8:29 PM
May 18 was a surprisingly cool day for a desert spring. Rain fell in the evening as Jonathan and Gerson prepared to go to their graduation ceremony.
Alejandro, who was still living at the trailer when he wasn't at his grandmother's apartment, had gone out.
He had told the boys he would be there for them at graduation. They were not sure if they believed him.
Gerson put on his robe and sashes at the trailer and wore them all the way to Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
Before the ceremony, all of the North High students gathered in a cavernous concrete room in the bowels of the stadium, wearing their blue robes and mortarboards. They formed into small clusters, hugging and laughing, before breaking apart and forming new groups. They were saying goodbye.
"I feel a little sad," Jonathan said. "I don't know what I am going to do next."
Teachers tried to shepherd them into alphabetical order, but in the sea of blue robes, it was nearly impossible to tell the students apart. They all looked so alike.
The graduation itself was a raucous affair. Anytime there was a quiet moment, a mother or father would yell a child's name.
After pomp and circumstance and the national anthem, Principal Telles addressed the students. "Do more than dream your dream," she told the students. "Love your dream."
The valedictorian spoke next. She was going to Europe for the summer and would enroll at the University of Southern California in the fall.
"Leave no stone unturned," she reminded her classmates.
Then the salutatorian: "Each man is the architect of his own future."
Then the senior-class president: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
---
Alejandro never showed up for the ceremony.
Since quitting high school, he had been taking some shift work cleaning hotel rooms. When he was lucky, he was assigned to the same hotel as his grandmother so they could drive in together.
He said he no longer knew what his dream was.
"This is not living," he said. "I am cleaning the hotel rooms of businessmen. And I don't even get many shifts because the hotels like the cleaning to be done by ladies."
Some days he would sleep until the evening, then maybe take a bus somewhere. He would come home late to watch movies and listen to music.
He heard from men at the trailer park that there was work in Maricopa, an hour south, picking melons for $60 a day. But he had no way to get there.
If there was any future for him at all, he thought, it was not in Arizona.
A few years back, Alejandro had joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His friend Jordie had baptized him.
By graduation time, he began thinking he should move to Utah, that things might be better there.
Jordie was planning to move to Utah with his brothers.
Jordie said his brother told him there was work there and that life was easier for an illegal immigrant.
Alejandro decided he would join them.
Any state, he thought, may be better than Arizona for an illegal immigrant.
---
Sitting in his cap and gown, Jonathan tried to imagine his future, but it felt difficult to think he was its architect.
His family was gone to Texas, and while he had the trailer, he had little else.
As the spring faded and tourists left, Jonathan's dishwashing hours declined. Money was tight again.
He kept thinking of the afternoons when he would come home from school and his mother would be cooking in the kitchen.
"Are you hungry, mijo?" she would always ask him. Then she would make him a plate of beans and rice, burritos or tamales, something to hold him until dinner.
He had been thinking of his father, too. Thinking of the afternoons when the two of them would work on the car for hours.
"Sometimes we would not talk at all," Jonathan said with a laugh. "But he taught me a lot about cars and how to fix things around the house."
Maybe he should move to Texas, Jonathan thought.
---
Sitting in his shiny blue robe, Gerson thought about what lay behind him and before him.
He had left his mother, sick with cancer and unable to care for him. He had crossed the border, lived with his father, lived on his own. He had learned English, and here he was, finally, graduating from high school.
As he waited for the moment when they could walk across the stage, he realized that all that would really matter now was his legal status.
School administrators always look the other way when it comes to a student's immigration status. Every child in their district has a right to an education.
Gerson was beginning to realize that as soon as he received his diploma, all of those protections would evaporate.
"From here on, there are so many uncertainties," he said. "But it's a great feeling. We are done."
Gerson had once promised his mother that he would return to Mexico City the day after he graduated. But that week, he told her he was going to stay.
He did not want to leave Phoenix. It was where he grew up and made his own life. His friends and his girlfriend were here .
His mother, disappointed, told him that he could stay only if he was with family. His father, after being deported, had returned to the United States, and Gerson could move in with him again.
So Gerson knew what lay before him. He would leave the trailer.
He would work and save money -- enough, maybe, to take a couple of classes at a time at a community college. Then, if things changed, he might be able to transfer to a four-year school. He was hoping for the Dream Act, federal legislation that might create a path to citizenship for young students.
He was beginning to think he might make it in Arizona.
"Yes," he would say. Then: "Maybe."
---
Toward the end of the graduation ceremony, Ben Miranda, a governing-board member in the Phoenix Union High School District, took the stage. He repeated a theme the students had heard before: All students need a supportive family.
"I want you to look around and find your family and acknowledge them!" he shouted into the microphone, and the building erupted with cheers.
The students pointed to their parents. There was clapping and stomping and shouting back and forth.
Gerson tried again not to cry. But this time, he did.
One by one, their names would be read. The students would cross the stage, shake the principal's hand, walk down a small flight of stairs and pose in front of an American flag for their official portrait.
Then, in a North High School tradition, they would shake the hand of every teacher at the school, all of whom were up along the bleachers.
When Gerson reached Mrs. Garcia, she gave him a long hug. They both were crying.
He knew how much she had done to help him. He wanted her to know that he would try to do the same someday.
Gerson whispered into her ear: "Le prometo, maestra, que voy a ser como usted cuando sea grande."
"I promise you, teacher, I will be like you when I grow up."
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