Miriam Hernandez works long hours to pay the bills at her family's trailer. Her mother has a bad back and knee. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
Reporting from Athens, Ga.—
When she is at home, Miriam Hernandez eats fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. And corn bread. And corn tortillas.
She has a little sister, Ana Maria, whom everybody calls Guera -- Spanish for blondie. She has a little brother, Jesus. Everybody calls him Bubba.
She sings along to Sinaloan bandas when she is busing tables at her uncle's Mexican restaurant out by the shuttered chicken plant. She sings along to country hit-maker Luke Bryant when she's driving in the family van with her white Southern mother.
She is 16 years old, and a native-born Georgian. She has a learner's permit and would like to take the driving class that would allow her to get a license -- that elusive prize so many of her foreign-born friends will never have.
The class costs $230, but the money from her two jobs is spoken for. Since her stepfather, an illegal immigrant named Abigail Carrillos, returned to El Salvador to avoid a forced deportation, she has stepped up as the family's main breadwinner.
In October, unpaid bills nearly prompted the utility to shut off power to the family home, a single-wide trailer with a leaking roof, gashes in the rain-softened drywall, and a framed photo of Abigail staring down at his family from the vantage of some happier past.
Which is why Miriam drives through Athens tentatively -- overcompensating, at times, with a litany of sass.
"Trust me, I'm not gonna hit your ugly car."
Donna has been pushing Miriam to acquire the means to vault beyond such troubles for good. She is a sophomore, but is taking enough classes to graduate a year early.
On Friday morning, the kids were dressing and primping for school, Miriam in an '80s-style off-the-shoulder T-shirt, with big hoop earrings and stylish rectangular glasses.
"Me traes Q-Tips, please?" she yelled to Guera. Her sister handed them over.
One of Miriam's homies stopped in and drove her and Guera to class. She has two kinds of friends at school, she says. The Latino kids, her homies. And what she calls her "academic friends" -- the white kids in her college prep classes, though she rarely hangs out with them after school. She doesn't hang out with the black kids.
She and Ana may be half white, but in the self-segregating culture of high school they are lumped with the Latinos. So that is what they consider themselves, and proudly so. When they visit their step-grandmother in Alabama, they bristle when she tells them to stop with all the Spanish.
In the short term, Miriam wants her brother to gain a little self-confidence, maybe through sports. She wants Guera, who has a wild streak, to keep out of trouble. Guera, 15, is already in ROTC, which Miriam considers a positive step. "They teach you how to be a good citizen," she says. "That's one of our goals."
She wants Abigail to come home and for her mother to be happy again.
She wants to make enough money to pay for more than utilities. Her mother's intermittent contributions to the family income come from informal work as a fixer of sorts, the gringa you call when you are being picked up by police or become otherwise entangled with government. She works for tips or, if tips aren't forthcoming, for free.
On Friday evening, Donna raced off when a man named Manuel called to say he'd had a fender-bender with a BMW. With her mother away in the van, Miriam had no way to get to her housekeeping job.
The next morning, she was hustling around her uncle's restaurant, serving pozole and sopa de mariscos to patrons longing for a taste of home and to adventurous college kids lured, perhaps, by the five-star reviews on Yelp. ("Don't worry about the skuzzy location: just go here."). A black woman wandered in. She had grown fond of the tripe.
Miriam's uncle said the job was the best gift he could give her. He could just give her the cash, but what would that teach her about the way the world works?
Latimes.com
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