Dating Latino Immigrants
Five Pitfalls To Avoid
So
Your Relationship
Can Last FOREVER
by Max T. Russell
Copyright © 2012
by Max T. Russell
Smashwords Edition
This book is also copyrighted under the
title I Fell in Love with a Latino Immigrant: Five Pitfalls to Avoid
So Your Relationship Can Last Forever.
Other products by the author and his twin
Max and Max Spanish
Videos for PK-8
Cultural Insights Video Series
Students’
Choice 1 Spanish Software
Students’ Choice 2 Spanish
Software
Bilingual Story Time for Preschool to First Grade
Ten
Things You Must Understand If You Want to Reach the Latino
Immigrant
Feeling Better Instead of Bitter about the Illegal
Immigrant
Make Your House an International Home
Live Before You
Die: Tips for Staying Out of the Ditch of Mediocrity
A Box Full of
Paper Clips
This book is not intended to be used as professional advice about law or relationship counseling. The information is meant to be used as a guide to careful thinking about relationships. Seek the advice of specialists when you need help with a specific case.
Contents
Pitfall
1: Trying to Bypass the Law
Pitfall
2: Thinking All Latinos Are the Same
Pitfall
3: Underestimating the Citizen’s Advantage
Pitfall
4: Underestimating La Botella
Pitfall
5: Being Unaware of Secret Loves
Make it Last
Citizens and their immigrant sweethearts make tragic mistakes everyday by thinking love is enough. They swear they’ve fallen into a forever love, but they don’t give it a fighting chance. When permanent residence in this country is not yet established, each person MUST know the rights and the wrongs that make or break this kind of relationship. If you like guarantees, try this one: Insisting that optimistic love is enough is a sure way to guarantee its failure.
Love is not enough, but love plus knowledge can put a relationship on the firmest footing from the start and create a two-culture experience that is shared for a lifetime. Love plus knowledge is the best relationship insurance for lovers who care about the unique needs and the strengths of responsible, nonpermanent residents.
That’s why I want you to know about five pitfalls that destroy dreams. I want you to do this entire thing right. I don’t want to see any more of these relationships turn tragic. I want you to make a smart start by understanding what citizens usually don’t understand about immigrants and what many immigrants don’t understand about the laws of the land and about self-destructive behaviors. I want to tell you why certain love affairs are doomed from the outset. If you are, or think you might be, one of the many people who would say, “I fell in love with a Latino immigrant,” listen up. Listen courageously and hopefully and honestly. I can save you years of agony and many thousands of dollars, as well as damage to other people whom you would unnecessarily and unfairly affect by entering unsuccessful or poorly chosen relationships. I really, really want you to do this right.
I’m a journalist and educator who listens every day to immigrants explaining their marital and love problems with citizens, and the other way around. I have finally decided to bring certain information together to help citizens build lasting, loving relationships with the immigrants with whom they become romantically involved. I’m not a marriage or dating counselor. I come from a family where Spanish is the second most spoken language. We have a lot of Latinos in my family. I have lived most of my life with one foot in the immigrant world and one foot in the citizen world. I have made hundreds of videos that teach kids and adults Spanish and the beautiful cultures of the Latino world. I make products for businesses and organizations that want to cross cultural divides to reach the immigrants. This product, Dating Latino Immigrants, is for the individual who senses a need for it at first sight. If you didn’t see the need at the very moment you read the title, this was not made with you in mind, but it is needed by someone you know. I am sure of this because of the increasing number of citizens who are entering into relationships with Latino immigrants. The number will only increase with time.
The reason I know so much about this topic is that immigrants have been telling me everything for years. Only recently did I realize that I need to reveal some of the information to people who, because of language and cultural gaps, don’t have access to the same conversations or the same quantity of them. I have interviewed and talked with immigrants and their lovers around the country. I have watched them repeat the same old unnecessary mistakes. I have watched them stagger like dizzied adults who can’t figure out what in the world went wrong or how they ever got involved with each other in the first place.
As I write these words, I am listening to four different Latinas on the Spanish radio talking about their disasters. Their Latino lovers have left, and now the women are working double time to care for the children. All these mothers are immigrants who are still trying to make sense of life in the U.S., where the bright dreams they imagined didn’t go the way they expected. This book could help them too. If it does, I’m sure they’ll tell me. They somehow know their information is safe with me.
The kind of situation the women on the radio are describing is complicated by the fact that they and their men are not here legally. Neither they nor their men can bring the other under the umbrella of legal residence. At this time, any of them could become caught in rapid legal proceedings resulting from something as simple as turning the wrong way onto a one-way street—and then be booted out of the country.
While a citizen-immigrant arrangement is usually less complex than these circumstances, it can still become just as difficult to navigate. But the road out of the woods, so to speak, can be explained in simple terms that put you in the driver’s seat of your relationship, which is where you ought to be, since we’re talking about your life and future with the immigrant from the Americas—North, Central, South, and the Caribbean. Cuba has referred to itself for years as “territorio libre en America”—free territory in America.
I must have your attention in order to help. Nobody listens in the heat of passion. The sting comes later, and it is a mighty painful sting for those who do not listen.
Pitfall 1: Trying to Bypass the Law
Jen took a while to realize she was working with insufficient information when she fell in love on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border. She didn’t need a marriage counselor; she needed some facts about laws and culture. In her case, she didn’t need to know more than a little about the law, but she didn’t know how important that little bit would be. She didn’t know how difficult it would be to bring her husband into the U.S. without proper documentation. She didn’t know that her new husband’s family had a structure that would compete with her notion of family structure. She didn’t know that her new husband, her first husband, might feel as much loyalty to his father’s authoritarian nature as he felt toward her. She didn’t know that a little foresight could have prevented almost every obstacle she and her husband faced. She could have brought him into the U.S. with utter ease by following a standard legal procedure, because he had never been in the country and therefore did not have a police record that could cause longer delays and penalties.
Knowledge came too late to save the marriage, which, to be honest, was on the path to destruction when they exchanged vows. They both had thought nothing mattered but true love. Whatever struggles came up, whatever the governments of Mexico or the U.S. would throw at them, true love would be enough. Somehow they’d get through. They’d make it work. They made it work for about a year, and, as far as I know, the baby never returned to her father again.
Here is part of my conversation with Jen before her marriage fell apart. She wanted to share her story and save you some heartache—and money. So please take it to heart for your benefit or someone else’s.
Me: Today we’re here with...
Jen: Monica. She’s 14 months.
Me: What is your situation, Jen?
Jen: I was married to a Mexican in Mexico, and I want to move back here to the States and we’re not able to get him over in the quickness that we want.
Me: Let’s be real honest. What’s going on here? Obviously you are a citizen of the U.S., and your daughter—well, wait a minute—she’s not a citizen of the U.S., is she?
Jen: Yes, she is.
Me: How is that so?
Jen: I came here when I was pregnant to have her. Right after I got married and found out that I was pregnant, I got very sick and decided that it would be better for me and the baby if I came to the States to have her. After coming to the States, I got a job and kept going to the doctor and made sure that everything was okay. And once we found out everything was okay, we decided we’d like to move to the States and try to get my husband here. And after them telling us that it would be eight months to a year, we really wanted him to be here before she was born. We just tried to resort to our last resort, which was he tried to pass illegally—on the day that she was born actually. And the day she was born he tried to pass and was arrested.
Note: Jen’s husband even tried entering through tunnels. Drug runners use tunnels too. No one knows how many tunnels exist below the U.S.-Mexico border and the border between North Korea and South Korea. Israel is concerned with tunnels under its border too. Also, Jen keeps saying “pass” when she talks about crossing the border. That’s how we often say it in Spanish (pasar), so I think Spanish has affected her English.
Me: Well?
Jen: He was arrested. He didn’t get it, and after being in jail for three nights, they let him out. That was in Tijuana. After being in for three nights they let him out and told him to go back to wherever he was from, and he flew to Texas, right on the border and tried to pass again in Texas and he was arrested again.
Me: Okay, so he was arrested, and they told him to go back where he came from, and we know, of course, they know that doesn’t do any good. But then, you say, he flew to Texas. What happened there?
Jen: He flew to the Texas border, [near] Mission, Texas and tried to pass on that side. There’s obviously two ways to get into the States. Tijuana’s on the California side. What I understand, what I’ve been told is that they paid someone to get them fake papers.
Me: They?
Jen: Well, it was my brother-in-law and my husband trying to pass together. And after getting to the border—what I understand is that everybody gets in a line to pass when you’re walking.
Me: We’re talking about they’re using a coyote (i.e., smuggler). Do you want to tell us what they had to pay?
Jen: I personally sent a thousand dollars. And he had money he had saved, so I want to say $1300 to $1500.
Me: Yeah, that’s a lot of money, but then that’s the going rate for a short trip.
Jen: Yeah. Not guaranteed.
Me: So, how good of an investment was that? Tell us about that.
Jen: Basically, when I was able to get in touch with my husband (while he was still in Tijuana), he did not know where his coyote was. He (Jen’s husband) was locked in an apartment. Nobody brought him food. Tijuana is very dangerous.
Note: Coyotes often lock their “cargo” in a room, one person to a room, in order to keep them from getting away or drawing up an alternate plan or blowing the coyotes’ cover. If the coyotes don’t deliver their cargo safe and sound, they might lose money, the failure will hurt their business reputation, and they might get hurt.
Jen: The guy said, “Stay here and I’ll come and get you when it’s time.” Every night he would say, “[The other coyote] called and said we’re going to do it.”
Me: All that money was wasted.
Jen: Correct.
Me: How long was he in the U.S. before he was caught?
Jen: He never even got over.
Me: He didn’t get over? Who caught him?
Jen: The first time, he was in Tijuana in a car, and the coyote told him everybody should dress in brand clothing like Tommy Hilfiger, or American brands, and hopefully the [border guards] would think they were just rich Mexicans who lived in the States. They were passing with my brother-in-law, my husband, and an actual American citizen, and a girl. And they all have fake names now. I guess the girl in the front seat forgot her name that was on her paper. So they surrounded the car and arrested all of them.
Me: The American police or border patrol stopped them just barely on the Mexican side.
Jen: Right. In the zone.
Me: So that money was wasted because he didn’t even get out of the country.
Jen: Right, exactly.
Me: Then he went to Texas. What about that?
Jen: He and my brother-in-law had their fake papers, and they got in a line. [The border agents] randomly check people. I was told that women with small babies were passed. They didn’t even check their papers. My brother-in-law was able to pass. They checked his papers and they said it was fine. With my husband they did a random check in the computer and obviously his face popped up from when he was caught in Tijuana, and they arrested him again.
Me: Did you send money that time?
Jen: No. What happened is his coyote said, because he was not passed, he said, “I’ll help you in Texas. I have people in Texas. You’ve already paid me. I’ll try to help you again.” He was arrested again for three days.
Me: Well, did he get anywhere at all?
Jen: No, he never got even on American soil.
Me: So he was put in an American jail for three days. And then what happened?
Jen: After they let him out, he just went back home.
Me: How old is Monica?
Jen: She’s 14 months.
Me: And so that’s when this happened.