What I learned as a child crossing the border alone

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I felt a lump in my throat with every step as I approached the Aeroméxico gate at Los Angeles International Airport, knowing I had minutes left to say goodbye to my mother. She was an 8-year-old American-born Afro-Mexican girl from Los Angeles. My mother sent me across the border to her homeland. It was only going to be for the summer, but I felt banished to a place that was foreign to me, away from the person I loved most.

Our family separation was not imposed by law, but by the economic situation, which left my mother with no other option. Being a single mother and working in the community, she couldn’t afford summer childcare, so she sent me to live with my grandmother in her hometown of Querétaro, a modestly preserved Spanish colonial town in north-central Mexico. This would become the starting point of a bittersweet six-year cycle for an unaccompanied black girl navigating two countries that somehow drew me in yet pushed me away.

Tears blurred my vision as we approached the flight attendants. I squeezed my mother’s hand tightly, desperate to soak up every last bit of the warmth of her touch. We looked into each other’s eyes and said goodbye with our lips.

I often met other children on these flights. We were the unaccompanied minors ignored by the media; We did not flee north in search of safety and prosperity; We were forced to go south because of the economic difficulties of the United States. They called us in Mexico “the invisible” . The Secretary of the Interior estimates that hundreds of thousands of US citizen children live in Mexico, many of them permanently. I sat with the others invisible cultivating a brief relationship based on the shared pain of sending.

Long before social media showed children torn from their parents, families like mine lived quietly apart. No border agents, no handcuffs. Only hand-wringing parents and the crushing pressure of bills, rent and low wages that forced us apart for months and even years.

To understand what President Donald Trump’s mass deportations really are, we need to examine the systems that have long separated black and indigenous families in America.

from boarding houses for Native Americans and the forcible separation of enslaved families to Japanese internment camps Mr mass incarceration dissolution has remained an eerie constant in the histories of families of color, providing them with far greater levels of instability than white families.

When I see videos of black and brown children sobbing while their Parents forcibly detained in ICE actions I feel the heartbreaking pain I felt during the years when my mother could not afford to keep me in my country. Their separation is more tumultuous and in some cases permanent. But the root is familiar to me.

Staggering data confirm the punitive nature of segregation systems: Black children represent only 14% of all children in the United States, but more than 53% will participate in investigations from child protection services before turning 18. One of 9 black children will be accommodated in foster homes.

Recent research from UCLA shows that since 1895, 96% of deportations from the United States have been to non-European countries, meaning that millions of black and brown children have seen their parents separated from their families.

Family separation is known to cause long-term mental disorders in children and adolescents and is associated with substance abuse, anxiety, inappropriate sexual behaviour, depression and self-harm, as studies show.

My own breakup experience, though less severe, left me with a cascade of psychological wounds: childhood night terrors turned into chronic sleep problems, and a deep emotional void fueled a pattern of self-destructive behavior in my adolescence.

Conservative media personalities often represented the absence of a father as a cultural pathology that affects racialized communities, ignoring the structural forces that drive parents from their homes. What they refuse to face is the role of the prison state and the economic order that traps families in poverty and forces them to live apart. Discontinuity thus became a defining characteristic of the non-white experience in America.

Consider the displacement of millions of African descendants and indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans from their homes in the last century at the hands of American corporate elites who have plundered their lands and resources, as Trump is doing now in Venezuela.

Consider how a militarized border always separates the displaced from their families and investments. They cannot visit a broken home or a dying parent at home without risking permanent exile for their American-born children or losing the jobs they need to support their families. Therefore, they must remain here as an exploitative workforce.

Separation is lurking

These are expressions of an empire that thrives on dragging families like mine into instability, tearing them apart. It is a separation that stalks us, like the border it has began to meander to the interior of the country.

In the United States, we live with the consequences of this breakdown long before an undercover ICE agent or social worker shows up at our door. My mother did not decide to send me; was forced to do so because the American economy requires black and brown labor while systematically devaluing our humanity by denying low-income families equal access to social resources.

Yet, even during this separation, Mexico gave me back parts of my spirit that the United States had taken from me.

My cousins, Lalo and Emiliano, made every summer bearable, enveloping me in their world and becoming a bridge to my Mexican roots. We rode our bikes around ours village and I was walking with my grandmother to Cherito a Toltec pyramid that stood over his house as an ancestral guardian. I attended summer camps covered by Mexican Social Security System a resource often unavailable in the United States.

My grandmother’s annual farewells also became a ritual of deep grief, beginning with a somber three-hour bus ride to the airport in Mexico City. My grandmother hated to see me go. Unlike my mother, who hid her pain, my grandmother cried openly, as loudly as I did. I begged him to let me stay, fingering him until the last second before I had to get on the plane.

My childhood was marked by pain and separation from my caregivers.

Young people who live in fear of separation or who have experienced the pain of separation need to know that we have the power to transform our grievances into united resistance, to destroy the institutions that enforce these malicious policies. We can hold our leaders accountable for their complicity in the injustices of ICE raids. We have the collective power to dismantle systems that benefit from the breakdown of communities.

This transformation has already begun. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, a wave of mutual support networks This already shows that the destinies of our communities are intertwined. By joining these local collectives, we can directly drive the community change needed to protect each other.

End of family separation

Ending family separation, however, requires moving beyond token outrage: We must build systems that value the stability of black, brown, and immigrant families as much as anyone else.

Our leaders must be pressed to invest in the foundations of fair systems, such as affordable child care so parents are not forced to send their children across borders to survive, housing assistance that keeps families stable, and safe pathways to citizenship for immigrants so they can freely cross borders without fear.

I refuse to let the brokenness I experienced be the end for anyone else.

I spent my life learning to live on both sides of the border, my heart scattered across countries and time zones, divided between a mother who worked tirelessly to keep us afloat and a grandmother whose love would forever mark my spirit.

This fracture took away the innocence of my childhood, but it also set me free. It empowered me to work for a vision of America that honors the tenderness of family, not the violence of separation.

A version of this essay was developed as part of Our Silence, a USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism program in partnership with Unseen.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under license Creative Commons Attribution/Attribution-Noncommercial.