I was born in the United States of America in the Republic state of Texas, the child of immigrants if you go back past where my family stopped remembering. I've lived a transient life since then, confused spaces between divorces where home could be parallel parked and the windows of my bedroom rolled down. Maybe that makes me a migrant, in a way, even though I've never left the city of Houston for any significant amount of time. Because I keep it moving, and frankly, anything else scares me.

See, I got into this kind of by accident. I was taking orders at a fast food restaurant when the guy doing the chicken slinging caught my eye. We went around in circles for a few months, both being too blind or too stupid to notice the mutual affection, and then we finally started dating. He was from Mexico, spoke in broken English, and lived in a one bedroom apartment with 7 other people. He was probably the guy you would expect to be "illegal", if you were the nasty sort to do that kind of expecting, but he was also a DREAMer. I found out, after 6 months of wondering why a smart 25 year old guy like him needed to work as a fast food cook, that he had come to the country with a fake passport at the age of 12. School wasn't important to the sister that brought him here, and 6th grade was pretty far compared to the grades that other members of his family arrived at, so his life took a different course than the that of a lot of other DREAMers. He didn't go to school, but he did start working, one job and then two, so that he could send money home and buy a big green truck, and oh yeah, become a famous soccer player.

The first two are sometimes achievable when you're a DREAMer, but the last one is pretty much out, and later on he got an injury that disqualified him from soccer fame, anyway. Now he just wants to open an Everything Store, with a Mexican grocery and a bar and a gas station and some pool tables. That's kind of out of bounds, too, so he has to keep performing the menial jobs while dreaming bigger, hoping that someday he'll get a chance to show up his millionaire boss who calls him "wetback" instead of his name.

He's in kind of a unique position. Although you couldn't say he's "assimilated" into American life, the fact that he grew up here means he's pretty detached from Mexico as well. You can see the shades of an identity crisis creeping up on him when one of his brothers who came over later on tells him that he knows nothing about being Mexican. At the same time, America rejects him. He's trapped in a dual identity, both sides of which are pushing him away.

Yeah, I know, this an about me post, but I wouldn't really be here without him, and if it weren't for him I would probably be completely oblivious to the other world around me, just like I was growing up. I didn't even know what the DREAM Act was until we went to go see a lawyer, who handed us a piece of paper about it when I asked her what I could do to get him his papers, and just shook her head and said, no, no, without providing any further information. It really is no, no for us, too, because my husband has a permanent ban. That means that if he ever leaves the country, he can't come back. Ever. Oh yeah, and there's a waiver we could get after he's been gone for 10 years, but nobody's ever gotten one before. As you can tell, we have so many options, we don't know where to start. Right.

I've been introduced to a fear that has long since melded so completely with his spirit that he doesn't know it's there anymore. It's the fear I got last week when I had to explain to my financial aid advisor, in the midst of a teeming mass of students and college employees, that I couldn't give them a copy of my husband's tax returns because he has no birth certificate, and therefore cannot get the appropriate documents to file taxes. It's the fear you get when you hear someone knocking on the door at five in the morning, The ICEing Hour, only to realize that it's the neighbor. It's the fear and the uncertainty you get when you look at your nine month old son and wonder what kind of difficult choice you will have to make for him, as his dad's parents did, if Papi gets deported. It's the fear of hearing everyday that someone else has been detained and deported and separated, and you wonder when it's your family's turn.

I don't deal well with fear. I'm much better at reacting and fighting than cowering, but sometimes it's a necessity to sink down before you can shoot up. Still, my name is Fash, and that's Scots for trouble, so you know I can't stand still too long. 

This is my case, so judge me on it. Why should we be exiles?