Sorrowful Stories
Many things have changed since Aheredia and Flores last saw Rainny, Junior and Alize.
The children’s time away from the U.S. and their family is slowly transforming them. Spanish is their language now. Even their names have changed. Rainny is now Lluvia, the Spanish word for rain. Alize is now Lolita, her middle name. (Junior is still Junior.) They’re withdrawn. They treat relationships with the same transience with which their mother treated them; none of them has made a best friend, someone they can count on, someone they could not live without.
But Grandma Flores knows none of these things.
“Every time I find something [of the kids’], I start crying,” Flores says from her cluttered home. Pictures of her large, extended family line her shelves. When the sun enters the room just so, the frames glow like so many little lights. She can point to any of them and share a story – sometimes a funny one but more often sorrowful. The tale of los niños Mejia is one of them.
“It would be better over here,” Aheredia says.
“I could take them,” Flores adds, her voice weak.
“I know, Mama,” Aheredia says. “I know, Mama.”
But maybe that’s just a dream.
The two, who are U.S. citizens, don’t understand what legal rights they have to the children. Until a reporter and photographer came to talk with them, they had no idea who the case manager was for the children. Even with that information, they’re not sure where to start.
Should they contact the Mexican authorities? Mexico is where the children are. Should they contact U.S. authorities? The U.S. is where the children should be.
This back-and-forth confuses the two women. It also confuses the U.S. Department of State.
Since this investigation began, the State Department has conducted a “welfare-and-whereabouts” check on the children via their Nogales, Mexico, consulate. The children are fine, spokesman Cy Ferenchak says.
As for what the family should do next, the department can offer little help. Ferenchak suggests the family begin with state officials. If they need additional help, the Nogales consulate’s American Citizen Services can provide some assistance but only to a certain extent. If the case goes to court in Mexico, the family would have to hire a Mexican attorney at its own expense. It would then be up to the Mexican judge to decide whether the family had any legal claim to the children.
“It’s hard to say what will happen or what should happen,” Ferenchak says. “This is a great unknown to a certain extent.”
What’s more, any movement in the case of the Mejia children would have to be prompted by the family; though consular officials will continue welfare checks, it essentially falls to the family to bring them home.
As much as Aheredia and Flores want the children back, the homes these two women have made are small. Flores doesn’t work. She has a bad knee. Heck, she says, even the good one is bad. Aher-edia faces her own health challenges that have sent her to the hospital more than once. They’re not certain they could even care for the children if they made it across the border.
Still, they would try and, at the very least, they would like to see the children in the U.S. foster care system with a family all their own and close enough that they could visit. That’s what the children would like, too. They remember, however vaguely, this city on the banks of a river, and they think of it as home.
Flores kisses a photograph of her great-grandchildren and holds it against her chest as she starts to cry.
“I miss them so much,” she says.
Flores starts talking to the children in the photograph, to herself, to God. Please, she begs, bring los niños Mejia home.