Circumstances

“Coming to America, to clean” by Ana Maria Corona was published in the US in 1993. The text is a biographical essay exploring the situation of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico to the US.

The US is a top destination country for Mexican immigrants, whether they arrive legally or illegally. This is because the US and Mexico share a border and because the US is the most developed country close to Mexico. “Coming to America, to clean” looks at the illegal immigration process in the early 1990s. For example, we find out what happened to girls that left Mexico to go to the US:

Every year some of the girls would catch the bus to Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez and try to get jobs on the other side of the frontier. Some came back to visit with nice clothes and money. Some never came back. (p. 33, ll. 2-7)

This suggests that some Mexicans living in the US would send money home while other would cut ties with their families. It also suggests that some had bad experiences in America that either made them too ashamed to go home or that meant they were unable to leave...