Quick Take
Sebastián Valdez crossed the U.S-Mexico border every day starting at age 13 to go to school in the U.S. It cost him time and took a toll on his mental health. It also made him wonder what made a successful future hard to find at home. Now a sophomore at UCSC, he is frustrated with the “performative activism” he sees in Santa Cruz and with how misunderstood people like him are. “I want to be a catalyst,” he writes. “I want to encourage others to use their own voices and tell their own stories. An accurate historical record, told by those who lived it, is the only way to reinstate dignity in our communities and break racist misconceptions about who we are.”
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The sound of pebbles crackling between wheels and concrete called my cousins and me away from our conversation in the callejón outside my aunt’s house in Tijuana. A semi-dusty black car approached us steadily.
Miguel Ángel, with his face gleaming against the summer sun, sat in the passenger seat and invited us to join him at the pool. He had come from Culiacán to visit his cousin, and the cheek-to-cheek smile under his sunglasses was entirely worry-free.
Two years later, in 2020, Miguel Ángel stood in the desert between Arizona and Sonora, begging his coyote (immigrant trafficker) to leave him behind. He was exhausted and couldn’t keep walking. Since the coyote knew his family, the group helped him along for the last hours until they arrived in Phoenix, Arizona.
That’s all that saved Miguel Ángel, youthful and healthy, from perishing under the scorching sun.
When I realized the lighthearted guy I often heard was “more popular than Coca Cola” in Culiacán could’ve become just another cross buried in that desert, it struck me deeply.
I’ve lived in Tijuana for the majority of my life, yet I was born in San Diego, in the United States. This arbitrary difference meant that my trips northward were comfortable, while his only journey nearly took his life.
How can it be that most Mexicans find themselves so desperately searching for a better life?
Desperate enough that an illegal migration through the border and a burning, desolate environment seems worth the risk?
I have the immense privilege of attending an American university, UC Santa Cruz, now, but I resent that I had to leave my home, my family and all of my friends to get an education and a chance at a better life.
As a sophomore psychology major, I strive to become a high school counselor and directly help youth like myself navigate the bad cards we were dealt.
Like Miguel Ángel’s family, mine also migrated north from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, a skinny slice of coastal land adjoining the Sierra Madre. Sinaloa is a place filled with blossoming mango and plum trees, greenery and rivers, banda musical ensembles and where deer and mountain lions freely roam.
Growing up, I soon understood Sinaloa also had a dark side: a reputation for drugs, AK-47s and what American media has historically labeled “bad hombres.”
Not only Americans and foreigners see us this way. Our brothers and sisters at home do, too. They resent the seemingly unstoppable waves of corruption and crime that plague our country, and the Sinaloense are an all-too-common scapegoat.
It angers me to see immigrants like Miguel Ángel (and Mexicans in general) depicted as reckless, ignorant and regressive — a cartoon of a person. Or labeled as “the cause” of the drug epidemic.
My whole life, I questioned what these depictions said about my family, or even myself. I wondered: How did we get to this point?
It all started with Richard Nixon, and his 1971 “war on drugs,” but even before that, U.S. foreign policy had bullied México into allowing itself to become a playground for American weapons.
And drugs, the great majority of them produced to satisfy American demand. For families just like mine, cursed with living in their places of origin, this began a cycle of abuse and criminalization.
Operación Cóndor, the invasive U.S-backed war to reduce Mexican drug trade targeting Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, began in 1972.
The result? The creation of a social cancer that perpetuates itself, and whose symptoms are the widespread corruption and lawlessness that inhibit us from a better future.
Millions of your taxpayer dollars funded the American military equipment that enacted the chaos that changed the course of my family’s world and pushed me to the U.S.
The military constantly harassed my community. This included many human rights violations — ghastly beatings, cigarette burns, mutilations, kidnappings, rapes and even electric discharges in the testicles. All this happened with absolute impunity.
The attacks stoked anger, but also demoralized the community and left people distrustful of authority and scornful of the rule of law.
And it left people broken and vulnerable. Families who no longer had breadwinners became impoverished. Some turned to crime, and many others migrated.
This is my family’s history. The story that shaped my life. This violence created a cycle of mental and economic poverty that still reverberates within my family and Mexican culture at large.
Behind most kitchens and storefronts, there are thousands of Mexicans forced to second-class positions by a system that benefits from them. I can’t explain to myself how a city that depends on us as its lifeblood is so incredibly out of touch. I can’t explain the invisibility we regularly feel.
My family doesn’t come from a background of wealth and nepotism.
In the inaccessible terrain of the sierra, my grandparents lived an austere, rural lifestyle. My hard-working grandfather, Trinidad, hunted deer, sold lumber, and sustained my family by working and sowing his milpas fields.
Contrary to expectations, my family enjoyed great peace and happiness. At first. With his own hands, my industrious grandfather helped build the first school and built the first-ever cement home in his native ranch, Palmillas de Concordia.
One fateful day somewhere along the mid-1980s, past midnight, a man named Daniel Páez (whom my grandpa never forgot) came to our house. He warned my grandfather that he had been offered a reward by local mafiosos for killing him, since they believed his prosperity came from marijuana and opium.
This began my family’s dispersion north, and as they moved, they lost the little livestock and belongings they had.
My family’s arrival to my hometown of Tijuana in the early 1990s was out of desperation, being forced to beg for money just to feed themselves when they had just arrived. As a consequence, during middle and high school, starting in 2016, I became all too familiar with the Tijuana-San Diego border.
No matter if it rained on us, no matter if we waited hours in the cold and poorly lit line to cross, no matter how badly I wanted to stay in Tijuana, my mother and I would walk through the border into Chula Vista, a suburb of San Diego, where I went to school, and then back again at night.
It’s traumatizing to remember having panic attacks walking through the run-down and hostile margins of both borders. Often, I wouldn’t get home to our apartment until past midnight, due to border delays. Then, I had to do homework.
As a sophomore at UC Santa Cruz now, I’ve come to witness first-hand just how misunderstood Mexican history is here and how unseen Mexicans often are to locals.
I want to be a catalyst that helps change that. I want to encourage others to use their own voices and tell their own stories. An accurate historical record, told by those who lived it, is the only way to reinstate dignity in our communities and break racist misconceptions about who we are.
Dignity — denied to us for too long — is paramount to reaffirm our right for self-determination and break the institutional negligence and performative activism that I so often see in Santa Cruz County.
I’ve spent two years immersed in Santa Cruz’s self-proclaimed “hippie” and “liberal” culture. It angers me that no one sees how much of this lifestyle and privilege is built on the backs of thousands of Mexicans; people just like me who are still deprived of the fruits of their labor.
Behind most kitchens and storefronts, there are thousands of Mexicans forced to second-class positions by a system that benefits from them. I can’t explain to myself how a city that depends on us as its lifeblood is so incredibly out of touch. I can’t explain the invisibility we regularly feel.
Santa Cruz’s astronomic housing costs, especially the lack of low-income, priority housing, has socioeconomically segregated us with invisible barriers most Santa Cruzans don’t see or care to understand. Many in Watsonville and beyond devote essential time and money commuting into Santa Cruz, only to be unseen, unheard and taken advantage of.
Take the recent storms: I could almost hear the silence around me as Pájaro Valley’s residents trembled outside their flooded homes. Everything was lost. And, I can also clearly remember an almost-immediate state of emergency announced by President Joe Biden, in person, days after restaurants and beachfront property in Capitola faced damage.
This is a wild contrast to the neglect that preceded and followed Pájaro’s recent disaster.
We must remember that the mainly Mexican workers here are not in this position willingly, or as a result of an inherent lack of competence.
Just like my family, millions of others have been forced to abandon the only life they’ve known to escape this cyclical violence, often knowing they will never be able to return legally.
Unless we work on regenerative approaches to repair this damage, the fabric of our reality will continue to be eroded.
I encourage you to break the walls of silence that stop a real dialogue from happening.
I encourage you to be curious, to have empathy, and to treat the silent heroes of your community with respect: not as inferior beings, and definitely not as opportunities to pat your ego in the back.
It’s the very least you can do.
Sebastián Valdez is a sophomore psychology major at UC Santa Cruz. He enjoys playing soccer, reading, playing the guitar, collecting vinyl records and listening to music of all kinds.
