Center on Immigration Book Talk Series: Dreams and Nightmares – Nov 17

Posted by Cabrini University on October 27, 2020

After planning her escape from her village in northern Guatemala at fourteen, she traveled through Mexico alone, was robbed by narcos in the mountains of Chiapas, rode the boxcars of La Bestia, and organized thirty of her fellow Central American bus passengers to convince the Federales who had arrested them to allow them to continue on their way. Finally, she made it to the US border, where she was caught by US Immigration in the Arizona Desert. After four months in a detention center, she was shipped to Philadelphia and placed in foster care while the courts decided whether to deport her. After having to recount her story several times, the judge determined it was too dangerous for her to return home and finally granted her a green card. She spent a year in a horrendous foster situation with a family that took her in for the money, and eventually landed on her feet with a family that loves and protects her. She is now in high school, while she works to support her family back home and makes plans to go on to nursing school.

As Liliana says in her memoir, this is her personal story, but it is also the story of over 300,000 other minors who in the last six years have fled horrific violence and poverty in their countries in Central America and Mexico, and traveled north without their families in search of safety in the United States.

Date and Time: November 17, 2020, 7:00 PM

Read more and register: https://www.cabrini.edu/about/departments/academic-departments/school-of-humanities-and-social-sciences/center-on-immigration/center-events/center-on-immigration-book-talk-series