SAN ANTONIO
Her son, Jaime, a second-string defensive back, paces the sideline, anxious for a chance to play. Mrs. Rodríguez, shivering in a vinyl car coat and sling-back heels, hardly notices the game, obsessing instead over her family’s cellphone bills unfolded across her lap.
She calculates when her cash flow might allow her to pay them, just under $180 in all, and worries she will end up late. She hopes that Jaime will not be sent onto the field, fretting out loud that her health insurance might not cover him if he were injured.
“I can’t stand to see them hitting my son,” she sighed, confessing that 11 years after moving here from Mexico, she still does not understand the game of football or feel part of the larger American way of life that her son so embraces.
That Mrs. Rodríguez, 46, was in the bleachers at all was a testament to her many achievements as an immigrant. The eldest of nine brothers and sisters from Monterrey, an industrial city in northern Mexico, Mrs. Rodríguez is the only one in her family who has papers to live legally in the United States.
Reporters and a photographer from The New York Times spent a week in October following Mrs. Rodríguez and two of her sisters, Verónica and Irma, all of whom speak primarily Spanish, to chronicle the American immigration experience through the turbulent, intertwined lives of one family from Mexico.
Mrs. Rodríguez’s legal immigration status has been both a privilege and a burden. Like countless others from Mexico, the largest source of newcomers to this country, Mrs. Rodríguez has secured a stable, decent life in the United States with her husband and two children, far better than anything she could have hoped for where she was born.
But she does not feel settled here, and remains endlessly embroiled in the struggle to raise up her brothers and sisters as well.
Immigration is often a family affair, and a messy one at that. Mrs. Rodríguez’s siblings — whose last names are not being published here because they have immigrated illegally — grew up under the same leaky roof, with the same abusive father and in the same poverty that had them sometimes begging for food.
Many years later, they have made economic gains, but the temptations and frustrations of immigration have separated the family, leaving none of them completely satisfied that they have taken the right course.
Verónica, Mrs. Rodríguez’s youngest sister, lives across town with her husband and children, an illegal resident haunted by fear that her family’s progress could be undone in a moment by the immigration authorities. Irma, Mrs. Rodríguez’s eldest sister, gave up on San Antonio after trying to survive here for seven years and now whiles away her days in Monterrey regretting that decision.
Still, Mrs. Rodríguez’s home remains a strategic beachhead for them and her other siblings. They seek her out for a warm meal, a ride or a cash advance as they navigate her adopted country. Those in Mexico rely on her charity too, which she delivers piled high in the back of her pickup in the form of second-hand clothes, toys and household supplies.
“She was like Santa,” said Verónica, who received gifts of dolls, pants and underwear in Monterrey from her big sister and later slept on her floor when first getting established in San Antonio.
At times, the family bond is strained by resentment. Quarrels erupt, social graces are ignored and feelings hurt. After Mrs. Rodríguez shared her home for months with Verónica’s family, the crowding irritated everyone and she asked them to leave. Both sisters felt bruised in Verónica’s hasty departure.
But Mrs. Rodríguez does not complain. She has an obligation, she says, almost an obsession, to use her Texas foothold to lift her whole clan.
“My family is always first,” she says fiercely. “Always.”
Despite her tenacity, Mrs. Rodriguez’s family is not as close as she wants. Dinnertime comes and her husband is working late, her son is at team practice. Her daughter, Gabriela, 22, has a family of her own. Mrs. Rodríguez sits on her blue corduroy couch, yawning with fatigue. Half of her torn heart remains in Mexico.
Running From the Past
As Mrs. Rodríguez tells it, she was never drawn to Texas by an American dream. She was driven to leave Mexico by the pain of the past.
“I’m going to work hard, Ma, so I can have something,” she told her mother when she decided to move to the United States. “So we won’t have to ask anybody for anything, like we did when we were children.”
Although Monterrey is only 150 miles from the Texas border, when Raquel was growing up it could have been a different continent. Her mother and the children lived in one room under a tin roof between four cinder-block walls. They all slept on one box spring, pressed together “like little chickens,” Mrs. Rodríguez says, placing coffee cans between them to catch leaks when it rained.
Her father was a drinker, Mrs. Rodríguez says, mean and violent when he had too much. He walked out early in the marriage but would visit his wife once or twice a year, drunk and demanding sexual satisfaction. By the time his visits ceased, his wife had nine children.
Mrs. Rodríguez, normally guarded, comes quickly to tears when she speaks of her father. Her eyes have permanent injuries from his blows, she says.
When she was 14, he tried to evict the family and take the hovel where they lived for himself and a new girlfriend. Mrs. Rodríguez quit school and went to work as a cook for a Christian mission to earn money to buy out her father. Every Saturday for several years, she recalled, he arrived at her workplace to collect her wages.
Though still a girl, Mrs. Rodríguez took on the role of head of her teeming household. She shielded the smaller children from her father’s fists. She barked and badgered to make sure they went to school.
Although several of her siblings grew up to be evangelical Christians, Mrs. Rodríguez, a Roman Catholic, says her hatred for her father prevents her from converting to their faith.
“They say you have to forgive first,” she says. “But my rancor is still fresh. I have wounds that will never heal.”
Her life began to change when she was 18 and she met Jaime Rodríguez Ramírez at a Monterrey roller-skating rink. Athletic and industrious, Mr. Rodríguez had also gone to work as a child, learning the greasy art of transmission repair.
They married in 1982. After a few years, Mrs. Rodríguez said, her husband began to frequent the corner cantina, and she feared he might become like her father. So when he suggested they try living for a year near a sister of his in San Antonio, she agreed. America was a way to get her husband away from the bar.
Gaining Legal Status and Jobs
Her opportunity to immigrate legally came through simple luck. Her husband’s sister married an American citizen. Once that sister-in-law became a naturalized citizen, she applied for residency for Jaime, Raquel and their daughter, Gabriela. Jaime Jr. was an American citizen, having been born in Texas during an exploratory sojourn by the couple.
Mr. Rodríguez went to work right away at JV Transmissions, the garage of his sister’s husband. Mrs. Rodríguez was hired as a waitress at Dos Pedros restaurant, a homey Mexican hangout with black velvet mariachi hats on the walls. She spoke no English, but rarely had a customer with no Spanish. At times she worked two shifts, sleeping only two hours a night.
Even though they were both legal immigrants, the Rodríguezes lived for years like refugees. They shared a one-bedroom apartment with Mr. Rodríguez’s parents. Her in-laws slept on the only bed, Mrs. Rodríguez said, while she and her family slept on the floor.
Her responsibilities to her clan in Mexico persisted. Various siblings began asking her to help them make a start in Texas, and she felt compelled to oblige.
“I had nothing once,” she says. “Now I can’t bear to see them have nothing.”
A Sibling Crosses the River
The first to come was her brother, Gutberto, the sixth of her siblings, and she insisted he stay with her. He forded the Rio Grande, and soon the one-bedroom apartment of her in-laws in San Antonio housed nine people. Mrs. Rodríguez’s in-laws still slept in the bed, while Gutberto and his wife and one child joined Mrs. Rodríguez’s family on mattresses on the floor.
Eventually Mrs. Rodríguez and her husband moved out, but their new apartment remained cramped.
Her sister Irma sent her oldest daughter to live with Mrs. Rodríguez so the girl could attend middle school in Texas. Later Irma herself came, bringing two more of her daughters to stay with Mrs. Rodríguez as well.
At one point when Verónica brought her family, the population in the Rodríguez apartment peaked at 10. Tempers were strained and doors were slammed.
But if Mrs. Rodríguez thought her siblings were imposing, she does not speak of it now. She accuses only her in-laws, whom she does not regard as core family, of callousness.
She still fumes when recalling that her mother-in-law barred Gutberto from their house when Mrs. Rodríguez was not there, and refused to feed his children when they came home from school.
Throughout it all, Mrs. Rodríguez has been investing on both sides of the border. Eight years ago she landed a school cafeteria job, a step up from waitressing because it provides health insurance.
Before long, she and her husband paid $69,000 for a sienna-toned two-story ranch house on a calm San Antonio cul-de-sac. In the same period, she built a modest house for her mother in the Monterrey neighborhood where she grew up. Just down the street, she is also gradually improving a larger house, with a swimming pool that mostly stays empty.
The pull of Mexico remains strong, like a spell. She goes back at Easter and during the school breaks. At Christmas she leaves her husband and children in San Antonio, preferring to celebrate with her mother and siblings in Monterrey.
When her daughter, Gabriela, turned 15, Mrs. Rodríguez spent $12,000, more than a year of hoarded waitress tips and cafeteria wages, on a quinceañera birthday party, held in Monterrey. Four hundred guests were served whiskey and received color photographs of Gabriela in her queenly gown. Mrs. Rodríguez paid $1,200 for a laminated, four-foot-high enlargement of that portrait. It crowns her living room in San Antonio.
Worries About Endurance
Mrs. Rodríguez expected to work hard in the United States, and she has. When the doors of the cafeteria at the Roy P. Benavidez Elementary School swing open at 10:30 in the morning, hundreds of hungry children rush toward the serving line, and she has to be ready.
She must be sure that 300 enchiladas are covered with the right amount of tomato sauce and that dozens of sandwiches are prepared with three slices of turkey and two of cheese. Potatoes must be baked and cookies cooled.
By noon Mrs. Rodríguez is bounding between ovens and freezers. She stirs soups, hoists trays and wheels carts, maintaining the flow of food to the servers out front on the cafeteria line. Her limited English is no handicap in the cafeteria. Most of “las ladies,” as the eight women of the kitchen crew are unofficially known, are Mexican.
She likes her job because after eight years she knows she does it well. “When you know how to do your job, nobody yells at you,” she explains.
But she has started to worry about her endurance. She makes $8.43 an hour, taking home less than $12,000 a year. She moves constantly between the walk-in freezer and the heat wave by the stove. One hip aches and her knuckles, frequently dipped in dishwashing water, are bulging with arthritis.
Her list of ailments is growing. She has had a hysterectomy, a cyst removed from her breast and multiple surgeries on her battered eyes. (Unable to apply makeup with her injured vision, she had black lines tattooed around her eyes and lips.) She has asthma and diverticulitis.
“It would be nice,” she muses, “to have a job where I could sit down.”
Blunt Words From a Friend
Dropping by one afternoon in Ms. Rodríguez’s living room, Blandina Sanchez, a neighbor who is one of her closest friends in San Antonio, puts it more bluntly.
“Get it through your head, Rachel,” Mrs. Sanchez says, “you are not going to want to do that job all your life.” Mrs. Sanchez, an American, wants her friend to accept Texas as home. She calls her Rachel instead of Raquel and speaks to her in English.
“Rachel, you need to go back to school!” Mrs. Sanchez says, urging her to get her high school equivalency diploma. Mrs. Rodríguez can never rise to kitchen supervisor at the elementary school without English, her friend insists.
Mrs. Rodríguez knows that is right, but she just sinks down on her blue corduroy couch, yawning but still tense. Even in her own living room, she does not unwind. She runs financial calculations in her head and plans trips to Mexico. She keeps the lights off well into dusk, sitting in dimness to cut her costs.
On Saturdays, she admits, she likes to drink beer, sometimes too much beer. Her worries force her to think about where she belongs. She has always been guided by her family, but now it is diverging.
Her husband has done well in Texas. He has worked hard, stayed straight and been a fine father, raising both his children to play sports and keep out of trouble.
Gabriela married a legal Mexican immigrant, a construction contractor whose business is booming. Their toddler, Hanna, is an American. Gabriela plays in a women’s soccer league in San Antonio.
No Question of Identity
Jaime Jr., at 18, is even more absorbed in American life. Not only a varsity football player, he is a solid student with plans to move to Phoenix to attend a technical college next year, an educational leap for a family that only recently, with Gabriela’s graduation, celebrated its first high school diploma.
A hefty young man with a square jaw, Jaime exudes self-confidence. Slipping easily between English and Spanish, he favors English, even knowing his mother cannot always understand him.
When asked to describe his identity, Jaime, born and raised in the United States, answers immediately, in plain English.
“I’m Mexican, yes.”
His high school friends all call themselves Mexicans. During middle school, he says, there was friction, with some “popular people” taunting them, calling them wetbacks. But now he is a senior on the football team.
“Now no one really makes fun of me or anything because I talk to everyone, and I play football,” he says. “Everyone just keeps it cool now.”
He is proud of his roots in Mexico. But that does not mean he wants to live there.
Mrs. Rodríguez is not sure where she wants to be. She has many friends in San Antonio, and her church, St. Bonaventure, is just down the street. Because of her work discipline and legal immigration status, Mrs. Rodríguez’s economic advance has been steady. She has never wanted for a job and has been able to obtain credit cards, car loans and a home mortgage. She drove to her son’s football game in a double-cabin pickup truck with polished chrome wheels, a recent purchase.
But she rarely sees her brother Gutberto and her sister Verónica, though they remain in Texas. She perceives terrible hints that some of her siblings resent her success.
“They don’t know how I am killing myself at work,” Mrs. Rodríguez says, in a moment of anguish.
So, although she is eligible to become a United States citizen, any move to do so would be purely practical. It would, ironically, be a way to help reunite her Mexican family because as a citizen she could apply for residency papers for her siblings. “I would do it to help my brothers and sisters,” she said of citizenship.
In the stands at the football game, Mrs. Rodríguez’s pensive mood changed when Gabriela arrived with baby Hanna to watch her brother’s big game. Mrs. Rodríguez seized her granddaughter in her arms. It was family again, and she let herself relax.
“I have a job,” she said. “My husband has a job. I have good children. I’m happy.”
But there was more. “I am also sad. I don’t have my whole family with me.”
