Why Maria crossed over: one family's binational life

LAST SUMMER I was invited by a hospice chaplain to accompany him on a visit to the family of Maria Durand de Perez, a Mexican woman who had died a few weeks earlier in the border town of San Ysidro, California, at the astonishing age of 111. Knowing that I had once worked as the pastor of a Spanish-language church, the chaplain, whose name is Andy, thought that my presence might prove helpful to Angela, Maria's 78-year-old daughter, who was mourning the loss of her mother deeply.

In his previous visits, Andy, who spoke only English, and Angela, who spoke only Spanish, had depended for translation on Yrma, Angela's bilingual daughter and the owner of the San Ysidro home. Andy suspected (tightly, it turned out) that Angela was longing to have a more in-depth conversation about her mother's remarkable life.

At first it seemed absurd that Angela's grief was so pronounced. It was not as if she had had insufficient time to prepare for her mother's death. Maria Durand de Perez had been one of the oldest people alive on the face of the earth, recognized officially by the Gerontology Research Group as a "supercentenarian" for having lived past the age of 110. The more Angela talked, however, the more I came to understand her sense of loss and dislocation. She had lived her entire life under the same roof as her mother. Her days would never again be the same.

As Angela described the many twists and turns of her mother's life, it dawned on me that Maria's life reflected the social and political transformations that defined life along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 20th century. Spanish-speakers living along the border call it la linea, "the line." I began to wonder: How did Maria Durand de Perez come to die on this side of the line?

Maria Durand was born in 1893 in Fresnillos, a small town in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes. Her paternal grandfather was a Frenchman who married an indigenous Mexican woman, giving rise to what his great-granddaughter Angela would describe a century and a half later as a typical Mexican family--de sangre muy mezcada, "of very mixed blood."

In 1911, at the age of 18, Maria married Raul Perez, a man three years her senior, and soon after their wedding the couple came to California. By this time the pattern of Mexican migration to the Southwest U.S. was well established. In the second half of the 19th century tens of thousands of Mexicans--called braceros, a term deriving from brazo, the Spanish word for "arm"--had moved to the U.S. to work in agriculture, mining and light industry. This migratory flow had increased dramatically around the turn of the century, with the construction of the transcontinental railroads and the All-American Canal.

Not until the 1940s would the U.S. attempt to regulate this movement of laborers. From 1942 to 1964, under the bracero program, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service issued over 4 million temporary work visas to Mexicans. For all the current controversy about Mexican immigration, this much is a matter of historical record: the U.S. has always needed hard-working arms, and large numbers of Mexicans have always been ready to provide them.

Raul Perez worked in the Los Angeles public works department for almost 20 years, but he lost his job when the Depression hit in 1929. The next year Raul and Maria decided to return to Aguascalientes. The decision was not an easy one. They had started a family in Los Angeles, and their two children were U.S. citizens by virtue of birth. The elder, a son named Francisco ("Frankie"), was already well into his teens and didn't want to leave the only country he had ever known.

Frankie Perez never felt at home in Mexico, so immediately after finishing his secondary education in Aguascalientes he returned to the U.S. Without any particular intent or design, Raul and Maria had given birth to a profoundly binational family--a family, like millions of others, with relationships stretched irreversibly across the line.

Back in southern California, Frankie Perez married a Tijuana woman, Sofia Vergara, and together they raised a family in San Diego. Their four children attended high school and college in California, married and had children of their own--an all-American story.

But Frankie's younger sister, Angela, followed a different course. She was a small child when her parents returned to Aguascalientes, and though she retained her U.S. citizenship she never learned to speak English. She married a Mexican national, Jorge Vazquez, and gave birth to three children in Aguascalientes. In the 1950s, when Raul and Maria decided to move to Tijuana to be closer to Frankie and his family, Angela and Jorge and their youngest daughter, Yrma, moved with them.

FOR THE LAST 50 years of her life, Maria Durand de Perez was the matriarch of an extended family that straddled the international boundary. Frankie and his extended family lived in San Diego; Angela and her extended family lived in Tijuana. Members of the family's many households visited each other frequently, crossing the line as a matter of course. Angela did so as a U.S. citizen, having been born in Los Angeles. Maria crossed the line using a "local passport," the document issued by the INS to Mexican citizens who could prove their permanent residence in Mexico.