The call came on a Tuesday night.
My mamá had gone into cardiac arrest. She was in the ICU, in another country, and I was here — standing in my kitchen, holding a phone that suddenly felt like a wall I couldn't climb over.
I paced. I paced for three nights straight.
Not because I didn't know what to do. I know exactly what to do in a crisis. That's kind of my thing. But there was nothing to do. No flight I could put my kids on. No visa waiver to invoke. No emergency lane for the kind of separation we've built into our system — the kind where a US citizen watches her mother undergo pacemaker surgery over FaceTime because that's the only window available to her.
She survived. Dios mío, she survived. And we were able to get reliable caregivers in time. But those three nights of pacing — they clarified something for me that I'd been holding loosely for months.
The distance isn't just geographic. It has a name: policy. It has an address: our political moment. And it lands in your body at 2 a.m. when you can't get to the person you love.
The last eighteen months have given me a master class in that kind of distance.
I've watched neighbors — people my kids know by name, whose kids play with my kids — get pulled out of their lives on their way to work. Not at a border crossing. At 7 a.m. on a Tuesday, between the house and the car. Taken.
I've watched US-born classmates say goodbye to best friends who are joining their deported parents. Not because those children chose to leave, but because the alternative is to stay here without a parent. Some families are splitting in two just to survive.
I've watched our community ecosystems reshape themselves in real time: aunts stepping in as primary caregivers, siblings redistributing income, children becoming translators for their grandparents in a country they've never lived in. We are constantly reassigning roles to keep things moving.
And here's what I know from living inside this: we are extraordinarily good at surviving. What we lack is infrastructure for it.
I am a US citizen. I have a career that can exist beyond borders if it needs to. I can say, with full awareness of what that means, that I have privilege in this moment — real, material privilege that most of the people around me don't have.
I also remember what it felt like not to have it.
I relocated to Mexico myself as a young adult, while I was adjusting my status. The word "temporarily" does a lot of work in that sentence — it's doing the work of hiding how disorienting that time actually was.
Because Mexico is not foreign to me. It's home in a deep way. But navigating it as a young adult with imperfect Spanish, with siblings who were in the same position, with a relationship to the country that was emotional but not always practical — that was its own kind of education.
My Spanish lives in my mouth one way and in my head another. I'd reach for a word and find the formal version, the textbook version, the version that sounds like I learned it from a worksheet instead of a kitchen. My siblings and I would laugh about it, and then feel the small sting of that laugh. We loved this country. We just didn't always know how to move through it without tripping.
Hope works like a spreadsheet. You start it small, just for yourself, just to keep track. And then one day you look at it and realize it might help someone else track too.
That's what happened with this project.
I've had a running document for years. Resources, contacts, things I wished I'd known. Whenever a friend or a family member or a colleague had to relocate, I'd pull it up and share it. It was a private thing. A survival document. Something I built for myself that I kept offering to other people because I couldn't stand watching them start from zero.
Eight months ago, the pace of forced relocations in my community accelerated so fast that the document couldn't keep up. People weren't just relocating — they were being pushed across a border with no preparation, no network, no roadmap for the country they were landing in.
So I built something. With my newest tech confidence (which is its own story), I turned the spreadsheet into a website: semillasmonarca.com.
It is not exhaustive. It is not perfect. It does not have all the answers, and it doesn't pretend to.
What it has: bilingual practical guidance for people who've been forced to relocate to Mexico — first steps, documents, work, housing, how to navigate systems when you've been away. Written for people who love Mexico and are still figuring out how to move through it. Written for the younger version of me and the many people I know who are living this right now.
It's free. No sign-up. No cost. Así es.
The work I am lucky enough to do has always been personal. Civic tech, election protection, community infrastructure — these things aren't abstract to me. They are the difference between someone making it and someone not making it. That's always been true. The last eighteen months have just made it impossible to look away from.
My mamá is home from the hospital now. She has a pacemaker and reliable people around her and a daughter who FaceTimes her every day. We are managing the distance, the way families always manage it: with love and logistics and the particular creativity that comes from having no other option.
ándale. Here's what I'm asking.