Undocutherapists Serve Those in the Shadows
When Mayra Barragan-O’Brien was 14 years old, she and her mother were smuggled across the U.S.-Mexican border in a truck. What she remembers most about the 1300-mile journey from Guadalajara was the sweltering heat. It was so hot that the bottom of her mother’s black tennis shoe melted from hiding underneath the backseat, and she fainted so often that Mayra lost count.
They were coming to America because the violence in their neighborhood had become life-threatening. Her mother had applied unsuccessfully for a visa several times, and she felt she had no choice but to flee. So she hired a coyote to get them across the border in secret and on to a safer life in San Diego, where they would reunite with the other half of their family.
Their first stop was a Denny’s. As they walked into the diner, Mayra felt an overwhelming sense of relief for more than the air conditioning. She was grateful for her mother, who was still alive, and the menu in front of her since she hadn’t eaten for hours. She ordered a piece of chocolate cake.
While they waited, she noticed an older white couple at a nearby table were looking at them and talking quietly. One of them pulled out a phone. Mayra didn’t understand English, but the coyotes, who were listening, knew the couple had called ICE, the U.S. agency that enforces immigration laws and detains undocumented immigrants for deportation. “Vámanos, vámanos!” they whispered urgently, hustling the startled Mayra and her mother out to the truck. They drove quickly to another Denny’s, where she finally got her cake. Her mother, shaken, ordered nothing.
From that moment on, Barragan-O’Brien knew she couldn’t talk about how she came to America. A good student, education became her singular focus instead. She went on to graduate high school with honors, but it took her ten years to get an associate’s degree because she had to work – mostly at a warehouse packing frozen meat or driving a forklift. Then came the California Dream Act in 2011, which extended financial aid eligibility to undocumented students. Barragan-O’Brien seized the opportunity. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and then a master’s in counseling psychology from Cal State San Bernardino.
As she pursued this work, she reached back for inspiration to her encounters with a psychotherapist who’d taught her a mantra of hope at her most difficult moment. It was a year before the Dream Act, when she was going through a deep depression after a failed relationship, on top of feeling like there were no opportunities because of her undocumented status. At one point, her family experienced homelessness, but even some subsequent successes backfired. She discovered a relative had called ICE on her family, jealous that they had saved up enough money to buy a house.
She’d gone to the therapist bawling, she recalls, saying that she had feelings of not wanting to live anymore. He walked her through a guided meditation that kept repeating “And remember there is hope.” She felt lighter after that session, she said, and wanted to be able to do the same thing for others – to ease people’s pain.
