MANUEL: THE LUXURY OF DEFENDING YOURSELF
Manuel is an energetic and robust young man with light brown skin and dark hair. He wears casual clothes most the time, and it is rare to see him without his glasses and a plastic water bottle in his hands. Like many people in this city, he moves around in a road bicycle and carries his belongings in a messenger bag. He is constantly on the move, because he leads a busy life. Every morning he wakes up around seven and has breakfast with other people in the student-run cooperative where he lives. Thirty minutes later he goes to campus and works out for about an hour. This semester he is taking five classes, all of them in the morning, so after leaving the gym he runs from one building to the other until lunch time. Afterwards, he bikes five miles to the non-profit organization where he works. Around 7pm he returns to his room, reads for the next day’s classes, and does his share of housework (usually cooking dinner). He goes to bed well after midnight, only to wake up a few hours later.
At first glance, Manuel’s routines do not differ much from those of other high-achieving students. However, one particular feature distinguishes him from most of his classmates: He is one of the hundreds of undocumented students at the University of Texas at Austin. His lack of papers has left a profound mark on his life, in a double sense. First, it restricts his life choices and fills his future with uncertainty. Second, his immigration status was, until not long ago, a secret kept from most people, buried under a deep layer of fear and distrust that took many years to overcome.
“When I was 8,” Manuel told me the first time we met, “I was assigned a student tutor in school. She was Chicana, they probably assigned her to me because she had a Hispanic sounding last name, but she did not speak Spanish, and I hadn’t learned English yet. I was good at math, because it was just numbers, I didn’t need to talk. One day, she took my homework, erased my name, wrote her own, and got an awesome grade. I couldn’t do anything about it, I did not know how to speak English.” A few years later, in middle school, Manuel got in a fight with a classmate who was picking on him. He was taken to the principal’s office, and placed on suspension. For some reason he does not understand, the police got involved, and his parents were called to the school. Later that day, they sat down with him and explained that he had to avoid fighting because he could get the family in trouble: “Don’t fight back. You don’t have that luxury,” they told him. More painful than being called names was the inability to do much about it.
Manuel would repeat these stories several times over the course of our meetings. Despite that, it took me a while to realize why the two incidents were so important to him. After hours and hours of conversation, it dawned on me that Manuel’s life is a constant search for efficacy, a relentless struggle to overcome arbitrary restrictions that prevent him from doing what most people around him take for granted. Manuel’s dream is more than just a college degree, a decent-paying job, or a driver’s license. It is about being able to defend himself, obtaining that capacity that was denied to him as a child. He has pursued this dream since he learned of his undocumented status.