Immigration stories: ‘I’m disillusioned with the American dream’
Elvira Valencia, in her new rental home in Reno, says she lost everything when she had to be out of work after an automobile accident.
Tears streamed down Elvira Valencia’s face as she described the obstacles she’s had to overcome in her past year.
“Right now, I don’t know where to run to,” said Valencia, 39, of Reno, in Spanish. “Because I don’t know how to get ahead in this country anymore.”
Her life in the United States was going well, she said, until a year ago when a car she was driving was hit by a suspected drunken driver. Her injuries kept her out of work for 10 months, which made her fall back on her house payments and forced her to spend her savings.
Valencia’s home was foreclosed in the fall, and she expects her 2007 Dodge Durango to be repossessed soon.
“I lost everything — house, car, savings,” said Valencia, who’s a single mother of three sons and a daughter. “Debt is all I have now.”
Valencia came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1988 and worked as a migrant fruit picker in the farm fields of California. She came to Reno eight years ago and began working in casinos, renewing her work visa each year. Before her accident, she cleaned houses on her days off from her two full-time jobs as a machine operator at Sherwin-Williams and doing kitchen-prep at Tamarack Junction Casino & Restaurant.
She was able to keep her job at Tamarack Junction when she was well enough to work in the spring. She lost her job at Sherwin-Williams.
“I’m disillusioned with the American dream,” Valencia said. “But I have to keep going for my children. They’re so little and I need to go forward for them.
“I have to get out this. I have to.”
This article originally appeared in Reno Gazette-Journal.
