The Douglas cops arrive, Irma denounces Aida as an illegal, and the Border Patrol deports her to Mexico.īut not for long-soon Aida is back in Douglas with her son, living without legal status as she always has, until alcohol and border enforcement snare her again, producing a second and more legally consequential deportation. One bright morning, Aida rams Irma’s car with her own car and punches Irma in the face. Unfortunately, she finds herself being stalked by her new boyfriend’s previous girlfriend, Irma. side of the border, with the help of her mother and other supportive kin. When the marriage breaks up, Aida and her U.S. Soon he is shouting, “I should never have gotten mixed up with a fucking mexicana illegal,” and threatening to call the Border Patrol on his undocumented wife. The father of her child is the enchanting David, breakdance king of Douglas High School and also a good student, who reluctantly gives up college plans for married life in a mobile home. She is in rehab for three weeks by the age of 14, and pregnant by the age of 16.
Mentored by older girls, she is stealing cars and getting high by the age of 13. But Aida has a wild binational adolescence. After three years of being shoved around and humiliated, Luz and her children return to the Mexican side of the border. Now her mother is a mere second wife to Saul’s first wife and family. The stepfather proves to be more violent than Aida’s own father, Raul. They are all able to settle in Douglas on the strength of a short-term border-crossing card, which gives Mexicans the right to visit the United States for 72 hours. citizen who turns out to have fathered two of the children. When she is eight, in 1996, her mother Luz suddenly yanks her and four siblings across the border to join Saul, a U.S. The pseudonymous Aida Hernandez begins life in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the twin city of Douglas, Arizona.
By delving into the life of a particular asylum seeker, he provides a wealth of detail far exceeding what is available to the immigration judges who decide these cases. The author, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, is a cultural geographer and activist who is careful to get the backstory. give refuge to women fleeing murderous husbands and other forms of gender discrimination? Both asylum advocates and skeptics can test their assumptions by reading The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez. Gender violence is one such criterion for asylum-should the U.S. President Trump’s open bigotry isn’t making it any easier-nor are the new, more generous grounds for asylum being proposed by human rights advocates.
But who actually deserves this kind of protection, and what to do when large groups of people ask for it en masse, have never been easy questions. Many Americans like the idea that anybody in the world can show up at the U.S. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, 432 pp., $28Ī liberal democracy treasures the right to asylum.
0 kommentar(er)
