My 14 year old teacher

December 11, 2018

     Yesterday I spent some time in the home of a family of illegal immigrants from Guatemala. I’m opposed to illegal immigration. I really like these people. 

     I visit them every year for a government health study I’ve been doing for several years. I work for a non-profit survey research company, and as part of my job as a bilingual field interviewer I visit the same individuals and families every year, as well as cold calling additional addresses to add to our sample. Most of the interviews I do are in English, but some are in Spanish. The Spanish-speaking families are almost always illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, though their kids are usually born here and as a result are English-speaking American citizens. 

     So it is with the Guatemalan family I visited yesterday. I can’t reveal their real names or location for privacy reasons. They live in a tiny trailer in a trailer park in a medium-sized city in California. The father makes a little more money than I do, but I’m single whereas he is supporting a family of four. His wife looks after the two boys, and it’s the teenage boy who has been selected to be the subject of my yearly interview. I’ll call him Juan. 

     When I first approached Juan’s parents they were understandably leery of letting a white man with a badge into their home. I introduced myself and the study, giving them literature and explaining that their address was selected at random to be part of a representative sample of the American public. I assured them that their answers and identities would be confidential, and that I would pay whoever is chosen to be part of our study. But it’s always a tough sell, even though I’m not selling anything, and it’s especially difficult to overcome the fears of some of our Spanish-speaking residents. Many of them have little or no education, and they come from countries where the concept of a government survey is foreign to them. Add to that their lack of legal status, and you can see what I’m up against. But somehow I managed to convince them to talk to me. Now after several visits they know me, and I just call to make an appointment. 

     So yesterday I sat at the tiny kitchen table in the cramped little trailer and spoke first with the mom, to get some basic information as well as to receive her permission to speak again with Juan. Then it was Juan’s turn to speak with me. 

     Like most of the teenagers I interview, Juan is shy with me. A skinny kid with a baseball cap, he’s unfailingly polite, but says very little unless prompted. I know almost nothing about him, except that he’s 14, prefers to answer questions in English rather than Spanish, and shares one of four little bunk beds next to the kitchen with his parents and little brother. I turned my laptop over to him, and let him answer the questionnaire on his own. 

     Once he finished, I paid him $60. He showed no emotion, just  thanked me. Sometimes my teen respondents or their parents tell me what the teen will buy with their windfall. I almost never ask. But this time, in an effort to draw Juan out of his polite solitude, I said “What are you going to do with your money?” He said simply, “Christmas presents,” and nodded in the direction of his mother and little brother. 

     Here’s a family with next to nothing, and the teen has a chance to buy himself music or clothes or whatever teenagers buy these days, and what is he going to buy? Something for his mother and father and little brother. 

     No, I’m not in favor of open borders. But I love this little family in their tiny trailer.