Land of Opportunity

Photo gallery Leonardo has saved nearly all of the phone cards he’s used to call his wife and daughter back home.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in late May. He’s calling his family.

“Hello? Hello?” he says. “Juana Maria Lopez Perez. Is she there?”

His only daughter, Norma, is on the other end. She tells him his wife, Juanita, as he likes to call her, is not at home.

“She’s not there?” he says, loud but joking. “Where is the lady of the house? Who gave her permission to go?”

She laughs.

Norma is 15 and tall for her age. Her hair is black and long like her mother’s. The two are best friends and cried in July when Norma celebrated her 15th birthday — her quinceanera — and her father wasn’t there.

Leonardo jokes with his daughter on the phone to keep her from asking this question: “When are you coming home?”

Photo gallery Used to having his wife prepare meals for him, Leonardo had to teach himself how to cook. He eats a late-night meal of pork and beans.

“Soon,” he usually says. “I’ll be coming home in a short while.”

But Leonardo knows it’s a white lie at best.

His family lives about a six hours’ drive from the Texas border, in a two-bedroom apartment that Leonardo thinks is OK.

But he wants something bigger: a mansion, as he imagines it, with two stories and stucco walls. A big Ford truck — preferably black — parked in front and money to open a grocery store or similar business.

“Working hard” is the portrait Leonardo likes to paint when he describes himself. He doesn’t like to talk about his family. When he does, his face turns hard and freezes in time, like the memories are rushing back to his mind through an electric current.

In a small shoebox inside Leonardo’s dresser is a receipt for a DVD player he ordered by mail. He shows it to people when they ask him what documents he has in the U.S. with his name on them.

The only identification document Leonardo possesses is a Mexican voter card with a mugshot of him taken 12 years ago. His rectangular, bronze-skinned face is serious, belying the playful nature he has when he watches Disney movies in Spanish on Sunday nights.

He shows strangers and friends photographs of the new house he is paying to have built and of his family. He takes pride in saying that he spends most of his time away from work in a constant slumber, sleeping or lying half-awake on a two-mattress bed propped up by white plastic drywall buckets.

He often looks at his five roommates and where they sleep — soiled mattresses on the floor, dirty couches — and thinks he lives better than they do. His bed is comfy. It’s a small thing, but it reminds him of what he wants to feel like when he returns to Mexico.

Comfortable.

He expects to return to Mexico in two more years. That’s how long, he says, it will take to save up enough money.

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