“I remember having a bookcase and it was full of books, and Rosita would sit on the shelf. And I would look at it – it was this juxtaposition. This poor, raggedy doll, and these books.”
Fatima grew up in Valparaiso, a rural town in the state of Zacatecas in Mexico. She was raised primarily by her mother and her grandmother.
My father, his brothers, and his father, and everybody else convinced him to travel North [to the US] for work. He would come back seasonally to visit us, send money – all that good stuff. But I was definitely raised by my mother and her sisters and my grandmother.
Fatima knew a little about “El Norte” (the North) from stories her grandmother would tell about her own travels – paved roads, multistory buildings ... It sounded like a fairytale. And, there were the dolls.
I remember these beautiful porcelain, blonde haired dolls. And that’s what we wanted to play with! It was a fight, ‘Come on Grandma, can’t you just get us a plastic doll?’
Fatima’s grandmother made the kids dolls with rags as an unappreciated substitute.
When my grandmother would make us these dolls and she’d say, ‘The plastic dolls they bend and they break, and they bake in the sun. This doll is going to last forever.’ And we’d be like, ‘No, we don’t want these dolls to last forever. We want them to go away.’
Around the time she was eight, Fatima’s father stopped coming home. Her mother traveled with her kids to the border, on a mission to find out what had become of him.
I still remember the night where she gathered up all of the kids and she’d folded up whatever she could carry into a small bag, and she said ‘Okay kids, we’re leaving.’ And I thought maybe we were going to visit my other grandmother – until, I remember looking out the bus window and thinking, ‘I do not recognize the places we are going.’ And I thought, ‘This is it.’ And I started crying because I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. ‘This is the day I’m going to God knows where.’
The family crossed the border, found Fatima’s father, and commenced life together in the US as undocumented immigrants. Fatima found herself unexpectedly longing for her dolls back home.
I remember after a few days being brave enough to ask my cousin if I could play with some of her Barbies. And I remember not feeling satisfied – like, this wasn’t what I thought my first experience playing with a Barbie would be like. And all I could think about was my rag dolls in Mexico that I didn’t get to say goodbye to because they didn’t know I was leaving them.
At the age of fourteen, Fatima’s grandmother visited them. In her bag was Rosita, Fatima’s doll (in yellow). She later acquired a second doll (in red).
I just remember falling apart as a teenager when I saw Rosita in her bag. I thought, ‘She must have read my mind. She must have known all these years that I needed that.’ I never let go of that doll since. It’s always wherever I am.
As she grew up, Fatima found in Rosita a reminder to persevere and stay strong.
She’s a reminder of the beautiful things that make me who I am, and the gratefulness to my grandmother that she was this tough old bag that wouldn’t let anyone or anything bring her down. And I want to be the same tough old bag! I remember seeing this doll, and whenever things got hard, and whenever I thought, ‘I can’t do it anymore. I’m undocumented. I can’t lie any more. I can’t live like this anymore,’ I would see the doll and think, ‘If my grandmother can do it alone, a widow with six kids, in a poor country, with nothing, who cares that I don’t have papers.’ There’s nothing stopping me from doing what I want to do, and being who I want to be.