Migrant retakes life's reins in Mexico

Brought to the U.S. as a baby, the L.A. man without papers trades worry and fear for agency and hope.

- BY ANDREA CASTILLO

ROBERT GAUTHIER Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES-RAISED Hector Alessandro Negrete waits to board his flight from Tijuana to Guadalajara.

On an overcast morning in September, Hector Alessandro Negrete left his beloved Los Angeles — the city he was brought to at 3 months old — and headed down Interstate 5 to Mexico, the only country where he held a passport.

It was a place that, to him, had “always felt like both a wound and a possibility.”

Negrete, 43, sat in the passenger seat as a friend steered the car south and two more friends in another car followed. He had condensed his life to three full suitcases and his dachshund mix, Lorca.

They pulled over at the beach in San Clemente. Angel Martinez, his soon-to-be former roommate, is deeply spiritual, and his favorite prayer spot is the ocean, so he prayed that Negrete would be blessed and protected — and Lorca too — as they began a new stage in their lives.

On the near-empty beach, the friends embraced and wiped away tears. Martinez handed Negrete a small watermelon.

As instructed, Negrete walked to the edge of the water, said his own prayer and, as a gift of thanks to the cosmos, plopped it into a crashing wave.

Negrete doesn't call it self-deportation.

"Self-repatriation," he said. "I refuse to use this administration's language."

President Trump had been in office just over a month when Negrete decided he would return to Mexico. Methodical by nature, he approached the decision like any other by researching, organizing and planning.

Negrete secured three forms of Mexican identification: his voter credential, a renewed passport and an ID akin to a Social Security card.

He registered Lorca as an emotional support animal, paid for a vaccine card and a certificate of good health, and crate-trained her in a TSA-approved carrier.