Teresita holds a family portrait. Photo by Emilia Cárdenas.

Teresita, my aunt, was born in 1933 in a small city in Colombia’s coffee region. In the 60s, she left to live in New York. She studied social work at New York University and worked in Queens and the Bronx for more than 20 years. In the 80s, she returned to Colombia.

When I was a girl growing up in Bogotá, the United States was the place my aunt went once a year, so as not to lose her green card, she said. She would pack her suitcase in October because she liked the fall. I never knew what happened on those trips to New York every October year after year. She never talked about the New York she visited, but of the New York in which she had lived, where she had arrived at the age of 28 and whose streets she transversed spring, summer, winter, fall, visiting foster homes, talking with mothers, going in and out of the subway in the midst of snowstorms or infernal heat.

When she returned to Colombia in her 50s, she’d regale us at Sunday gatherings with stories about her life in New York, and my cousins and I would feel as if we were watching a television program on two distinct channels: that of the news and that of propaganda. On one, there was racism, domestic violence, addictions, the struggle for survival under a social system that operated with carrots and sticks. The other, the New York with her friends, the beach in the summer, elaborately decorated store windows, coffee houses and ice cream shops. She was a happy woman alone in New York with a sense of life, independent and autonomous. For me, at age 13, the United States was New York, the New York of possibilities.

One year, with sadness, Tere decided not to travel because it was a lot of money just to maintain the green card. Time passed. Several of my cousins and I went north. One traveled to Washington, another to Atlanta, another to Chicago; I went to study in a small town in Massachusetts. Tere came a few times to visit us. In one of her trips, two of her former work colleagues drove three hours to see her. None of them were working anymore in the field to knit together the community and the state. Each lived in a tiny apartment, suffering the winters and loneliness. Tere lived in Armenia, a city in the coffee region, in an apartment without winter and without loneliness. She could pay with her pension from her years of work in the United States. She received $800 monthly in her bank account, which allowed her at 80-some years to continue to be the self-sufficient woman she had managed to become in her 30s.

Not long ago, after the pandemic, she got sick and had to go to the hospital. I went to Armenia from Bogotá to visit her. In that dark room, with nurses coming and going, in the midst of her delirious state, she returned to New York. She spent hours talking with the friends of her youth, Antonio, Patrick, Melba. As I sat on the edge of her bed, I heard her make dates with her friends to meet at the Times Square station to go to the beach, to meet at the entrance of Macy’s to go to the theatre. She was back in the New York where she had been able to be a professional, independent and happy woman.

After being discharged from the hospital, Tere never walked again. In the apartment where she had always lived by herself (as she liked to), a Venezuelan woman named Liz now occupies the guest bedroom to accompany and take care of Tere. Liz recounts how her children, nephews and some of her grandchildren crossed the dangerous Darien Gap, arrived in Mexico, waited a month for a work permit and later entered the United States to get hotel work and drive Uber. This trip was in February 2024.

I go to visit Tere in October and Liz shows us videos on her cellphone of Venezuelan migrants who have managed to get a seat on an airplane. When they land in Houston, everyone claps and gives a blessing with hopes for what’s ahead. In the afternoons of this October visit, I see that Liz and Tere are reciting the rosary. They pray for my cousins and their children, for Liz’s children and grandchildren. They pray that Liz will get her turn on an airplane. Months before, she registered for a refugee program and she’s already had two interviews, including one in Bogotá. They pray that Liz can get to the United States as soon as possible, even though it’s not Tere’s New York, but Houston, where Liz’s children work as chambermaids and Uber drivers and her grandchildren go to school and learn English, hoping their grandmother will be with them by Christmas.

The year 2025 arrived and I read in the news that the refugee program had been suspended. Liz tells me over the phone, when I call to say hello to Tere, that her children are now saving money to return home. Their work permits have expired. They do not know if they will have to cross the border to Mexico and give themselves up to authorities so they will be sent back to Caracas and from there return to Colombia’s coffee region. Tere prays with her, although she does not understand that this United States Liz talks about is her United States, that of New York, in which she was a happy and independent woman in her 30s, working in the field helping to construct, like so many others, this country.

She has not noticed that the pension that always allowed her to pay for her apartment as an independent woman in Colombia’s coffee region has stopped arriving. In April, after Tere’s deliria, Liz went to take out money from the account of Teresita Giraldo, opened 50 years ago in some branch of Chase Manhattan, as she did monthly to pay Tere’s rent, but no money had arrived. The current government was no longer depositing her Social Security. They asked for proof that Tere was still living, which Tere could not give. In a wheelchair, without a green card or a visa, she could not show up to say she was among the living. Her nephews in Armenia tried to provide proof and a notary certified a document that they sent to a postal box in the Dominican Republic, as indicated, but no one understood why there. She had no social worker to help her reclaim her rights. At the beginning of May and later in June and July, Liz went to the bank to see if the government had paid what she was owed, like García Márquez’s Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a cliché but true. “How can that man do to my lovely elder lady the same thing as my government does to the old people in Caracas and Maracaibo?” Liz asked me over the telephone one day. Tere does not know that the United States of which she dreams does not exist anymore, and she does not exist for it. Liz keeps praying that the land of possibilities Tere talks about in her prayers and deliria can return to be possible.