When her parents’ tourists visas expired, and they were no longer allowed entry into the United States, Elizabeth, an American citizen, persuaded her parents to allow her to stay in Arizona solo. She was only 15 years-old. Even as she contended with housing and food insecurity, Elizabeth managed to graduate valedictorian of her high school class, before going on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, we talk about the values tension in wanting to change the world and needing to pay rent, why the responsibilities she carried never allowed her to “let loose” like her peers, and her decision to share her story in her new memoir, “My Side of the River.”
Follow Elizabeth on instagram @lizzycancu and find her book My Side of the River here.
If you liked this episode, listen to How Travel Empowered Nikki Vargas to Bring Her Life Into Alignment and What Jennifer De Leon Had to Confront to Become the First Writer In Her Family.
Alicia Menendez : Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez has the type of life story that makes you think: how did she do it? She was born in Arizona to Mexican parents. Her family moved during her early years before returning to the United States. When her parents' tourist visas expired, they returned to Mexico to reapply. Only then, their paperwork wasn't granted. 15-year-old Elizabeth persuaded her parents to allow her to stay in the US to finish her education. And to do that, she endured a period of housing insecurity and food insecurity before graduating valedictorian of her high school class and going on to attend the University of Pennsylvania. If that all sounds too simple and too neat, don't worry. Elizabeth is invested in complicating the good immigrant narrative and she's telling her story in her beautiful memoir, My Side of the River.
Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here.
Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez:
Thanks so much for having me.
Menendez: So often when we hear stories of parents and children being separated in the interior of the country, it's the story that we hear, for example, from Diane Guerrero, which is she goes off to school, ICE agents show up at her home, the next thing she knows, mom and dad are gone. For you, that story is different. Your parents are on tourist visas. 2011, those tourist visas expire. And so you as a family actually get to have a conversation, granted it's really parents telling children.
Camarillo Gutierrez: Yeah.
Menendez: What do you remember about that conversation and how your parents explained what their plan was?
Camarillo Gutierrez: What I remember about the conversation was, one, we're not going to overstay our visas because that means that we're going to become fully undocumented. And the reason we're not going to do that is because you and your brother are US citizens, and there is a chance that when you turn 18 or 21, I forget what the actual age is, that you can do it, you can ask for a residency. And if you get deported undocumented, you can't do that anymore because you are now blacklisted essentially right from the US. And so my parents told us we're going to go back to Mexico because it is allegedly, or so we've been told, easier to get a tourist visa when you're in Mexico versus applying for it within the United States. And so they left the country. And we were told, "Oh, this should take about two months." Right? And so they ended up getting them denied while in Mexico. That meant that they no longer had a way to even enter the country again.
And we got separated because I was in the US with my little brother, and they were now in Mexico, was no possibility of entering again.
Menendez: Terrifying for you. As a parent, I can only imagine, terrifying for them. How did you persuade them to let you stay?
Camarillo Gutierrez: I was a very intense 15-year-old. I kind of realized that my life opportunities wouldn't be the same if I ended up in the town that they were going to end up in. I was a freshman in high school. I knew that I had to do certain things to get into a certain college. I was getting straight A's, I was at the top of my class, and I already had a list of XYZ scholarships and programs that I was going to apply to in Arizona that I knew I wouldn't get the chance to if I was in Mexico. And then I went back that summer, after that happened, to Mexico with my parents and my brother, and it took a lot of convincing. I went on a hunger strike. I really scared my parents.
I just refused to eat. I refused to do anything until they agreed to let me go to the United States, and they finally relented. And I mean, I really think that the biggest gift that they could have given me is letting me go. And now that I'm older, I'm like, how could someone let a teenager be by themselves in the United States without anywhere to go or stable housing? It was a lot of trust that they ended up giving me, and I was so determined that I knew I was going to figure it out regardless of what it took.
Menendez: And for you, it required leaving not only your parents, but leaving your little brother.
Camarillo Gutierrez: Yeah. He was only eight years old when this happened, and that was the hardest part, because then I felt like we were living these weird parallel lives where I had opportunities and he didn't
Menendez: In that period, you end up living with a teacher who I think you do a really good job, in My Side of the River, of teasing out the space between true generosity and charity. You have housing in the sense that there is a place you go to, but you're sleeping on a couch, there is not food provided for you regularly, and you don't really register yourself as being homeless, until all of a sudden, a guidance counselor pulls you into a room and is like, "There are resources for you. There are things we can do to make sure that you have just sort of basic necessities." What do you think your life would've looked like if not for that inflection point?
Camarillo Gutierrez: Yeah, If I hadn't had that counselor, I don't know how healthy I would've been. I didn't have access to health insurance. I didn't have access to get glasses. I was super blind, and my teachers were putting me at the front of the classroom just to get by. I was constantly hungry, which made me really not focus in school. And then I was doing all these extracurricular sports. I was there at school from 6 AM to 6 PM, doing soccer, tennis, whatever it was, because I needed to be the perfect all-American student that would be accepted by these schools that I wanted to get into. And I think that I just would've burnt out. I probably would've ended up in the hospital or something.
I think it was the first year maybe that I was with that family that I was really struggling. I was eating off of my friend's plates. And my parents would send me money whenever they could, which is usually the opposite, right? Usually, the person in the US sends the family in Mexico money. But for that amount of time, they were trying their best to send me stuff. So it was really crazy to think about, especially when I was writing the memoir, reminding myself that this is what I went through.
Menendez: You are the all-American, all-star student. You get into basically every college you apply to, and the final decision comes down to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. And I love that the reason you're like I might go to Columbia is because your parents are familiar with the brand, and that means something to you, right? You want it to be as proud a moment for them as it is for you, and you have this great interaction with a teacher. First of all, I know that you and I would've been friends if we were the same age and gone to school together. Like I'm going to do a PowerPoint presentation and a Venn diagram and an Excel spreadsheet so that I can assess this decision. And the teacher's like, "Elizabeth, we're going to flip a coin, and in the middle of the air, you're going to know exactly where you want it to land.” And it's Penn for you. Your heart is telling you that it's Penn. That moment of intuition, have there been moments since in your life where you have relied on that same intuition to guide you?
Camarillo Gutierrez: I worked in finance right after college, and that was a very intense, terrible environment. I would kind of have to trust my gut and think about, who are actually my allies versus who is acting like they're my ally, but they're not? And so I use that to kind of help guide me.
Menendez: Part of being at Penn is I think you sort of arrive and you're like, "Okay, this is it. Finally, I'm just going to get to be a kid. I've got a dorm, I've got a food plan. I don't need to worry about all these things that I've been worried about in the interest of survival." One, it is academically extraordinarily rigorous, and there's a part of you, like a part of all of us, that shows up at these institutions that feel like we're not supposed to be there and we're a fraud, but there's also, and I thought you kind of danced around, this question of anxiety and how anxiety shows up for you. You talk a lot about panic attacks and having panic attacks, which I recognize very much. Have you really reckoned with that anxiety? And how would you describe it now, looking back on it?
Camarillo Gutierrez: When I was in high school and going through all these things, I was probably suffering from it, but because my life was chaos, my nervous system was aligned with that chaos. When I got to Penn, things sort of slowed down in a way. I had my basic needs met, which is something I didn't have before. And so then I was looking at all this school stuff, and I was like, "I don't know how to do this. I don't know why I'm feeling and why it takes me three times as long to do anything versus my peers." And I realized I had raging undiagnosed ADHD throughout college, which probably explained and caused a lot of the anxiety that I felt. It's taken a lot to reconcile with it. I'm very aware of it. I know that it's always going to be there and that I will probably have to be medicated for the rest of my life. And I'm just constantly finding ways to make me feel peaceful and to make my nervous system match my head in a way because I feel like there's some sort of disconnect happening.
Menendez: Well, because the underlying anxiety, and then there's just the truth, which is that after graduation, your little brother is going to come to the United States, and in so many ways, become your charge. So part of what I struggled with reading My Side of the River was like, was there anything that could have made that different for you? And I'm not sure there is, right? Because the vast majority of students, their big concern is getting a job or getting into graduate school. Those are your concerns as well, but you will layer on top of it this big adultification. So that when your friends are, "Loosen up, have fun," I'm like... I give 18, 19-year-old you so much grace because I just don't know how that would've been possible.
Camarillo Gutierrez: I was selfishly... I wanted that time for myself. I wanted so bad to graduate college and do the things that my friends in college were doing and be crazy, and I couldn't. I couldn't do that. In addition to that, I knew that out of the jobs that I had to look for, I couldn't just get any job. I had to get a job that paid really, really well because I was probably going to end up in New York and I was going to have to pay New York rent for two. And I knew I was going to have to support my brother, I was going to have to go to the court to get guardianship for him, do all these crazy things. And I was doing this while being an analyst in a finance role, which is basically when you become an analyst in finance, they expect your soul. Anything else is you not being committed to the job. And so it was super hard to balance that, be exhausted from work and come back, and then take care of a 16-year-old. And in college, I really wanted to avoid that.
Menendez: Tell me, Elizabeth, about going through the recruitment process for all of those jobs and how you learned to take your complex and singular story and sort of jam it into a really easy to digest little box.
Camarillo Gutierrez: So I was applying to all these finance roles, and my whole shtick was, “yeah, I grew up along the border. My parents were always talking about the fluctuation of the Mexican peso and the US dollar, and that's why I want to work in securities, and it has been my dream. This has made me such a global individual that it's something that I can bring to the company and bring this perspective of understanding global financial markets.” Did I understand global financial markets? No, I'm dyslexic. I have so many issues. And I've always joked with my parents that I'm really good at getting the job, and then maybe not so good at being in the job. And so that's what I'm constantly working on, which is probably some sort of imposter syndrome, but I'm just like, I don't know if I tricked everybody and I got here. But yeah, it's a formula. I teach my brother, I tell him: “You have to make your stuff digestible. You can't super trauma dump. You have to flip it into something beautifully positive, and then connect it exactly to that company's values in some way and really just wow that recruiter, and we'll figure it out after.”
Menendez: Reading My Side of the River, the part that really shattered me was during that process where you write, "My story mattered to other people, but it no longer mattered to me." You had told the story so many times. You had made the story digestible in so many ways. Did writing this book change that?
Camarillo Gutierrez: That's a really hard question. I think that my brain betrays me because I spent three years writing this book. And then during the final editing, I had taken a break from reading it over and over again. And even rereading the book, I remembered stuff that I had already blocked out that I wrote in the book. And I think that I'm very good at desensitizing myself from the things that I've gone through in the past. And that's really, really scary to me. And I think to some extent, I definitely will continue to use my story in a way that I am completely desensitized to because it is what I know to do, and it is what I know provides results. And at the end of the day, my biggest motivation is making sure that my family is financially stable, that they have a future.
And so if it takes doing this and commercializing my story over and over again, I will do it. And I hope that I can keep touching base and being empathetic with myself and with the younger version of myself that was going through this day by day. But when the world demands our stories on a silver platter, our little trauma, and that is the only way that we're going to get ahead, what am I going to do? Right? Is there any other option for me to be humanized? I don't know.
Menendez: It's brutal because it's true. I think about it too all the time, as you have. I think about it in the context of immigration. I think about it in the context of women sharing their reproduction and abortion stories, where just to be treated like a basic human, they have to share every horrible thing that's happened to them. I appreciated, in your TED talk, that when you share how recruiters wanted to hear that since the age of eight, you'd been intrigued by the global market that, you're like, "I couldn't say what I needed to say, which is I am here to pay rent." Which is like that's the real driver. And I wonder if you could talk to me about how you ultimately reconcile the values tension between, “I am a person who has had both enormous struggle and enormous privilege, and I want to change the world and give back to people like myself and communities like myself,” and “I need to make money for my family unit.”
Camarillo Gutierrez: Yeah, it's always been really hard to reconcile. I went into college... All of high school, I was this idealist thinking I was going to be an environmental scientist and lawyer. I was going to stop global warming. And then I got into Penn, which is one of the most pre-professional universities you could go to. And within a year, I was like, there is nothing I can do to save the world. I felt so defeated. I saw all of my brilliant friends who were interested in the arts and sciences. So many of them just started going into, "Oh, I'm going to just work at a consulting firm and in finance, because that is the thing to do." And I was not immune to that. And so I ended up thinking, it's going to be very hard for me to change the world because I don't have money to even protect my world, which is my family.
And so this is the first step, making sure that my brother has the opportunities that I didn't even now. I wanted to make it so that I would be so financially stable that when he got to college, he wouldn't necessarily have to think about working in finance or one of these consulting firms, whatever, that he could maybe study art history, which is what he's studying now. And now, I'm regretting all of this. I'm like, why did I let you do this? I'm like, "You can't be studying art history at a liberal art school. I actually need you to get a job." So it's hard to think about that, but that was my ultimate goal. It was, let me lower the stakes a little bit. And as I get older, I realize my parents are also getting older, their medical bills are getting higher, and I genuinely admire people that go into routes of politics and all of that because I'm like, I don't know if that will make enough money to even just keep us afloat.
Menendez: I love that you are neither a parent nor an immigrant, but you have big immigrant parent energy.
Camarillo Gutierrez: Yeah. It's so embarrassing. I'm just like, I'm trying to be chill, but at the same time, I have my brother like this. I'm like, "Did you apply to that scholarship? Why didn't you apply to that scholarship? You can't just use my credit card as your scholarship." So we're trying our best.
Menendez: I love that. Um, do you allow yourself to imagine a day when your family will all be together?
Camarillo Gutierrez: So a couple of months ago, my parents actually got their green cards. It took like three years. I think with COVID, everything got super delayed. And then out of nowhere, they were just accepted. And it's crazy to me that just one day to another, the way they're treated just changes immediately, and it's absolutely... I still can't believe it. They can stay with us for as long as they want, and it's never going to be an issue. And then my dad can go to my brother's college graduation because he wasn't able to go to mine. So it's really exciting.
Menendez: Elizabeth, congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for doing this.
Camarillo Gutierrez: Thank you so much for having me. It's been so much fun.
Menendez: Thanks for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua and me, Alicia Menendez. Virginia Lora is our producer, Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer, Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. We love hearing from you. Email us at ola@latinatolatina.com, slide into our DMs on Instagram or on Threads and TikTok @latinatolatina. Check out our merchandise at latinatolatina.com/shop and remember to subscribe or follow us on RadioPublic, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Goodpods, wherever you're listening right now. Every time you share this podcast, every time you leave a review, you help us to grow as a community.
CITATION:
Menendez, Alicia, host. “How Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez is Complicating the Immigrant Narrative.”
Latina to Latina,
LWC Studios, April 29, 2024. LatinaToLatina.com.