In recent days, I have seen stories of people talking about their experience with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, what 12 years of this program mean, the impact, both positive and negative, and what it feels like every time we have to renew our permit to be in the USA with an indefinite status.
My name is Luis López Reséndiz, and I was born and raised in Colonia Obrera, 3rd section, in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, where I was raised in my community that comes from a town called San Jeronimo Progreso, in the Ñuu Savi (Mixteca) region, which went to the border of Mexico and the United States to plant a root and a new dawn.
As a child, in elementary school in Colonia Obrera, I was taken to an exhibit at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT), where I became fascinated by the region's history, mostly about the sea and endangered species. So my dream was to grow up to be a marine biologist or something like that that would help protect the sea and its inhabitants. I wanted to save the sea. The sea became very meaningful to me in my childhood. From my grandmother's house, you could see the sea, a bright blue sea that reached the other side, all the way to the Coronado Bridge in San Diego, California, where I could see the ships passing under the bridge. That dream of wanting to take care of the sea was interrupted when, at the age of 12, my dad woke me up early in the morning, curiously on a Thanksgiving Thursday, so I could say goodbye to my mom because that day was the day I was going to cross the border to go live in the USA. Then everything changed. The day had come to leave Colonia Obrera and join all the other children in my community who had also gone north. The dream of growing up to see the sea in Baja, California, Mexico, turned into one where I didn't have to swim but run and hide between the hills and dark roads to be able to reach my destination in San Diego, California, in the USA.
Before coming to the United States, I didn't understand what it meant to be undocumented, but an uncle who was with me on the road told me, "We don't have papers. That's why we have to cross the hills. A paper is the only thing we need to stop hiding, just one paper, can you believe it?" Then, I understood it would take me a long time to return to my home in Colonia Obrera with my mother. At that time, I realized that in front of me was a sea full of obstacles, where I could see the beginning but not the end. And, well, at 12 years old, I was a child who did not understand the huge impact of not having that piece of paper that my uncle referred to on the way to San Diego.
Coming to live in San Diego, California, helped me understand many things about the migrant community in that region that activists called the Borderlands. Aside from being a few miles away from my grandmother's house, I could swear that I could see her house from the pier in Imperial Beach, where I would sit in front of the sea. The sea brought me memories that I will never forget. In 2012, precisely on May 1, I became an active member of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) and my life changed. At the FIOB, I was part of a process of political awareness about a bi-national movement of Indigenous peoples and our role within the migrant community in the United States, with or without immigration status. There, I understood that my path in life was to fight for the respect of indigenous peoples' rights. That same year I received DACA.
Receiving DACA was an experience that definitely changed my life. The main thing is that it gave me the opportunity to get a job in an office and receive support to continue my studies. That filled my father with happiness because I no longer had to work in construction with him. DACA opened another door for us on the road, but it did not allow us to enter where we wanted to go fully. Meanwhile, at FIOB, they helped me develop critical and political thinking. The organization reminded me that this achievement is important but not everything. There was still a lot of work to do since the true dreamers were the fathers and mothers, the grandmothers and grandfathers who envisioned a horizon, walked, and fought for a dream that had yet to be fulfilled. Twelve years ago, that hope for change still burned with great passion among the youth who still remembered when their parents took them to protest in the marches for immigration reform in 2006 and who saw the impact of collective organization. These young people were the ones who fought for a policy change that encapsulated the dreams of freedom of an entire community. The real Dreamers who fought for the Dream Act are the nine undocumented young people (The Dream 9) who risked everything to shake up a system that did not listen, and that had stolen their dreams. However, despite everything, they fought for what we now have, and although I was not part of that fight for the Dream Act or DACA (because being part of an organization or a movement did not cross my mind before 2012), I recognize that I enjoyed the privileges that were denied to other people.
Twelve years after DACA, the conversation at the national level is based on one question: what does it mean to lose DACA? And it is something I think about a lot, now as Director of Operations for the organization Indigenous Communities in Leadership (CIELO), where we see in depth the impacts of policies based on hate and prejudice and how the Indigenous community and its languages are rendered invisible. And, well, I think that if tomorrow they take away DACA from us, that would force us to return to the main thing: grassroots organizing and lobbying. And, of course, to show those who make policies that our community will never stop fighting because we are a strong economic block that pays taxes, and at the same time enriches with culture the cities and regions that were not well seasoned; that we are more than the young people with DACA who deserve respect and the right to stay in the country that is now the common home of thousands of dreams. That we are not a single community, but that we are different people with different languages with a story to tell of how we came to the USA and why. It is fair to say that things are different, that what was once a sea of obstacles, today we could say it is a sea of opportunities. After all, what is certain is that with or without DACA, the community will always fight for its place in this great country, only this time, no one will be left out because we are here and we are not leaving.
