Sergio: After your mom told you couldn't go on that trip, how did that affect the way you were involved in school, the things you wanted to do, did that change? Is there anything that you...?Rodolfo: I didn't put as much effort as I did anymore. I knew, at the end of the day, I'm not eligible for scholarships. I don't get any aid, I don't get anything. In my mind I thought, “Man, what's the point of really working hard in school if at the end of the day, I'm not gonna get any help?” My mom is having to work to put me through college. No, I don't want this, so I just thought, you know what, I'm just gonna give her what she wants, my diploma, my high school diploma. From then on, if I want to do something, it'll be by my own hand, out of my own pocket. I didn't want her to... Not that I was a burden or anything, my objective was for her not to work that much. That's it.Rodolfo: After she told me that, I'm like, "Well, okay, what's the point of really working hard and putting your best effort into school if, in my position, I won't be able to surpass US citizens." Then the aspect of financial aid, or any aid at all, I'm not gonna have any of that. I tried it with the fake social, but obviously it didn't go through. Nothing happened. Yeah, it changed a lot. It changed the way I viewed everything around me. Like, spring break all my friends would go certain places out of the country, and I used to get invited and, "No, I can't go man, my family doesn't think..." It would always have to be lie after lie after lie. I didn't want to... for one, I always had that idea of like my mom and my family always told me, "Don't ever tell anybody you're an immigrant. If somebody has that knowledge they can do you harm. They can take you away from here, they can take us away from each other."Rodolfo: I'm seeing it now, with the families going across the border, and them being separated. I didn't understand it at the time, and man, now I do understand it. I didn't know how it really was until I finally got put in handcuffs and got shipped to an immigration facility.Sergio: What do you think you would have wanted or end up being before you found out? What kind of things... Like you were on debate team that was—Rodolfo: I wanted to be a lawyer, man, that's what I wanted to be. That's what I wanted to be, a lawyer. It's funny, because when I was younger I wanted to be a lawyer. Then after that I'm like, "I want to be an immigration lawyer, that's what I want to be now. I want to be an immigration lawyer.” I was already on the right track to being a lawyer, but then when that happened, it really opened my eyes more to, "Okay, let's help my people." I didn't realize... I know individuals over there who are citizens, and they're panhandling because they want to. They're on their own addiction or for whatever reason right? Or people who are just living off the government, but then I see some of my family members, or my friends’ family members and they're not citizens but they have businesses.Rodolfo: They have a business, they have trucks, they have houses, they're great. They're not living off the Government, they're not asking for a handout. They're living better than what a citizen is living. It's all about how much work you put in, right? If you hang around people who don't want to do anything, then you're not gonna do anything. I remember Gerald Ford always told me that. He was like, "If you want to be a millionaire, hang around millionaires. If you want to be successful, hang around people who do successful things, but if you want to keep doing what you're doing, and just be a little caddie or whatever, stay here. Stay here and maybe one day you'll do something else."Rodolfo: He was very blunt in that aspect like, "Always do a good job. I don't care if you're a shit-shoveler, you're gonna be the best shit shoveler there is.” That always stuck to me, that's why whatever I do, it's always been 100%.Sergio: That's good.Anita: Can I speak? I'm Anita, I'm the director of this project.Rodolfo: Okay.Anita: I'm really pleased to meet you—Sergio: Likewise.Anita: I'm amazed at your incredible story. When you talked about the trip to DC, the debate club, and you got very sad—Rodolfo: Yeah.Anita: ... what made you sad, and did it make you feeling... Do you remember what your feelings were as you sort of found that all these options were gone to you?Rodolfo: Well, it was just mixed emotions. I felt sad because I contributed to the team a lot. I wasn't just there, and it made me sad because I wasn't going to be able be with my friends, my teammates. It also made me mad because all my life, all my short period, my whole time here in Chicago or whatever, I don't think I've done anything bad. Why shouldn't I have the privilege to go if I put in the same work as they did? Only because I don't have a social security number or a document that lets me buy a plane ticket and go over there? I think about it in a different—at the same time, I was a little kid too—I just cried a lot. That night I just cried a lot because I knew I wasn't gonna go. My mom spoke to the, I'm not sure what my mom told her, but see, I don't think she told her that we're undocumented, and I can't fly.Rodolfo: Yeah, I just remember that night feeling very sad, very sad, but then it turned into anger. It was like, "Man, why can't I?" It was always just that, "Why can't I? I put in the same work, and just because I wasn't born here, I can't fly?" I even looked into bus routes and everything to DC and stuff like that, but my mom was like, "No, you're crazy, you can't go alone." She worked and everything, I just felt sad, mostly sad.

Sergio: Have you always known that you were undocumented?Rodolfo: Have I always known that I was undocumented? When I was younger, when my mother and I arrived to Chicago, I remember my aunts telling her, "Don't go out that much. Stay indoors, because if they see you, they can take you." I'm at a very young age, at that point, I think I was six or seven. Adults are talking in the room and you hear them tell your mom, "Don't go out that much. If they see you out there, they're gonna grab you." I thought like, “Whoa, who's gonna grab us, who's gonna grab mom?” I didn't understand the concept of the legal side of migration. Why we're not supposed to be here. I'd never quite fully understood why I wasn't supposed to be there.Rodolfo: Until finally, one time my stepdad, he told me, "You need to go to school and do everything that you need to do, because we're not supposed to be here." I asked him, "Why not, why can't we be here?" He told me, "We're immigrants, we come from a different country. You weren't born here, I wasn't born here, and this isn't our country. People don't want us here because they say we take their jobs. Or they have a preconceived image of what an immigrant is." I still didn't understand it yet, I didn't know why. You go to work, you pay your taxes, you do everything as my American parent's friends do.Rodolfo: Everybody... I go to their house and, yeah, they have big ‘ol houses and mansions and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, they go to work, they have a job. I don't see you out here stealing or doing anything, you're not causing any harm. Why can't we be here? He told us, "Well, I mean, that's just the way things are." I didn't understand that until obviously I grew up and then I found that out. When I finally really, really understood what an immigrant was or why I was an immigrant, it was the day that—I was in a debate team in my middle school. We won, in the whole district we won. We won the top prize. We went... Not national, I think it was... Yeah, nationwide, we were supposed to go to DC.Rodolfo: We were supposed to go to DC. I remember this then and it broke my heart, so I want to even cry now [Emotional]. Damn. I asked my mom, "Can I go?" She's like, "No you can't." I'm like, "Why?" "Because you can't fly." I'm like, "Why can't I fly?" She said, "Because you don't have a state ID, you're not from here." I'm like, "Damn." Then, I think she told the school... She made something up, but that's when I finally knew it. Like, "Damn, this shit is real, this is real." Then after that I just, "Okay, whatever, I'm just gonna see where this takes us." Yeah, that's around the time I found out.

Ben: The business started blossoming when we were in Texas. I had told my wife to give me…Within five years we'll have a house and we'll both have good vehicles, dependable vehicles, but it's going to take a while. Well within a year and a half from when I started, we bought out first house and we both had good, dependable vehicles. However, it was still tight when I took a project on in Akron, Ohio. And when I took that project on, I did not want to go up there for many reasons. One, because I had this immigration issue on me and I'm going near the Canadian border. Another, I didn't really want to be away from my family.Ben: But when these customers get persistent, "What's it going to take? What's it going to take?" And I said, "It's just out of the question. I can't go up there, I got all these jobs going on. Plus, I got bad equipment, my equipment’s old and if my equipment breaks down up there, I'm not going to be able to meet the schedules and we're all going to be in trouble.” "Is that it? Really?" The last price he had upped the price of what the contract was to pay, and the pay was fine. I had other reasons why I didn't want to go. Well when he says, "I'll throw in a brand-new texture machine on top of it, but I'll sign off on the paperwork after you complete the project.” And I go, "You'll do that?" "I'll do that and when have you known me to not keep my word?" And I go, "Done deal.”Ben: One of those texture machines, the price tag at that time was about $30,000. Right now, it's probably closer to $40,000 because we're talking about 1996. And he followed through, I came up to Akron, when I got up to Akron though, they had projects, there were projects everywhere, Kentucky, Michigan. And the pay, the pay was awesome. And that is where it really, within I think about the second month that I was up north, it just completely changed.Ben: But I hadn't seen my wife and children since I had taken off up there. So, I told her to come up there and visit and I started discuss with her. I go, "Look these other jobs,” and I had already said I was going to take them, but I didn't tell her that. I told her, she says, "What if you go to be traveling?" I go, "It's worth it to be traveling back and forth, but I'm not going to be traveling back and forth. We're going to just take the kids; we're going to move up here and we're going to be together".Ben: And so that's when I moved them to Indianapolis. We stationed in Indianapolis although I did travel quite a bit. I was on the road quite a bit because I had later ended up with jobs as far down as Orlando, Florida. And I ended up in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to repair a bunch of apartments which we had worked on before. But it was a pretty wild ride, but we really were doing really well, and it was really amazing.

the nomadic subjects