Mexican US Border
During the Covid-19 pandemic, my grandfather, Víctor, received a yellow envelop from a niece of one his deceased sisters. The package contained unseen documents and photographs that recovered some of the stories and lives of his parents, Antonio Vallejo and Bertha Riveroll. Ranging from their youth until their last years alive; from the already told but still imprecise stories, these documents help to tell some of their stories, especially, the ones regarding their migration to the United States. They help not only to better reconstruct some of the missing pieces, but also, to re-imagine their movement in border areas between the 1940s, 1950s and a set of further trips to the United States of my great-grandmother in the 1980s.
Coming from an extremely poor background after the Mexican Revolution, my great grandparents migrated from the highly Catholic and conservative states of Michoacán and Hidalgo to the continuously modernizing and demographically explosive capital, Mexico City.
After working in the state-owned electric company, raising five children and taking care of the house and the family, Antonio’s and Bertha’s family migrated to San José, California, in 1945.
It is not entirely clear if they migrated with the Bracero program, a bi-national labour agreement between Mexico and United States between 1942 and 1964. Although denied by Víctor that he and his family arrived in this way, the Vallejo Riveroll family engaged in a still predominantly segregated and booming Bay Area in northern California, exactly when my grandfather was 11 years old. All members of the family worked right away, as all labour from the country was mobilized and dedicated to World War II.
In fact, when my grandfather was 17, he spent a longer time, going back to Mexico City with a man fluent in English who made him work for the Mexican branch of the General Electric and later as the right hand of a Jewish wood contractor. While no close relative from this migration experience remains in the United States, this experience was a landmark for a lot of us, the descendants, getting to be in contact with a second language, and even migrating to more distant countries, like Germany.
As the Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas argued in one of his most important short essays, both histories of Mexico and the United States are inextricably tied, and one cannot be explained without the other. For us, in the family, this double mirror always represents a point of encounter and reflection for trying to comprehend, what it requires to move and leave so many things behind, but also, to find a home in unexpected and distant places perhaps never imagined by our ancestors.
