Anonymous steps out of their mom’s car and onto the curb outside of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. Once inside, they run around the hallway with a friend, trying to scare us, once from behind a pile of boxes, once from behind a lounge chair. As we sit down to begin this interview, Anonymous talks about their life as an eleven-year-old.
My favorite part of McKinley Park is where the ducks are at. They’re everywhere. There’s also a pond, a baseball field, and a pool. But I mostly just go to the pond because I like seeing the loud ducks. Sometimes I feed them, but sometimes they starve.
There was this one fair I remember when I was five or six. Well, I got on this ride. It wasn’t that high, but I was so scared that I couldn’t breathe. So my mom told them to stop the ride.
My mom’s undocumented. She told me that she came here from Mexico when it was raining, and that she crashed into a car. Then, she just ran away because she was 16, and she didn’t know what to do. Now, my mom works for Lyft. Sometimes she works from 3:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon. I don’t really know.
I really only know about my mom’s story because my brother asked. At home, my brothers and I have days, like with washing dishes. We don’t spend much time together, since they’re both boys and older than me. We also fight a lot over random stuff. Still, we celebrate Cinco de Mayo and eat pozole and enchiladas together.
My school doesn’t really have resources for undocumented people, and we don’t talk about immigration in class. Some teachers don’t speak Spanish, even though my school’s pretty bilingual. I have to translate because some people only speak Spanish.
When I grow up, I want to go to college. I want to be a lawyer to help my mom, to buy her a big house and a better car.