“Adiós, Antonio. Siempre te amaré,” said Antonio’s mother as she waved at him. Antonio waved back with a tear in his eye, a tear that held both joy and sorrow as he left his family, but he had also waited so long for this to happen. He stepped onto the airplane out of Mexico into the U.S.A., where he would live with his father. With his green card in hand, he boarded. He left the terror of dying from a gunshot at night, the gunfights in the street, the corruption of the police. Some nights there was no food. One night he had woken to find his only brother murdered. His mother told him that America would bring him a better life.

However, he had no clue what obstacles he would encounter.

His classmates would burden him by taunting and name-calling with insults like “border-hopper” and “wetback,” despite coming legally. He would spend lunch sitting alone because all of his classmates would claim to have xenophobia. Other white kids would take him into an alley and beat him, physically and verbally. Nobody would give him refuge, not even faculty at school. If Antonio told faculty, the kids would only pummel him more.

To add to the mountain of grief and mortification, Antonio’s father would give him a hard time. Most of the time when Antonio would get home from school, he would not find his father there. After work, his father would immediately go to the bar and stumble in the door at two ‘o’ clock in the morning, reeking of alcohol. When Antonio would be home with his father, he would smell the alcohol and get beat if he asked about it. His father would say: “You’re just a pile of garbage and a waste of my money.” Often, Antonio would find no food in the pantry and he would either starve or devour bits of food from his neighbors’ trash. The neighbors would know about his father’s maltreatment, yet nobody would bother to report his father’s negligence.

Antonio would come to decide his own fate. He would feel that the only escape would be the cold barrel up to his head. He would feel that the only escape would be the pull of the trigger. But he boarded the plane with his green card in hand. He hoped to find a paradise away from the hellhole of Juarez.

He did not know about the other hell that lay in front of him.