A home for the holidays: How one migrant family remembers their past to help define their future in Chicago
Unbeknown to the children of the Mendez family, Christmas for their mother, Esperanza, was a game of counting — counting hours, counting bills.
The Mendezes, who settled in Chicago after enduring the strenuous journey from their home in Maracaibo, Venezuela, had spent previous Christmases surrounded by family and visiting neighbors and loved ones. They’d shared plates of food and gathered around chairs and tables in the street. Kids ran around and lit fireworks in the tropical, muggy air.
But this year, the hours passed slowly, a reminder of the strange emptiness in their new wintry surroundings, their relatives far away, the absence of hallacas, or traditional Christmas Venezuelan tamales.
“We’ll see if you behaved this year,” Esperanza Mendez, 47, teased her two youngest children.
Since arriving in Chicago on July 15, she has struggled to figure out where to look for housekeeping work and worried about having enough money to fill their Christmas table with food.
The family is among the nearly 8 million people fleeing violent crimes and shortages of food and supplies under Venezuela’s far-left president, Nicolás Maduro. They face the brunt of social upheaval in their country of origin, stemming from a political war that goes back decades.
Of the more than 27,000 people who have migrated to Chicago in the past year, over 7,000 are children. Most of the migrants come from Venezuela.
“We walked and walked,” Esperanza said in Spanish, looking at her 9-year-old boy, Pedro, and 11-year-old daughter, Yuledy, and recounting her family’s journey to the United States. “We drank a lot of water from the rivers. It was horrible. Horrible.”
Since following the Mendez family in July on their trip from El Paso to Chicago, the Tribune has been present for many of their major familial milestones in the city, including the birth of a baby boy over Labor Day weekend and their struggle to find basic necessities like housing, food and health care.
The family lives on the second floor of a home in Englewood with a few other relatives. They have a new pit bull dog, which they got after their part-chihuahua puppy — who traveled with them all the way from Venezuela — escaped out the back door of their apartment and never returned.
The kids have registered at the nearby elementary school, but can’t communicate with their fellow classmates and teachers who mostly speak English. They’ve been targeted by other students in fights. Gunshots ring out on the street corners near their home. They have struggled with attendance.
As Christmas and the New Year approached, more than five months after arriving in the sanctuary city of Chicago, the children were still adjusting to their new reality.
‘There is nothing for them’
On a recent morning, Esperanza gently brushed Pedro’s hair before school. Light streamed through the sheer curtains in the dark living room of the tidy two-story walk-up. She gently put one hand on his forehead to stabilize his head. He looked up at her.
Pedro, wearing a small gray backpack, flopped over on the armrest of their soft brown couch.
His sister, Yuledy, gathered her things as she also got ready for school: a pink folder to match her pink jacket. She said all the girls at school had been given matching pink coats.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary, where the children are enrolled, is 91.4% low-income and has a 51.3% chronic truancy rate, according to Illinois State Board of Education data. Of the 116 students who attend, 104 are Black and 12 are Hispanic.
A few weeks ago, the two Mendez kids had gotten into a fistfight after school. Terrified, Esperanza had made them stay home from school for weeks afterward. They spent the days lying in a room on a bare mattress playing video games.
Now they were back. That morning, Yuledy refused the bread her mom offered her, another instance of the girl refusing to eat. A worried Esperanza had recently brought her daughter to a clinic, where they recommended she see a specialist to check her weight.
Esperanza braided Yuledy’s long black hair, and the three of them walked the two blocks to the blacktop where children were gathering. They got in line — Yuledy for fifth grade and Pedro for fourth — and a man ushered them inside.
There is one Spanish-speaking teacher at the children’s school.
“There is a boy that helps translate, but he barely comes,” Yuledy said.
Aside from family, schools are the most meaningful place to rebuild a sense of normalcy and identity after going through a major displacement like Pedro and Yuledy have, according to Daysi Diaz-Strong, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies education and immigration.
She said children who witness atrocities and death on their journey to the United States learn quickly the world isn’t safe.
“And when they enroll in school, schools can either create experiences that further that thinking or can counteract that experience and provide a sense of safety,” she said.
Yuledy and Pedro like going to school to have something to do during their days, they said, despite the classes being in a language they don’t understand, the frequent fights that break out and having few close friends.
Outside their home, sirens are their new normal. Ambulances and blue police lights fill their street.
“In this neighborhood, our kids are basically imprisoned because of safety concerns. We hear gunshots constantly. They don’t play on bikes in the street. There is nothing for them,” Esperanza said.
‘We don’t look like them’
The city of Chicago is struggling to provide food and medical services to thousands of migrants staying at 27 temporary shelters around the city, and there are more families outside the shelter system — like the Mendezes — who also need assistance.
According to city data, there were 5,000 migrant children in city-run shelters this Christmas. Several thousand more have settled in houses or apartments in Chicago, or have moved elsewhere.
The Chicago Public Schools system is federally required to support the enrollment and education of students who are homeless or in temporary living situations. This includes children like Pedro and Yuledy and who are “doubled up,” sharing a house with others due to economic hardship or a similar reason.
There were 19,295 students in temporary living situations enrolled at the end of November — a 51% increase from last November and more than ever recorded at this time of year, according to data provided by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Chicago schools are feeling the strain in the need for more bilingual resources and support.
Patricia Nix-Hodes, director of the coalition’s Law Project, attributes this increase in part to the thousands of migrant children who have arrived over the past year — staying in makeshift shelters, in police station lobbies or doubled up.
“That increase is very dramatic,” Nix-Hodes said. “And there’s a lot of very critical life or death needs that families have … housing, health care, food and warm clothing. It’s all of those things.”
As Esperanza walked to pick up Pedro and Yuledy at the end of the day, she remarked on the need for psychological services at the elementary school.
“Kids here can be violent. They don’t have self-control. I think it stems from bad home life and aggressive behavior from their parents at home,” she said. “And then they don’t receive the help they need at school.”
Sounds of children playing echoed across the street to the corner where she stood, waiting. Yuledy came out the back door of the building and skipped across the crosswalk. She hugged her mom.
Pedro came running up next, his face covered in crumbs. It was the day before winter break and he told his mom there had been a big party in his class.
“What happened?” asked Esperanza.
“We ate little cookies, Mommy. Candies and Takis,” he said quickly, running his words together in excitement.
Pedro recounted his entire day to Esperanza as they walked back to their house. He had gotten his hair buzzed four days ago and swung his hips as he walked, as if trying to mimic the stride of his 20-year-old brother, Fabian.
Esperanza said that he didn’t like the haircut at all, and missed the hair that used to swoop across his forehead. Yuledy walked quietly ahead of them.
When they got home, Esperanza dished out a bowl of chicken noodle soup and called Yuledy to the kitchen table.
“Eat everything, you hear? Everything. Come todo, oíste. Todo,” she said, sitting next to her daughter and watching until she had downed all the broth.
Esperanza asked how her day had been.
“They don’t want to accept us. Because we don’t look like them,” Yuledy said. “It could be because we speak a different language. Cats and dogs fight because they don’t speak the same language.”
‘They have this spirit of happiness’
It can sometimes feel like the walls of the apartment are closing in on her, Esperanza confides.
She doesn’t feel like she can leave. The hallway along the steep stairs smells like cigarette smoke. Family members come and go.
Esperanza has carefully planted flowers in three plastic pots by the upstairs door, and lined the top of the wooden shelves in the kitchen with cans of diced tomatoes, beans and pink salmon. She’s placed an artificial house plant next to their small TV across from the couch.
She wants to leave her neighborhood for one with more Spanish speakers. But with her partner Hugo’s day-labor painting job and her inability to find work, they don’t have enough money for the move.
In early December, the family bought an artificial tree from Walmart and decorated it with red, gold and green ornaments. They pooled their money to make a pasticho, a creamy and meaty Venezuelan lasagna, a nod to the strong Italian influence on their country’s cuisine.
The bills for Christmas stacked up: $100 for the tree, $37 for the pasticho. More for the ponche crema, or Venezuelan eggnog. And for Christmas Eve beer and whiskey.
“We don’t have the money for the Christmas meal like we would have wanted,” said Esperanza.
“But we drink like we do,” her partner Hugo joked.
There wasn’t enough money to make the traditional Christmas hallaca: the thin layer of corn dough stuffed with a stew of beef, pork, chicken, raisins and olives, wrapped and baked in fragrant banana leaves. There wasn’t enough money for all the gifts the children asked for.
Yuledy and Pedro left notes in their artificial tree for the “Espiritú de Navidad” or Christmas Spirit, detailing what they wanted.
“They have this spirit of happiness for life that seems to stay forever,” said Esperanza, looking at the folded papers tucked up and away with amusement.
As is customary in Venezuela, the crinkled letters disappeared on Dec. 21. The children kept their fingers crossed.
‘When I’m coming home’
Christmas Eve arrived, finally, after weeks of waiting. And Yuledy, to her mother’s surprise, cried.
Esperanza describes Yuledy’s character as “strong” and says that her daughter helps lift her up when she’s down.
But Pedro — who is both Yuledy’s best friend and her greatest annoyance — said something especially irritating. She went to the room she shares with him and slammed the door.
“I’m tired of this life. I want to be with my friends,” she said to her mom.
Normally the more stoic of the two kids, something inside her broke. Yuledy cried for hours.
Her best friend in Venezuela was a boy named Leonardo, whom they called Leito or little Leonardo.
“I’ve been his best friend for four years. He always asks where I am, and when I’m coming home,” she said.
She played video games with him using her mom’s phone. She spoke through the phone. But the messaging feature broke, and she could no longer hear his voice.
“How can I talk to him? It’s not working,” she said, holding it up to her mom.
Isolated, scared, adjusting — nothing in America was like she had thought it would be. She was lonely. She’d left behind her friends, her grandma, everything she knew and loved. She’d crossed seven countries, without months of school, without a place to sleep, without knowing where she was going.
Traumatic experiences affect every child differently, said Tareq Yaqub, a child and adolescent psychologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital. He said he looks for behavioral or milestone regression — sleep disturbance, anger or bed-wetting — when identifying those who might need additional treatment.
“There’s a lot of complexity in trying to determine what the best steps are, and this is why some of these evaluations of migrant children who have experienced such traumas really take a long amount of time. They can take hours,” he said.
Ideally the city would have the capacity to see every child individually, he said, but there are not enough case managers and therapists.
Esperanza wonders at times how much her children are processing of the journey and their new life, and how much they need to process. Without being able to leave their house, their small rooms in Englewood are where they relive their time walking to get to the United States.
“I see them see everything, but they quickly get distracted,” Esperanza said.
Migrant parents often have a wide range of unmet mental health needs that can adversely affect the mental health of their children.
“Children will struggle in the absence of parents or caregivers who can model how to cope, how to be responsive, and how to solve problems,” said Aimee Hilado, a professor, clinician and an expert on immigrant trauma at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work.
‘We are here. We need to accept it’
“We have ourselves. They have their dad. They have me,” Esperanza said later in the evening, looking at her children who wore matching red Christmas pajamas and lounged on the couch.
The day was harder on Esperanza than she had anticipated. She said she spent a lot of the morning in her room remembering what she was doing last year at this time.
The feeling of missing home always lingers, but near Christmas, it felt more acute. She cried thinking about her eldest son, who died suddenly and tragically in an accident in Venezuela when he was 19 years old.
“I remember him every day, but (now), it’s more painful,” she said.
The children often go to their rooms when they hear their mother speak about the family’s hardships.
Familiar Christmas Eve pasticho smells wafted through the apartment — layers of potato, meat, pasta and hard-boiled egg. Fabian’s girlfriend, Yolexi, emerged from their room holding her 3-month-old baby named Derick, dressed in a plaid shirt with a fur collar.
“His first Christmas clothes! He looks just like a little doll,” said Yuledy, holding up the baby.
The children gathered in front of the tree for a photo. Yuledy scrunched her face up.
“She’s the Grinch!” Yolexi said, laughing.
Yolexi put the baby down in a carrier on the coffee table, next to a stack of Marvel books and a bowl of colorful crayons.
The door to the apartment burst open and the children’s father, Hugo, came in with a couple of friends. He sat down on the couch.
On Christmas morning, a group of men from Honduras sat on the porch below the family, drinking whiskey and Modelos. A broken ceramic dish on the rail held their ashed cigarette butts. Empty beer cans littered the steps.
They’d spent the entire night drinking, Esperanza said.
Pedro and Yuledy slept in, opened their few presents, and then sat on the couch and played video games.
“It was a happy Christmas,” said Pedro.
Esperanza groggily ate leftover pasticho from a tupperware in the kitchen. The children’s voices in the room took over the silence in the house.
She set out some casserole for them to heat up, and said she intended to make them a hallaca later in the week. She counted in her head what money she had left to spend on ingredients.
“We are here. We need to accept it. Estamos aquí. Tenemos que aceptarlo,” she said, in her sweet, raspy voice.
She left the children with their older brother and went out of her house into the damp Christmas day to try to find more money.
