The Mexican Couple Planning to Self-Deport

"Lily García was ready for her seventeenth-birthday party well before it started. On a late-summer afternoon in San Bernardino, California, the high-school senior stood in the cool shade of her family's covered back patio, wearing a black tank top and high-waisted jeans. As always, her mother, Rosalinda, had gone all out with the preparations. Traditional multicolored Mexican fabrics were draped across tables and benches. Two men from a party-rentals company were testing the controls for a mechanical bull they'd set up in the back yard. A mini-fridge was stocked with soda, and small bags of Cheetos and Doritos were neatly arranged in a basket. It was two-thirty in the afternoon; her friends weren't even invited until five. "And that's 'Mexican time,'" Lily said, smiling, before heading off to her room to double-check her makeup."

"At the counter of the family's outdoor kitchen, Rosalinda was preparing a huge tub of ceviche, chopping shrimp and cucumbers and limes; it had become a signature dish of hers, and she sometimes sold it to neighbors when the family needed extra cash. Her son, José, the oldest of her three children, sat at the head of a long table. "She seems excited," Rosalinda said to José, in Spanish. "Yeah," José replied, in English, a bit distracted. (The family's names have been changed.) The twenty-eight-year-old, who worked as a scientist at a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles, was studying his laptop screen. He was using Google Maps to look at Mazatlán, a city on the Pacific coast of Mexico."

A Mexican couple in California contemplates self-deportation to evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement, planning to leave their U.S.-born children in the United States until legal adulthood. Daily life combines celebration and ordinary domestic routines with underlying anxiety about immigration status and financial survival, including informal food sales. The oldest son researches Mexico while balancing work in Los Angeles, revealing transnational ties and possible departure planning. The family navigates cultural traditions, economic pressures, and the looming prospect of separation as they weigh the risks and consequences of leaving or staying.

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