Bohemia Cuevas, now a UCLA food service worker, paid a smuggler $1,000 in the middle of the night to guide her over a mountain pass into the United States.
Jose Lara, another UCLA food service worker, had a much different experience crossing the border.
"I memorized all of the information on someone’s birth certificate. He was probably dead, but I was able to answer the questions immigration (officials) asked me, and I drove over the border in the front seat," Lara said.
These UCLA employees represent a much larger community of immigrants that come to the United States to work and establish themselves. Though they originally came here illegally, Lara and Cuevas have integrated themselves into the lives of UCLA students, and through the process of their integration have helped to support a nation.
Cuevas and Lara came to the United States with the intention of supporting their families, and they said most of the other immigrants they know come here with similar intentions.
The funds that immigrants send home, called remittances, are the second largest source of foreign earnings for Mexico, second only to petroleum, said Ruben Hernandez-Leon, an assistant professor of sociology who teaches courses on immigration.
Remittances help to stabilize Mexican currency and reduce inflation, which has been extremely stable for more than a decade, he said. In 2005 the inflation rate was 3.3 percent, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The money people receive from remittances is used not only for food, clothing and other basic needs, but also to create small businesses and invest in education, Hernandez-Leon said.
If Mexico were to stop receiving remittances, entire regions of the country would be living below a level at which people could sustain themselves, he said.
Community improvement projects would also not occur, including road-building projects, clean water programs, schools and beautification of churches, all of which are partly financed by remittances, he said.
Establishing a new life
While resting in the mountains, Cuevas’ small party was caught by border patrol officers.
At 3 a.m., Cuevas and another woman in her party were taken back to Tijuana by border patrol, where they spent the morning begging for food.
Later that afternoon, Cuevas and four other women came across another smuggler willing to put them in his trunk and drive them over the border.
After 45 minutes of being locked in the back of a stranger’s sedan, Cuevas and her companions were safe at the smuggler’s house, finally in the United States.
The next day a van came to transport her to Los Angeles.
It was 1980, and she was 15, making a dangerous journey to support her loved ones.
When she was 8 years old, Cuevas started to help her parents clean other people’s houses for extra money to support her family in Mexico City. By age 13, she had completed elementary school.
While helping to raise her younger sisters, Cuevas left school and got a higher-paying job at a restaurant.
Cuevas was still not earning enough money to support her family at age 15, and she was faced with a difficult prospect.
"Deciding to leave my family was a very hard decision," Cuevas said, recalling the agonizing feeling of having to leave all that she knew.
Her family managed to save enough money to buy her a train ticket to Mexicali, and from there she took a bus to Tijuana. After arriving in Los Angeles, Cuevas started working as a housekeeper. But her clients thought she was too young to continue in their household, so she got a job in a factory as a seamstress.
"I was making $80 to $90 a week, working 45 to 50 hours. … I sent everything I could to my parents," she said.
Though the money she sent home seems like a small amount to live on, it bought her parents the food they needed to survive.
Cuevas married another immigrant when she was 16 and started a family. The factory she worked for helped her to install a sewing machine in her home so she could work while taking care of her small children.
"Now (my children) are 20, 23 and 24. Paralegals. I raised them right" she said, welling with pride.
Through her years as a single mother, Cuevas managed to continue sending money back to her parents. Having lived in the United States illegally for about six years, Cuevas said she became eligible for a government amnesty program.
She gathered years’ worth of documents to prove she had been living in the United States and applied for permission to live here legally in the late 1980s. After a period of two years, during which time she could not leave the country, Cuevas was granted a green card "at last," she said.
Cuevas has worked for Dining Services at UCLA since 1998.
"I’m here because I love the students," she said. "I love to take care of all of them."
Cuevas and her sisters, who are also in the United States, together send between $500 and $800 a month to their parents back in Mexico City, who use the money to buy necessary groceries and pay bills.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s February 2006 purchasing power parity statistics, the U.S. dollar is worth 37 percent more in Mexico when it comes to buying goods.
Becoming independent
The birth certificate and ride over the border cost $150 when Lara came to the United States in 1968, when immigration to the United States was less common.
Once in Los Angeles, Lara said he was taken in by a Jewish family to help with housework. His new family paid him $25 a week and put him through Catholic school to learn English and work toward a diploma.
The family that had taken him in loved him like he was their son, he said, making it that much harder for him to eventually leave the family and live on his own.
While working for the family into the 1970s, Lara was able to send home $30 a month to support his parents, giving them money for clothing and groceries.
Lara was eventually granted a green card through an amnesty program and was able to stay in Los Angeles and work independent of his adopted family.
He moved out on his own, rented an apartment, and became a busboy at a Beverly Hills restaurant, where over the years he worked his way up to maitre d’.
He worked in Beverly Hills through the mid-1990s until it "lost that special flavor." He said that because of tourism the area lost a certain vibrancy and feel after it became more commercialized.
Lara came to work at UCLA in 1999 because he wanted to be at a world-class university.
"It’s inspiring to be here around all of the young people," he said.
Lara’s parents passed away years ago, and he is saving money every month to eventually retire in his hometown of Merida, Mexico.
Ready for more
With little financial and emotional support, Cuevas and Lara came to the United States with the intention of helping their families.
They dreamed of a day when their loved ones no longer needed to worry about living from day to day on pennies, and were eventually able to provide stability.
Both were able to establish new families and make lives for themselves here, despite their former undocumented status.
Cuevas’ children went to high school and college, and are now successful enough to support their mother if the need arises.
Though Cuevas has only completed elementary school, she hopes to one day go back to get her high school diploma, then pursue a college education.
Lara has completed two years of college and also hopes to eventually go back, inspired by the students at UCLA that he serves every day in the dining halls. "Immigrants think that way," he said. "We want to improve ourselves."