Tijuana man rejoices at being reunited with his wife but struggles with heart trouble, bleak job prospects

Their illegal journey to Denver taught them that they might be
better off together at home.

If only he could get his heart fixed.

It started when burnt-out taxi driver Amador Venegas, 43, of
Tijuana, Mexico, decided to cross into Texas.

But two weeks alone in an El Paso safe house without Blanca, his
bride of two years, was too much.

Amador still hadn’t found work. He’d labored before in U.S. potato
fields, sending money home to his previous wife, and knew how
lonely he’d be. Now with his heart trouble, he might never see
Blanca again.

“It’s a question of a man and a woman being together,” he said,
telling his story Wednesday afternoon in a Denver homeless
shelter.

So Amador telephoned Blanca in Sinaloa and told her to go to the
border.

They had no money for a high-end “coyote” who, for $1,000 or
more, could haul Blanca in a jam-packed van all the way through to
a job. Those rides are dangerous, anyway.

Amador arranged a crossing for $200, relayed directions to a house
in a colonia at the edge of Juarez.

Blanca, 32, left her kids with her mother and met the coyote. “I
had to trust him,” she said. They hiked for six hours, up and down
steep mountains.

Amador paid up at the “plaza of the alligators” (Jacinto Plaza)
in El Paso.

Now they were free. But the church-run safe house stank. “Like a
cage,” Amador said. And he wasn’t well. Medicine from a Tijuana
doctor was running out.

Migrants there dreaded the trip north. U.S. Homeland Security
agents ran a checkpoint at Las Cruces, N.M.

But Amador told Blanca: “We have to risk it. If they catch us, we
go back to Sinaloa. And if not … .”

She borrowed $57 from a mother with three kids for a bus ticket to
Denver and promised to call Amador when she got there.

At Las Cruces, two security agents boarded. Blanca sat still in the
very back row – “thinking they’ll make me get off the bus and go
back to Mexico.”

They didn’t ask for her papers.

And she made it.

Reaching Amador proved difficult. No phone. Amador followed to
Denver anyway. He wandered around lost and found a place in the
homeless shelter.

At a nearby day shelter, he telephoned the El Paso safe house. “If
Blanca calls … .”

She did. And two days later, they met in the lobby of the day
shelter. They hugged, crying.

Now they’re together whenever possible.

For $100, Blanca bought a fake work ID. She found a job cleaning at
a restaurant that brings them $180 a week – not much more than what
she earned cleaning houses in Tijuana while he drove a cab.

He went to an emergency room and got a doctor to check out his
heart. Bad news. “The operation I need costs a lot of money, more
than $50,000.” A doctor gave him medicine that has helped hugely –
“he didn’t say anything about money.”

Now by day, Amador wanders the icy streets north of downtown
looking for day jobs while Blanca cleans. In their one month here,
he’s worked about seven days.

One minute they talk about buying an apartment and getting out of
the shelter, the next about going back to Mexico.

She put her arms around him.

“I want to go back to Mexico,” he said.

She acknowledged she thinks about it, too.

“Mexico is poor – poor but noble,” he said as rush-hour traffic
whizzed past.

“Here, there’s no sun.”