Adriana

The assumption that most people have about this podcast is that it's a show about people who have been deported. And that isn't the case. But that's even an assumption that a lot of people in Mexico have about binational returnees in general. In the minds of many Mexicans, these folks came back because they did something wrong in the US. There's a big stigma in Mexico over being deported. People see you as a criminal.

And there's a local stereotype that if you were deported from the US you were probably involved in the drug trade. So for people who actually were deported for whatever reason, there's a lot of shame there. Most people who return do so on their own. But for children in a family, the choice isn't really theirs. And maybe their parents are making that choice for reasons beyond their own control, like

They don't feel like they can afford to live in the US anymore or they need cheaper health care. And that move for the kids can be pretty traumatic. But what happens when the kid says, hey mom, I want to go back? I'm Alexandra Rivera and this is United Stateless.

Hi, my name is Adriana Estefani Carvajal Chavez and I was born in Mexico State. Adriana grew up in an impoverished neighborhood in the state of Mexico. Oh, also, Mexico has states. Kind of like in the US. Mexico City is kind of like Washington, DC, in that it isn't part of a state. And in this, Mexico State is kind of like Maryland.

It surrounds most of Mexico City. It's an area where the most common economic opportunity is to leave. I have I remember when I was in secundary, I said elementary, it's the education and the teacher was like Please raise your hand whoever has a family member living in the US. And we all raise our hands. Audriana's mother was nineteen when she was born, and most of Audriana's family thought she would follow the same path. But Adriana loved school. She was actually doing really well.

In her hometown, she had won a spot at a high school, which was part of a school system run by one of the most prestigious universities in Latin America, Unam. Frida Kahlo was an alumna. Graduation from that high school would have automatically won her a spot at Unam to study whatever she wanted.

But one day, when she was fifteen years old, her mom dropped a bomb on her. She said we're all gonna go and live in the United States this Friday. Adriana knew her mother was having trouble finding a job. And that her aunt and uncle already lived in the US. She knew why her mom wanted to leave, but being told with four days notice that she was moving to another country was a shock for the teenager. Yeah, and I was...

A little disappointed because I was gonna be the first one in my family to go to college. So it was good. And then this we changed and we had to migrate. I was scared, I had many feelings. So Adriana, her mom, and her mom's husband packed their bags and headed north. We traveled to Tijuana and then uh well a person gave us these fake documents and we got through migration easily. There's a whole industry of people who smuggle folks across the border into the U.S.

They're known as coyotes and they get people fake documents, car rides, places to stay at while they make the journey. And they aren't cheap and they can be a little sketchy. I think we paid a lot of money. When we got in the in the United States we were in the house. And they asked for more money. They told us, we need like 50,000 pesos more so we can let your family go. I mean, now I know you don't have to do these things and it was a little thing. in this

A whole situation when you migrate without documents. Anyone can take advantage of it because you don't know the place, you don't know the language, you don't know anything. Eventually they got out from under the thumb of the coyotes.

They got on a plane and flew to their new home in New York City. It was first in Queens and we moved to Elmherst, which was a very um multicultural place. Like this whole new world for me. New York was a big adjustment for Adriana. She had come from a small town in Mexico, and for her all her life she had only known, well, Mexicans. Now she was living in one of the largest cities in the world and surrounded by people from India, Colombia, China, countries she'd only ever read about in books.

She also had to live in a language that she wasn't familiar with. English. I mean I was depressed when I got to the United States because I didn't know English, you know. How was it learning English? It was easy because I have a very good teacher. Adriana traded her spot at the school in Mexico for one at Newcomer High School, a school in Queens that is specifically dedicated to immigrant students. It's a melting pot.

filled with teenagers hailing from all over the world, much like Queens itself. It also has a great reputation. In two thousand nine, around the time Adriana was there, US News World Report named it number six in a nationwide list of the top 500 public schools, outstripping every other public school in New York City.

While her school offered to enroll her in core curriculum classes in Spanish, Adriana said no. If she was going to live in the US, she wanted to learn English. So she pushed herself and got a mentor. Uh her name is James Cock. And she teaches uh theater at Princeton. Uh, I think the goal of the the objective of the program was that this mentor needed to help you to get to college. The first time I saw her, I was like, I didn't know how to communicate with her.

It was frustrating. Her mentor would say something that the rest of the students would really react to, but Adriana would just be left in the dark. But as time went on, Adriana began to understand more and more, and it was frustrating less and less. When I started to understand everything that she was telling me, it was very good. And finally, things clicked.

And Jenny's world of New York City opened up to Adriana. She taught me many things. She took me to theater, to Broadway Place, to Queen's Museum of Art. Uh during high school I was even able to go to the UN headquarters uh to add these debates and many activities. It had always been Adriana's dream to go to college.

And back in Mexico, she was on track to go to UNAM, which is the dream for many people in Latin America. She was determined to continue her education after graduating high school in the U.S. There was just one problem. But I wasn't able to get a scholarship.

Not only was Adriana unable to get a scholarship, no one in her family had a social security number, so they were unable to apply for loans. This was before DACA became a thing. So without any sort of financial resources, it was going to be nearly impossible for Adriana to realize her college dream. Here's the deal. UNAM is free for Mexican nationals. And many colleges in Mexico that aren't UNAM have robust scholarships. So she had a choice.

Stay with her mom and stepdad in New York, try and find a job, and give up on her college dreams. Or She could leave her family, go years, possibly a whole lifetime without seeing them again, and go to college. She made the very controversial decision to return. Everyone was against this decision. They told me in the United States you will have a better And you should stay there. I wasn't really upgrade.

Adriana isn't the first person I've talked to who decided to return on their own. But from speaking to others, I know it's something that can be really complicated. Sometimes the parents, who are left behind in the states, think the child is ungrateful for all the sacrifices they made, or they feel abandoned by them. Sometimes the lines of communication break down and it causes huge family riffs. Fortunately for Adriano, while her family didn't want her to leave.

They understood why she wanted to and supported her. Yeah, my mother told me it's okay. Go back to your father and and and I understood. And then when I came back it was like, Oh my god, what did I do? But the first days, yeah. Adriana came back and lived with her biological father in the same town she started in. And despite it being a familiar place, she knew she was a changed person. I used to miss bagels a lot. I know I can buy them here also, but uh I used to miss bagels.

The world had opened up to her. She'd seen Broadway shows, visited the UN, eaten momos. She had had a little taste of what was out there in the world. And now she just had to get into college to start her life's journey. There was just one problem. I can have geography in high school and you need geography.

Adriana didn't have the classes necessary for Unam to recognize her transcript. This is a larger problem for a lot of people returning. They might not even have access to their transcripts or have a physical copy. And sometimes the schools in the US won't give them out unless they show up in person and prove their identity. After completing a geography course that Unam would recognize, it was time for Adriana to apply to college.

The journey of getting into UNAM was hard and I did it. Before Adriana went to the States, she wanted to be a doctor. But after experiencing New York and realizing that there was a great big world out there, her goal shifted.

I found this international relations career. When Adriana says career, she means major. Yeah, I wanted to do something international. So after four years, Adriana graduated from UNAM. And now I work in an international office of UNAM, so I've been able to send abroad almost a thousand students. Most of the people are the first ones in their family to have a career. So they haven't been able to travel abroad. And I have this very nice life. I I like it and I get to travel.

Had Adriana not left the US, she would not have been able to travel internationally like she can do today. While living in New York opened her eyes to the rest of the world. Living in Mexico afforded her the option to see it. And I've been able to travel to twenty countries.

And every time I'm there, I I discover something different. Although Adriana does have a love of international travel, she doesn't forget about back home. There's a lot of things she feels that Mexico needs to learn about people like her. So, she got her master's in migration studies. Mexican government that they have priorities. And I think migration is not a priority for any government.

is an issue for Mexico as a society, but doesn't really get talked about as much as it does in the US. I've heard a lot of wealthier people in the country take an attitude towards the topic of Well, that sucks for them. How do Mexican nationals, generally speaking, see people who have returned?

But yeah, it's uh it's uh a bad stigma. It became important for Adriana to help Mexican nationals understand what returning people go through, to target that local stigma that all returnees are criminals who don't deserve a second thought. What is the thing that you wish people knew about returnees? that are human also that need to I think the most difficult thing for them is

to get to a place that is supposed to be their home, but they don't know their home. I mean, many people were taken to the US when w they were born, when they were very little. They don't know the place. So imagine that you have an ideal life and then somehow you have to go to another place that you don't know. I think that they need a lot of Others than the other.

And and sympathy. Adriana also wishes Mexicans were better educated about opportunities in Mexico. They only know a picture of Mexico, of the small towns or uh neglected areas. And that's why they live. And they don't have the chance to come to these big cities and to look for other ways, opportunities. We just have this cultural idea that the United States is going to be the only...

place where you can better your life. If we had more information about these big cities such as Nuevo León or Mexico City, you get that perhaps not everyone will have in their mind that the United States is gonna be the only option to change your life. That something that we need to change little by little also. Even though Adriana hasn't been back to the US since she left after graduating high school, she has seen her mom and stepdad.

That's because they were able to legally immigrate to Canada. any job as a medical assistant in the US because we didn't have papers. And in Canada she had the the opportunity because she knew the language. She had this idea very, very strong that she wasn't gonna be happy in Mexico. Adriana, on the other hand, is very happy in Mexico. A lot of good things came from her return.

to a very good university in Mexico. I've been able to travel to many countries. But these whole you these opportunities, I think that many people who come from the United States can have this opportunity over. I think uh journey of migration helped me realize that I have a life in my hands and I can do anything I want. You don't realize how a year well in this case five years living the in the United States can change your whole life.

For Adriana, returning seems to have been one of the best things she could have done for herself. She was also in a much better position to return. Her time in the US really shaped who she was today. But she spent a lot less time living there than in Mexico. She's more comfortable speaking Spanish than English, and most of all, she had a plan and a supportive family. But that isn't everyone's story of returning.

Although Mexico has a lot going for it, the stories of danger and misfortune aren't made up. And it's a trap that a lot of people who are in a strange land and feeling alienated can fall prey to. So if Adriana's story is what happens, when everything goes right? What's the story when everything goes wrong? Told me, Hey, you know, you're very pretty, you have a nice body. Do you wanna go to this place and there's a lot of girls, you could get good money and I'm

I didn't really know what kind of people I was getting into. Um this place was fr this place was owned by an arc. Um this guy came in Next time on United States, This episode was written and produced by Alexandra Rivera. Story editing by Alexandra Rivera and Caitlin Pierce. Collective. Audio engineering by Francesca Meser. Sound design by Fernando Hernandez Becerra of Estonio Radio. This podcast was done in collaboration with Blue Remedy Media. Follow us on Instagram at United.

Podcast. For more information and opportunities to donate to organizations that help returnees, visit our website at www.United Stateless Podcast.com.