Terry Gross

Can we talk about that without worrying about your family being deported now?

How old were you when your mother became a citizen?

And what was it like for you when the National Guard troops and Marines were just showing up in L.A.?

It was kind of unbelievable.

You grew up in a border town on the American side of the Texas border, and the town was just about all Mexican and Mexican-American.

And you used to cross over the border a lot to visit family on the other side in Mexico.

What was crossing the border like then?

This was in the 1980s during the Reagan administration.

Your mother raised you, your sister, and two brothers, that's four kids, on her own, and she was on her own because she left her abusive husband.

Would you describe how she ended up being married to him against her will?

So this is at the point where they're already in the U.S.?

I'm thinking of how brave your mother must have been to be in the U.S., undocumented, pregnant with you, three other children she had, and leave your husband, have no real income.

She ended up working at restaurants, but they were not exactly high-paying jobs.

She didn't have a home.

Was she very brave in other ways, too?

Yeah.

She couldn't be there to protect you because she had to work.

Yeah.

So your family was so poor, and your mother was supporting the family, four children on her own.

What kind of job did she have?