Growing Up Undocumented When Your Siblings Are Citizens

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reported by master's students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. The stories explore the impact of the vast racial and economic inequality in Fresno, the poorest major city in California.

Andy Magdaleno should have been born in California. And he would have been born there, just like his sister Beatriz was eight years earlier, had it not been for an unexpected visit from a government worker one day in March.

The year was 1986. Andy’s parents, Juan and Concepcion, were undocumented immigrants from Guanajuato, Mexico, living in Anaheim, California, with six of their children, roughly ages one to 10. Life was hard. When Juan wasn’t working, he would collect cans to supplement their earnings. As Concepcion tells the story, a neighbor made a complaint because she believed the family wasn’t reporting the income from the cans. Then, someone they believed to be from a government agency came to the neighborhood to talk to them. His parents feared that their undocumented status and the visit to their house meant that they were at risk, and might be separated from their children.

Juan decided it would be best if Concepcion took the kids back to their small community in Mexico. She was about three months pregnant at the time. Andy was born in Mexico in September of 1986. The family spent two years there before returning to the United States at the behest of their father, who had stayed behind.

Different members of the family came back in different ways: The family’s five children who had been born in the United States crossed with their father’s cousin, presenting their birth certificates at the border. Andy, on the other hand, crossed over the border illegally, carried by his mother. They ended up in Selma, California—a small agricultural town in Fresno County known as the raisin capital of