Opinion: Prevailing Over Bureaucracy and Politics, My Blended Family Celebrates a Binational Christmas

In a small vase in my husband’s grandmother’s house is a dried bouquet of miniature roses, no larger than your hand. Two years ago, my own grandmother bought them on the street in Mexico City for something like a dollar, and gave them to her. It was the day before our wedding, the first time Licha and Sue, both in their 80s, met — and we thought it would probably also be the last.

On our wedding night, they danced together, unable to speak a word the other could understand but joined by circumstance and also, perhaps, by something less tangible: Each recognizing another woman who was kind and stubborn, soft despite circumstances meant to harden her. The video of them together, hands clasped, is among my favorites from that night.

My husband and I decided to get married in Mexico for both romantic and logistical reasons. The romantic: It was where our love story began, where we had built our life together. The logistical: Americans can enter Mexico without a visa, whereas Ricardo’s family needed one to go to the States.

The current wait time in Mexico City to get an appointment for a tourist visa is 245 days. At the time we were planning our wedding, the waiting list was close to two years. The application requires a nonrefundable fee of $185 and involves navigating several baffling, contradictory layers of bureaucracy, including an English application form on a website that appears to have been in use since 1993.

Every wedding has a sense of unrepeatability. But in the days after ours, my husband and I were keenly aware that it wasn’t simply that our families likely wouldn’t come together again, it was that they probably couldn’t.

Accordingly, we began dividing up the important moments of our lives. We would spend Christmas Eve with Ricardo’s family in Puebla, then drive back to Mexico City on Christmas Day to catch a flight to Arizona. In the U.S., my family began celebrating Christmas on Dec. 26, and both our families began sending gifts back and forth. After I told Licha that Sue’s mother, my great-grandmother, collected dolls, Licha sent Sue a typical poblana doll.

When I told Sue that Licha was sensitive to the cold, she sent her a blanket she had crocheted. We bought Licha and Pancho, my husband’s grandfather, a digital frame, and sent them photos of us celebrating New Year’s with my family in the snow, which they had never before touched.

My parents and brother have visited Licha and Pancho in Puebla a few times. They were mostly unable to talk to one another, but we made do with telephone-style translation, hand gestures, and the universal language of food. My husband and I felt like a window was opening up between our two worlds. But the window only opened in one direction.

At some point, we wondered: Did it have to be that way? We asked Licha and Pancho: Would they want to see Christmas in the U.S.? They did.

Licha and Pancho had never left the country, and they didn’t have passports. Getting them should have been a straightforward endeavor: submit the documents, pay the fee, attend the appointment.

Shortly before Christmas last year, we arrived at the government office early on the appointed morning, paperwork assembled, Licha and Pancho dressed in their best clothes. That was when we ran into the first hiccup: Pancho’s birth certificate, for reasons not precisely understood, had been issued some 30 years after he was born, and the passport office wouldn’t accept it.

They told us we would need to collect Pancho’s parents’ birth certificates or marriage license — an improbable prospect, as they were born more than a century ago. A sibling’s birth certificate would do, but here, another problem: Pancho’s brother’s certificate didn’t include their parents’ names. It, too, was rejected.

And so began a Groundhog Day-like rotation of document collection, Saturday morning appointments at the passport office, weekend drives to Puebla, and rejections that lasted for the next six months. In June, some bureaucratic miracle parted the clouds and, finally, the passports were approved. Licha and Pancho leafed through the small green books with their names, proud and excited.

Now we had to pivot from the layered, idiosyncratic, and inefficient bureaucratic apparatus of Mexico to the differently confounding one of the U.S. I filled out the visa applications online: personal information, travel history, work history, a series of yes/no questions: Are you planning on committing polygamy in the U.S.? Have you ever committed genocide?

Later, it was time to create an account on another system that generated a payment form that was only valid for one day and could only be completed in-person at two approved banks. Ricardo and I messed that part up and would have lost $400, had it not been for the mercy of a kind bank customer service rep.

I was familiar with this process — many years ago, I had helped Ricardo apply for his own tourist visa, and later we filled out similar forms to apply for his green card (a complex, years-long process we’re still in the middle of). And yet, as I went through the steps for my 80-something in-laws, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a cruel bureaucracy, designed to frustrate, discourage, trip up. The system would crash with no explanation, require different log-ins, hide complex instructions. It would knock you down, weed you out.

Finally, some eight months after our first passport appointment, I secured a slot to drop off my in-laws’ documents at a processing center in Mexico City. A staff member rifled through my manila folder and pointed to their photos — they wouldn’t be accepted. The offense? Small earrings pierced Licha’s partially visible ears, and you couldn’t see the whites of Pancho’s eyes, which were set back into his face, creased and shrunken by age. I would need new photos — which meant another trip to the photo studio, another trip to Puebla, another appointment.

The employee of a visa assistance shop near the embassy, hovering like a hawk near the line, quickly swept in, promising a solution and leading me to a small office three blocks away. Meanwhile, an aunt frantically texted pictures of Licha and Pancho, standing against a white wall outside their house. None quite complied with the photo requirements. Pancho couldn’t seem to open his eyes wide enough to make the whites clearly visible, and there was no way to position Licha so that you could clearly see both the lobes and the tops of her ears. In a last-ditch attempt, Licha shoved cotton balls behind her shriveled earlobes. Another bureaucratic miracle: The visa hawk printed the photos, charging me five times what it would’ve cost at a normal photo studio, and the embassy reluctantly accepted them.

There was one final hurdle: I could pick up the visas at the embassy processing center in Mexico City, but would need a notarized letter from Licha and Pancho, signed exactly as they had signed their passports. Licha’s shaky hands couldn’t precisely replicate her signature, so she and Pancho bought bus tickets (six hours roundtrip) and we all went to the embassy processing center together. They showed up, again, in their best clothes. They posed for photos, beaming. We Googled images of U.S. landmarks. The next week, we booked their flights to spend Christmas in Arizona.

My family has been getting ready to welcome them. My brother got a Spanish tutor and practices nearly every day. My dad made a list of must-sees. My grandparents ask about Licha and Pancho every time we talk: They’re still coming, right? We hope they’ll be able to touch snow for the first time.

Licha and Pancho, meanwhile, are giddy: What will we see, what will we do, what will we eat? The last time Ricardo and I visited Puebla, they showed us the new suitcases they had purchased: Vitamins will go here, clothes here, shoes here.

After the results of the election, a colleague asked me: Will they still come? The answer was yes, but the impetus behind the question haunted me: What did it mean to introduce Licha and Pancho to the U.S. at this moment? To introduce them to a country that had, I believe, voted as it did because of economic anxiety and anti-incumbent sentiment — but in doing so, had also voted against mixed-citizenship families like the one Ricardo and I are building? For years, in Sue’s house, there’s been a framed photo of Trump. How do I hold that photo together with the image of Sue and Licha dancing together at our wedding? If our families could speak to each other more easily, what would they say?

As improbable as it once seemed, this will be our family’s first blended, bicultural Christmas. My binational family is messy, complex, and beautiful, and I suspect our Christmas will be the same. We’re held together by dried bouquets of miniature roses, bureaucratic miracles, and a desire to see and understand one another—or at least to keep trying.

It is cliché to the point of emptiness to say that the greatest gift is being together. And yet this year, it is true: We fought to bring our families together, to make the window open both ways. That is a present that will last.

Mia Armstrong-López is an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square and a managing editor at ASU Media Enterprise. She lives in Mexico City.