Note: Part I was posted on November 4, 2011
Summary of Part I: Zelda Ayala fled El Salvador’s civil war in 1989 for the US border. She was placed in deportation proceedings in the Texas border town of Harlingen, and requested asylum. While her case was pending, she sought work in central Washington State picking apples, and then packing fruit at a plant near Wenatchee. Part II begins with her hiring at the packing plant.
The company barracks for women was cheerless, draughty, and dark; the company cafeteria served an unrelenting menu of bland, grayish food. Zelda lived in the barracks until January, when she and Emilio, a Mexican who worked as a supervisor at the packing company, rented an apartment together. Zelda liked Emilio well enough; he was serious, kind, and unflappable as a supervisor, and generous as a friend. She knew he was married, with a wife and children in Mexico, like many migrant men, but she also knew that she couldn’t afford an apartment on her pay, and she was bone-tired of being on the run and in temporary shelters for so long. She wanted to save some money, too. When the notice from the Seattle immigration court came, she planned to go to Seattle to live, and find a lawyer there. She heard that there were plenty of jobs available, if you were willing to work on the factory fish trawlers that shipped out from Seattle and stayed for two or three months at a time offshore in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
Spring came, and still no notice from the court. She had written to the court again, with her new address, and sent it by certified mail, so she would be sure the court had it. Then summer and fall passed with no notice, except this: she was pregnant with Emilio’s child, due in April. Emilio was glad enough at the news, but Zelda was blindsided by grief for the first time since her husband and children were murdered more than a year ago; the pregnancy brought the memories of them, and their deaths, back to her in force. She gave birth to Evaristo, named after her father; she could hardly bear to look at the baby for the mixture of joy and fear she felt. Later, when it became clear that Evar, as everyone called him, was developmentally disabled and would need special education, it didn’t lessen her joy in her child.
Zelda’s court notice never came. No notices ever came for the vast majority of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers who came to the US from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, when the wars there ended. Lawsuits by immigrant defense organizations against the US government for summarily denying Central American asylum applications without due process froze most of the cases before they even got in court. The litigation dragged on, seemingly hopeless of solution, until the Department of Justice suddenly settled the lawsuits in 1997 by giving many of the asylum seekers a chance to apply for permanent residence. Zelda applied for her residence in 1997, and got it. She sought out training as a community health organizer for state government outreach to Hispanic migrants, and started a new job as a de facto social worker, getting migrants and their children linked up with social and health services. She was popular with migrants for her problem-solving skills and her doggedness in getting benefits for them, and a number of infants born since 2000 in her district are named Zelda, in her honor.
Zelda stayed with Emilio for nearly eight years, but they had no more children together. Emilio went to Mexico every other year, for two months at a time, and fathered several more children with his wife. When he became a citizen, he decided to bring his wife and children to the US to live with him, and Zelda and Evar moved into a house Zelda bought outside of Wenatchee. With a sizeable down payment on the mortgage from Emilio and the monthly child support that he paid, she could afford to live alone. She wasn’t bitter about moving out, or when she saw Emilio around town with his family; she knew about his other family from the beginning, and she had taken a friendly interest in them. When Evar was 18 and Emilio’s child support obligation ended, Evar went to work packing fruit, and helped with expenses. He married a schoolmate, Brenda, who he knew from his special education classes, and they had a child, Olivia, before Evar was 20. Zelda was glad to have them live with her; she loved spending time with her grandchild.
Shortly after the baby’s birth, Zelda was laid off after twelve years with the state migrant health outreach program; the state slashed funding for all non-emergency health care in the wake of the 2008 recession. Zelda went back to work at the fruit packing company, at half her state salary, and with no health insurance or any other benefits. The lifting strained her back and the standing hurt her feet. At fifty-five, she could no longer keep up a pace sufficient to earn bonuses. She made $10 an hour, and came home too tired to cook and clean and wash. So when her sister Rosa moved in with her two boys, she welcomed the help at home, as well as Rosa’s pay.
One of the conditions of Rosa’s release by Immigration and Customs Enforcement was that she and the boys report monthly to ICE in Seattle, to confirm that they hadn’t fled the jurisdiction of the court. Each month for the two years it took for Rosa’s asylum case to be scheduled in court, Zelda and Rosa asked for the day off work, and Zelda drove her sister and nephews the six hours to Seattle for the check-in at 11 a.m. on the first Tuesday of every month. Zelda did research to find a Seattle immigration attorney who took Rosa’s case, and Rosa met with that attorney every month after her ICE check-in, to prepare her case. It took two years of the monthly meetings to get ready for trial, going over and over their stories of why they had fled El Salvador.
They had two preliminary court hearings before the final hearing to present their stories of why they should win asylum. The night before the first of the preliminary hearings, Gilberto carefully packed a suitcase and stowed it in the car trunk. He believed that the judge would order their deportation at that hearing, and they would be taken immediately away. He heard the attorney say that this hearing was just to tell the judge that they were seeking asylum, and to get a date by which to file the asylum application, but he didn’t really believe it. He tried to take the suitcase into the courtroom, but the guard wouldn’t allow it. Gilberto had to take it back to the car in the parking lot; when he left it in the car, he said goodbye, he thought for forever to his favorite new shoes.
The case preparation was wearying for them all. The attorney asked for proof for everything Rosa said about their lives in El Salvador: proof that the boys went to school where she said they did, proof that they lived in the neighborhood she claimed, death certificates to prove her sisters’ children had been murdered, and proof of where her brothers and sisters lived now. The attorney also went over and over the story of their lives in El Salvador, so that she could write down the details of how it happened that the 18th Street gang took over the neighborhood, and threatened to kill her sons if they did not join the gang and start carrying out gang leader orders.
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