Saying Yes by Jeannine M. Pitas

Her name is Valentina. She is eighteen years old and five feet tall with long black hair and a sweet smile. Her favorite outfit, when she isn’t wearing a brightly colored traditional wrap dress, is hot pink stretch pants and a slightly less hot pink sweater. A senior in high school, she is sitting in the kitchen of my home, which has now become her home too.

Today in her history class she watched Saving Private Ryan and wants me to explain World War II, which she’s never learned about before. Though she attended school back home in Guatemala, her life there—which demanded much hard work on the family farm—often required absences, and while she is exceedingly intelligent—now earning top grades at a US high school—her general knowledge of world history has many holes. When I try to describe Adolf Hitler as a terrible dictator who systematically killed Jews, she asks me who the Jews are. Getting over my initial astonishment at this lack of prior knowledge, I try to explain in five minutes the world’s oldest monotheistic religion. It becomes clearer to her when she, a lifelong Christian and avid reader of the Bible, understands Judaism as the religion of Moses and Abraham, the religion practiced by Jesus. I explain that in the early 1940s, European Jews were subjected to a genocide.

At that moment, her eyes widen, all confusion dispelled. Sadly, the “g” word is one she knows. She is an Indigenous person from Guatemala, a descendant of the Mayans. In the 1980s, soon before her birth, many in her community—including her mother’s first husband—died in a genocide. Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide against Indigenous Mayan people was carried out by successive military governments between 1960 and 1996, killing at least 300,000 people. This is part of her story—but not all of it. To see her now—watching Marvel movies on her iPhone, breaking out into hysterical giggles with her boyfriend after I accidentally walk in on them kissing—she seems like any other US teenager. As the poet Walt Whitman has stated, we all contain multitudes.

♦ ♦ ♦

In the autumn of 2015, for the first time in my life, I found myself living alone.

I’d just finished a Ph.D. in Toronto and been offered a teaching position in Iowa. My decade-long romantic relationship had just ended, and, weighed down by grief over the loss, I was struggling just to get up and head to work each day. I’d chosen a sunny apartment with large, east-facing windows, having hoped that my partner would join me. He did not.

I soon learned that solitary living was not for me.

I could tolerate it in the summertime, when days were long and the sun shone brightly into my south-facing windows. But as leaves fell and days grew shorter, I found it an increasingly difficult place to come home to each night—particularly knowing that nearly all my work colleagues were going home to partners and families. I missed my lost relationship, and I also missed the big city I’d moved to Iowa from—a city where I’d had many friends and been a part of many communities. In an effort to stave off loneliness, I sought community where I could in my new home. I spent evenings working in a cafe downtown, signed up for hip hop dance classes at a nearby community center, and sang in two choirs . . . all to avoid returning to a cold, dark house where my only company was my own restless mind.

“It was your choice to keep it cold and dark,” a friend pointed out when I recently told her this story. But it seemed incredibly wasteful to leave a light on all day in an empty apartment. Instead, I’d fumble in the dark at my door, searching for my key; after some confusion I’d remove my shoes, stumble inside, and only then turn on a light.

♦ ♦ ♦

During another tutoring session, I’m tasked with teaching Valentina about the Spanish-American War, that early twentieth-century moment when the United States became an imperial power.  “Why is it that this country is so rich, when mine is so poor?” she asks. I pause, knowing that it’s going to take more than a year-long high school US history course to give her the answer to that question. High school history certainly didn’t teach it to me.

♦ ♦ ♦

I initially didn’t expect Valentina to live with me. My initial role was to visit her in the apartment she shared with friends, to make sure her basic needs were met, and also, to make sure she was enrolled in school—a requirement for a minor seeking legal status in the US.

“You can’t keep missing school,” Valentina’s older brother, who’d driven an hour to our town just to reprimand her, insisted. “Your application for legal status here depends on you attending school.”

Valentina, who’d been staying up until 2 a.m. to help close down the restaurant where she worked under the table, looked from him to me. At this point I’d been her legal guardian for a few months. Her face was flushed with anger.

“I know you want to work, but this is very important,” I said. “Your case depends on it.” Her brother translated my words into Ixil, the Mayan-derived language that was her native tongue (Spanish was her second, English her in-progress third). She did not look pleased.

“I hate school,” she said. “I don’t understand anything they’re saying. The teachers don’t help. The students don’t talk to me. It’s a total waste of time.”

In that moment, I could feel her pain. I knew a little about her suburban school with its stark, colorless architecture and mostly white, conservative student body. It was not known as a particularly culturally sensitive place. The urban school closer to where I lived was supposedly better.

And then, a light bulb flashed in my brain. “I have an idea,” I said.

They both looked at me. “What?” Valentina asked.

“You don’t have to work at that restaurant. And there’s another school you could go to. A better one, near my house,” I said. Without any premeditation, the words slipped out. “You could come and live with me.”

At that moment, the muscles in her face relaxed. The flush began to go down. She didn’t smile, but I detected a slight nod. Before she said a word, I knew her answer was “yes.”

♦ ♦ ♦

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, my evenings of dance classes and hanging out at cafes were gradually replaced by meetings of local activists gathering to discuss how we might best protect undocumented immigrants in Trump’s USA. I found myself interpreting at “Know Your Rights” training sessions led by local attorneys; on afternoons when I wasn’t teaching, I began accompanying individual immigrants to dental and immunization appointments. Any work for the cause of justice seemed crucial; though just one drop in the bucket, I yearned to make a difference.

Eventually, I learned that a nonprofit aiding local immigrants was seeking US citizens to serve as legal guardians for minors applying for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, one of the few viable paths to citizenship open to them (though getting less viable all the time). A few of my friends and acquaintances had already signed up for this role, and one suggested I do the same.

The idea of becoming a legal guardian seemed daunting. I don’t know what it was about Valentina—the light in her eyes, the warmth of her smile, the fact that prior to working the closing shift at that restaurant, she’d been enthusiastic about learning, regularly calling me to ask for help with her homework. Meeting her was like meeting the person who later becomes a significant other or a dear friend. It wasn’t an abstract sense of justice that made me invite her to live with me. It was something about who she was.

Around this time, my Christian spiritual director asked me to meditate on the Annunciation in Luke’s gospel—to read the story and imagine myself as one of the characters in it. I tried to imagine the moment when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and informs her that she’s going to be the mother of God. It is not a command, however. Faced with the possibility of scandal, stigma, accusations of adultery and capital punishment, the young, unmarried Nazarene woman has a choice to make. Filled with the Holy Spirit, she utters a faith-filled “yes.” While I initially imagined myself in the role of Mary, I would later learn that the story applied evenly to both of us. Just as I was saying “yes,” to Valentina, she was saying “yes” to me.

♦ ♦ ♦

“How was your first day?” I ask her the first August afternoon when I pick her up from school. She is grinning from ear to ear.

“Good!” she says. She tells me about her classes—ESL, algebra, a film class in which she’s already watched the first scene of The Wizard of Oz. As I steer the car in the direction of home, I feel a deep-seated pain in my heart beginning to ebb. I no longer feel that existential dread, that chilly loneliness at the thought of returning to an empty house at the end of the day. It’s been just a few weeks since Valentina moved into my apartment, bringing a microwave and a television, clearing out space for her things in the spare room I set up with her. But already, the space feels different. No longer just four walls and a place to rest my head, it is slowly becoming a home.

“Want to stop for some ice cream?” I ask with a smile, my insides swelling with a joyful excitement that I imagine as maternal. A first-day-of-school stop at the ice cream stand was always the special ritual I shared with my mother. She smiles bashfully, and within minutes we’re both delighting in cold chocolate, rainbow sprinkles, and waffle cones.

♦ ♦ ♦

“Being a guardian is about more than just getting ready for school,” says Valentina’s immigration attorney as we sit in his office to finalize the paperwork that will make her my legal ward. I’ve been waxing sentimental about the joys of being a “pretend mom.” Valentina is using the restroom at the moment, and he has taken advantage of the privacy to offer me a reality check. Ever since I began doing solidarity work with immigrants, I’ve been wary of succumbing to the “white savior complex,” and this conversation serves as another reminder. While many people are seeking to welcome Valentina to this country besides him and me—her teachers, staff at the community health center, and the new friends she is making—none of us is in any position to “save” her. Ultimately, none of us has the ability to grant her legal status in this country. “You may end up going to visit her in the county jail,” he warns.

He is speaking of another case. Valentina’s cousin has recently been caught by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) after working at a chain restaurant under a false name and social security number. She was traced, and on a routine check-in with ICE (something all undocumented immigrants in removal proceedings have to do), she was detained and jailed. Valentina’s lawyer also represents this young woman also, and while he is doing all he can to get her out of jail, the prospects don’t look good.

I don’t expect that Valentina will end up like her cousin. By nature she is a rule follower. Young immigrants applying for Special Immigrant Juvenile status are not permitted by law to work—a difficult situation for them, since in most cases that is a big part of their reason for wanting to come to the United States in the first place. Since applying for status, though, Valentina is following that rule—living with me and focusing only on school. Still, the lawyer is eager to warn me that this commitment will very likely involve more than the peaceful domestic arrangement I have in mind. With that sobering awareness, I sign the form.

♦ ♦ ♦

Despite the lawyer’s warnings, as our connection deepens, I lean into the joy of “pseudo-parenting.” I come home each night not to a dark, empty house, but to a beautiful young woman sitting at the kitchen table doing algebra homework, evangelical Christian music ringing in the background. Every morning I rise early to drive her to school. At parent/teacher conferences for the first quarter, I learn that she has made the honor roll and received rave reviews from all her teachers, particularly about her eagerness and ability to help other Guatemalan students who are struggling. She has befriended two classmates who invite her to parties and weekend concerts; she has also gotten to know a Mexican exchange student in the US on a Rotary scholarship.

Little by little, my life is changing. At least once a day, Valentina enfolds me in a warm hug. I remind her not to forget her homework, and she reminds me not to forget my lunch as we both got ready for school in the mornings. Though we don’t always share meals—she prefers her own cooking to mine—if I stay too late at the office, she calls me up and suggests going out for pizza. When I get too preoccupied with my own projects, she interrupts my plans with unexpected requests for a ride to visit her brother or do an errand—healthy limits on the self-centeredness that can develop when one lives alone. Most important, if I have a good reason to stay late at work, Valentina always leaves the kitchen light on for me.

Of course, not all moments are smooth. For a while, I allow another friend to crash on my couch for what he promises will be a few days but turn out to be a few months. He is messy and fails to clean up after himself. Due to her higher housekeeping standards, she often cleans up after him. The resentment builds to a breaking point when he uses some of her shampoo without her permission. I have to make a tough decision. Luckily, my friend does have another place to go; he parts on good terms, and we remain friends. But after that, the mood is always uneasy when he and Valentina cross paths.

But despite these occasional conflicts, most of our moments are happy ones. One day when I’m feeling particularly down, I tell her I’m having a hard time believing in God. She stared at me, perplexed. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in God? Without God you wouldn’t even be here.” That’s the end of that conversation—and in the future, whenever I struggle with faith, her words will return to my mind. Given the unbelievably dangerous journey she made to come to this country, the daily precariousness under which she lives, I can’t just shrug that statement off. More than any pastor or Bible thumper, she has the credibility to preach.

♦ ♦ ♦

I am not the only person inspired by her religious witness. One day in early spring, I invite her to give a talk in a colleague’s Religious Studies class on my campus. The name of the class is “Jesus Isn’t White,” and its purpose is to educate students on multicultural representations of Jesus. Valentina is nervous. She isn’t used to speaking in front of people. I offer her the option of speaking Spanish, with me present as interpreter. But she wants to make use of the English she’s been learning so diligently in school. Once she takes to the podium and stands before the thirty students in the small lecture hall, she begins to tell her story, and I learn things about her I’ve never known.

“From the time I was a child, I wanted to be a preacher. The problem was I didn’t have a Bible. My mom can’t read, but she told me the stories,” Valentina says.

When the course instructor asks her to share her favorite Bible story, she can’t pick just one. “My favorite story is the one about Adam and Eve in the Garden, and the way the snake tricked them, and this brought suffering and death into the world . . .but then God sent his son Jesus to save us, and he did, and thanks to him, we have faith in eternal life.”

On so many occasions I’ve found my students buried in their phones and distracted, but in this moment, all eyes are on Valentina. In the Q&A that follows, the students are brimming with questions. What is your favorite food here in the US? Deep dish Chicago pizza. What do you miss most from home? My mother. What do you like about life here? The fact that I can take time to go to a park or see a movie—back home it was just nonstop work on the farm. What do you hope to do in the future? I’d like to go to university, but first I intend to work.

When we leave the classroom, and I drive her back to her high school to finish the school day, I thank her profusely for overcoming her shyness and speaking to the students. She smiles and thanks me back. “I’d never turn down a chance to preach,” she says. I drop her off and go my way smiling. I am truly a proud “mother.”

♦ ♦ ♦

When a professional mentor read an early draft of this essay, he warned me to be careful about falling into either a white savior narrative or else what Spike Lee described as the “Magical Negro” story (where a marginalized person of color comes to the aid of a privileged white person—think The Help, or many of the movies Whoopi Goldberg has been in, or even The Shawshank Redemption). I do not believe I was ever a savior to Valentina. Whenever anyone commends me for my generosity in sharing my home, I am quick to speak of my mild depression and assert that Valentina has done more for me than I did for her. But really, the issue of who helps whom is beside the point. Why should I be seen as exceptional? In the Catholic Worker movement, in the Benedictine monastery that houses the college where I currently teach, in the pages of the gospels, and among people with limited financial resources, hosting guests in one’s home is considered normal practice. If people want to commend me, fine. But I’d much rather see a society in which forming communities beyond bloodlines and inviting friends to share one’s home is a norm rather than an exception.

As for the Magical Negro story, I can understand why some might critique my narrative for indulging in that trope: lonely, self-destructive thirty-something gets “rescued” by young Indigenous companion. “She’s your maid,” my cousin remarked when he visited soon after she moved in. I shook my head firmly. I never asked Valentina to do any housework for me; she took it upon herself to do so, mainly because she upheld a higher standard of housekeeping than I did (which included packing up many of my living room decorations and putting them in the basement—definitely not on my request)! In addition to providing her housing, I offered her rides as needed, helped with homework, bought food and clothing—in short, I was as caring of a “pretend mother” as I could be. When, at the end of that school year, she walked across the stage and received her high school diploma, I rushed down to the designated area where parents could take pictures; afterwards, I threw her a jubilant party, inviting sixty of her relatives and friends. Ours was a symbiotic relationship. Her graduation and party—which at least sixty of her extended family members attended, as well as many teachers and friends—will always be remembered as one of the most joyous moments of my life.

In the film version of our story, I’d want to end on that graduation day in June 2019, with Valentina in her blue gown, her family and friends around her. In real life, the story continues, and unfortunately, there is no happy Hollywood ending. Just a few weeks after her graduation, I accompanied her to immigration court in Omaha, Nebraska, where she’d been summoned because the time limit for getting legal status had come to an end. On that bright June day, as her brother drove her and me across the Iowa prairies to Omaha, I was truly afraid I’d be returning without her. Thankfully she was not detained—she was allowed to return with me while awaiting her status. But that was a scary moment for us all.

Soon afterwards, due to a legal disagreement over the definition of the word “juvenile” (nationally it means someone under 21, but in some states, including Iowa, it means someone under 18), Valentina was denied Special Immigration Status. All legal paths to citizenship were (and still are) closed to her. Like millions of other Americans, she is living in the United States without documentation. Today, when I read outrageous stories of ICE detaining a 70-something-year-old grandmother or deporting people to countries they’ve never resided in, I worry that Valentina or her loved ones might be next.

In the film version of this story, I wish I could have seen Valentina continue her studies, to go on to university, to leave the restaurant work for a white-collar, professional job. But after her triumphant high school graduation she stopped studying, instead working under the table once again to help her family.

Her choice was particularly challenging for me because I was a professor at a small college where, as her guardian, I could have gotten her a full scholarship to continue her studies. For a while she took an ESL course at the community college. When she decided to drop out, I was initially disappointed. “Are you going to obligate me to attend?” she asked. I shook my head “no.” She was, by now, a twenty-year-old woman; I knew I needed to respect her choices. But it was challenging to stand by as she made decisions I did not agree with.

When COVID-19 hit, we disagreed on the level of precaution to take. For the first three months of the pandemic, I stayed with my parents back in Buffalo and left her to live alone in the apartment. We stayed in touch, however, and I knew she was choosing to downplay the severity of the virus: going into public places unmasked and working as a hostess in a restaurant that required no masks. I did not want to ask her to leave. I tried to offer options—maybe I could leave, staying with a friend temporarily until the pandemic passed. Or maybe she could take this as an opportunity to quit work and further her education. But her decision was as I predicted: she continued working at the restaurant and moved in with her boyfriend. I cried as we parted, unable to hug due to fear of infection. Soon afterwards, she sent me a note telling me that she would always love me.

The immediate aftermath of our parting in 2020 is another story, but five years later, I am still honored to be a part of Valentina’s life. I became a guardian to her brother, who, since he applied for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status before turning eighteen, was able to get it. Valentina moved in with her partner and in 2022 welcomed the birth of her first child. While part of me lamented the choice to choose low-wage work and young motherhood rather than advancing her education as a path forward, I recognized the need to respect her choice. For women in her culture, motherhood is a major life goal and a main way of gaining power and agency in one’s community . . . which she has. And in the absence of legal status, her main goal was, and is, to earn and save money quickly in preparation for a future return to Guatemala, whether that return ends up being voluntary or not.

Today, Valentina is a leader in the local Guatemalan community. As a trilingual Ixil-Spanish-English speaker, she is able to serve as a support for others when they need it. She helps others find housing, to enroll their children in school, to organize parties and soccer games that have become a mainstay of the community, and whenever she can, to preach the gospel to anyone willing to hear it. I remain proud and indeed in awe of the person she is becoming.

In 2022, soon after Valentina’s daughter was born, I moved to Pittsburgh to take a new job and be closer to my aging parents. Here I have continued to do immigrant solidarity work with two local organizations, to gather with people dropping banners that say “Due Process for Immigrants” from the highway overpass, to pray outside the ICE detention center that sits just a fifteen-minute drive from my home. I am horrified by the wave of nativism we are currently seeing in the US, reminiscent of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the Red Scares of the twentieth century. I keep yearning to believe that this xenophobic moment is just a phase, that we in the US will eventually wake up to our history and remember who we are.

Meanwhile, I have stayed in touch with Valentina, always making sure to see her when I go back and visit Iowa a few times each year. Since Trump’s reelection in 2024, she and everyone in her community have tried to keep a low profile, stay calm, and go about their daily business. I am grateful to learn that Iowa is filled with immigrants’ rights activists who are doing their best to keep the community as safe as possible from ICE, to continue building structures of support. Valentina is nervous—she tells me so. But, amid the fear and anxiety, it is her faith in God’s protection and trust in the community that keeps her grounded. I am very grateful that she has stayed in touch with me, my “pseudo-daughter” now grown up, building a life for herself and her family in this land that once promised opportunity to all.

When my spiritual director first urged me to meditate on the Annunciation story, I saw myself in the role of Mary, being called unexpectedly to an unconventional maternal role, placing faith in the unknown and saying “yes.” But maybe that is not the correct story. Perhaps the visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth is a better fit: two women, one young, one old, both waiting to give birth, who encounter each other and, though that connection and friendship, simultaneously encounter the divine. Maybe neither Valentina nor I “saved” the other. Maybe we’re just pilgrims who, across barriers of age, class, race, ethnicity, national origin, and legal status, have managed to become friends. Pope Francis famously spoke of creating a “culture of encounter,” and for me, that lies at the essence of the connection we have formed and maintained across time and space. I am so grateful that, again and again, Valentina has said “yes” to me. ♦

Jeannine Pitas is a teacher, poet, scholar, freelance journalist, book reviewer, and the Spanish-English translator of several Latin American writers. Her translation of I Remember Nightfall by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators’ Association. A graduate of University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, she currently lives in western Pennsylvania and teaches literature and writing at Saint Vincent College. Or/And, her second full-length collection of poetry, is available from Paraclete Press.

Banner image: Holy Week procession, Antigua, Guatemala, 1980. Infrogmation / Wikimedia Commons / GNU