Houston Texas
We arrived with not a single cent on us. There are a lot of things that happen when one leaves their country to come here. They entice you with promises of easy money and a chance to get ahead. They tell you that you’re going to help your family and things aren’t really like that. You suffer here as well. It’s a special kind of suffering because you’re not with your family either. You’re not free to walk around this country because of the fear of getting sent back. Bosses abuse you, sometimes they pay you and sometimes they don’t. We suffer in a lot of different ways.
My husband got a job in construction and I was offered my old job working at the taco shop. I didn’t take it because the boss there was very fond of sexual abuse. He would feel a lot of the workers there and they would all feel that they had to take it because they didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I didn’t go back because when he tried to do that to me I told him to back off and that even though I was undocumented that didn’t mean that I didn’t have rights as a person. I wanted respect. When my husband was working there with me, this was before we were married, he would sometimes tell me that I was being too stuck up. I told him that wanting respect wasn’t the same as being stuck up. I treated people how they treated me. That same day I quit and I told him to send my paycheck to me that night. It was the middle of lunch hour. He lost a lot of money that day because I was the only one who knew how to make guaraches a type of food that was very popular there.
Some of Tita’s treats.
I still needed a way to make money though and so I started making tamales and cakes to make some money on the side. That was what I did, I made and sold tamales and empanada, jell-o little foods. I had basically come full circle back to when I was little girl selling treats to get by.
Later on when I started to study english at a small school that offered free lessons, one of my friends there asked me why I didn’t make cakes for 15’s. I hadn’t even thought about that. Making cakes for big parties was scary I didn’t think my cakes were good enough but I went for it. In fact it was that same friend who bought my first cake. It was for her daughter and it consisted of a grand total of 15 different cakes. It ended up being around $650. I told my husband it had been $450 because I wanted to buy myself this perfume that I had wanted since I had been a little girl. Turns out that my husband had gotten it for me to celebrate. I decided to keep the money instead for emergencies. My husband wasn’t mad because he knew that I was doing it for the kids and the house.
So I started to focus on that instead of getting another job and things were good for a while. We did eventually run into money problems. They always seem to be there. We would go on the weekends to flea markets and sell toys and icepops. I would always feel bad dragging the kids around but we had to do it.