A NURSE WITH NO COUNTRY

AFTER BLANCA CASTILLO graduated with a nursing degree from Texas Woman’s University, she had to go back to her high school job, working the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant.

Without a social security number, she couldn’t sit for the NCLEX, the test for certification as a registered nurse.

She’d graduated salutatorian from Townview High School. She attended TWU on the presidential scholarship. She completed her clinical work and walked across the stage to accept her degree.

And she worked at Wendy’s. Castillo’s mom brought her across the border from Mexico right after the girl’s father died. She was 6 years old. to go to college. “I didn’t even know what college was,” she says. Her mother had attended school only until about age 10.

But teachers told her she was smart and that she had to work hard to get out of her situation.

They were right.

After being accepted into Townview’s certified nursing assistant program, she had to give up her spot because it required a social security number.

At Hogg Elementary School in Oak Cliff, teachers told her she needed

Around the time of high school graduation, it was suggested she should “let someone else be salutatorian” since she was undocumented.

A couple of TWU professors treated

The Immigrants Next Door

her coldly after learning her work status, she says.

And then, after all that, she had to go back to Wendy’s.

But six months after graduation came Obama’s executive action, which allows certain undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children to receive renewable twoyear work permits.

“It was such a happy day,” she says.

Once she got a work permit, she landed a job as a volunteer coordinator at Methodist Dallas Medical

Center. An uncle in Chicago paid for her NCLEX study course — by then it had been two years since graduation — and she passed it on the first try.

Methodist hired her, now as a registered nurse, to work on its sixth floor in cardiology. That was three years ago.

“I still get excited to tell people I’m a nurse,” Castillo says. “I feel very empowered by where I come from because it’s made me work harder for what I do have, and it’s made me appreciate it more.”

She constantly worries, however, that one day her work permit won’t be renewed. Family members tell her she should buy a house, and she wants that too. But she’s afraid to spend money. What if her permit isn’t renewed and she can’t continue working here?

“I was 6 years old. I’ve done the that I can,” she says. “If it did get taken away, I would lose my identity. I don’t know who I would be.”