I don’t know what to think.
But I feel that it’s only right if I tell this story based on my own insight and experience. In order for this story to have the impact it deserves, I want to lay it out to you bare and raw, the way I believe our Mexican people have grown accustomed to doing for a very long time.
On Monday, June 16, I was out grocery shopping with my wife and son, when I noticed a text from my mother. On the ride to the grocery store, I’d seen an attachment from her that I didn’t think much of, since she tends to send me Bible scriptures and edited photos with the names of my siblings and me on them that look like something you’d make on a computer back in 2010. But for one reason or another, her follow-up message wasn’t delivered to my phone until I was halfway through the shopping trip, scanning through the seasonings. The attachment I’d brushed past twenty minutes earlier was a video, and the follow-up message provided all the context I needed.
“Migración se llevó a Cristobal.”
My brain couldn’t register what I was reading as quickly as my eyes had. If I could have seen my own reaction as if watching myself through a camera lens, I imagine it would have looked like my eyes were bulging out of my forehead as my pale skin turned red.
My hands shook with terror. Before I could even get through ten seconds of the video, I muttered in literal disbelief. As I watched the footage—federal immigration agents violently pulling a man from a truck and tossing him on the ground, his partner, heavily pregnant, yelping and crying in distress—my heart sank to the hollows of my insides. I watched as a man I knew—someone with whom I had shared conversations, drinks, and even a roof with—fell victim to the brutal injustice and cruelty ravaging this country at the hands of ICE.
It felt as though what I was watching couldn’t be true. Every detail of the video was quickly etched into my mind, from the broken glass of Cristobal’s truck, which once sat on my mother’s driveway, to his neon orange work shirt—the kind you’d see him wearing more often than not. The video ended, and I tried to go on with my errands, but my hands continued to tremble. Though my eyes were focused on the seasonings in front of me, it felt as though I was looking straight through them. I had a feeling in my chest that I can only describe as heartbreak—that shakiness that feels like your heart is trembling inside of you.
I’ve always thought of myself as outspoken and informed on the matters of racial injustice and social inequality, but I can admit that I may have been a hypocrite in that regard; even I was naïve to what is truly going on until it came and slapped me across the face.
As I write this, a day has passed since Cristobal’s arrest. I couldn’t anticipate that the footage would be featured by some local media outlets, as it now has been. Most of the articles I’ve read about the detainment don’t even state his full name—in most cases, he’s simply referred to as an undocumented immigrant or the partner of Kristen Solorio, the woman in the video. It’s as if he isn’t even deserving of recognition beyond whatever perception the media wants you to have of people like him. When I click through social media posts about his detainment, the comments are riddled with hate and bitter ignorance—women and men following their oppressors’ path of bigotry. I am baffled by it.
His name is Cristobal Pu Us. I met him about three years ago, when my mother told me that they were seeing each other. I didn’t have much conversation with him in the short time they dated, but the time we shared was enough for me to develop an understanding of who he is and who he is not. Yes, he is undocumented. And because of that, strangers will look down upon him as nothing more than a job-stealing, criminal peasant.
But he’s also my little brother’s godfather, and for good reason. He was the man who helped my mother when she broke her leg and was unable to work for over a year. I watched as he took care of my mother, not in a nurturing way, but in a paternalistic manner. He carried her—broken leg and all—into and out of that very truck that appears in the video of his detainment. He was a quiet guy, but his demeanor was the essence of his character. He was not like the lazy stereotype of the Mexican tradesman who works sunup to sundown just to lay back and binge beer on the weekends. He was a young man juggling all of his familial responsibilities while the trajectory of his life bound him to the false narratives that define many Americans’ perception of immigrants like him.
Cristobal did not cross the border in his early twenties in pursuit of selfish endeavors, but rather, in pursuit of selfless ones. You don’t have to be Mexican to understand that the absence of your father growing up has lasting impacts that not only change you as an individual but also shapes your environment entirely. Something that is hard to grasp for many Americans who are sheltered from the rest of the world’s realities is that poverty here does not fall along the same lines as poverty elsewhere. Poverty in Mexico is so prevalent that some people don’t even realize they’re trapped by it—it all seems normal, despite the fact that you can’t fully rationalize it. For many people who fit the stereotype of the sunup-till-sundown drunkard, drinking has become a necessary escape from the cruelty of a world in which a day’s worth of work can only afford you a case of beer.
Cristobal understood this, and at just twenty-one years old, he sacrificed his livelihood, health, and well-being to get himself and his mother out of the circumstances that life threw upon them. By the time I met him, he’d already been in the United States for a decade. My mother would tell me of times he’d send his mother in Mexico as much as $4,000. My eyes would widen in disbelief in those moments—I couldn’t help but wonder what trials and tribulations he and his mother must have gone through in life to foster such devotion for one another.
When I found out that Cristobal was only thirty-three years old, it gave me a sense of clarity rather than indifference, since my mother was well over a decade older than him, and that kind of reaction was to be expected. He was calm, even shy, maybe. He spoke to me as if he were worried about what I thought of him, and now I wonder how he’d feel if he knew what the strangers commenting about his arrest on social media seem to think of him.
A year ago, I was blessed with the arrival of my son, Giovanni. Lots of parents describe the changes you go through as you learn to be a parent like a switch in your brain that miraculously flips. Cristobal’s child has not even been born yet, and still, the trauma of separation that has tortured generation after generation of Mexican people, dating back to the days of the Spanish conquest, has already been passed down. I think any man who didn’t have the opportunity to be raised by a father understands the importance of being there to raise his own child, and for now, Cristobal has been robbed of that opportunity. This sort of trauma is a cycle that will continue to be passed on for generations to come—and for what?
We will continue to see example after example of our people taken from their families and spoken of as nothing more than illegal immigrants without stories to tell. But Cristobal’s story will not go untold—I refuse to let that happen. He is not a criminal. He is not just a casualty of this ongoing war on empathy. He will not be thought of the way the media wants to frame him.
Americans are no longer blind to what their government is doing to immigrants. I don’t know if they understand just how ruthless it really is. Perhaps they won’t truly get it until it happens to someone they care about. But I will never understand how anyone could see this for anything more than what it truly is: authoritarianism in the making.
I just don’t know what to think.