XIOMARA: WORKING TOWARDS HOME

I ran into Xiomara recently at the worker center in Austin. We embraced warmly with the customary kiss on the cheek and exchanged pleasantries. I asked her what good fortune had brought her out to the meeting that evening. She was an infrequent visitor these days to the weekly meetings where we had first met while serving as volunteers years before.

She said that she was there to recruit new members for her housecleaning cooperative. “We have so much work now, we are having to turn away jobs!” she said and laughed. “Imagine it. Before, we were worried that we didn’t have enough work. Now we need more workers.”

A warm woman with a cherubic face, Xiomara has light brown skin and naturally curly hair. While always well-groomed, she is no-nonsense about her appearance—the exact opposite of her oldest daughter, Annabel, whom she describes as having “alta paciencia para pintarse [so much patience for making herself up].” Xiomara always pulls her hair back in a ponytail and generally wears some combination of jeans and a T-shirt or pullover. Though I have seen her dressed up with full makeup (usually her daughter’s doing), she “doesn’t see the point” of going to all the trouble.

Whether due to the absence of makeup or the determined positivity with which she approaches life, Xiomara looks much younger than her thirty-eight years. The second of six children, she assumed charge of most of the household responsibilities at twelve years old, when her father passed away, so that her mother and older sister could work. She followed her husband from Mexico to Austin twelve years ago, and, despite early isolation and hardship, she has started her own cooperative business, making a life for her family in the city she now calls home.

The first thing Xiomara said when I asked her about crossing the border from Mexico was “thank God it wasn’t sad. We didn’t suffer, thank God. . . . So many stories I’ve heard where people had a really hard time. Thankfully, we were just fine.” In the nonchalant and unassuming tone that I’ve come to realize is not just her customary way of speaking, but rather indicative of the humility with which she speaks about her life— as though it were somehow unremarkable—Xiomara continued. She described a journey that included spending four freezing November nights in the Sonoran desert. Though saved from the cold by discarded blankets that they had found during the day, they barely slept for fear of the rattlesnakes whose lethal music cut through the night air.

“I remember we came by Arizona,” she said. “They told us we would walk for about five hours and when we arrived at . . . I can’t remember what mile, a truck would pick us up. Well, we arrived there at 11:00 p.m., but they didn’t pick us up.” It was rumored that someone had been killed by immigration officials, resulting in extra vigilance that had made it difficult for the truck to arrive. So they had to wait, which meant sleeping in the desert. They had come with very little. Xiomara, her then nine-year-old daughter, Annabel, and the oldest of her younger brothers had joined a group of fourteen others destined to try their luck in El Norte. It was 2002, just a year after the World Trade Center towers had fallen in New York, an event with ripple effects that would reshape not only border life and border passages in the name of national security, but also the daily lives of those who crossed the border clandestinely.

Jennifer Scott