By Mark Muckenfuss

Benito Sanchez still remembers the endless walk through the desert in the moonlight. He, his four siblings and his father were part of a dozen or so people being led by a smuggler through the Arizona wilderness, skirting border security to enter the United States from Mexico.

The night was spooky for the 10-year-old. The journey had already been punctuated by encounters with rattlesnakes, cacti and hostile trees that had left his arms embedded with thorns. In the dark, those and other dangers were hard to see.

“There were these rolling hills we had to walk through,” he recalled. “You would come to the top and it would be completely dark on the other side. You had to step into the darkness and you didn’t know what was down there.”

The life that awaited him as an undocumented immigrant would be much the same – years of not knowing what lay ahead and enduring the fear of being uprooted at any moment.

That difficult path did not keep him from eventually graduating from CSUMB and landing a job in computer science, his field of study. His story is one of several being spotlighted for June’s Immigrant Heritage Month. 

As a child in Mexico, Sanchez said there was little opportunity for him and his family. 

“There’s a lot of poverty in Oaxaca,” he said of his hometown. “I went to school there, but it was difficult to get a scholarship or any money for clothes or shoes or books. I grew up being told I was wasting my time in school, that I would never learn anything.”

Poverty wasn’t the only obstacle his family faced as part of the indigenous population.  

“There are no opportunities for people who are indigenous or who speak a native dialect,” he said. “So, my parents moved to Sonora because there were farming jobs. Eventually, my father wanted to come to this country and bring my mom, without risking the kids.”

Several years later, once his parents had established themselves in Greenfield, Sanchez and his siblings crossed the border. 

It was a difficult journey, he said. They ran out of water on the second day of their four-day trek across the desert. 

“When it comes to survival, you don’t question too many things,” he said. “We came to areas where there were cows and they had watering troughs. That’s what we would drink. We would use our clothes to filter the water.”

Once he made it to Greenfield, he found a small community of Oaxacan families who also spoke the same indigenous dialect. It was a welcome feeling, but a very limited one. His family’s status made it a target.

“As soon as we got here, it was very apparent,” he said. “My dad told me right away to be very careful and to avoid the police or I could end up in Mexico. It was very scary. You go to school and you don’t know if you’ll get deported, or if your parents will get deported.” 

School presented its own challenges. He didn’t speak English and the culture was strange to him. But, unlike in Oaxaca, he was encouraged.

“My teacher would say, ‘You’re so good at math. You’re learning English so fast,’” he recalled. 

What made the biggest difference for him was the library.

“I was really amazed by the library,” he said. “I couldn’t believe they had all these books and you just had to have a library card and they would let you take them home. That was really shocking to me. I spent hours in the library. I wanted to just learn everything.”

His undocumented status limited him, however. He didn’t see any possibility of pursuing higher education. But then DACA was enacted. Sanchez applied to the program and was accepted. It changed his world. 

“I don’t fear deportation,” he said. “That took so much stress out of my life.”

He entered the CSUMB/Hartnell College, three-year computer science program. That too presented a challenge. 

“I barely survived CSUMB,” he said. “I almost failed my first computer science class.”

But he sought help from his instructors and his peers. 

“Being in a cohort helped a lot, being with similar students,” he said. “That went a long way to helping me understand things. CSUMB was really accessible. It was a really good experience.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2017, he got a job as a software engineer at Uber. The job has allowed him to remain connected with the campus. 

“There’s a partnership with CSUMB and Uber and I come back to mentor students,” Sanchez said. “I love coming here, it feels like home.”

He hopes immigrants in similar circumstances might be inspired by his story.

“I never heard stories of someone like me,” he said. “Maybe speaking up will help others who are out there.”