Time Deferred: Dream-Memory of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

On the 11th year of a pyrrhic victory that marked the high-water mark of migrants rights in the United States, remembering what was felt before ambivalence and fear of rescission set in.

All images generated by the Author with Draw Things, utilizing the Openjourney model.

I: The Sun Rises for the Second Time in America;

For those who were tuned into the announcement and identified as a potential beneficiary, the morning atmosphere on the day Deferred Action for Childhood arrivals was announced held an incredible, almost kinetic energy. Suddenly, and especially for the older but eligible undocumented migrants for whom opportunity and belonging were always someone else’s gifts, the sudden arrival of hope after the fracas of the latest immigration reform campaign was tinged in dueling tones of skepticism and anticipation. After hearing the president’s announcement on ethnic media and confirming it was true on CNN, we pored over the text of the executive order time as many times as our eyes would allow as if through repeated readings we could fix the new legal reality like a constellation in our starless sky. We let ourselves be credulous and to dream again for the first time since the day America first broke our hearts.

Reading the requirements, we became aware of our many subjectivities. Here our age, our education status, all of the line items which tabulated us in the Census were now hurdles we had cleared or ones that would be insurmountable. The Chinese horoscopes on restaurants tables became lucky signs or cursed ones. Water roosters crowed the dawning of a new day, golden roosters let their tears fall into egg drop soup. If our mother had given birth one day earlier, we might have not been so lucky. For those who did not live carefully and meekly, our errors roared to life coming from the corners of our imaginations and our nightmares to take on the form of a deep hopelessness that smothered us. We still would seek help, our mothers, our spouses, our children demanded we did. We would still hold onto hope even though our grip was tenuous. Reading the requirements, we realized that we were never undocumented. 

Here, USCIS demanded of us pieces of paper to prove our existence and permanence in the United States year after year. We went with the solemnity of court eunuchs into our mothers’ archives and pulled out report cards, theme park season passes, medical bills, consular identifications and our spouse’s death certificates. We looked for our own names in pieces of paper unsorted across numerous boxes and half-torn envelopes until we had amassed enough evidence to establish that we had existed. We longed to satisfy the mandarins who now held our dreams of kinetic motion and wage slavery in the palm of their hands, we could not tell which paper was more relevant or which one was superfluous because we became nearly intoxicated seeing our own names. There was a simple pleasure, the feeling between our fingers of the blended pulp of letters that had been folded time and time again before being ceremonially buried in its original envelope. One by one, we disinterred them. 

Here we reverted to our first name, the composites that evinced that we had once loved our mothers without fearing for her, before we realized in America a mother is a liability, a constant source of worry and not a comfort. Through the process of staving off our exiles from America, we became closer to our countries of origin, looking the legislatures that abandoned us in the eye we demanded passports and other identification. We demanded they claim us. We demanded legal services. We challenged the national government through our sheer pathetic eagerness, like fancy goldfish who could decide to die at any moment in their gilt bowls.

Before us in xeroxed piles with two hole punches in the top margins lay our lives’ residues. We had never lived in the shadows, we had never been undocumented. Here was ample truth, an entire childhood documented, an entire life living in the gaze of government and a society which rejected us and asked us to hide in plain sight. We ignored this realization because it is more important to have an income than to have the truth. If they could concede us a temporary truce, we could accept the terms upon which it was proposed. Our undocumentedness was several pounds of documents; we regretted we could not find more. We feared it would not be enough. 

II: Petition to His Majesty the King and His Representative the Honorable Lord Keeper of the Gate for His Majesty’s Granting of Temporary Relief from Exile;

Before us was a form unlike any form we had filled before. In its single printed pages was contained the whole of our future. We scanned it, read it, agonized over it as if it were our death warrant. So full of dread. We dare not mark its white spaces, we dare not fold the corners. Every word was suddenly foreign again. We had to relearn English to give our names, our full names and to confess to the other names we had use or which we had been given. We had come accustomed to using so many names. The diacritic marks, characters, syllabaries and abjads we had forced ourselves to learn so we may maintain the ever-more-tenuous connection to our motherlands were sacrificed for the sake of typography and legibility on a piece of plastic. It was another capitulation to the English language that had always seemed to demand of us one capitulation after the other. 

We were confronted again by questions of who we were, some of us begrudgingly becoming white for the first time. It made no sense to us. Our race remained elusive or was suddenly painfully crystalized; we contorted to fit in the checkboxes for statistical purposes. Why did they need this information? We asked. To whom does it matter, what statistical purpose does this serve? Who will use this information? The questions that filled us brought bitter tastes to our mouths, they scrambled our sense of self momentarily. 

Every place we had lived in was recalled and written down. Heartbreaks over broken mortgages or the sudden panic of being evicted roared back to life and were captured in the bureaucrat’s mercury-lit posterity. We could see ourselves at eight years old putting our toys into black plastic bags and our mothers tears full of eyes as the table she cleaned innumerable houses to buy partially on credit was sold to pay for the moving truck. We realized in more than one sense we have never had a home of our own. Every address we jotted down brought forth buried memories of neighbors we never saw again or of the many elementary schools and the hundreds of classmates who blended into one as we were pulled from one zip code to the next. We were a people who were always in motion, we were a people who had never found refuge. Even behind the door of our homes, America came to find us and tell us we had to leave. There are so many borders and so many ways to deport someone. 

On the same page, despite our many addresses we realized we had never been anywhere. We had never traveled except through Google Maps. If we had left America we kept this a secret from everyone but the people who were involved in smuggling us back in their arms or under the parasol of a borrowed birth certificate. We remembered the last day we set our eyes on our first homes, the thick sadness that coated our childhoods in the days upon arriving back, wondering why God was so cruel to us particularly and only. 

Then we were asked for a date, the exact date this all began. In our bodies we could feel the adrenaline that cut through the warm, brown noise of a night we had buried so deep within us that we had never been able to recall it with accuracy. As we looked through the stack of documents, we looked within ourselves struggling to remember all the hands that touched us and all the humid rooms we hid in waiting for someone to retrieve us and, with a great push over rusted steel fences, make us American. The date didn’t materialize, the dates in our minds couldn’t all possibly be accurate. We were filled with the despondency of forgetting most significant date, the one that would define the rest of our lives for what seemed like eternity, the day that had never ended and was in fact every day we had ever lived in an endless loop of the same twenty-four hours. All we knew is that on that day we had no lawful status. That was obvious. We learned to grieve without a date or the remains.

We were horrified when they dared presume we’d ever serve in the military, our bodies recoiled from the suggestion. We felt bemused when they asked us if we were communists. We just lied and hid our little red books in our breast pockets and smiled inside. We mistakenly hoped others like us would not be so shameless or so näive. 

The lawyers from the church who helped us refused to sign the form expressing they had. We did not understand why, but for the first time the process seemed less than profane, less than arcane. When they asked us if we had the cashier’s check for the application fee, we blushed. It was more money than we had ever held in our hands. We placed it in a plastic zip bag so the oil and cold sweat of our palms wouldn’t blemish it. We verified the destination eighteen times. We don’t know how our parents managed to put this together. We lost count of how many plates of food and roof tiles were touched to earn a place in the country that had shaped us in its mold. We were full of gratitude and guilt.

In an envelope marked for a P.O. Box in another state, we sent all our hopes and our dreams to be inspected and approved by the faceless bureaucrats who would soon know all our secrets from childhood to the present. As the postal worker took it, an immense dread filled us that it might be incorrect or that we had committed an error. We suppressed to the best of our ability the surging regret of having handed the government our mothers’ addresses. We hoped the promise would be kept, that this would not result in midnight knocks that would bring forth a new day and punctuate the warm, brown noise of our eternal night with our fathers’ pleading. We learned that an envelope full of dreams weighs the same as an urn with ashes. 

Days letter we received an e-mail that made our hearts stop. Our application had been received. The mandarins could see us as children now, they saw our teachers’ reprimands for our poor handwriting and the compliments on our unaccented English. They could see that we were good, inside, that we were not what we were called. We wondered what it was like to peer into the life of a scared stranger. What is it like to vivisect someone remotely? How does it feel to have so much power over someone else’s life, we wondered, having so little power over our own. We hoped they would be kind, we hope they still were in touch with their hearts because they held ours in their hands.

The trance of the days spent waiting felt like a trial in the desert. Grey spheres, so unremarkable, were crystal balls peering into the future. We waited for each one and attended to them like the stations of the Cross. They wouldn’t budge despite our prayers. Despondent we looked for news, we called help lines, we cried at night wondering if this was an augur of rejection and confirmation that our dreams were not the visions of saints but the hallucinations of drunkards. We held the children who were indeed the tender anchors of our hearts, we looked upon our siblings who would never know this fate, our parents whose prime years had led to this. We felt alone and scared. 

Then, one after another the spheres turned blue. America had forgiven us. We cried because we had not yet forgiven ourselves.

III: Space Expanded, Learning To Have a Body;

It arrived. The artifact, tricolored amulet that would protect us. We held it in our hands and peered at a face that seemed like it belonged to a different person from another time. Our mothers kissed our foreheads. We immediately booked appointments for licenses if we could or social security cards we did not yet realize would bear a mark. It was intoxicating. This is what our parents must have seen in their visions decades ago. Our parents were such saints. 

Suddenly we realized we could move, that we had bodies. The gazes of others no longer pierced through us and sent us scurrying. We sat in chairs in public and spread our legs marveling at our joy in occupying the two cubic meters around us. We were slightly embarrassed, but we quickly spread out further. The internal borders of America melted and we saw the eastern edge of the Pacific for the first time. With these seemingly gone, we saw America’s face in the light of the second day. We remarked how beautiful it was, truly beautiful. The canyons and the woods, the rivers and the mountains all seemed as if they were painted by a brush licked by God. The roads teeming with people in their cars seemed to contain the whole of life. We sat in traffic in our cars made in the previous century and didn’t complain the entire time while we waited for a wreck to clear or the wildfires to settle. As the wind hit our face on buses we had been forbidden to ride or in the cars we had before driven with one anxious leg trembling. Our bodies only whimpered when we saw police in the rearview, a change from the screaming that now seemed to abate so long as our pockets were heavy and full with the employment authorization document in our wallet. Is license to work not the same as license to live? We were conflicted, constantly. But, we lived regardless. 

When the sun set directly to the west we remembered the Pasig as it met Manila Bay when the frogs still sang, we remembered the Sierra crowned with century plants in bloom in our home just beyond Zacatecas blazing red in the afternoon. We wondered if it was true, that we might soon see them again. We wondered if a century had passed since the last bloom, if after a century the frogs still sang. We felt the first pang of regret in our heart. Why do I need parole, I asked, if I did nothing wrong?

When we arrived to our families. we saw our parents sitting limp after the day had chewed the cartilage in their bodies. Our guilt would not abate until it came time to recharge our protective tokens and anxious waiting took its seat in our dining rooms. When we left before dawn to the warehouse for work, we saw our mother and felt secure, for the first time, that we would return to her in the evening. We did not yet know we were being drip-fed a life, we did not yet know this could all be done by proclamation. We went to sleep with both eyes closed, we had work again the next day and the day after. 

And the day after that, too.