Juana Armenta: Immigration Decision Derails “American Dream” for High School Teacher

Juana Armenta: Immigration Decision Derails “American Dream” for High School Teacher

 

I am sitting on the couch next to the counter at Café Efebina’s and I stare at the high ceiling. In front of me is a red wall and behind me a couple of paintings and six multi-colored papier-mache face masks.

I order a green tea as I wait for Juana Armenta, a high school teacher who has another one of those incredible family-splitting immigration stories. I take a sip of my tea, unsweetened but warm, and wait.

I had met Armenta, 49, on April 2 when she spoke at a press conference at City Hall on the day that a George Cardenas, 12th district alderman, sponsored resolution was passed at the City Council.

The resolution, which sounded official as usual, with a lot of whereas clauses, called on the Obama administration to stop all deportations and the separation of families.

Around this time there was a lot of talk, too, about the purported two million deportations, mostly against non-criminal undocumented immigrants. Everyone seemed to agree it was some sort of dire milestone.

I keep staring at the entrance of Efebina’s, hoping to see Armenta because as far as I know her story is a bit different from other immigration stories as she is not your average immigrant but a high school teacher.

Finally, I see a dark-haired woman, about 5’2’’ tall, wearing brown pants and a brown coat. She says hello and minutes later begins to tell me her story.

After two bad marriages Armenta had finally found the love of her life. His name was Nestor C. Perez-Gonzalez, a construction worker who had even found time to go to New Orleans to help reconstruct the city after Hurricane Katrina.

He had arrived in Chicago from Oaxaca, Mexico, just short of his 18th birthday, He was now 33 year-old and owned his own construction company. He had never been in trouble with the law.

“He was the father my children never had,” she said, “He was a good man.”

Armenta is a math and geometry teacher at Kelly High School in the city’s Brighton Park neighborhood. She has taught there for 11 years. She says she loves her job and the challenges that it brings.

Juana and Nestor married in 2009 and once while she was traveling in Michigan as part of a Bolivian dance group she had joined, a friend told her about a female lawyer there who had helped her with her immigration case.

Shortly after that, Armenta filed immigration papers on behalf of her husband with the lawyer, whose name is being withheld.

Her petition was reviewed and Nestor was given an interview date in July of 2012 at the American Consulate offices in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

During the interview, Nestor reported that his petition was denied and that the interviewer alleged that there was insufficient proof that they were married even though Armenta says she gave all the paperwork to the lawyer, including ample proof of the marriage along with many photographs.

Unable to return to Chicago, Nestor had no recourse but to go back to his home town of Huajuapan de Leon, Oaxaca. The lawyer in Michigan refused to review her case.

“I became very depressed,” said Armenta. “I suffered from depression before; I had a very hard life up to the time that I met Nestor”.

The sophomore teacher said she was born in Mexico City. She studied fashion design in Mexico but when she came to Chicago in 1991 she went back to school and attended Northeastern Illinois University and got her degree in educational technology with a major in mathematics.

Her two previous marriages had gone bad and only bring her bad memories.

She says her first husband use to beat her and would often put her head in the toilet. She tried to escape several times but she had no family in Chicago to help her.

After that marriage ended in divorce, she later married another man. All seem happy and normal this time but she later discovered that her second husband had fathered a child with a female tenant who rented their basement apartment.

The second marriage ended in divorce in 2008 and the following year is when she met Nestor and her life changed completely.

“When I met Nestor he treated me like I had never been treated, he gave me love and affection, he was my friend and we used to go everywhere together,” she tells me.

For once in her life, she was happy, her depression had ended and the days when she had tried to end her life twice were all in the past.

But the dream ended when immigration denied their case. Now she is trying to deal with the separation but says it is a difficult time for her.

“After Nestor left my depression came back,” she says amidst the clatter of cups and plates and the hum of other people’s conversations at Efebina’s.

Armenta, who is fluent in English, tells me Nestor is having a hard time adjusting to Mexican life. He had arrived in Chicago quite young. Now he can’t seem to fit over there. He talks different, dresses different and that has caused him some problems.

Whenever Juana sends him money to pay for his food and board, the locals have robbed him several times and he is now trying to move to a different town.

When I had met Armenta on April 2 and had interviewed her as part of another story, she had pointed out how deported immigrants who have lived in the United States for a long time can’t seem to fit back into the countries they left behind.

“We are already from here, we don’t have anything left in Mexico, we have lived here ten, fifteen, twenty years,” she had told me. “Where are we going to go?”

The mass deportations have left a deep wound in the Mexican immigrant community, a wound that is invisible but nevertheless evident if you look for it.

At Kelly High School, she says, she sees the effects of deportations among her students.

One day she asked one of her students why he hadn’t done his homework. She warned him that if it continued, he would not pass the course. The student then broke down crying and said his mother had recently been deported.

Another student, this one a female, told Armenta she couldn’t come to school anymore because she was now caring for her younger brothers. The student said her parents had gone on vacation to Mexico and were unable to cross the border again since they were undocumented.

“Many students suffer from depression, some don’t want to go to school and in many cases older brothers or uncles are now caring for them” Armenta had told me on April 2.

For now Armenta wants others to know her story. She feels it is unfair that being a U.S. citizen and a teacher her life can be so drastically changed.

She has written a letter to Senator Dick Durbin and is seeking legal advice from lawyers in Chicago.

“All the people that are being deported are not people who got here yesterday,” she says, “They have families, they have children here. What are they going to do with the children that were born here? They cannot take them back with them. They belong here.”

Antonio Zavala. Journalist, he’s also an Aztec dancer and is the director of Coyolxauhqui Danza Azteca.

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