Guillermo Rivera was only a few years old when his family fell apart.
It was 1984, and his parents were getting divorced. He stayed in the United States with his father. His sister, Patricia Salazar Rivera, went to Mexico with her mother, who was undocumented and had no choice but to agree when the father asked to take the girl with him. No one deliberately chose that fate: things simply fell into place that way for a family split in half, and the ocean of immigration paperwork did the rest. More than three decades passed without hearing each other’s voice.
It wasn’t until 2017 that they managed to speak for the first time. Two days later, Guillermo was waiting for her at Los Angeles International Airport. When Patricia walked through the arrivals door, thirty-some years of silence dissolved into an embrace neither of them thought they would ever share again.