A Special Report
Articles:
The Other Face of Immigration
Soluton Minded
The Border Film Project
Divided Lives
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The University of Arizona Alumnus — Fall 2006
Divided Lives Marisol Badilla was born on the border, almost. When her mother was pregnant with Marisol, her water broke when she was crossing the border from Sonoyta, Sonora, into Lukeville, Arizona. “She went into labor, so she went back home and went to a clinic in Sonoyta,” says Badilla, who earned two UA degrees in May, one in art and the other in Mexican American studies. “You can actually say I was born on the border.” Badilla has considered herself a citizen of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands almost ever since. “I’m nationalistic about the border itself,” she says. “I’m attached to the land, the people, the culture.” Badilla’s cross-national upbringing bolsters the argument often made by scholars that the border is a unique cultural zone, a place of complex relationships and tangled ties that stretch across the international line. In her own family, Badilla is about to become an American citizen after years of residency, but her older brother and sister, born in the U.S.A., have been American citizens their whole lives. Their Mexican-born mother became a U.S. citizen through the amnesty program of 1986. And numerous family members have served in the American armed forces. “We’re the third generation in the service,” Badilla says. “My brother just came back from Iraq. My step-grandfather was in the Army, and my uncle was in the Navy.” Yet the border divides this family. The American branch lives in Tucson, but Badilla’s father still lives in Sonoyta. He’s a Mexican citizen who manages to maintain a marriage with a wife in another country.
“He adores my mother,” Badilla says. And though the UA has helped change the course of Badilla’s life — this semester she started a doctoral program in American studies at Washington State University — border policies almost kept her from attending. Her educational saga began in Sonoyta, the Mexican border town beachgoers pass through on their way to Rocky Point. The whole family lived in Sonoyta, and Marisol started kindergarten there at an early age. But when her brother, Sergio, got to high school, he faced a Catch-22. Since he was an American citizen, he’d have to pay steep tuition in a Mexican school. “My parents couldn’t pay it,” she says. “So we came over here.” The three Badilla children enrolled — illegally — in public schools in Ajo, Arizona, some 35 miles north of the border. At first they’d cross the line each day and board the Ajo school bus in Lukeville, on the American side. Eventually their mother moved with the three kids to Ajo, returning to Sonoyta — and Badilla’s dad — on weekends. The transnational life was rough in both directions. “My cousins in Mexico teased me; they’d say, ‘Speak English,’” Badilla remembers. And in school, in Ajo, “They thought I was retarded, but I just didn’t speak English. They dropped me down a grade, back to kindergarten. They told my mom to stop speaking Spanish, and she went to workshops to learn to be a ‘good American mom.’” Badilla, feisty then and now, resisted when teachers tried to Anglicize her name to Mary. One time a teacher told her she was rude for speaking Spanish to a friend. Badilla talked back, telling the woman, “You should use my language.” She found herself slapped with a suspension. The family pulled up roots again when Marisol’s sister, Anna, was accepted to the UA in the mid-90s. “Mom couldn’t leave her alone, so we all moved to Tucson.” The move coincided with a new U.S. crackdown on the border, and the transition was hard on Badilla. “I became rebellious and upset. We couldn’t go back and forth as often to Sonoyta,” where her father still lived. “The border was getting militarized. Doors were closing. I had to stay here. It was harder to cross.” Badilla enrolled at Tucson’s Amphitheater High School, but found that “in general there were no expectations for migrants to graduate from high school. What for?” But her 11th-grade English teacher, Ken Vondran “saw my academic potential. I had straight A’s. Mr. Vondran did the paperwork for me to go to the UA, and got me a scholarship.” Soon Badilla ran into a Catch-22 not unlike her brother’s of many years before. Though her mother had long since applied for legal residency for her daughter, it had not yet come through. As an illegal resident, Marisol was not eligible for a scholarship or even for in-state tuition. Nor could she apply to the UA as a foreign student, because she had no high school record in another country. The family turned for help to Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz, the longtime Congressman who now is about to retire. “He helped me. My mom was a citizen, we had our papers in, and Kolbe believes in education.” Once at the UA, Badilla began with an art major, but her paintings about the border led her to Mexican American Studies, and to Lydia Otero, the professor who would become her mentor. “She’s great. I took her 319 class (Mexican-American Culture). I followed her to her office every day. She knows a lot about history, especially about Tucson history.” Until Badilla met Otero, she says, “I didn’t even know I could go for a master’s and a Ph.D. My English teacher paved my way to the UA, and Lydia solidified my focus at the UA.” As a promising undergrad, Badilla was admitted to the UA’s McNair Achievement Program, which awards stipends for summer research to first-generation, low-income students who intend to pursue a doctorate. Her project focused on a guide to migration published by the government of outgoing Mexican President Vicente Fox. Called the Guia, it targeted male migrants, and Badilla critiqued it for its failure to address the female experience. She also tried to interview migrant women in Tucson, but to her chagrin, she found she had to win these women’s trust. In their eyes, she had crossed another kind of border, into the privileged life of a college student. “They see me as an outsider,” Badilla says. It’s their experiences, though, and of migrant women like them, and her mother, and herself, that Badilla plans to document in graduate school. After getting her doctorate, she hopes to become a university professor whose research will “bring awareness of migrant women’s stories, stories never told.” She also plans to reach out to minority teens. “I want to help Mexicans and other minorities get an education. I’m part of the 1.5 generation: I’m the child of a migrant, and I didn’t come here out of free will. In the 1.5 generation we’re pushing the Dream Act, to allow the children of migrants to get a higher education.”
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