The phrase sounds better in Spanish, the way I heard it first: “Amor con hambre no dura.” “Hungry love doesn’t last.”
I’m used to these little proverbs. I learned my first language through them, uttered by adults surrounding a coffee table, teachers reprimanding a classmate and old ladies gossiping in a bakery line.
Immigrants to the U.S. often translate their own colloquial phrases into English, packing culture and history into sentences that run too long or make no sense to native Anglophones. I, too, can pick them out, these lexical anomalies, when I hear them. I put them in a mental jar and save them for when words fail.
I collected the one I mentioned above Thursday night at the opening screening of “Madres 0.15 el minute,” or “Mothers, 15 cents a minute,” a film by director Marina Seresesky and the first of six films shown this month during the Gainesville Latino Film Festival.
The film focuses on women who have left their homes and their children to search for work and a better life in another country.
One of the women in the film has lived and worked as a housekeeper in Spain for a decade, and she sends a check every week to her parents, who take care of her daughter in Colombia. Vivian spends her free time in a telephone booth, dialing an international number over and over, wincing when the line is busy and sighing in relief when her daughter finally picks up. She asks Manuela about homework and her health in a few minutes of normal mother-daughter conversation. Then it’s time to hang up — she swallows back tears.
She missed her only daughter’s transformation from a toothy toddler into a talented, beautiful teenager. When asked why she doesn’t go back to Colombia to be with her daughter, she said “Amor con hambre no dura.”
As I walked out of the theater at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art on Thursday, the proverb echoed. I couldn’t stop thinking about the immense sacrifice of the women in the film, working to alleviate their children’s physical hunger but knowing it will never be enough to fill the void of time spent away.
I am the child of immigrants and an immigrant myself. Sending American money back to our family was what saved my parents from the initial loneliness and hardship of moving to a new country. We were lucky enough to stay together during the transition, and my parents didn’t have to raise me from a telephone booth.
Other immigrants to America aren’t as lucky.
A report by the Immigration Policy Center titled Falling Through the Cracks gives statistical evidence of the correlation between immigration enforcement and the child welfare system in America and revealed that the nation’s laws on immigration are separating families every day.
Right now, there are 5.5 million children in the U.S., mostly U.S.-born citizens, who live with at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant, according to the report.
Statistics from the Department of Homeland Security show that between July 1, 2010 and Sept. 31, 2012, the parents of 204,810 U.S. citizen children were removed from the U.S.
A dramatic rise of parental removals in recent years coincides with the immigration-enforcement policy shift that further involves the criminal justice system, stated the Immigration Policy Center report. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics, more than half of deportees in 2011 were identified as “criminal aliens,” even if they committed nonviolent offenses.
The system does not consider the fate of children who are separated from their deported parents.
Directly from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website: The 287(g) program, one of ICE’s top partnership initiatives, allows a state and local law enforcement entity to enter into a partnership with ICE under a joint Memorandum of Agreement. The state or local entity receives delegated authority for immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions.
The IPC report shows that in places with 287(g) agreements, children in foster care are 29 percent more likely to have a detained or deported parent.
If the parents still maintain the right to make the decision to take their children with them, often the choice becomes difficult if they know they would be taking their children back to a an economic wasteland or politically troubled country.
They are often forced to make the hard choice, leaving them in the states to parent from a telephone booth in their own countries.
After all, hungry love doesn’t last.
Daniela Guzman is a UF journalism senior. Her column runs on Mondays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 9/16/2013 under the headline "Our flawed immigration system impacts families"
