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Participants in the Mexico International Study Opportunity for Learning (MISOL) program at the UW-Madison Law School Center for DREAMers.
On their trip back to Mexico, Magali Tecua-Rivera, left, and Anna Villagomez Moreno participated in a workshop at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on how to make tamales.
Ana Villagomez Moreno immigrated to the United States when she was 15 years old. She did not want to leave her hometown of Guanajuato, Mexico, but her parents decided it was best for their family. They entered the U.S through the Tijuana-California border and moved to Dane County, where Moreno has lived since. When Moreno turned 30, she began struggling with her sense of belonging here.
“To Latinos here I am too Americanized, but to white people I'm still Hispanic,” says Moreno, who lives in Madison and works as a nurse manager at UW Health.
In December Moreno had a chance to travel to Mexico for the first time in 19 years. Returning to her roots in Mexico helped Moreno understand who she was.
“I came back with a whole different mindset,” says Moreno, who is a single mother of two. “I used to only see success professionally but now I see that it is when my kids are happy, when I enjoy what I'm doing no matter how much I am getting paid. My whole vision of what life is has changed since returning.”
Moreno traveled to Mexico as part of the Mexico International Study Opportunity for Learning (MISOL) program at the University of Wisconsin Law School's Center for DREAMers.
The MISOL program, which launched in 2022, offers a study abroad opportunity for DACA beneficiaries like Moreno to spend a month in Mexico. The nearly 20 MISOL participants from UW and Dane County must first apply for Advance Parole, a travel document that allows noncitizens to return lawfully after traveling temporarily outside the U.S. for humanitarian, educational or employment purposes.
DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an Obama-era program that allows undocumented immigrants a work permit and protection from deportation for a certain period of time. The program is not currently processing new applications. To have qualified for the program individuals must have: arrived in the U.S. before turning 16 and before June 15, 2007; been under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012; been enrolled in school, completed high school or been a veteran.
Erika Rosales, director of the Center for DREAMers and a member of the MISOL steering committee, says she and her colleagues, Yesenia Villalpando-Torres and Gerardo Mancilla, started the program to create opportunities for DACA beneficiaries who have not been able to return to Mexico since arriving in the U.S.
“We wanted participants to be able to go back home and reconnect with their families and learn about where they live, about their family traditions, about the history of their families and about the migration stories of their families,” says Rosales, a DACA beneficiary herself.
This August marks the second year of MISOL, and 17 DACA beneficiaries from UW and the Dane County area recently left for a month in Mexico. The program costs each participant $2,575 — $2,000 for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) program and $575 for the Advance Parole filing fee — plus independent study expenses.
Rosales says priority is given to people who have not yet been back to Mexico, or those who may be able to adjust their status when they come back. For example, DACA beneficiaries with Advance Parole who leave the U.S. and return “with inspection” are able to then apply for a marriage-based green card.
In the first two weeks of the trip, participants connect with their families. The second two weeks are spent doing more formal learning, museum visits and city tours through UNAM. For Moreno, the trip felt surreal.
“There are days that I think it was a dream,” she says. “I have to look at pictures to remind myself I actually was there.”
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Wisconsin participants in the 2022 program pose in front of the National Palace while visiting the Zocalo in Mexico City.
The Center for DREAMers provides students with DACA status access to “culturally responsive legal representation, social services and educational career services,” according to their website. The center is funded through the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, a two-year grant program that supports public engagement.
The grant ends in October, and without funding, the center and MISOL will close. Rosales says she and others at the center are looking for ways to keep it open by applying for grants and collaborating with other departments at UW.
Before leaving for Mexico last summer, Moreno was excited but also apprehensive. She feared she wasn’t going to be able to connect with her family again.
“I was going to see my aunt who helped my mom raise us for a few years,” Moreno says. “I wondered how old she was going to look when I got there. Was she going to remember me? Would she love me the same way?”
But as soon as her aunt hugged her, the fears melted away. Moreno spent the first few days grounding herself, reintroducing herself to the family she already knew and meeting the family she had not yet met.
Magali Tecua-Rivera, another member of the 2022 cohort, moved to Madison to live with her father when she was seven. Her family is from the state of Puebla, where her mother worked at a bus station and her father was a truck driver. She says that while her parents had jobs, they wanted to bring her and her brother to the U.S. to provide them with a better life. Now 32 years old, Tecua-Rivera still lives in Madison, working as a bilingual customer service agent for Exact Sciences.
She says being able to connect with the other MISOL participants was an unanticipated, but welcome, part of her experience.
“We all shared something very personal,” Tecua-Rivera says. “Being able to see our relatives and going through the same emotions all together. Sitting down with the rest of the group and talking about our experiences — what we felt when we first saw our relatives or the hometown where we grew up, that was something that we all had in common and we connected because we all understood that feeling.”
Tecua-Rivera’s grandmother died three years before she visited Mexico with MISOL, and she hadn’t been able to travel to Mexico for the burial. During her trip back, she visited her grave — an experience that brought with it complicated emotions.
“When I went to her grave, I just felt like I was a bit too late,” Tecua-Rivera says. But, she adds, “Being able to go see her grave is the one big thing that I think about from the trip. I was able to at least go see her grave and say goodbye, or I'll see you soon.”
[Editor's note: This article was corrected to note that the first cohort traveled to Mexico in December 2022, not last summer. It was also updated to clarify that the DACA program is currently not accepting new applications.]
