This is Latino USA, the radio journal of news and curture Latino USA. Latin Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of Black and Latino Studios United, Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement. I'm Maria Inojosa, nose Bayan. Hello, my dear Latino USA listener.
You know, living on the Texas Mexico border is challenging for a lot of reasons right now, and so today we wanted to bring you a story about what it's like to give birth in southwest Texas, where there's only one hospital serving a region of twelve thousand square miles, and it doesn't get better on the Mexican side of the border. Brisa Levezma knows this all too well. She lives in Ohinai in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, but
she works in the Texas bordered town of Presidio. For the birth of her second child, Bisat, decided to schedule a c section at the only maternity hospital available in southwest Texas. It's called Alpine. Bisa thought it would be safer than delivering in Mexico, but things didn't go as planned. This is a story from our friends at Marfa Public Radio.
It's part of the series So Far from Care. We're going to find more stories about the challenges women are facing to access reproductive healthcare in the Big Bend area. Here's the episode. It's called Alone on This Side.
It was a cold night in February up on a highway through the oil fields of the Permian Basin. And if you've been up there, you know people tend to drive pretty fast, lots of f one to fifties and big tank trucks. But there was one little car that was moving a lot slower than the rest, and everybody was honking at it, passing it, trying to get it
to go faster. What they didn't realize was that this car was actually in more of a hurry than anybody else on the road because inside the woman in the passenger seat was in laborer.
Partners.
That's Brisa Levesma. She'd been having contractions for more than a full day by this point. Her mom Lauda was driving as fast as she could, but Lauda lives in a small rural community in Mexico, and she wasn't used to having to keep pace with oil field workers. Yes on, this was an emergency, and she was trying to keep her foot on the gas, but she was watching all these huge trucks zoom by and didn't want to get
in an accident. Meanwhile, Brisa was in a lot of pain and they were both trying to keep calm in Miauela. In the car, they talked about Brisa's grandma, Lauda's mom, who died just a few years before, remembering her. Trying to distract themselves with stories, Lauda told b He says she felt like Thelman Louise, two women on the run down a desert highway that made them laugh and then also cry. I me and Rosenthal and this is so
far from care. If you heard our first episode, you know that long, scary drives like this one aren't uncommon in West Texas. There's only one hospital in the Big ben region, serving an area of twelve thousand square miles. People here have even given birth on the side of the road because the delivery room was just too far away. But the situation Brisa faced was even more dramatic than what we're used to out here, because she'd already been
to that one hospital and they couldn't help her. Britisa's story is about a real low point in access to reproductive care out here, when the only maternity ward in far West Texas started shutting down. But it's also about another force that shapes life in the region. One you might not immediately connect to healthcare. That's the border and what it can mean to somebody becoming a mom, how it can divide a family but also create options where there seemed to be none. I met Brisa last year
at a cafe in the border town of Presidio. She came in with her mom and her baby daughter.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Barisa lives just across the Rio Grande in Ohinada Chiuahwa, but she has a green card and she works in Presidio. Her prenatal visits were here in town, and she'd scheduled a c section at the Hospital Alpine, an hour and a half away. She'd had one before with her first child, so the doctors thought that was the safest way to.
Go brevia, more complicate than canine pusil.
They'd planned everything out. Brisa's mom was in town to be with her for the birth, and the doctor Brisa had seen her whole pregnancy would deliver the baby. But five days before the section was scheduled, Brisa started having contractions and they lasted all night, so in the morning, she and her mom headed for the hospital, but when they got there.
No, we are personal, but.
The staff told them the maternity ward was about to close post pandemic. Like lots of rural hospitals, Big Ben Regional Medical Center was really struggling by the summer of twenty twenty one. They didn't have the staff to keep everything running, so that meant for part of the week the maternity war would go on something called diversion. Basically, it was closed and that would go on for days
at a time. So if you went into labor during that period and didn't want to give birth in the er with whatever staff was on hand, you had to make it to another hospital, and the closest one was in Fort Stockton, another hour away, But he said, her mom decided to head back to Mexico. They were hoping she could wait until the ward reopened. But by the time they got to Marfa, still more than sixty miles from home, the pain was getting worse, so they turned
around again and drove to Fort Stockton. On the way there, Brisa says they lost service and they couldn't get it at the second hospital either, But he says husband was back in Ohinaga with their older daughter and they couldn't reach him for hours.
Navia the lips p lesnou po now.
They stayed at the hospital until nighttime, but then Brisa says the staff told her it wasn't time to give birth and that their doctor was heading home for the day. Laura couldn't believe it isn't a She said, I give birth to four kids. I know she's about to have her baby. Barisa says the nurse unduty told them I'm the only one here is if you're gonna have your baby, She says. The nurse said, I'll be the one to deliver it. But it won't be a sea section. It'll
be a natural birth. Now, after you've had one sea section, vaginal birth can be really risky, but in Fort Stockton, but he Sai didn't feel like she had a choice. She called up her original doctor, the one who was supposed to deliver the baby. She says, he told her, if you can move, move, try and get to Odessa. That's another eighty miles away, but there's a big hospital there. So they got in the car again and we're back where we started. Lauda went from this two lane road
to the interstate, suddenly surrounded by honking trucks. Brisa in tears, twenty four hours into her contractions.
Yeah and I.
Well really They got to the hospital in Odessa around ten thirty and in the middle of the night, after driving nearly three hundred miles between two countries and three hospitals, Brisa had her sea section and her baby, Andrea was born. Brisa wasn't the only person with a multi hospital trek like that. Over the full year that the maternity ward in Alpine was on diversion, the hospital told me fourteen
women were turned away while in labor. Now the unit is open twenty four to seven again, but the hospital isn't equipped to deal with emergency cases, so if the delivery is complicated or the baby comes early, it can still mean a trip to Odessa. Brisa's story really brought it home for me. Here, even if you have everything planned out, you can find yourself in a really scary situation, far from help, having to make big, high stakes decisions
on your own. It was especially jarring for Brisa because the experience was so different from the first time she'd given birth back in Mexico.
To Planifica zahiron Oke Is the Mamosa Programrte Unassaria Talia at Talora.
As soon as.
Santas, she said before. Everything went smoothly. She came in at the scheduled time, they did the C section, took the baby out. It wasn't even painful, and that was just a few hundred miles away. When we talk about far West Texas, we often talk about how isolated this region is, all these tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.
But that's only true if you forget about Mexico. Okinaga, where Burisa lives, isn't a huge city, maybe twenty five thousand people, but it's just across the river from Presidio, and it does have a hospital. For Burisa, though, deciding where to go for care and where to have her daughter was more complicated than what was closest to home. Bisa is from a smaller city south of oj and she and her husband Efren had their first daughter, Michelle,
near there. They moved to Okinaga not long after for work, but good paying jobs were hard to come by. Eventually, Bisa found work across the border in Texas, cleaning rooms at a resort down the river. She said the job was tough, but it was the best she could get for a couple of years.
Casidos esperandos buenos pos system physi.
Meanwhile, Efrin didn't have a visa that entered the US, so he couldn't cross. Neither could little Michelle, so he was raising her almost single handedly. Brisa would come home to Ohinaga after a long day of work and basically collapse. The setup didn't feel sustainable for either of them, so when Brisa got pregnant again in twenty twenty one, they decided this time they'd have their daughter in the US. That way, she could cross two and they'd have options now.
That decision meant Efrin wouldn't be able to be with Brisa when she went to give birth. When I met him later on, I asked him what that had been like for Himso, yes, they not being able to be there to accompany Brisa, to help his wife and his baby daughter.
See.
He said it felt like not having limbs. He felt useless. Luckily, Brisa's mom had a visa, so she wasn't completely alone. When they decided to go to the Texas route, Brisa and Lauda knew they were going to a smaller hospital, one far away, with fewer resources than one's in Chihuahua. That was a price Brisa was willing to pay, but Lauda said they didn't expect to find themselves speeding between hospitals, for the process to be so long and complicated and scary.
And it wasn't just the distance, Brisa said. Until they got to Odessa, it was hard for them to even understand what all the medical staff were telling them. She says almost no one spoke to them in Spanish. Her English is limited, but she said the pain helped her concentrate on understanding the important stuff. And Brisa told me she keeps thinking about other women she knows who've also given birth in the US. A lot of them don't speak English at all, and not even their moms can cross.
Some have even lost their children in the delivery room and dealt with that totally alone.
I am as camp Ala.
Even before giving birth to Andrea, I'd been thinking she only wanted to have two kids, but now she's sure no not. I thought a lot about Bisa after our conversation. For her, living on the border meant possibility, increased options for work for medical treatment, but it had also separated her from her family and pushed her to choose a
riskier option for her own health care. I wondered about the aftermath of that decision, what the border would mean for her as a mom, and whether a year and a half after her childbirth odyssey, she felt like she'd made the right call. So this summer I went to go meet her in Presidio at her job at the Mexican Consulate. But Hesa told me she'd been worried about what it would be like to go back to work after a maternity leave, but she said the consulate had
been great about it. For the first few months. She'd been allowed to go home early every day. Now she heads out at four pm to pick up Andrea.
And and that wasn't at first.
Brisa and Eviden weren't sure how they were going to handle childcare, but on this front, the Mexican side of the border had come through for them. In Ohinanga, they found a nursery that would take Andrea starting at three months. We drove across the border into Mexico. No stopping required here. The Mexican officials just waved us through and then pulled up to the daycare. Brisa told me the nursery was
subsidized by the federal government. She said it charged less for a month of care than the small daycare and Presidio did for a week. To enroll, Andrea had to be registered as a Mexican citizen, but compared to the process of getting a US visa, signing her up for dual citizenship was a breeze. But he's I could do it right at work, says he. The last time I'd seen Andrea, she was barely a month old. Now, at eighteen months, she'd grown into the little boss of the family.
At home.
In their new house, she showed off her outfit, a pink shirt that said my mom is magical. That's Prettysa's older daughter, Michelle. They're still waiting for her green card and evidence. It's now been three years since they filed applications, and the length of the whole pros has been hard on Brisa, and.
It'sla and so Andrea.
In the US, She says, it's still Brisa and Andrea against the world. The hospital trip wasn't Brisa's last long drive to care. Andrea's pediatric appointments were in Alpine. Brisa had to take the baby alone, and she says every time she panicked about Andrea by herself in the backseat. When the baby would start to cry, Brisa would pull over, leaving the car running to keep her warm and breastfeed
her there on the side of the highway. She'd changed Andrea's diaper, play music, try to get her to go to sleep before getting back on the road.
Altres Allo stops.
Manuel. Was usually a two hour drive became three hours each way, and eventually Brisa decided it didn't make sense there was no pediatrician in Persidio, but they'd have to make it work with the regular doctor. When I visited, Efrin was also home, helping the girls pack for a
trip to see their Grandma Lauda. He told me he still struggles with the ways the border keeps him from being able to support Brisa, but on the other hand, the limitations of the migration system have given him the chance to be a really active parent to Michelle, especially when she was little. With Pam, he said he's found little ways to bond with each daughter, dancing with them in the morning, getting to know their personalities as they form.
The demos inclusive.
And I asked Prisa and Efrin if they felt like considering everything the decision to give birth and Texas had been worth.
It aid process there, you say, see.
Briso said to a certain point.
Yes, Alao, But if she'd known everything she knows now, she might have done things differently from the start.
Chose is right officas.
In healthcare in the US is overrated, She's decided. But if you're willing to try it, you give your kids options. If they want to study, if they want to work, if they want to travel, then they can. And in the end, she said this was the most important decision she and Evidence had made as parents. And she told me we could have said let her be born here, but we said no, We're going to give her the
opportunity to not have to struggle. Once we'd finished talking, but Hesa drove me back across the bridge, stopping at the kiosk to show the customs officer our documents. While we waited for him to scan my passport, I thought about how this everyday experience for Brisa is one that half her family still doesn't share. The West Texas highways define this region for so many of us, and they were the site of Brisa's scariest moments and the first experiences of her daughter's life.
And Alexorcista.
Brisa says, she tells her family, I can still smell the oil. She remembers, the moon, the highway, the cars honking, her body twisted up like the girl in the Exorcist. But that landscape, those roads, Brisa's husband has never even seen them. I can't imagine them. So when she found herself scrambling to make game time decisions on the road, she says, he told her, you make the call. I can't tell you what to do. Before I met Brisa, I thought mostly about the loneliness that comes from a
lack of options when it comes to care. But hearing that, I thought, here's a different kind of isolation, one that comes with choices, having to make decisions without being sure what's right, and having to do it alone. Brisa dropped me at the consulate and then turned around to cross the border again. As she drove off, I thought about something she'd said earlier when I asked what she wanted to do when all the visas were approved and her
family could come to Texas together. She told me she wanted to bring them to the observatory in Fort Davis to see the Marpha Lights.
Marpha Lights.
And tourists come from all over the world to peer through a telescope at the stars, which shine more brightly here than almost anywhere else in the country. Brisa said she wants her family to be able to see them too. This episode of So Far From Care was produced by Zoey Kurland, Carlos Morales, and me Annie Rosenthal. Muchamlia Combarta,
thanks also to Stephanie Quo and Ruxandra Guidi. The music you heard was composed and performed by Clara Brill, and the episode art is by Hannah Gentiles and Dio Kramer. So Far From Care is a production of Marfa Public Radio and is made possible by support from listeners like you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can find the rest of the episodes and ways to support the station at Marfa public radio dot org,