Calida

As this semester goes on and as I'm writing in this blog, I seem to be discovering more and more that everyone, EVERYONE has a story. Everyone has had something wonderful or horrible happen to them, and everyone could fill a book with the strange people, events, and memories of their lives. Each person in this blog has a fascinating story. Whether the way I tell those stories is fascinating or not, each of them has had experiences that have entertained, inspired, and grieved me, and I know that their stories, in this country at least, will probably be ignored.
All of the people in this blog gave up something very important in a gamble for a better life. Most of them gave up family, home, comfort, culture, legality...things that I would not be able to sacrifice so easily. A lot of them are winning the risk, but tonight's blog is about someone who didn't.
Calida was a small, curvy, gorgeous 24-year-old girl from Colombia. She was just a hostess because of her poor English, but she was smart as hell. She had apparently gone to law school in Colombia, and she came to the US with her family and boyfriend, Alejandro, to find decent jobs and decent life. Hostessing was a temporary job to help her learn English, and her boyfriend was the bartender at another restaurant in our chain. They really were an amazing couple: charismatic, mature, super-intelligent, gorgeous. At parties, her boyfriend showed off his bartending skills when he made drinks for everyone. When the bartender at my restaurant did something cool or tried out a trick like making the drinks for customers at the bar stronger than for those at tables, he usually followed it with "Alejandro taught me to do that." Basically, they were good, respectable people. It sucks when bad things happen to good people.
I think the problems began when Calida missed several days of work, then showed up and said she was quitting. I don't know the details, but her family had to return to Colombia, and she had two choices: she could return with her family and perhaps never return, or she could stay in the US with her boyfriend and a be banned from Colombia for two years. I thought she would leave, but she decided to stay and kept working at the restaurant. We were friends, and on my last day on the job at the end of last summer, she gave me a wooden Colombian bracelet that I absolutely love and still wear often. After I quit, I didn't talk to her for a few weeks until she sent me a text message that sounded like something was wrong. I asked her if she was OK, and I was a little freaked out when she sent back, "Something bad happened. I can't talk about it now." I had to wait a couple weeks before she told me that she had to leave the US, but she couldn't tell me why. Before I had the chance to see her again, she was gone.
A couple months after Calida disappeared, I went out with the restaurant's bartender and his wife who were close to her, and then I heard the whole story. Calida and Alejandro had friends over to their house one night. They stayed up drinking and talking until 5 in the morning. Then the friends went home, and the couple got ready for bed. As soon as they turned off the lights, INS knocked on the front door, asked for Alejandro, and arrested him. They told her absolutely nothing. Calida didn't know what was going on for days and stayed at the bartender's house because she was afraid to go home. Then they shipped her boyfriend back to Colombia, and Calida spent the three weeks or so before she followed him packing and selling all of their stuff--she had to sell all the stuff that was supposed to be their new and permanent life in America. Now they are back in the shitty little town in which they started. They probably won't come back, but I have been invited to their wedding when they have it.
When Calida and Alejandro came to the US, they weren't illegal. They had visas, but they expired, and renewal was difficult. It's upsetting for me to see them go even though I know they were outside the law. Immigration is a real problem for this country, but life in general is a real problem in other countries. Those who come here do so in order to escape a cycle of poverty and lack of opportunities in their home countries. The solution does not involve escaping to the US; it has to start in Latin America, but until real changes begin, what can we or they do?