Santiago Campos:
My great-grandmother did succumb to this pressure, agreeing to inform Border Patrol of the whereabouts of other undocumented migrants.
In exchange, she wouldn’t be deported any further and would eventually get naturalized. These sorts of encounters with Border Patrol instilled fear that persisted to the next generation. My father, who was born in the U.S., showed me around the colonias where he grew up. These were unincorporated communities near the border, primarily inhabited by undocumented migrants and their families, with very few resources and in poor living conditions.
Marco Campos, Father of Santiago Campos: This was originally a one-bedroom shack built out of discarded political campaign billboards, but we lived in a community of poor undocumented immigrants. We didn’t experience the wrongful deportations. We still grew up in a community where that was still a very real threat for us.
At least we felt that it was still a real threat because we knew what our family had gone through.
