Mireya’s Third Crossing

In January of last year, Mireya called me to say she was going to Juárez.

She had been living undocumented in the United States for 25 years, but now she was applying for permanent residency. The final step in the years-long process could be done only at the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

There, Luz Mirella Zamora (she spells her name with a y to avoid confusion; it is pronounced Mee-ray-ah) would stand across from a State Department employee with three stacks of papers: green, blue, and pink. If Mireya received a green slip, she’d get a visa and return to her husband and children. Blue and she’d have to stay and collect missing paperwork. Pink and she would be stuck in Mexico until her extended family could pool enough money for a smuggler to bring her home: $8,000 to hide in the back of a vehicle, $15,000 if she wanted to sit in the passenger seat.

Mireya had only 30 days to come up with the money to travel to Juárez for her appointment, and from her voice on the phone—victorious, hilarious—I could tell she had some kind of madcap plan. In fact, there had been a minor windfall: A cow had slipped in the mud and broken its leg, and its owner had asked Mireya and her husband to end its suffering and salvage the meat. They went around the house and found $9 in coins, filled the truck with some gas, and drove out to the farm. Robert put the animal down, and they dressed it in the pasture. Now Mireya was turning 80 pounds of beef into jerky to sell by the bag.

I told Mireya I would go with her to Juárez. I’d been following her story for a few years, and I wanted to be there to see how it turned out. I was as strapped as she was, but I returned to the Ozarks, where I was born, and finally got around to selling for parts the Volkswagen Passat with a blown water pump that someone had left to my mother and whose title had somehow been signed over to me.

I first met Mireya in 2014.

During one of my trips home to Arkansas, my father asked me whether I knew I had another sister. He sat on the woodpile outside my parents’ trailer, drinking a beer, and spoke in a rapture of the woman he had come to think of as his 10th child, though they shared no actual blood. He speaks fluent Spanish, and he and Mireya would talk through the afternoons in her language.

My parents had met Mireya and her five children through her husband, Robert, a third-generation Mexican American who was working in the area. Mireya had grown up in rural Mexico, and she and Robert wanted to go back to the land, in the Ozarks; my mom and dad decided to sell them a few acres of their property on a zero-interest loan.

Mireya and Robert named the place El Rancho and began filling it with geese, mules, and a split-rail pen of pigs. They planned to build a cabin there. Meanwhile, they rented an apartment in nearby Springdale, a cow town when I was a kid, best known for its annual rodeo, that has grown into a small city with the arrival of Latino and Marshallese immigrants. The big businesses in Northwest Arkansas—industrial chicken farms, Walmart, construction—depend on these newcomers for labor.

Mireya’s husband and children are born-and-raised Americans, but she lacked a Social Security number and was forbidden to work. In truth,