migrant daughter essay

Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman.

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Migrant Daughter Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman

• by Frances Esquibel Tywoniak (Author) , Mario T. García (Author)
• January 2000
• First Edition
• Paperback $31.95,  £27.00

Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide Pages: 267 ISBN: 9780520219151 Trim Size: 6 x 9 Illustrations: 33 b/w photographs

About the Book

Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. García, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty. Migrant Daughter is the coming-of-age story of Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, who was born in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, moved with her family to California during the Depression to attend school and work as a farm laborer, and subsequently won a university scholarship, becoming one of the few Mexican Americans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, at that time. Giving a personal perspective on the conflicts of living in and between cultures, this eloquent story provides a rare glimpse into the life of a young Mexican American woman who achieved her dreams of obtaining a university education. In addition to the many fascinating details of everyday life the narrative provides, Mario T. García's introduction contextualizes the place and importance of Tywoniak's life. Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a channel for breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effect of migration on family and culture. This deeply personal memoir portrays a courageous Mexican American woman moving between many cultural worlds, a life story that at times parallels, and at times diverges from, the real life experiences of thousands of other, unnamed women.

About the Author

Frances Esquibel Tywoniak is a retired teacher and administrator in the San Francisco School District. Mario T. García is Professor of History and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (California, 1994) and editor of Ruben Salazar's Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955-1970 (California, 1995).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction by Mario T. Garda 1. My Roots in New Mexico 2. Moving on to a New Life in California 3· Migrant Souls 4· Discovering the Limits of the Barrio in Junior High 5· Joining the High School Track to Success 6. Scholarship Girl 7· Off to College 8. Settling into the Berkeley Ambiance 9· New Vistas and New Connections Postscript Photographs following page

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A Migrant Daughter’s Reunion With a Mother She Barely Knows

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Natalia was only two years old when her mother left El Salvador to come to the U.S. So, to Natalia, she’s a stranger.

“I have no memories of my mother. I don’t remember anything about her. I just had pictures of her.” From the time she left in 2002, her mother had paid a family in El Salvador to look after Natalia. One of her earliest memories is of watching her friends get picked up from school by their parents. “No one would pick me up.”

More than a decade later, Natalia’s mother summoned her to the U.S. Soon after, Natalia left to make the journey alone with a coyote .

Reuniting with her mother has been the hardest part of the life in the U.S.; even more than adjusting to the language and the weather.

“It was very difficult because it was a new country in which I didn’t understand anything, not even my mother. She’s the person who gave me life, but I had never met her, and I didn’t know her.” Natalia says her mother expects her to be the little girl she left behind. “When I came, she wanted to take care of me, tell me what to do. But I grew up by myself and I took care of myself. I don’t need anyone to tell me what to do.” They argue a lot and her mother gets upset with her. Natalia misses the family she grew up in, especially the man she called ‘dad.’ She feels she’s lost a family, rather than gaining one.

For Natalia, who is now 17, “school is the greatest help.” At first, it was challenging getting used to being in school for a full day, rather than the half day she was used to in El Salvador. But she’s always loved school, so she focuses on her studies and knows that she wants to be a civil engineer. Natalia tries to be “very friendly and very smiling” all the time because she’s noticed that other students are not always nice to those who aren’t fluent in English.

She says there are other girls who are going through similar experiences, but she hasn’t shared her story with them. “My story is very long, and very sad, and talking about it reminds me of everything I’ve suffered.” But she is grateful for the network of adults at school. Natalia says she was surprised by how many teachers are kind to her, asking how she’s doing and helping her feel comfortable. “A teacher, Mrs. Johnson, came to me every day to ask how I was feeling, even though I wasn’t used to talking about my problems. She was patient and she helped me when I was feeling sad or wasn’t feeling well.”

Natalia is juggling responsibilities at home. She works 30 hours a week in a bank, she’s her mother’s primary caregiver since she recently fell ill, and she looks after her young nephews. From doing very well academically and getting As and Bs, this year she’s received Bs, Cs, and Fs. She doesn’t attend classes as consistently as she did in the past, because she feels tired and gets stressed more often. Still, school is her refuge.

Her favorite class is gym, where she can play soccer like she did as a little girl. She gets to run around the field with the wind in her long black hair and laugh with her friends. “This is a place I love the most. I can come here and play like I used to play in my country.”

A version of this article appeared in the April 10, 2019 edition of Education Week as Teaching Migrant Children: Natalia

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‘I Have No Idea Where My Daughter Is’: Migrant Parents Are Desperate for News

With a record 20,000 migrant children in shelters and detention facilities, many parents have waited weeks to learn what happened to their children after they crossed the border.

By Miriam Jordan

When Maria Ana Mendez left Honduras a decade ago to earn money in the United States, her daughter Cindy was still in pigtails and playing with dolls.

But settled now with a job and an apartment in upstate New York, Ms. Mendez was ready to bring Cindy to live with her. Because she is still undocumented and could not legally bring her into the country, she paid a guide $8,000 in February to take Cindy, now 16, across thousands of miles to the doorstep of the United States.

Three weeks later, Ms. Mendez heard from her daughter for the first time: She had crossed the Rio Grande on a raft and was being held in a temporary U.S. border camp in Donna, Texas. She had not showered in five days, and was sleeping on the ground. She did not feel well.

Days without news turned into weeks of anguish as Ms. Mendez made repeated phone calls to a U.S. government hotline to learn her daughter’s whereabouts. On April 3, Cindy was able to call — from a hospital in San Diego. She was “very sick” with Covid-19, she told her mother.

“I can’t take this anymore,” said Ms. Mendez, who booked a flight to San Diego.

A surge of arrivals on the border has put nearly 20,000 migrant children in government custody — the largest number in recent memory — creating chaos and confusion as immigration authorities scramble to care for them, contact their parents and process them for release.

The Biden administration has rushed to open emergency intake sites at convention centers in San Diego and Dallas, a coliseum and expo center in San Antonio, a former oil camp in Midland, Texas, and at the Army base at Fort Bliss, Texas. Other sites, including a convention center in Long Beach, Calif., are expected to accommodate children soon.

But the government is still struggling to bring in people to staff them, and immigrant parents across the country, who often have no idea what happened to their children after they entered the United States, are growing increasingly desperate.

Some children have gone weeks or longer without being able to contact their parents.

In Austin, Texas, a Honduran woman is waiting for news of her two children, 6 and 9, who were brought to the border in March by a family member but then separated from the adult relative and taken to an unknown destination.

A Honduran father said he had been told that his 14-year-old son, who arrived in March, is one of 2,000 migrant boys being housed at the convention center in Dallas. But he has yet to speak with him.

A Guatemalan woman living in Iowa City has filled out two packages of paperwork to try to reunite with her 16-year-old sister, who has been in government custody since crossing the border on March 4. She recently learned that the teenager had been moved from a shelter in Texas to another in Pennsylvania.

“I am very worried about her,” said the woman, Juana Cuyuch Brito, 32. “I don’t know why they transferred her or what is going on.”

The problem appears to be one of sheer numbers, as the new administration struggles to hire enough people to staff the temporary shelters, make contact with parents and verify that children can be safely released to them.

Administration officials say they are doing the best they can to handle the latest rush to the border, trying to provide safe housing and secure placements for children who have already faced substantial dangers traveling through Mexico and crossing the border, often with no adult guardian.

“I can say quite clearly: Don’t come over,” Mr. Biden said last month . “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”

Yet hundreds of children continue to be intercepted and transported to processing centers each day. In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, border facilities were operating at 743 percent capacity last month. A tent structure in Donna was at 1,707 percent capacity.

About half the children arriving at the border are coming to reunify with a parent, like Ms. Mendez, who has been residing in the United States for many years.

Often the children were raised by grandmothers and other close relatives who are now aging and can no longer care for them. Like their parents, many are teenagers who do not see a future in their home countries.

Because the parents lack legal status or have asylum cases stuck in immigration court backlogs, most are unable to sponsor their children to immigrate legally to the United States; they resort to smuggling networks to transport them.

Nearly 16,500 migrant teenagers and children who crossed the border without a parent are being housed in Department of Health and Human Services facilities until they have met the requirements for release. Roughly 4,000 more are stranded in Border Patrol stations waiting for beds in those shelters to open.

The emergency facilities provide clean sleeping quarters, meals, toiletries, laundry and access to medical care, including coronavirus screening. Services are provided by a combination of contractors and federal staff.

But there is still a severe shortage of case managers to handle the bureaucracy. It is these social workers who contact parents and request documents to start the process of releasing their children to them.

Once a parent has submitted the paperwork and passed a background check, the child’s placement must be approved by a specially designated officer, to ensure that a child will be safe.

The dearth of staff at every level, according to child-welfare experts, is one of the main reasons that, on average, only about 300 minors a day are being released, creating a frantic race for new bed space as more children cross the border.

Leecia Welch, a lawyer whose team interviewed about 20 children in several intake facilities in Texas on March 29 and 30, said none of the children had been assigned a case manager by that time.

The lawyers found that many children were waiting several weeks before being permitted to speak with family members.

“What these kids want first and foremost is to be reunited with their families,” Ms. Welch said. “They were desperate to hear their parents’ voices.”

One child she interviewed in Dallas, she said, teared up as he told her that he had gone three months without contact with his family and that he had made his first call the day before.

Many parents already had undergone weeks of anxiety as their children undertook the dangerous journey through Mexico, often in the hands of smugglers. Customs and Border Protection officials this week released a video of a sobbing 10-year-old Nicaraguan boy who had been found wandering in a remote area of Texas after he was abandoned by the group he was traveling with.

“The inhumane way smugglers abuse children while profiting off parents’ desperation is criminal and morally reprehensible,” the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, said in a statement in March. “Just this month, a young girl died by drowning, a 6-month-old was thrown into the river, and two young children were dropped from a wall and left in the desert alone.”

Since arriving in the United States a decade ago, Ms. Mendez, 42, has juggled jobs as a housekeeper, a packer at a seafood processing plant and a chef’s assistant at a diner, sending $200 to $300 every two weeks back to her family.

Last year, Ms. Mendez watched her daughter graduate from high school by video. Cindy wanted to fulfill her dream of becoming a computer programmer, and the time to do that was now, she said.

As she headed north toward the border, Cindy checked in with her mother every few days.

To prepare for her arrival, Ms. Mendez painted her room pink, furnishing it with a new bed and a colorful princess spread. She hung helium balloons to make it festive.

Cindy reached Texas in early March and was intercepted by the Border Patrol, which took her to a processing center.

After an initial phone call from her daughter, Ms. Mendez waited anxiously for more news.

But weeks went by, and every time Ms. Mendez phoned a call center at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for sheltering migrant children, she heard that her daughter’s case was “pending.”

“I have no idea where my daughter is,” Ms. Mendez said in an interview on March 26. “No one is telling me anything at all.”

The agency has not responded to questions about staffing and reunification procedures, though it has said generally that children are being carefully accounted for and put in touch with their parents as quickly as possible. Rushing the process risks the possibility of releasing children into unsafe conditions, officials say.

When Ms. Mendez could learn nothing of her daughter’s whereabouts, she contacted an immigration lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, who filed a complaint with the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. The handling of Cindy’s case, it said, represented a “gross deviation” from the Biden administration’s stated policy of reuniting unaccompanied minors with their parents as swiftly as possible.

“We fear that the child has either been lost or unaccounted for by the agency,” the letter concluded.

Nothing happened.

Then, last Saturday, Ms. Mendez’s cellphone buzzed. It was Cindy.

“Mami, I am in the hospital in San Diego. I have Covid,” she told her mother, her voice feeble.

She said that she had been staying at the convention center in San Diego before she began feeling very sick and was transferred by ambulance to the hospital.

“How could they leave her alone in the hospital and not advise me?” Ms. Mendez said.

It took a day before she would receive an update about her child’s condition. Ms. Lincoln-Goldfinch called the hospital, but a charge nurse and social worker initially refused to release any information, referring her to the Border Patrol, she said.

In an interview from the hospital on Monday, Cindy said she had been isolating in a room at the convention center, which holds about 1,400 girls, with 20 others who had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Finally, on Tuesday, Ms. Mendez learned that Cindy had recovered from her illness and would be discharged soon. The government had approved her release from custody, she was told.

Ms. Mendez immediately flew to San Diego, and went straight from the airport to the convention center late on Wednesday.

Mother and daughter emerged 15 minutes later, holding each other in tears.

Miriam Jordan is a national correspondent who reports on the impact of immigration on the society, culture and economy of the United States. Before joining The Times, she covered immigration at the Wall Street Journal and was a correspondent in Brazil, India, Hong Kong and Israel. More about Miriam Jordan

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The Left-Behind Wife and Her Migrant Daughter

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The Real Story Behind the ‘Migrant Mother’ in the Great Depression-Era Photo

By: Sarah Pruitt

Published: May 8, 2020

It’s one of the most iconic photos in American history. A woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two more children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. The mother squints into the distance, one hand lifted to her mouth and anxiety etched deep in the lines on her face.

From the moment it first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco newspaper in March 1936, the image known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, poverty and hopelessness endured by so many Americans during the Great Depression . The photographer Dorothea Lange had taken the shot, along with a series of others, days earlier in a camp of migrant farm workers in Nipomo, California.

Lange was working for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration—later the Farm Security Administration (FSA)—the New Deal -era agency created to help struggling farm workers. She and other FSA photographers would take nearly 80,000 photographs for the organization between 1935 to 1944, helping wake up many Americans to the desperate plight of thousands of people displaced from the drought-ravaged region known as the Dust Bowl .

How the Photo Was Taken

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange told Popular Photography magazine in 1960 . She had spotted a sign for the migrant workers’ campsite driving north on Highway 101 through San Luis Obispo County, some 175 miles north of Los Angeles. Bad weather had destroyed the local pea crop, and the pickers were out of work, many of them on the brink of starvation.

Lange didn’t ask the woman’s name, or find out her history. She claimed the woman told her she was 32, that she and her children were living on frozen vegetables and birds the children had killed, and that she had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.

Soon after the photos were published in the San Francisco News , the U.S. government announced it was sending 20,000 pounds of food to the pea-pickers’ campsite. But by the time it arrived, the still-anonymous woman and her family had moved on. Even as her image was widely reprinted and reproduced on everything from magazine covers to postage stamps, the “Migrant Mother” herself appeared to have vanished.

The Real ‘Migrant Mother’

Then in 1978, a woman named Florence Owens Thompson wrote a letter to the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper. She was the mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the record straight.

In an Associated Press article that followed, titled “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo,” Thompson told a reporter that she felt “exploited” by Lange’s portrait. As Geoffrey Dunn wrote in the San Luis Obispo New Times in 2002 , Thompson and her children disputed other details in Lange’s account and sought to dispel the image of themselves as stereotypical Dust Bowl refugees.

Born in Oklahoma, Thompson was actually a full-blooded Native American; both her parents were Cherokee. In the mid-1920s, she and her first husband, Cleo Owens, moved to California, where they found mill and farm work. Cleo died of tuberculosis in 1931, and Florence was left to support six children by picking cotton and other crops.

When Bill Ganzel, a photographer for Nebraska Public Television, interviewed and photographed Thompson in 1979, she told him that while a young mother, she typically picked around 450-500 pounds of cotton a day, leaving home before daylight and coming home after dark. “We just existed,” she said. “We survived, let’s put it that way.”

When Lange found her in Nipomo that day in March 1936, she had two more children and was living with a man named Jim Hill, the father of her infant daughter Norma. After their car broke down on the way to find work picking lettuce, the family had been forced to pull off into the pea-pickers’ camp.

Two of Florence’s older sons were in town when the iconic picture was taken, getting the car’s radiator fixed. One of them, Troy Owens, flatly denied that his mother had sold their tires to buy food, as Lange had claimed. “I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another,” Troy told Dunn . “Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have."

Life After the Famous Photo

The family kept moving after Nipomo, following farm work from one place to another, and Florence would have three more children. After World War II , she settled in Modesto, California and married George Thompson, a hospital administrator.

By 1983, five years after claiming her identity as the “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was living alone in a trailer. She suffered from cancer and heart problems, and at one point her children had to solicit donations for her medical expenses. According to Dunn, thousands of letters poured in, along with more than $35,000 in contributions.

Florence Owens Thompson died in September 1983, just after her 80th birthday, ending a life marked by economic hardship, maternal sacrifice and human dignity. 

Even President Ronald Reagan offered his condolences , writing that “Mrs. Thompson's passing represents the loss of an American who symbolizes strength and determination in the midst of the Great Depression.”

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Leonel Moreno, ‘migrant influencer’ encouraging others to invade US and squat at homes, is now on the run from authorities

T he “migrant influencer” encouraging others to invade the US and squat at the homes of citizens skipped out on authorities shortly after arriving in the country and is on the run from immigration officials, The Post can reveal.

Venezuelan national Leonel Moreno crossed the southern border illegally in April 2022 at Eagle Pass, Texas, and was enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, which allows federal authorities to track migrants using ankle monitors or other technology.

However, Moreno didn’t follow the rules and is now listed as an “absconder” from the program, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents seen by The Post.

Moreno — who claims in his videos that he, his wife and daughter receive $350 a week from the federal government — appears to be hiding in plain sight, even posting a video in front of a police car from Gahanna, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

Gahanna police told The Post they are aware of the videos, but added: “To date, our agency has had no contact with this individual and we are unaware of his location.”

Moreno was originally released into the US on parole due to a lack of space in detention facilities. This has previously meant migrants haven’t been fully interviewed and vetted by authorities — which usually takes around three days — before being let into the US.

John Fabbricatore, a former ICE field office director for the agency in Denver, told The Post that the Biden administration’s reliance on Alternatives to Detention, which currently includes over a million people, “is nothing short of a failure.”

“We have witnessed yet another individual who was allowed entry into the US under the ATD program, only to abscond and make TikTok videos explaining how to break the law. The question stands — how many thousands more are out there unaccounted for after fleeing this program?” said Fabbricatore, who is running to represent Colorado’s Sixth District.

Moreno has been seen living in Columbus. His listed point of contact in the US was Catholic Charities in Miami, according to ICE documents.

ICE in Miami mailed Moreno an immigration court date in November 2022 after he never appeared in person, according to sources.

If caught by ICE officers, Moreno would

“The Biden administration markets these policies as solutions, but in reality, it’s merely a smoke screen obscuring the chaos and failures at the border. We should demand transparency of this program and not continue to let this administration compromise the safety and integrity of our nation’s borders.” Fabbricatore added.

Moreno has become a TikTok influencer, encouraging “fellow Venezuelans” to squat in the homes of US citizens and calling President Biden “mi papa.”

However, on Thursday it appeared his profile on the platform had been deleted, although he continued to post on Instagram, with a video of him flauting $100 bills from a huge wad.

Moreno also frequently shows off supplies purchased using food stamps. He can also be seen on his Instagram waving a Social Security card while lying in bed with his baby.

On social media, he frequently boasts of his earnings from begging for cash, claiming he makes roughly $1,000 a day .

“I don’t like to work,” he tells followers. “Boys, in the US there are a million tricks, a million things to do,” he says as he outlines how to live effectively for free in a new country.

“I’ve concluded that the American Dream is real,” he said in a separate post, adding that he has lived for more than a year in the US and never had to work. “This is food of the best quality that they just give you.”

“Subject has been on national news for being viral on TikTok encouraging illegal immigration,” ICE documents obtained by The Post state of Moreno.

Moreno also claimed child services is investigating him for using his baby daughter in posts about scamming and begging.

However, that too appeared to be a scam as Gahanna police said they were “not aware of any investigation involving this individual and Children’s Services.”

Moreno claims he traversed 12 countries to reach the US and tried to seek asylum in Canada last year alongside his wife, but ultimately came to America because he didn’t get free handouts up north.

“They didn’t give us the hotel they promised,” he said in a video posted to his Instagram account last year.

“They gave us a month and then kicked us out, and didn’t give us the papers they promised. They didn’t give us a job and didn’t give us asylum.”

After his wife gave birth, Moreno shared from the hospital that the couple didn’t pay anything to have their daughter, thanking “Papa Biden” for paying.

The Venezuelan migrant also instructs followers on how to carry out scams, such as claiming abandoned vehicles to sell for scrap and giving tips on how to return clothes that have been worn.

He also told his followers to pretend they’re injured by making a leg cast with plastic and Velcro.

“Work is for slaves, boys. Remember that work is for slaves. Where have you seen a millionaire work? Don’t humiliate yourself … You have to be creative to ask for money,” he said.

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29 migrants rescued off small boat in trouble in the Mediterranean Sea south of Crete

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A group of 29 migrants was rescued Tuesday off a crippled boat in the Mediterranean Sea south of Crete, Greek authorities said, on an increasingly busy migration route from North Africa to Europe.

A coast guard statement said the boat was located about 23.5 nautical miles (27 miles, 43 kilometers) south of Gavdos, a small island off Crete’s southern coast, by a passing merchant ship after passengers made a distress call.

The migrants were being ferried to southern Crete. No information was immediately available on their health, nationality or port of embarkation.

Southern Crete and Gavdos, 27 nautical miles off the island, have seen a substantial increase in migrant arrivals this year. Most leave from the eastern Libyan port of Tobruk, having paid smuggling gangs up to $5,000 each.

According to United Nations data, more than 1,200 people have reached the area this year, out of a total of about 9,600 who arrived in Greece by sea.

On Sunday, another 74 people were rescued off a boat south of Gavdos, which is about 29 square kilometers (11 square miles) in size and has just a few dozen residents in the winter. Two of the people on the vessel were later arrested on suspicion of belonging to a migrant-smuggling gang.

Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

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