Four children. One passport. Three less fees. Their white shirts blend together into one curtain of folded fabric, buttons going down the middle. Their original colors have been forgotten. “FOTOGRAFÍA” sits above their heads like the title of their book. They are motionless like a photograph. Their childlike faces have been shaped into those of stern adults. The little one has yet to catch up. The more expressionless they are, the more recognizable they’ll be. Boy, will they be unrecognizable.

A year flies by. One long train ride awaits them. Fourteen hundred miles. The name “Mexicali” sits in their heads like a magnet attracted to an invisible force. Two worlds collided under one name. The outline of their passport is visible through their grandmother’s bag. Way up North, their mother awaits.

Months fly by. The American Dream is only a mile away. It doesn’t move, but neither do they. If only they could reach it. But their arms are too short. Their hopes are too high up, singing with The Angels. They wait too long. They move a mile a month.

The passport moves with them, slow as their journey may be. It is a time capsule, paper thin. Now, they can never forget their past. The day comes. The date is drilled into their heads: January 16th, 1963. It remains like a hole in their curtain, never to be sewn up.

The Angels are no heaven. The Gardens do not ring with Bells. Chocolate does not mix well with cold, watered down milk. They mature at the speed of sound, the time it takes for the slurs to break through their glass window.

Six humans. One bedroom. And they say you can’t live in Los Angeles without a car. “Is this the American Dream?,” they wonder while laying in bed at night, shoulder-to-shoulder. The white picket-fence has been submerged in concrete. The clean-cut green grass has gone brown.

The hope in their eyes lives in their passport. They cling on to it for dear life. A moment in time, saved forever. The day they will go back, they are still unsure of. Surely that date will leave a stain in their minds, whenever it comes.

Note: “The Gardens do not ring with Bells” refers to the city my grandfather moved to in Los Angeles, called “Bell Gardens.”