In an aid station for deportees in Nogales, just inside the Mexican border, I met Flor. She was eager and proud to practice her English. Now twelve, she had spent the past eleven years in Phoenix, Arizona with her parents. Her dad was a chef at a French restaurant. Her mom worked as a seamstress and in a local restaurant. Her four-year-old brother, Antony, was born in the U.S.

Several months ago, a call from relatives in Oaxaca brought sad news. Flor’s paternal grandmother had been diagnosed with cancer and her maternal grandfather was dying. The family took a big risk—they headed to Mexico, so Flor could meet her grandfather for the first and likely the last time. Flor smiles but looks away as she describes how her grandfather could hear her at his side, feel her holding his hand, but never opened his eyes.

The medicine there, Flor explains, was not good enough to help her grandfather or her grandmother. As the family prepared to come back to their home, jobs, and schools in Arizona, they pleaded with their grandmother to come, too, but fear of the journey and its outcome kept her in Oaxaca.

At the border, the family paid someone to take them across in a truck. The driver dropped them off in the U.S., and the family of four began their walk to Phoenix. The first day, they passed three dead bodies, now etched in detail in Flor’s memory. One evening, as they rested under a tree near Ajo, Arizona, the border patrol seized them all.

Flor, her mother, and Antony were separated from her father, and Flor hasn’t seen him since that night. She learned he was taken to a jail, and then to a different jail. As the family’s sole English speaker, Flor is now in charge of negotiating the system. She was given a phone number to call, with the assurance that this number held the key to reuniting their family. She called. No one had heard of her father.

Flor’s courage and determination are an inspiration, and the love that binds this family together is strong. My profound hope for Flor is that, very soon, her family will be united.

Additional Activities

Download the Summer 2012 UUWorld Families Pages (pdf) for more activities.

Originally published in the “Families Weave a Tapestry of Faith” insert in The UUWorld.

Dea Brayden, Special Assistant to former UUA President Peter Morales, met Flor during a witness trip to the U.S./Mexico borderlands in 2011. Today, the whereabouts of Flor and her brother and parents are unknown. Photo by permission of the Kino Border Initiative, which provides shelter and food in Nogales, Sonora, just inside the Mexican border, for families deported from the U.S.