship to Sua Quarees?

Once I accepted my reality, I came to understand that beauty was wrong around me.

Danian's story spans from the cornfields of Iowa to the call centers of Guadis to the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France. It's about what it's like to leave everything you know and come back to a place that doesn't feel like home, and it all starts with a love story. This is episode one of Imperfect Paradise Returned to Mexico. Lorenarios takes it from here.

It was two thousand and eight and Daniel Samora had just graduated with an art degree from Grennell College in Iowa. The look was buzz cut, graphic tees and Chuck Taylor's. His plan was to move home to la and get a job, but his car had other ideas.

My jip had some transmission problem. I was able to go forward, but not back. I knew that I would have to stay a couple of more days.

So Danielle took his car to the shop, and while waiting for it to be fixed, he went out.

A friend invited me over to go to a bar in De Moin. We went to a gate bar called the Blazing Saturn. I was outside of the bar smoking and I met A Rick Miller.

It was nighttime. I think we're in the parking lot area, and I guess is romantic as that sounds, and I thought he was the most handsome guy, an outgoing type of a people person.

Eric is these very handsome men from Michigan. He had this more like nerdy look, the little button down shirt, as white as he can get, blue eyes, gorgeous smile, trovit blonde.

So I just had the courage and just want to start talking to him.

Daniel's version is slightly different.

A friend of Eric came over to me and he told me, hey, my friend thinks you're cute. And I looked over to him and I'm like, well, tell him to tell me so right. I've always thought that if you want to say something, say it to someone right. Doesn't send someone else to do your dirty work.

I mean, very well. Could have happened. Like I said, it was a long time ago.

We went back inside, we danced a little bit and we kissed. Perhaps it was they dancing and you know, all this smoke. I don't know, but every single piece fell in the right place.

And that was it.

Daniel's car got fixed, but he'd be staying in Iowa with Eric. Un Less than two months after meeting that night, they moved in together. In the next two years, Danielle and Eric built their lives as a couple. They got a calico kitten and named her Bibi, decided to move to Austin, Texas, found jobs, made friends, and settled into the daily rhythms of life. Daniel liked imagining his American life with Eric, stretching into the future.

He would come home and there would be apple pie baked, and that would be with him until we growled. He made me feel safe, and I knew that as long as I was with him, I would be okay. I almost forgot where I had come from. I was living in a bubble, and the bubble felt really nice.

One summer weekend in twenty eleven, Daniel and Eric decided to go on a getaway to visit friends on South Padre Island, a resort town in Texas.

It was a gravel road, It was kind of dusty, it was hot, very humid. I think they were just kind of like large open spaces, like maybe ranches. Everything was kind of like light green.

I was laying down, the music was playing. He was I mean, I didn't have a care in the world. I was just waiting for us to get to the beach. I woke up because the road was feeling kind of bumpy. So I remember waking up, opening my eyes and the first thing that I saw was that we were kind of in the middle of the bushes. We were on a dirt road, and I asked Derek, what are we doing? Where are we going? I said, Oh, I just want to see the wall.

The wall, the artificial boundary that separates the us from Mexico.

For Eric, it was a curiosity.

I was kind of interested, you know, the border and the river and seeing what it was like, and I was like, Oh, let's go on this road. I remember seeing the wall, big iron slats, and I think they were constructed on such a that you couldn't squeeze through them. He could feel a little bit through them, but the.

Wall meant something very different to Danielle.

I felt like the time stood still for a second. I felt afraid.

Daniel had crossed into the US at sixteen without papers. His parents had worked with a lawyer to get documentation for the family. Danielle says, as far as he knew, the process was still moving along.

He and Eric didn't talk.

About it, so Eric had no idea that Danielle was undocumented. As they drove, they realized they weren't alone on the road.

And suddenly all of these border patrol trucks start showing up parks in front of us, and two more pull up behind us. I kept on telling myself that everything was going to be fine. Eric told me that everything was going to be fine. It was a routine check.

The officers asked Danielle and Eric what they were doing there, asked them to show their ideas. Danielle says he wasn't given a reason for why they'd been pulled over. Normally, the Fourth Amendment protects you from arbitrary searches and seizures, but because of national security justifications, within one hundred miles of the border, those rules don't apply. The officers focused their attention on Danielle.

The police officers starting struggling a little bit with my identity. They started going back and forth to figure out who I was, and they kept on pressuring me, telling me that I had just crossed the border, and I kept on telling them no.

Officers told Danielle that they couldn't find him in the system and that he had to go with them to the station.

Eric was confused.

I thought maybe there was some sort of a some sort of a mistake.

I was told to face the car and put my hands behind my back. I was handcuffed, and as I was being led to the border patrol truck, I just looked back and I saw Eric, and I wanted to say something, and I couldn't. I just remember that my heart.

Stopped in that arid stretch of South Texas. Danielle says he was handcuffed by border patrol and driven to an immigration processing office in McAllen. Danielle says he was asked to sit at a big, semi circular desk.

The desk was a fake.

Yellow wood color, and behind it, Danielle could see holding cells with people in them. Across the desk, various officers were typing away trying to find records of him in the database.

They kept on going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until an officer to him, like, you know what, I can't find anything. This other officer came back and he said, like, let me have a go.

Daniil remembers waiting for an hour, sitting on a cold concrete bench until eventually, he says, one of the officers looked up and told daniel that he'd found a room move order against them, meaning he could be deported. Daniel was confused. He knew he was undocumented, but he thought he was on track to being documented in some way.

But at the border processing.

Center, Daniel found out this was not true.

According to a.

Document we got from the Board of Immigration Appeals, his parents had lost their case back around two thousand and four. The family had been put under a deportation order, but they did not leave the US. Danielle says he didn't know about it, and his parents didn't talk.

To us for this story. But this deportation order.

That's what must have shown up in the database.

At the station.

Danielle was anxious, and as the gravity of the situation started to sink in, he was presented with two impossible options.

When they told me that I would have to be removed from the country, and I told him, like, well, you know, can I call a lawyer? And they said very clearly, now, like you have two choices. You can either stay in jail until an immigration judge can see you, but that can take months and I'll make sure that it takes a long time. Or I could leave and I could apply for re entry.

We tracked down a lawyer who would end up helping Danielle pro bono, and she explained it this way. Basically, Danielle was in a loose, loose situation. He could either be put in the attention and wait for a court date or be deported.

I foolishly thought that I would be able to come back as soon as I said for the Medica kind of be able to reapply for ranger in the US or within a couple of years, you know, and I would be reunited with my family once again.

At the office in South Texas, Danielle was alone, no lawyers, no parents, and no information about his rights or how the immigration legal system even worked, which researchers and lawyers say is not uncommon in these types of situations. Danielle was conflicted, and he was being pressured to make a decision quickly.

I have this picture in my head of trying to put a house together made out of rocks, but there's no mortar or there's no glue holding the rocks together, and then suddenly you are putting the last rock up, and everything looks fine and it looks beautiful, but suddenly it just fonts and there's nothing you can do to stop it because there's no clue and nothing is holding it together.

The first rock that made up Danielle's American life was Los Angeles.

I honestly think that my life started when I moved to Ala.

Danielle's parents had immigrated to the US from Mexico to find work. They didn't have papers, and when he had just turned sixteen, Danielle says he joined them, crossing by himself with a coyote. As soon as he got to Los Angeles, he threw himself into his new life and the American teenager experience.

I took the Metro for the first time. My mom took me down to Los Co Johones in LA right the Allies in Fashion District, and we would go to the ninety nine cent store and I had my first McDonald's breakfast. LA felt like the most wonderful place on earth. That's what I think Disney England feels like. To people who visited, it felt welcoming.

You said you knew like two three phrases in English.

Do you remember what those were?

I actually do. Hello. My name is Danielle. I live in Mexico. And I used to say, like, how much is it? That's as much as I knew.

Danielle says he worked really hard to learn English so he could go back to school.

I would come back home and I would literally sit down with the newspaper, the La Times, and my dictionary and a notebook, so I would literally have to translate every single word in that newspaper. And I would do that for one or two hours every day. As you will learn from other migrants. We learned English and we learn how to speak it very quickly, not because we want to, but because we need to.

Daniel enrolled in high school as a freshman. He sent us some photos of himself from this time, oversized teas and jeans, white sketchers, races, and a livery copy of Harry Potter. Daniel says he got good grades and he also started making friends, and he would end up finding most of his friends in his favorite part of high school, theater. He started learning all about vocal exercise and doing plas

I was wearing a dress and a wig, and I walk out on stage and I look at my mom's face and I was expecting to see shock. I was expecting to see disappointment or something. I all I saw was a smile on her face, and she started laughing hysterically when she saw me like that, and everybody started laughing hysterically. It felt wonderful. And when I started wearing a rainbow belt rainbow bracelet, it was fine. No one

As high school came to an end, he had to think about what came after, about college, and for the first time, he says, his immigration status came up as a real obstacle.

I knew the situation that I was in, and I knew what I couldn't have, and what I couldn't have was the American dream.

But why why couldn't you have that?

Because I needed to have more privileges that I wasn't able to access. My dream at that point was just to have an education, but I couldn't because I was strapped by my resources.

Because he was undocumented, he couldn't get federal financial aid. He said his parents were not making enough money.

To pay for college.

His dad worked at a warehouse and his mom worked as a cleaner. But then Danielle's teachers nominated him for a competitive scholarship, which pays for low income kids to go to top private colleges across the country, and Danielle, with his good grades, charm and determination, got the scholarship.

I felt like I could taste a little bit of like that American dream, that American life that some other classmates were seeing.

And that's how Danielle ended up in Iowa.

When I got to the college, I felt like I was illegally blonde. When she walked into Harvard and she sees these great holes.

Danielle went to Grennell College, a school of about fifteen hundred students at the time, About a thousand of them were white, and only fifty five were Hispanic. Danielle says he used his theater skills to make friends with everyone, and he felt like the world opened up.

It was my first time actually interacting all the time with people who had a life that was to a certain extent ful of privileges. Friends who vacations were in Aspen, or who were going to Paris Fashion Week.

He decided to make the most of it. He studied art and took all sorts of classes like sculpture, dance, painting, print making, and photography.

I wanted to explore beauty, to actually explore every single aspect of my life, of my body, of my perspective of the world, and put her on paper.

It all culminated in a solo art exhibit at his graduation. Daniel's parents flew out and got to see the piece he made called twelve Moons, a wedding dress that was torn apart and coiled up to look like the moon. It was dedicated to his mom, who had never had a wedding, and it was accompanied by a poem.

And it's talking about how my mom I see her as a moon, that even though she's not with me or she's not close to me, I always keep her in mind, in my heart, and whenever I need to, I can reach out and I can see her there. So it was very beautiful to have my parents there and I I am for are grateful and they were able to see in one stage and get that diploma.

Danielle finished school in two thousand and eight, the year Obama became president. Danielle told us he canvassed for Barack Obama, who was campaigning on what is still known as La Promessa. Obama a promise to Latino voters that he delivered comprehensive immigration reform, including a legal path for millions of undocumented

In work here for years.

That's why we need to offer those who are willing to make amends a pathway to citizenship.

In a lot of ways, Danielle was graduating into a landscape of optimism for immigrants in America.

I fought for you in the Senate, and I will make it a top priority in my.

First year as President of the United States of America.

But all of that would soon sour.

Maybe my biggest disappointment was this Dream Act book.

By the time that Danielle was driving along the Texas border with Eric in twenty eleven, there had been no comprehensive immigration reform. The Dream Act, which aimed to grant legal status to young people brought by their parents without papers to the US, failed to pass Congress. It was a bill meant to protect people like Danielle who had spent their formative years in the US and who felt

Late for Danielle.

La Promessa did not come to pass, but enforcement did ramp up as Obama faced criticism from border hawks, expansions of ICE, border Patrol and CVP, and record numbers of deportations every year of Obama's first term.

We have more of everyone, ice, border patrol, surveillance, you name it.

For us. This president has been the deporter in chief.

The majority of the deportations seventy two percent were migrants from Mexico.

Removals immigrants formally expelled and barred from returning, have risen to an all time high.

Under the Obama administration. Nearly three million people were deported from the US, and Danielle was about to become one of them. At the Border Patrol station, daniel spent five hours trying to figure out what to do, whether he wanted to risk spending months in a detention center.

I just felt like I wasn't going to be able to make it in jail, regardless of whatever happened. I mean, jail was going to be worse than coming back to Mexico. So I asked him if I could call Eric. They said yes. I called him and I let him know that I had decided that the best thing to do was.

To be deported.

Daniel decided to go through with the deportation process, but he couldn't totally escape detention.

He says.

Officers processed him into a cell.

I was told to undress, I got the uniform, and then I was told to wait. When I was going to the prison facility where I was held, I noticed that all the men that I was in the cell with were either barefoot or they had shoes without laces on them. I was feeling shame because I felt like I had let my parents down, that all the time spent at school, all the money that they had put

He thinks he was in there for about five days, but he has trouble remembering.

It was all a blur, and like.

I was sparalleling down and it got progressively worse. I started feeling like my life had no meaning. I felt like I had lost everything. When you were in this moment of despair, you think about the craziest things that you know that you could easily, you know, make it all end with the sheets that you have there, with the metal sinc.

Finally, an officer handed him his clothes and told him it was time to go.

We were driven at night to an airport and I saw this huge airplane and I saw how they started loading up the busses of pe pole they started loading up the plane. I had those chains that have handcuffs on your wrist and on your ankles, and it was really hard to walk up those metal stairs and to get on the plane. And they're cold, and the night fell cold, and I was angry.

Danielle says he was flown from Texas to Yuma, Arizona, then rode a bus along the US Mexico border. He remembers looking out the window at the rusted metal wall and thinking how it could have been an installation by the artist Richard Serra. In a strange twist of faith. Danielle was briefly back in California, where his parents lived. The Boss took him across the Calexico Bridge to Mexicali, Mexico. He remembers seeing the Mexican flag waving in the air.

I wanted to turn around because I felt like I didn't belong in Mexico. I was being brought back to a place that saw me be born, but no longer felt like home. And if home is where your heart is, my heart was in Texas and I was heartless.

There's this particular moment Danielle remembers from the bus ride when the guards turned on the radio.

The one song that stuck with me as I saw the Mexican border coming up was Sila Greens Fuck You.

I don't know the song, how does the song look?

So?

The song said, as you've been writing around with the girl, I love that You've been doing your best, but now she's with someone else.

Life.

Forget you. That phrase, forget you, I felt it down in my heart as a goodbye song from me to America.

Forget lorinar Rios is the lead reporter of Imperfect Paradise, Return to Mexico, coming up what it takes to get to the US physically and emotionally.

And I was starting to feel the stroke coming and we start running, and I have no idea where.

We were what it means to be ripped from your home and the people you love.

When I finally saw him pull up on the street where I was living, I didn't know whether to kiss him or not.

This story is about transition, and.

I started having this weird struggle within the Mexican part that has this beautiful freedom that can go anywhere, or the American one that wants to come back. And it's always like longing for something that he no longer has.

How Daniel found a sense of home in the middle of all that uncertainty and reclaimed his homeland. This episode of Imperfect Paradise Returned to Mexico was written and reported by Lorenard rios Co, writing by Natalie Schatovski, who is also the senior producer of the show. I'm the show's host, Antonia Sadahido. Catherine Milhouse is the executive producer of the show, and Shane and Naomi Crockmell is our vice president of Podcasts. Our producer and sound designer is Emma Alabaster. Our editor