‘You’re living in a tin can’

AFTER IMMIGRATING TO Tucson, Arizona, from Culiacán, Sinaloa, in 2012, Cristina Apan struggled to find stable housing. In 2016, after the woman she was staying with kicked her out, she slept in her car. “I thought I was going to die,” she said. “In Mexico, you’d get killed for sleeping out in the open in your car. I couldn’t stop thinking like that.”

Finally, she asked a friend, a quiet landscaper named Juan Diego Rodríguez, if she could stay in his manufactured home. The two eventually married. “2016 and 2017, we were friends, but in 2018 we said, ‘You know what, we keep getting closer to one another; let’s get married.’ That’s what fate had in store for us.”