'The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez': Immigration

A border story that is all shades of gray.

There’s a saying in newspaper journalism: “Put a face on it.” When you want to explain a complicated topic, look for a person whose story you can tell to illustrate the topic in an everyday way.

“The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story,” is a textbook example of putting a face on it. Deeply researched and reported, tightly but compellingly written, Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s 2019 book examines the history, evolution and consequences of U.S. immigration policy along the U.S.-Mexican border through the experience of one young woman trying to make a life for herself in the country she considers home.

Aida Hernandez, as the author calls her, grows up in Douglas, Arizona, U.S.A., and Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, towns that seem more connected than divided by the border — some locals call the towns “DougaPrieta.” People from both towns have long crossed regularly to work, shop, socialize and otherwise live their lives. That is, until faraway American politicians decide to harden the border starting in the 1990s, while Aida is a child.

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I have family in Canada, so I grew up crossing the U.S. border to visit them. We always traveled by car, and I remember how all of us would grow quiet as we approached the booths where unsmiling Customs officers — always white, always male back then — peered down. Both of my immigrant parents were permanent residents, not citizens; if the Customs officers didn’t like the look of Mom and Dad’s green cards, we’d be courting trouble. Sometimes we got lucky and were simply waved on. Other times, an officer would decide that he needed to see what was in our trunk, and we kids would sit tense and mute in the back seat while he made his examination. Then there were the times when an officer pointed to the parking area. We’d have to pull over so my parents could be questioned further inside the Customs building. They never were detained, but that didn’t make the experience any less unnerving.

Once, as a child, I asked my mother if I could see the green card she guarded so carefully. It bore my mother’s face and the words “Resident Alien.” I stared at those words for a long time. An alien was a strange and scary creature from another planet. I couldn’t reconcile that word with my mother.

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Aida Hernandez has a mother, a father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Her parents separate and her mother takes her and her sisters to live with another man. Aida goes to school. She falls in love and has a child. She goes to work to support that child.

It’s a life like so many others. But everything about it is tied to a line between two countries and whether the people on one side of that line think Aida and her family have the right to be on the same side. Her status as an undocumented immigrant costs her family members. It disrupts her education. It drives a wedge between her and her child that traumatizes him. It prevents her from earning a living wage.

Bobrow-Strain doesn’t present Aida as completely at the mercy of others. We learn that she goes back and forth across the border repeatedly despite her awareness of the risks, that she lies about her immigration status to a Customs officer, that she shoplifts when she knows she’s legally vulnerable. But the author’s delineation of U.S. border and immigration policies raises the question of how they’ve put her in a place where these actions make sense.

Current border and immigration policies are not broken, Bobrow-Strain writes:

They are working just fine for many people, and that is the problem. … In the absence of efforts to address the root causes of migration, they have increased the vulnerability and exploitability of immigrants. And they have fueled a vast, lucrative, and often corrupt immigration industrial complex.

Many people, corporations, and agencies benefit directly from the current arrangement: polarizing politicians, nativist social movements, private prison companies, ordinary people in search of decent jobs, local governments struggling to increase revenue, employers seeking exploitable undocumented workers, massive federal law enforcement bureaucracies, and countless private security contractors. All these actors have a stake in maintaining perpetual crisis on the border.

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My parents didn’t have much sympathy for those who broke the law to enter the United States. We entered legally, my parents thought, so everyone else should, too. But my parents didn’t account for the fact that they had had the resources to apply for visas, buy plane tickets and establish a financially stable household once they arrived. They didn’t acknowledge the vast economic, political, social and historical differences between the place they’d left and the places other people were coming from. They didn’t know the history of U.S. immigration law, including that the federal government didn’t attempt widespread regulation of immigration until 1882, and that those initial efforts banned people who looked like them: People from China were singled out by the first significant law restricting immigration to the United States. I didn’t know this myself for a long time. Not knowing is not understanding, and not even knowing that you don’t understand.

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“The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez” includes many stories besides Aida’s. There are the ranchers who are fed up watching strangers crossing and damaging their property every night. There are the Border Patrol officers who find themselves at the top of the pecking order in Douglas, and revel in it. There’s Raul, Aida’s father, whom she learns to her surprise is a resistance figure of repute in Mexico. There are the civic leaders of Douglas who split bitterly over their own border and immigration policies. There are Aida’s mother and sisters — Luz, Jennifer and Cynthia — who each have their own statuses to worry about. There are the women Aida meets when she lands in an immigrant detention center, a place subject to less regulation than prison. Bobrow-Strain deftly shows how all these people and their situations feed into the maw of the immigration industrial complex.

Aida’s story has what could be called a happy ending. But the resolution of her situation doesn’t move the needle for anyone else. She can hand out business cards for the immigration lawyer who helped her, but that lawyer will have to start the fight all over again for each person who contacts her. Meanwhile, the complex grinds on.