By Sara Aridi
The threat of deportation has clouded Lourdes Salazar Bautista’s future for some time.
She had left Mexico in 1997 to join her husband, Luis Quintana Chaparro, in Denver, where he had moved a decade earlier. Four years later, the couple bought a house in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised three children there: Bryan, 14; Lourdes (“Lulys”), 16, and Pamela, 20.
Ms. Bautista, 50, and Mr. Chaparro, 52, were undocumented but always managed to find work. She earned a living cleaning houses and churches while he took construction jobs.
Life was normal, until it wasn’t.
In 2010, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Ms. Bautista. She spent 23 days in custody before her lawyer reached an agreement with ICE: She would be allowed to stay in the United States to care for her children — if her husband was deported instead.
That compromise granted her a stay of deportation, which she renewed every year. But when the Denver-based photographer Rachel Woolf met the family last year, their world was crumbling for the second time. In March 2017, Ms. Bautista was told that her application would no longer be renewed. She fought the decision for months. But that August, she was deported with a 10-year re-entry ban.
Ms. Woolf, 25, heard about Ms. Bautista through a campaign by the volunteer-lead Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights in Ann Arbor. She connected with the family in July 2017 and caught a glimpse of their lives in Michigan before Ms. Bautista returned to Mexico.
“Her children are her life, and that’s where she’s hurting the most,” Ms. Woolf said.
Ever since the family’s world was upended on that summer day, Ms. Woolf has been photographing them make sense of a life torn between two countries.
After receiving a grant from The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit journalism organization that counts The New York Times among its media partners, she flew to Mexico last year to photograph Ms. Bautista as she was reunited with her husband and adjusted to life in the city of Toluca. Her younger children, Lulys and Bryan, left Michigan in August 2017 to be by her side. And that transition took a toll on them.
Bryan had hopes of joining a soccer team at a high school in Ann Arbor, but he hasn’t been able to find a team at school in Mexico. At school, both he and his sister struggled with the Spanish curriculum. They were born and raised in the United States and suddenly had to adapt to life in their parents’ homeland.
“They’re kind of straddling these two places and feeling a lot of the changes that come with that,” Ms. Woolf said.
Living in Mexico wasn’t easy on Ms. Bautista either: “I returned 20 years later and the situation is worse,” she told Ms. Woolf. “I realize how hard people work to survive here.”
After Ms. Woolf’s first trip to Mexico, she received another grant from the Art Works Project, a Chicago-based human rights group, that allowed her to visit the family again in May. “They’re hurting a lot but they also are so strong,” Ms. Woolf said. “Their family has been torn apart, and they’re still just as loving and as caring as ever.”
Lulys spent a year with her brother and parents before deciding to return to Michigan and finish high school. Now she lives with her aunt and uncle in Ann Arbor, not far from her sister Pamela, who’s studying at Michigan State University.
Ms. Bautista was heartbroken when Lulys left, but she supported her decision. She wants her children “to see further than the tiny world that I grew up in, for them to become more than what exists here,” Ms. Woolf said.
For her, education has always been a priority. But knowing that her daughters are focusing on their studies is a bittersweet relief. “One of her dreams is to also see her two daughters graduate from college and high school,” Ms. Woolf said, “and she’s recognizing that that may not come true.”
Ms. Bautista is not done fighting to return to the United States. She plans to apply for a pardon when Pamela turns 21 in 2019.
“She has not given up,” Ms. Woolf said. “All she wants is to be reunited with her kids.”
Ms. Bautista sweeps the sidewalk in front of her cousin’s shop in Toluca, where she helps sell food and sandwiches.CreditRachel Woolf
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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