SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HOME

There are a lot of things you don’t think of as privileges until you’re the person who can’t do them.

Driving yourself to work.

Filling out a job application.

Going to college.

Getting on a plane and leaving the country.

Making plans for five years from now and actually believing you’ll be able to follow them.

For most people around me, those were just parts of growing up. For me, almost every one of them came with the same question:

Do I have the papers for this?

Usually, the answer was no.

I spent most of my life in the United States. I went to school there. I spoke English. My friends were there. My family was there. If you met me without knowing anything else about me, there would have been very little reason to think my life worked differently from anyone else’s.

But it did.

I was undocumented. And more importantly, I didn’t have some clear path that would eventually make me not undocumented.

That distinction matters.

There Was No Finish Line I Was Waiting For

People sometimes talk about being undocumented as though it’s a temporary problem. You wait. You file something. You get in line. Eventually, your turn comes.

That wasn’t my reality.

I wasn’t eligible for DACA. My mom married my American stepdad the year I turned 18. Eventually she was able to petition for me, but by then I was an adult, and the category I fell into came with a wait that could stretch for decades.

More than twenty years.

Think about what that means when you’re in your twenties. It means the solution people tell you to wait for could arrive when you’re in your forties. Maybe later. What exactly are you supposed to do with the years in between?

There was technically another path: marriage. If I married a U.S. citizen and everything worked out legally, that could potentially change my situation.

But I never wanted to marry someone for papers.

I didn’t want my ability to live a normal life to depend on whether I happened to fall in love with the right person, whether that person happened to be a citizen, and whether we decided to get married. Marriage should have been something I chose because I wanted a marriage. It shouldn’t have been my immigration plan.

So when I looked at my future in the United States, I wasn’t looking at a difficult few years before things got better. I was looking at potentially decades of the same limitations.

Even Driving Was Complicated

A driver’s license is such an ordinary thing that most people don’t remember what a big deal it is once they have one. You turn a certain age. You learn to drive. You take a test. You get your license. Then you stop thinking about it.

I couldn’t.

Living in Texas without legal status meant something as basic as legally driving wasn’t available to me in the same way it was to the people around me. And in Texas, not driving isn’t a small inconvenience.

Work is somewhere else. School is somewhere else. The grocery store is somewhere else. Your friends are somewhere else. Everything is built around the assumption that you can get into a car and go.

Not having access to that one little card affects far more than transportation. It affects independence. It affects what jobs you can realistically take, where you can live, how much you have to depend on other people, and how easily you can do the basic things adults are expected to do for themselves.

And underneath all of that was something else: the knowledge that everyday interactions other people barely thought about could carry different consequences for me.

That’s what being undocumented did to ordinary life. It added an extra calculation to everything.

Work Was Never Just About Whether I Was Qualified

Most people can look at a job posting and ask themselves: Can I do this?

I had to ask another question first: Can I even work here?

Those are very different questions.

I could have the experience. I could speak English and Spanish. I could know the systems. I could be capable of doing the actual job. None of that changed the fact that there were opportunities I simply couldn’t access legally.

So you learn to build a working life around whatever is available to you. And then something strange starts happening. Your résumé might grow, but your options don’t necessarily grow with it. You can become more experienced without becoming more free.

You can know you’re capable of more while having very few ways to prove it.

After enough time, you stop looking at every opportunity. Why get excited about something when you already know the paperwork at the end of the application is going to be the part that decides for you?

Education Worked the Same Way

College was another door I learned not to stare at for too long. I had gone through American schools just like everyone around me. I graduated from an American high school.

But graduating didn’t suddenly make my immigration status disappear. There wasn’t this clean transition from high school to college to career. Everything had another layer.

What could I afford? What was I eligible for? What documentation would I need? What would happen after I graduated? Would I even be able to use the degree the way someone else could?

At some point, dreaming about a future becomes exhausting when every dream immediately turns into a logistical problem.

So I worked.

And years passed.

The World Was Right There, and I Couldn’t Go See It

Travel hurt in a different way.

I’ve always wanted to see the world. Not just take a vacation somewhere nearby. I wanted to actually go. Europe. Asia. Places I’d only seen online.

I could look up flights. I could make imaginary itineraries. I could watch other people go. But I couldn’t simply get a passport, book a ticket and leave the United States knowing I could come back.

For someone in my situation, leaving wasn’t just leaving. It could mean not being able to return.

So the world became something I consumed through a screen.

There were millions of people casually posting airport pictures, complaining about long flights, getting lost in foreign train stations, coming home with stories about places I’d wanted to see my entire life. Meanwhile, crossing an international border could change the course of my entire life.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford a particular vacation. I couldn’t participate in international travel the way everyone around me could.

There’s a difference between “I can’t go right now” and “I don’t know when I’ll ever be allowed to go.”

I lived with the second one.

And Then There Were All the Smaller Things

This is the part that’s harder to explain because there wasn’t one dramatic restriction that defined every day. It was the accumulation.

Every form that asked for something you didn’t have. Every opportunity that came with eligibility requirements. Every time identification mattered. Every job you didn’t bother applying for. Every plan that required travel. Every conversation about the future where you quietly knew your options were different. Every time someone suggested an obvious solution that wasn’t actually available to you.

You become incredibly good at finding workarounds. And because you can survive that way, people sometimes mistake surviving for being fine.

I did too.

My life wasn’t terrible every second. I had friends. I laughed. I worked. I dated. I went out. I had normal days and good memories.

That’s almost what makes this harder to describe.

I wasn’t locked inside a room. I was living inside a country with millions of other people. I could see the doors. I could walk right up to them.

I just couldn’t open a lot of them.

Eventually, I Had to Ask Myself What I Was Waiting For

For years, there was always this vague idea that maybe something would change. Maybe immigration law would change. Maybe my situation would change. Maybe some option I hadn’t considered would appear. Maybe eventually I’d get my chance.

But eventually I had to look at the actual choices in front of me.

I wasn’t eligible for DACA. The family petition wasn’t going to give me a normal life anytime soon. I wasn’t willing to build my future around marrying a U.S. citizen. And I didn’t want to spend another twenty years waiting for permission to start doing things I had already spent years wanting to do.

That realization changed the question.

It stopped being How do I make my life work in the United States?

And became Why am I so determined to make my life work in a country where I can’t fully participate in it?

Mexico Didn’t Give Me an Easy Life. It Gave Me a Legal One.

This is where returning to Mexico changed something I hadn’t fully understood before.

I didn’t arrive and suddenly become successful. I didn’t step off a plane and have a career, money and a perfect future waiting for me. Mexico has its own problems. Finding good work here has been harder than I hoped. Starting over costs money. Bureaucracy is still bureaucracy.

But there was one enormous difference.

I was allowed to be here.

That sentence sounds so simple. I didn’t realize how powerful it would feel.

I could get identification. I could deal with government paperwork as a citizen. I could enroll in school without my entire future being built around an immigration status I couldn’t change.

I could get a passport.

I could leave the country.

And I could come home again.

For the first time in my adult life, the question wasn’t automatically Am I allowed to do this?

It became Okay. How do I do this?

Sometimes the answer is still difficult. Maybe I need money. Maybe I need qualifications. Maybe I need to wait. Maybe I need to work harder.

But those are problems I can actually do something about.

There is an enormous difference between a door being difficult to open and a door having no handle on your side.

I Finally Understood What I Had Been Missing

I used to think freedom was something much bigger and more dramatic.

Now I think sometimes freedom looks incredibly boring.

It’s a driver’s license. A passport. A university application. A job application you’re legally allowed to submit. A plane ticket with a return flight. Filling out a form and actually having something to put in every box.

It’s being able to make a five-year plan without first wondering what your immigration status will allow.

It’s having problems that can be solved instead of restrictions you simply have to organize your life around.

For most of my life, I had been told, directly and indirectly, that the United States was where opportunity was. And I understand why people believe that. There is enormous opportunity there.

But opportunity existing around you doesn’t mean you have access to it.

That was the part I had to learn.

The Country My Family Left Became the Country I Could Finally Move Forward In

There’s an irony in all of this that I don’t think I’ll ever stop noticing.

My family went to the United States because it represented a better future. Years later, I returned to Mexico because staying in the United States was limiting mine.

That doesn’t make one country good and the other bad. My life is more complicated than that.

The United States raised me in many ways. It shaped how I speak, how I think and who I became. There are people there I will love for the rest of my life.

But loving parts of a place doesn’t mean you have to spend your entire life waiting for that place to make room for you.

Mexico didn’t hand me the life I wanted. It did something more basic.

It gave me a place where I could legally start building it.

And after spending so many years learning how to live around closed doors, I don’t take that for granted anymore.

I can drive. I can study. I can work toward a career without wondering whether I’ll ever legally be able to have it. I can get on a plane, cross an ocean, land somewhere I’ve never been before, and know that I’m allowed to come home.

I can make plans. I can change them. I can fail at something and try something else.

I can finally ask myself what I want to do instead of beginning with everything I can’t do.

The doors Mexico opened for me aren’t extraordinary.

That’s the point.

They’re ordinary doors.

I just spent most of my life on the other side of them.