Vietnam, Mexico, The United States…one man’s immigration and history

 

For the “Crossing the Valley:  A Multimedia Ethnography Project”, I chose to interview one of my good friends, a 22 year old half-Vietnamese half-Mexican man named An Chu Villareal.  He eagerly agreed to the interview, so we went out to lunch and talked at a restaurant for several hours regarding his personal immigration story.  His interesting and unique name, he tells me, stems from the Vietnamese “An”, meaning “peace” or “peaceful”, his mother’s family name Chu, and his father’s apellido, or Mexican surname, Villareal.  He and his parents migrated from Mexico to the United States when he was merely 2 years old; as such, he is fluent not only in his native languages of Vietnamese and Spanish, but English as well.  The following passage is the story of his family’s migration from Mexico in 1984 and their subsequent life in the United States.

 An Chu Villareal

          “My mother moved to Mexico from Vietnam in 1978 to follow her family who was fleeing the country because of the Sino-Vietnamese war.  When they arrived, she got separated from her mother, father and two younger brothers in the hustle and bustle of the port activity.  My mother was befriended by a traveling port family who later moved up the coast to Puerto Ángel.  Two years later, she met my father and they fell in love.  She lived with him and his parents (who did not really approve of the marriage) for the next year and a half, having my older brother Bao, and then me.  It was very important to my mother to keep her family name continuing through her kids, and it was possible because of the Mexican tradition of using both the mother’s maiden and the father’s surname to compile the name of the children.  My father loved my mother so much that even with the patriarchal tendencies of his native culture, he allowed my mother to give my older brother and myself Vietnamese first names (my younger brother and sister are named Francisco…we call him “Cisco”… and Ángela, pronounced “AHN-hey-la”).

          “Anyway, my abuelos (grandparents) died soon after.  They were very poor.  So were we.  Dad had a job working the tourist trade in Puerto Ángel.  He was very good at it,

Puerto Ángel

but that port isn’t as active or doesn’t have as much of a draw, as the bigger ports like Puerto Peñasco or Puerto Vallarta.  When he lost his job in Ángel, and none of the other seaport towns needed any help, he and my mother decided to pursue work in the United States.  They entered the green card lottery in 1983 and our family was actually drawn!  I don’t remember much from our trip…I was only about 2…but I’ve been told since that it was hot.  There were only five of us back then, Ángela hadn’t yet been born, but our truck was only supposed to carry 3.  And it was summertime.  We had it loaded down with so much stuff, our entire house full of furniture and clothes, and some food just for the trip.  Even if the truck had had air conditioning, we wouldn’t have been able to use it because the engine was already overheating.  Apparently, my father had already picked up all the necessary paperwork before we arrived at the border, but it still seemed like it took forever to cross.  The men at the border went through our entire truck full of stuff, and scrutinized the paper work, probably to make sure it wasn’t fake or something.  They even had someone check the diapers of me and Cisco, I guess to see if anyone had stashed drugs there or whatever.  We stayed in Tucson for a while, and my parents worked mostly odd jobs, here and there, restaurants mostly I think, for about a year just to save some money.  Eventually, Tucson became too clogged with people that had come up from Mexico without papers.  They worked for way less money than my parents, who could ask more because of their documentation paperwork.  Plus, they still had their pride, and they had to support us…most of the people just coming up were young men, who had left their families behind so they could come up here and make some money.  People…I got the feeling, even that young, that nobody there really like us.  I mean, we had our papers and stuff, but my parent’s English wasn’t that good.  Plus, all the gringos, they couldn’t tell us apart from all of the young guys coming up with no papers, and they really didn’t like those guys.  Then, all of the…I guess you could call them ‘undocumented’ young men, they kind of resented us because we did have our papers.  We had that security, that no one could just send us back to Mexico on a whim, and they were really jealous of that.  A couple of times, my father was jumped on the street.  He had no money, but the guys that did it were after his papers.  He had to keep our stuff hidden all the time.

          “When we had finally saved enough money to move on, we drove up to Phoenix, and we’ve pretty much been here ever since.  We got lucky, or maybe blessed is what it is.  My father got a job in construction—not day labor, like people think of “the Mexicans”, but in middle management…I guess you could call it a foreman?...because we’re “legal”.  My mom got a job with a pretty good corporation as a secretary.  I guess she likes it OK, she’s pretty much been there ever since.  Her boss is nice. (Names of corporations have been withheld at the request of the interviewee).  My brother, he didn’t want to have to work with his hands like my father did, so he went to a computer-training school and now he develops software.  I’m studying architecture; one day I want to be able to work with my father and develop and construct buildings for the downtown area here in Phoenix.  Cisco is training to be a police officer, actually.  The department he signed on with was really excited to hire him because of his language skills.  And Ángela…well, you know how kids are.  She’s still in high school.  She’s a really good student, actually.  She’s really smart—smarter than all the rest of us!  I think she wants to be a nurse, something like that.

          “Hmmm…why did we migrate?  My father wanted out of the tourist industry down there.  Even though it was one of the best-paying jobs down there, it still didn’t pay well enough to support our entire family.  I think he just wanted better for us.  He didn’t have an education, neither did my mother, but he saw all the people coming down from the U.S., staying in the hotel he worked…he saw the luxury they lived in, and figured that it would be like that for us if we moved up there.  He did want us kids to get at least a high school education, and they always told us when we were kids that they would help us do college too if we wanted to.

          “Haha, oh, the language thing.  Well yeah, my mother taught all of the kids Vietnamese, the language anyway.  Not so much the culture, but we picked up on a little of that from her along the way also.  Most, we are fluent in Spanish and English.  My parent’s English is way better now than it was…I remember one day, it would have been a couple of years after we got here, my father was talking to the pregnant wife of a colleague of his.  He kept saying how happy she must be to be “embarrassed”.  She got this kind of confused look on her face, because you know, who is happy to be embarrassed?   Well, the husband of this lady, who spoke some Spanish, finally caught on a little while later and cleared things up.  See, in Spanish, “embarizada” is a “false cognate”—it doesn’t mean “embarrassed”, like you would think.  It means pregnant!  Haha, it was my father’s turn to be embarrassed after that.  But he’s never confused the two since!

          “It wasn’t that hard for me to adapt to the U.S. culture.  A little more so for my parents, just because they had had so  much exposure to a different culture or whatever, but they pretty much raised all my siblings and I “American”, I guess you could say.  As my family and I adapted to this culture, the discrimination mostly ended.  I know it’s way better in college, attending diverse universities really highlights the differences between races and each race’s unique set of experiences, but not in a negative or discriminatory way.

          “I have no plans to return to Mexico, at least permanently.  We still go back to visit occasionally, and we send money back to my tios (uncles and aunts)…but it’s kind of hard to cross the border…the harassment is still there, even though we all speak English, it takes us forever to get back across.  We still have to make sure the papers are in order, and then hope that we get an agent who’s not just going to assume that we’re trying to jump just because my dad looks like he’s a native….it’s because he is!

          “We only recently became aware of all of the deaths of the undocumented people trying to cross…we don’t really know how to feel about that.  On the one hand, obviously we feel so bad, because we could come over, we know how desperate the situation is over there with the economy in the trash and nobody knows what to do about it…but on the other hand, yes, we were able to cross, and we did it legally.  And if we can do it, then so can anybody.  It’s not like we knew anyone special that helped us out.  It’s just hard.  I think no one really has the answers to that problem…no one.”

          This kind of sentiment is echoed in Leo R. Chavez’s article on the media’s portrayal of immigration, “Manufacturing Consensus on an Anti-Mexican Immigration Discourse”.  He states that out of 16 magazine covers on articles that dealt with immigration issues, 15 had images he perceived to be “alarmist”, and one was neutral.  While illegal or undocumented immigration is certainly a problem in this country, people in general would do well to remember that all immigrants are not illegal, and that many of them worked under conditions of extreme duress to arrive here.  Moreover they have worked even harder since their arrival to successfully integrate into our culture.

          In his book Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists, Christian Zlolniski discussed the various perils of the immigrant’s status within the job economy of the United States.  Luckily, due to their draw in the lottery, the family was not subjected to perform in the informal economy as providers, but was welcome to participate in it as consumers.  They, unlike the families portrayed in the book, did not have any major difficulties finding or retaining a job.  Furthermore, they were not subject to being thrown out of the jobs they managed to find at the discretion of their boss, as are immigrants that enter this country via less than legal means.

          In fact, even his experience with prejudice by the border authorities is reflected, albeit to a larger extent, in Sylvanna Falcón’s article “Rape as a Weapon of War:  Advancing Human Rights for Women at the U.S.-Mexican border.”  While, obviously, none of his family was solicited for sex or sexual favors, the attitude of the border patrol and immigration services in their perceived superiority and wielding of power was similar to that of the women in the article, who were essentially told that they could be sent back to Mexico at the whim of the officer if they did not play by the rules, which were also outlined by the officer.  Their status as “illegal” immigrants, unfortunately, put them at a disadvantage not shared by the Villareal family.

The parent’s experience with the disapproval of An’s grandparents to his parent’s marriage was reflected in the story of Marianna and Miguel from Crossing the Boulevard.  While they continued in the marriage, An said that the disapprobation of his father’s parents did not affect his parent’s union in any practical matters such as moving or income, as it did with Marianna and Miguel’s parents.

          The life Villareal’s family escaped is most poignantly expressed in Maria Guadalupe Torres’ article “We are not machines:  Corporations that bring jobs must bring justice too”.  Although no one in his family was ever unfortunate enough to work in a maquiladora, the conditions Torres described about the homes and their construction, the single toilet, the lack of living space, etc., perfectly reflects the Villareal’s experience in Puerto Angel.  When Sr. Villareal was underbid in his job working for the tourist industry, the family was forced to subsist in conditions very similar to this one.  The parents, along with the eldest three children, lived in a one-room 200 square foot residence with a concrete slab for the floor and a corrugated tin roof.  There were no interior walls; the exterior ones consisted of little more than cardboard.  This was one of the main reasons the family decided to enter the lottery system and emigrate to the United States.

          I was rather intrigued by An Chu’s story.  Never before had I heard of any family that was such a rare combination of ethnicities; I was not, however, surprised to discover that their reasons for emigrating from their homeland were essentially the same as practically every other family’s that did the same thing.  The interview process gave me a chance to learn more about the background of a good friend of mine that I, in all probability, would not have discovered otherwise.