End of an era

A divorce, a handful of plane tickets, a 3-day tourist visa. That's all it took to get this family, or all of it but the mother, out of Iztapalapa, a section of Mexico City variously described as "crime-ridden", "crime-infested," or "crime-plagued," depending on which website you click to, but that was six years ago. Talk about long, strange trips. If they had only but known, I wonder if they would have stayed.

When I see him, for the first time in years, I wonder if the dad's front teeth have always been like that, rotted and broken, and I doubt it; I would have remembered. But the decay seems too fitting of a symbol for the fall they seem to have taken, and I remind myself that it's probably mostly in my head. I know little of the specifics about what came before, just talk of fights and gangs, but if it wasn't worth sacrifice they wouldn't have come. I remember their arrival too clearly; they were one of my first families. Dad in a pressed dress shirt. Two middle school boys supernaturally diligent. A high school girl shy and eager. Well, we took care of all that.


Or, really, circumstances did. Leave kids on their own to raise themselves while dad works two jobs to support them, and they will. Raise themselves, that is. And not in the most constructive way, though they were never in any real trouble. Leave a sensitive soul to deal with a divorce on his own, his mother a half a continent away, and he'll struggle. Leave a well-intentioned teacher to figure out what she's doing on the fly, and well, there are likely to be casualties. At any rate, we all seem to have taken the hard road around.

They all dropped out, and I don't feel good about it, even if that's what the statistics say they will do. Today, son number two is trying again in Oregon with a girlfriend's family. Rumor has it one in his position can get a driver's license there, so the plan was just to pretend to try, but now Dad says he seems to be doing it for real. Son number one has gotten himself deported, thanks to an ill-advised California bus ride, and dad and daughter are here to pick up a transcript though he's already nineteen. He thinks he wants to go to school now, and who knows, maybe he will. The daughter, now 21, got close to graduation before a boyfriend intervened and whisked her off to Georgia. They're still together, though, so maybe there's that.

So today I hand over a sealed envelope bound for Mexico, and print off some information about the GED and talk encouragingly about community college, and send more best wishes to Oregon, though I told him in person the day before he left, and shake hands with these people and accept their thanks with a bit of guilt for maybe the last time. None of us, I'm certain, are where we thought we'd be six years ago. We are all quite obviously older and more tired. We have all undoubtedly learned a lot. But maybe, it could be, in the end, it will turn out to have been worthwhile.