The story of Raul Garcia, a good-looking young man who's quick to smile and extraordinarily easy to talk to, is much more typical. When he was two years old, Raul's mother carried him over the U.S. border on her back. Unlike Lorella, Raul grew up in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Hartford and got caught up with the wrong crew. In middle school, he started dealing drugs, carrying a freezer bag of cocaine and ecstasy wherever he went.
After graduating from high school, Raul stopped dealing and enrolled at a local community college using a fake social security number and much of the family's savings. He graduated with honors in communications in May of 2010, but the most meaningful part of his college experience was co-founding a program dedicated to tutoring high schoolers from Hartford's poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Raul's face lights up when he talks about this -- in an ideal world, he would devote his time to tutoring and mentoring at-risk teenagers.
Instead of turning his passion for mentoring teenagers into a career, Raul stands by himself in front of a 12-foot long printing machine for nine hours each day. A giant roll of paper spans the length of the machine, and onto it, Raul prints applications for things he can't apply for. "I have a lot of time to daydream," he says in a matter-of-fact tone. "In my head, I plan all these things I want to do. These fundraisers, these programs I want to start."
The printing factory was the only employer Raul could find willing to risk breaking a federal law by overlooking his status. Raul is slowly working towards a BA at the University of Connecticut, but because he can't apply for financial aid, he can only take one class at a time. He's wanted to marry Andrea, an American citizen and the mother of his two-year-old son, for years, but because he didn't come to the country with a visa to begin with, he would have to leave the country first and then prove that Andrea faces "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship" without him there.
Perhaps more depressing than all this is the fact that Raul may be paying for his mistakes for a long time. Because he didn't know to leave the social security number blank on his community college application, for example, he may have unknowingly created legal barriers to his eligibility for the DREAM Act if the act ever passes. Because his parents have no savings, and because he spent his high school years befriending drug dealers and not, like some C4Ders, befriending Americans who could help him pay for college, he pays for his college education alone. And because he now works, takes classes, and cares for his family, Raul hasn't made time to inform himself about opportunities for undocumented students.
When I ask Raul how he manages to stay positive while living with so many barriers to his success, his usual charismatic smile gives way to a tired, dejected look. "I have to put up a front," he says quietly, "But it's like a psychological prison."
Realistically, Raul may already be a lost cause -- in fact, he is seriously considering leaving Andrea and his son to make a life for himself in South America. But his situation is still better than it was 10 years ago because he is part of a community of students who are getting sick, as Lorella puts it, of "viviendo en las sombras" -- of living in the shadows. The budding movement's literature circulates among friends, and every two weeks, new people crowd into C4D's office for meetings. Its members drive long distances without licenses to speak at workshops in the hopes of motivating just a few high schoolers to envision lives beyond rock-bottom wages and the overbearing fear of deportation.
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