Taurino and Silvia rest in peace beneath a Californian pepper tree in San Diego. Three of their sons, their three daughters-in-law, and seven grandchildren attend the funeral. Their fourth son, Isaac Rivera, has no choice but to attend the funeral virtually through a call on Zoom. He stands outside a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico while sobbing and mourning. Alone.
Isaac watches the funeral on his cellphone and recalls the fond memories he has of his parents: how they grew up as children together, got married, had their own children, and emigrated in 1992 from Oaxaca in southern Mexico to California; how they each worked for 18 years at McDonald’s and each became pastors of a church for another 18 years; how they both died within days of each other from health complications due to COVID-19.
On the screen, Isaac sees a green tent protecting the mourners from the sun, many of whom are among the hundreds of migrant families that his father helped find a job, a place to live or spiritual comfort.
Through his headphones, he hears the cry of his relatives saying goodbye to the two pastors. When he sees the red and purple roses on the two white coffins, he can almost smell the floral scents that his mother wore in her perfume.
Isaac, now 35, has been crying for days, his eyes swollen, his face red. It has been more than nine years since he was able to hug his parents.
“Today is a very sad day,” he tells his relatives in San Diego over the phone. “I would like to wake up from this nightmare. I just want to remember those beautiful moments I had with my mom and dad."
In his head float images of Saturday afternoons cooking with his father and watching boxing matches on television; the long talks in his parents' room about the performance of Cruz Azul, the Mexican soccer team that they followed. In that room he also saw his father writing his church sermons with exquisite calligraphy. Isaac always wanted to write and tell stories like his father did.
He did not attend the funeral to fulfill a vow he had made to his parents: He had been deported nine years earlier, and he promised them he would not return to the United States unless he had proper documentation to allow him to reenter.
Isaac and his family were part of the 36 million people of Mexican origin living in the U.S. He was one of the three million Mexicans deported during the two terms of Barack Obama's administration – a number so high that advocacy organizations that help Latino immigrants gave Obama the nickname "The Deporter-in-Chief.” Thousands of people were forced to leave the U.S. for committing minor infractions, or in many cases, for being detained in raids by immigration agents.
Isaac has been patiently waiting for the 10-year penalty to be served in order to apply for a U.S. visa .
"My mother sometimes told me crying on the phone that she wished I would cross the border and visit her because she missed me. However after a few minutes, she reminded me that it was better for me to do everything legally.”
Isaac vividly recalls the day that would change his life forever.
He was 25 and had lived in this country since he was 6 years of age. He was about to get married when his future father-in-law, also a pastor, asked him the day before to accompany him to a pastor's conference in Temecula, California. Without hesitation he answered yes. The next morning, they hit the road in the early morning hours of June 1, 2011, the same as they had on many occasions. Within 20 minutes of starting the trip, he noticed that the pastor was constantly checking his rearview mirror. Turning to look, Isaac observed a white Dodge Charger. It was a U.S. Department of Homeland Security car. A few miles away he noticed a black electronic board with yellow lettering that read: “Slow down. Boarding patrol checkpoint ahead.”
Without documents to prove his immigration status, Isaac was taken into custody. He was sent to the Murrieta Detention Center to begin the removal process from the United States. That night he slept little, trying to remain calm. He exercised until he grew tired, and then lay on the floor. His head was full of thoughts about his future, and the words of his lawyer whom he had previously consulted about the possibilities of adjusting his immigration status: “At the moment, if you fought your case to remain in the U.S., the chances you would lose it are pretty high.”
He decided that it would be best to sign his voluntary departure. A Homeland Security bus took him to the San Ysidro international border. On June 2, 2011, he was returned to Mexico where he would remain for the next nine years. “That had to be the saddest days of my life,” he says. “I was a foreigner in the country where I was born.”
Speaking only broken Spanish in a “weird” accent that immediately revealed where he was from, he remained in Tijuana where he had been dropped after the removal process.
Over time, depression and loneliness gave way to a more hopeful future: planning his wedding with his fiancé, and then applying for a partner visa to return to the U.S after his marriage. The wedding was set for August 26, 2011, in the Punta Moro Resort in Ensenada, Baja California. But a week before the scheduled day, Isaac and his fiancée had an argument and canceled the wedding. Their relationship of seven years ended, and Isaac was plunged into an even deeper depression, without family or friends to help him get through it.
“To make the things worse, I didn’t have my best friend, girlfriend, confident and lover, someone that I knew since I was 8 or 9 years old -- only girlfriend I had until this day. In a matter of days, everything that had value to me, everything I loved, was gone. Nothing. Nada. All my dreams, goals, desires and ambitions. The world, my world collapsed.”
The first year and a half was the hardest -- he went to bed crying and woke up crying almost every day. “I slept on the floor crying for hours. I remember I had a special crying pillow that became my best friend, and I still have it."
His first job in Tijuana was in a call center where he had met his first two friends in Mexico, Nelson and Fabi. With their help, he was able to vent and work through his depression.
He cried sometimes on his way to work, in a taxi, at Starbucks. It was at Starbucks where a woman saw him crying and came over to him and gave him a hug. That was a turning point for him. That day he made a radical decision to stop living in the past and feeling like a victim. In the process of healing, he began reading again, traveling again, visiting his grandparents in southern Mexico.
In those moments when the sadness did return, he longed for a hug from his mother or a kiss on the head from his father, to hear them say that everything was going to be fine.
Over the past nine years, his mother would called him every week to see how he was doing. In all her calls she ended up crying and asking her son when she would see him again. "That broke my soul, the impotence of not being able to be there. I always told her that I was going to return legally, to be patient. Unfortunately, she never saw me again."
Many times, he dreamed of returning for a few hours to be able to eat his mother's mole, which left an unmistakable smell throughout their house. If he could have done it, he would eat three dishes of her mole.
After quitting the call center, he started a hair shampoo venture and a driving school. Isaac now works in marketing. His income has improved, and he is close to finishing the 10-year penalty imposed by the U.S. authorities on people who were deported.
He was looking forward to the following June, when he was eligible to apply for a visa that would allow him to stay for longer periods in the United States. But tragedy reached his family in mid-January. Daniel, one of Isaac's brothers, was diagnosed with COVID-19 and a few days later his parents also tested positive.
The youngest of the Rivera brothers recovered quickly, but his parents were hospitalized and put-on ventilators. Isaac spoke to his father on the phone before he was intubated, and Isaac remembers that his father asked him to pray for his mother's health because he was getting better.
However, in the early morning of February 1, 2021, his father died, and the family began to grieve and plan for his burial.
His mother, on the other hand, began to recover and the doctors decided to remove the ventilator. She was never told about the death of her husband, but the family is sure that after sharing their whole lives together, she sensed the death of her partner and decided to follow him. Her heart stopped working 18 days after her husband passed away.
Isaac received a call from his siblings confirming the death of his mother. He was still processing the death of his father. Everything collapsed again; he sat in his car and wept inconsolably, regretting not being there for his parents because of his promise not to go back to the U.S. unless it was legally.
"The first thing I wanted to do when I could enter the United States was hug them, but now I'm going to have to go to the cemetery to visit my parents' grave," he says. "I could no longer see them in life."