His big sister, Naomi, is Bobby de la Rosa‘s “best, best, best, best friend.”
“She makes me laugh when I’m sad,” says Bobby, 10. “She hugs me when I’m scared and teaches me not to be scared.”
He’s been sad and scared too often in the last six years. In 2009, when Bobby was not yet 4, his mother left Tucson for an appointment in Juarez to get a green card. Instead, she was banned from returning to the United States for a decade because years prior she crossed illegally after overstaying a visa.
During the weekends that Bobby and Naomi spend at their mother’s small apartment in Nogales, Sonora, Gloria de la Rosa often finds them cuddling, holding hands while they sleep.
In 2011, when their elderly father was in the hospital from a collapsed lung and their mother couldn’t visit, Naomi worked hard to keep Bobby’s spirits high.
“She told me if I’m gonna cry to just make myself laugh, think of something funny,” he says. “Or she would make me laugh by making me watch videos or say jokes.”
One time she even took him to a parent-teacher conference.
“I come to represent the father,” Naomi, then 11, confidently told the teachers when they asked who she was.
In many ways, Naomi is equal parts big sister, best friend and mom to Bobby.
The day everything changed, Bobby had gone with his parents to Juarez, not really sure what was going on. He remembers coming back to Tucson after visiting his abuela Maria in Zacatecas, having no idea that his mother would have to stay in Mexico until Bobby turned 14.
At first he lived with his father in Tucson, but then Arsenio de la Rosa had a stroke and Gloria decided it would be best for Bobby to move to Nogales, Sonora with her and enrolled him in first grade.
When he was in Nogales, he missed his sister, his brothers, his dad. But when he was in Tucson he missed his mom and his friends.
“It was confusing,” he says.
After a year, the family decided he needed to move back to Tucson.
You can’t be selfish, older brothers Bill and Jim told their mother — Bobby should have the same opportunities we have. Besides, he is a U.S. citizen. What good will a Mexican education do him?
So she let go.
The situation is fraught with challenges. Bobby feels sad that he doesn’t see his mom when he comes home from school. And he is struggling in class. Several times the school has called big brother Bill or family friend Lety Rodriguez to say he is behind in his reading.
Rodriguez thinks it’s all part of having a family divided.
“When his dad was in the bathroom or in his bedroom, I would ask, ‘Mijo what’s going on? You have to apply yourself so you can read at least 20 minutes a day’ and he would stay quiet and stare at the picture of his mom,” Rodriguez says.
One day, his teacher was reading a story about an orphan and Bobby started crying. It hit him, he said later: His mother was away in Mexico and his father, who is in poor health, could die.
He would be left without parents. The thought still frightens him today.
With time, he has come to understand a little bit about immigration and why his family is separated.
Last school year, Democratic U.S. Congressman Raúl Grijalva stopped by Mission View Elementary School to talk to the students. As he was talking about his roots and his support for the community, Bobby raised his hand.
“How do you help people cross the border that are separated from their family like my mom?” he asked, so softly that someone had to repeat the question for the Arizona congressman.
A few weeks later, at Grijalva’s invitation, Bobby shared his family’s story before about 200 people, including U.S. congressmen, during an immigration forum at Pima Community College.
“I try not to be sad knowing I will have to leave without her back to the United States, where we live her dreams for her of a good education,” he read from a speech he had practiced for many afternoons with his counselor, Liz Hoover.
“The immigration laws have kept my mother away but not her spirit, her words and her hope that motivate her kids,” he continued. Naomi recorded the speech with her phone from the front row and reassured him with a smile. Many in the audience were in tears.
What Bobby wanted people to understand, he says, is that “it’s not fair that kids could only be with one parent and that the kids would have to go to the mom to see her and that the mom couldn’t come to them. It’s hard to live like that.”
So much about it is hard. Every year since starting school, Bobby got extra help from an after-school program. But this year he has to go straight home to stay with his dad until Naomi gets off school.
“I need to help him get up so he can start walking,” he says, and then he starts to cry. “What worries me is that he falls and hits his head or something like that, because Jim is going to have to start going to college at 2:15 p.m. and I get home at 2:40 p.m.”
Those are the things that worry him the most.
“I think about my dad and how his health is and my mom and how she’s far away from him,” he says. “And Naomi is going to go to college and I’m not going to be close to her and Bill’s not always gonna be here. Jim might be the only one that I would be able to talk to, or my friends.”
When he thinks scary thoughts like that, he tries to go back to his video games so he can stop thinking them.
But sometimes it helps him to think about his brother Jim, who moved back home to play with him and to make him laugh.
Jim has become Bobby’s other best, best, best friend.
