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![]() Juan loves to draw and play with Transformers, machines that can be changed into robots and space weapons. Marta found employment at the same restaurant, overseeing the salad bar. At night, he cuts chicken in the back kitchen of a fast-food restaurant. From morning to mid-afternoon, he is the maintenance man at the apartment complex they live in near the runways of Austin's municipal airport on the northeast side of town. In many respects, the Hernandez family represents the classic American immigrant household. Voge in Laredo two years later, are getting that opportunity 200 miles north of Nuevo Laredo in Austin, the capital of Texas, where the family moved several years ago without the approval of the U.S. Juan and his sister, Cynthia, who was delivered by partera Blanca I. Both had quit school in Nuevo Laredo after attending the mandatory six grades, and they had their baby across the river in Laredo, Marta said, "because we wanted our children to have the opportunity for a better life and a better education than we had." That trip into Texas 11 years ago for Juan's birth was the first step in a journey that led Raul and Marta to where they are today - two of millions of undocumented aliens living and working in the United States. He was in fine health except for his little right foot, which turned inward. They delivered seven babies that month: Adriana Josefina Campos from Nuevo Laredo San Juanita Patricia from Guadalajara Brenda Alicia from Nuevo Leon Irma Azeneth from Lamposas Brenda Salas from Ciudad Juarez Jose Angel Cortez from San Luis Potosi and Juan Herasmo Hernandez from Nuevo Laredo.įrom seven Mexican women came seven American babies. The vital statistics of his birth are noted in a record book kept by the two midwives. Marta had prayed to la Virgin de San Juan for an easy labor it lasted only a few hours. Eighty-five dollars was the price of delivery - the price of American citizenship - for the first child of Marta and Raul Hernandez. There is nothing illegal about this tradition it is difficult, after all, to write legislation that stops only pregnant women from crossing a bridge.īy birthright, the newborns are American citizens, making the parteras de facto immigration judges who grant citizenship in the delivery room. They carry what are known as local cards that allow them to enter the United States for a day of working or shopping, and many women use these cards when they are ready to deliver. Although many Americans envision Mexicans entering this country by swimming or wading across the Rio Grande, scaling fences, crawling through rat-infested sewage tunnels or cramming into boxcars, it is not like that for most border residents. ![]() Voge, was on Iturbide Street at the western fringe of Laredo's business district close enough to the bridge and other landmarks such as River Drive Mall and the Hilton Hotel so that pregnant women from Mexico could find it without difficulty.įor years along the Rio Grande, women have crossed the river to have their babies. ![]() Her office, which she shared with midwife partner Blanca I. Rangel, was a partera (midwife) who had lived on the Laredo, Tex., side of the river with her husband, a taxi driver, since 1954. Marta, nine months pregnant, was ready to have the baby, and they had arranged for her aunt to deliver it. 16, 1975, Raul and Marta, accompanied by Marta's mother, Margarita Gonzalez, got into the family's 1966 Chevrolet Impala sedan for a short trip that forever changed the lives of the Coca-Cola truck driver and his wife, then both 26. So are flocks of children, pink stucco row houses, shacks of dark rotten wood, skeletal dogs, cackling hens, rooting pigs, side yards crowded with old Fords and Chevys in various stages of disrepair, donkey carts stacked with neatly folded cardboard and heavy blocks of ice, corner loncherias advertising hamburguesas and Superior Beer, and trees of pine and fruit.Īs the sun rose over Calle Hidalgo at half past 7 on the morning of Oct. Wide potholes, some of them alleged to hold more water than the Rio Grande, are part of the daily scene. One block before Calle Hidalgo reaches the house, as the street runs east from the center of town, it changes from pavement to dirt. The gray cinderblock building with slabs of wood covering its windows sits at the east end of Colonia Victoria, a poor working-class neighborhood two miles from Nuevo Laredo's tourist district and the bridge to the United States. NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - Raul and Marta Hernandez, who live as undocumented immigrants in Austin, Tex., and who are seeking amnesty under provisions of the 1986 immigration law, began their married life at 1512 Calle Hidalgo, a little house that looks like a frayed shoe box.
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