Featuring an interview from Katherine Tejeda, 23-year-old Honduras native and New Bedford local. Written and interviewed by Gavin Parent, 23-year-old teacher and writer from Acushnet, MA.
Sixth birthdays are supposed to be stress-free. Piñatas, decorations, childhood friends, cake, and presents flood traditional homes during a celebration of six healthy and prosperous years of living. For Katherine Tejeda, however, her sixth birthday represented a major turning point in her young life; it marked the beginning of a journey that she admits shaped her into the woman she is today. On August 13, 2005, Tejeda, her mother, Norma Urbina, and her one-year-old sister at the time, Nathalia Tejeda, started their long expedition from their home country of Honduras to the United States.
Honduras was home to several Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya, before the Spanish Colonization in the sixteenth century. Facebook photo.
“I remember it as fun because obviously, I had a lot of family there… Hispanics throw a lot of big parties,” Katherine stated when asked about the first six years of her life in Honduras. Coming from an immense family who relies heavily on faith in God for guidance, Tejeda quickly understood her family’s foundation. “Sometimes we want to rush things in our timing,” Tejeda said, “but it is not the timing that God has prepared for us. I’ve always put my faith in God.” When the time came to start their migration to America in 2005, Katherine’s father, Hector Tejeda, was not a member of their journey. He had previously received a legal Visa and worker’s permit in the United States, allowing himself to make frequent trips to and from Honduras to provide for his family. “My mom was single raising the two of us [in Honduras]… my mom sort of got sick of that so she said ‘You know what? We’re just going to move to America.’” This ambition and determination are what initiated their journey to a new life and a new beginning.
The trio of migrators knew they needed some assistance. “We had this guy called a coyote,” Tejeda said. “He helped us with the process of going to America… We actually sold him our jeep as part of our payment.” Coyotes are customarily Mexican civilians who assist immigrants in their dangerous feat of crossing the border into the United States.
To get to the United States, they first had to troop over 1,200 miles southwest to the Mexico border. “We went through this river to get to Mexico… We had to be quiet because we never knew our surroundings,” Tejeda said.
Latin Americans have lived in what is now the United States since the 16th century. There are currently 940,000 Hispanics of Honduran origin living in the United States today with an estimated 250,000 Honduran immigrants in the U.S. being unauthorized according to Pew Research.
Once successfully passing through the river, buses were waiting for them on the other side. “When we got into the bus, there were a couple of families with us… Obviously, you had to hide your money. I remember either my mom had her money hidden in her bun or her sock.”
This decision to hide her valuables turned out to be a detrimental one for Norma Urbina. What six-year-old Katherine remembers as “imposter police officers armed with guns and badges,” stopped the bus on its way to the United States border, robbing the early voyagers of anything valuable. “They came onto the bus. They were robbers, and they started stealing from the people,” Tejeda said. “I remember they were like, ‘We’re taking your money, take everything you have out.’ Luckily, my mom had it in her sock… but she was left with no pampers for my baby sister [Nathalia].”
“We somehow got through the border and to Texas,” Tejeda recalled, a memory lasting 16 years now. It was the first time in her life being in the United States. Upon arriving in Texas, instant trouble arose. Texas State troopers stopped the bus, discovering Katherine, Norma, and Nathalia: three Honduran natives.
“They automatically brought us to a detention center for families,” Tejeda remembers. “It’s not as bad as we see it right now in the news, these detention centers. Now, it has only gotten worse.” After 36 hours of being detained, the persistent team of three voyagers were released and “somehow got on a plane and made it to Louisiana,” the state in which Katherine’s uncle lived at the time.
In 2019, the United States government detained over 500,000 people in a sprawling system of over 200 detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Plans to temporarily stay with their family in Louisiana quickly got shut down. “We were supposed to stay with them for a while. That’s where my mom’s immigration case was building up,” Katherine stated. Norma Urbina had been planning this voyage for years before it was put into place. Her immigration case was gaining ground with the U.S. government. Unfortunately, Hurricane Katrina had other plans for the family. “The hurricane hit on the 25th. We had gotten to Louisiana a week before. Luckily, we had time to prepare. We had time to leave.”
Already receiving his legal Visa and American worker’s permit before the rest of his family, Katherine’s father, Hector, was an established laborer in Boston at the time. With nowhere else to go, their best option now was to reunite with him. “I don’t know how, but they let us get on the plane and we came to Boston, where my Dad was,” Tejeda remembered. Katherine and her family currently live in New Bedford, MA, a populous inner-city on the waterfront south coast, located about 50 miles south of Boston and originally known for its vast whaling industry. It has been home to the Tejedas for over 16 years now and is the only place they have lived permanently in the United States.
As you could imagine, adjusting to life in another country did not come easy to Tejeda, who was only six years old at her time of arrival in the United States. “I didn’t know how to speak English. In my first three years of elementary school, I was put in a bilingual class… I got bullied a lot. I had to focus on not losing myself here in America.” Even teachers sometimes treated Katherine unfairly. “I remember in third grade my teacher didn’t let me go to lunch until I learned this specific word in English. Now I don’t think of it as a bad thing because she helped shape me into who I am today.” It is this positive outlook that has helped Katherine persevere through any obstacle life has thrown at her.
There were some noticeable life differences between her home country and her new country. “Over there [Honduras], we had a house, I had more family over there. Here [United States], I came to live in an apartment. It was just a huge change for me.”
DACA is an immigration policy that allows some individuals with unlawful presence in the U.S. after being brought to the country as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for an employment authorization document.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA) had a huge impact on Tejeda’s life in America. “The DACA program allows me to have a worker’s permit. I’m allowed to work legally. I’m allowed to go to college legally, but I’m not allowed to have financial aid.” She found out about the DACA Program in her freshman year at New Bedford High School.
Katherine continued, “I can buy a house under the DACA program. It expires, before it was every four years, but when Trump became President that changed to every two years, so now every two years I have to renew my DACA card ahead of time four months before for it to get approved.”
Norma faced more difficulties than her daughters once arriving in the United States. Since she was over the age of 31 years old, Norma did not qualify to be a DACA recipient. “When she [my mom] first came here, she did what every other Hispanic person does; they work with a fake ID, a fake name.” In 2007, Norma almost lost everything she had worked for. “She was working in a factory… she didn’t have her papers, and ICE came to raid that building. It was like a scene from the movies. They came, jumped through the windows. They took everyone who was undocumented.”
Luckily for Norma, she was working while pregnant with her third child and Katherine’s soon-to-be little sister. “They [ICE] were going to deport her, but she was pregnant with my third sister, which didn’t allow them to deport her [back to Honduras].” If it were not for her pregnancy, the Tejeda family would have been split up, once again.
In 2021, more than 30,800 immigrants have been monitored through ATD GPS tracking devices, including ankle monitors.
This is not the only interaction Norma has had with the United States government since arriving. While Katherine was in middle school, Norma was forced to wear an ankle monitor for two years. “Every month she has to report to a phone call to Immigration to make sure she isn’t fleeing the New Bedford area,” Tejeda stated. One month, their home phone got disconnected, so Norma was unable to make her monthly call. Her punishment: two years with an ankle monitor, for one missed phone call.
“That for me was very hard to watch… we would go out and she couldn’t wear dresses. She couldn’t wear heals or certain types of shoes because the ankle monitors were very, very big,”
Katherine said. In Katherine’s final year at New Bedford High School in 2018, Norma was forced to wear an ankle monitor once again. “Once [people] see that, they think you are a criminal or like you committed murder… moms would separate children from her and quickly move away from us.”
Outsiders did not understand the Tejedas’ story and were quick to stereotype or racially profile the innocent and tight-knit family who had been through more in their lives than any family deserves to go through. Through it all, Norma always found a way to keep them together by believing in God and leading by example.
“She’s a strong woman. She maintained the authority over the house and showed us to never give up,” Katherine admirably said about her mother. “Once she had her worker’s permit, she bought a house, she bought a car; she did everything an American can do as a Hispanic but she did it the right way legally. I admire her very much because of that.”
As of 2020, there were 130,132 new cases of people seeking asylum in the U.S. and 598,692 cases pending.
Norma still has plans in place for her immediate future in the United States. “She [Norma] is going to apply for asylum, which is seeking refuge from our country [Honduras],” Tejeda stated.
“We are not going to be allowed to go back there once she gets approved for it, for ten years or more, because it is like we are fleeing our home country.” Seeking asylum is a common process for immigrants to do once establishing themselves in a new country. It does not mean they are forgetting about where they came from but instead moving on to a better and more prosperous time in their lives with greater opportunities to succeed and be happy.
“I don’t think about it [the journey] every day but obviously it is part of my life. Whenever someone asks me about it or I think about it, I don’t get sad because I know it’s made me strong today. Now, I don’t really care what people say,” Tejeda said. She has embraced the struggle her entire life, and now she is reaping the benefits from it. “The ultimate goal is definitely to become legal U.S. citizens. All of us.”
Katherine and her family took their own path to where they are now. “The American dream; a white picket fence, I didn’t have that when I got here. To this day we are building the process of that.” Katherine is thriving in the U.S. but made it clear she will never forget her origins and where she came from. “If I ever have a chance to go back when we are approved for the asylum… I do hope to visit sometime. My great grandmother had ten children so I have so many cousins over there,” Tejeda said. “Whenever I have children, I want them to be born here, though… but I want them to know of my story so they can learn where they came from and know their roots.”
Katherine laughed about the irony of how far they have come as a family. “My mom owns this building that we’re living at, and we have a white picket fence in the back, so we’re slowly living the American dream.”
A special thank you to the amazing and beautiful Katherine Tejeda who allowed me to interview her to learn more about her life story and for embracing her voyage and letting it be recognized and admired.
All photos by Katherine Tejeda:
