I remember even defending a person from the Marshall Islands because a Mexican guy had taken his food. I said, "Hey, man, don't take his food. That's all he got to eat." They were like, "So, what, are you going to defend them now?" I'm like, "I'm just defending a person. He's just like us. We're all detained. We shouldn't be like that." But they got onto me and they said, "Either you're with us or against us. If you're against us, we're more." I said, "Okay, I guess I can be with you guys," just for being scared. Then after that I was there for about a month. Then they took me to a real prison. I remember they asked us to do jobs like clean your cell, clean the bathrooms, and things like that. Again, I was only 18 years old. I didn't know why I was put in prison with those people. In there, yes, I met some people that really had done some really bad stuff.

Well, since I learned that I was living illegally in the United States, I got discriminated for that. They would call me “illegal Mexican.” So I took that as a positive thing and said, "Yes, I am," and I felt like I needed to represent that not just for myself but for a whole generation because there's a lot of people just like me whose parents took them to the United States, and they struggled through the same thing. I felt that I needed to represent them. I didn't get the tattoos until I came back to Mexico. That's how it started. I do remember in high school, most of my friends that I hung out with were all Mexican, we were all born in Mexico. I guess that's how it started, just hanging out with friends and making jokes about it.

I don't want to say that I'm Mexican or American. I am both. I'm bi-cultural. I just don't like that. I don't like what they say. I'd rather we say, "Hey, we're human. You and I are human." Yes, later on we get that, later on they tell us, "Okay, you were born in Mexico so that makes you Mexican." But since we're born, we're born as human, not even as a woman or a man. We're born as a human. Yeah. I get asked that question a lot.

Because he was separating families. I remember just telling my mom, "I don't want to go back to school if that means putting you at risk, or putting one of my brothers at risk, I just don't want to go back." And since my father's deportation process was still—we were still going through that as well. I just had to go with my mom to a couple of hearings with her and translate what they were saying and all of the information and all of that.

I told my parents not to get close to the school. A lot of students had to walk home far distances, scared of their parents going for them because they stayed out there for a while and they were stopping cars coming out of the school. They stopped the teachers, they stopped everybody just because of the color of their skin. You got stopped and you got asked for papers or ID, even though a lot of us knew it was illegal for them to stay outside of a school and ask for papers.

The fear. The constant fear, that actually came true [Chuckles], of your family members being deported or coming home from school because since I was underage, I kind of knew that I was safe from that because they weren't going to raid schools, like middle schools and stuff like that. But it was a constant fear of coming home and being told that, I don't know, your dad's not coming back or your mom's not coming back. And it did happen like that. Unfortunately, my father was working and he was raided. So he got taken away and then when I came back home one day from school, my mom told me. It was really hard.

In Mexico, it's really hard to get an opportunity. A lot of people are where they are because they know someone [Laughs] or because they've paid to be there and it's really hard trying to be what they would say, the working class. Trying to work your way to a point where you know you're successful and you can say, "I've done a lot of things." But if you're not the cousin of the owner, or if you're not a family member related to somebody in power, it's like you don't have a chance.

I knew the basics, but sometimes I'd start a conversation with a family member or somebody and then they'd start saying a couple of words that I didn't understand, and I would actually be like, "Oh, what does that mean?" A lot of people would say, "Oh, well it means this." But a lot of others would just laugh and they'd be like, "How could you not know Spanish if you're Mexican?" And it’s like, yeah, I'm Mexican. I know the basics but—I don't know, it was very confusing. My mom used to always say that we were kind of nomads because we weren't from the States. We were raised there but we're not from the States, but we weren't from Mexico either because we may have been born here, but we didn't know anything about it.

ell, I was actually three years old when my parents decided to go to the States looking for I guess, a better life.