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A few months after Jose returned to Utah, the police busted down the apartment door in search of Miguel. Instead, they found Jose and a .22 rifle he told Hunter belonged to a relative. Rather than have the relative go to jail, Jose told the police it was his weapon. Jose was charged with possession of a firearm by an illegal alien and pleaded guilty on Dec. 19, 2006, in federal court and was sentenced to 11 months detention.
Hunter went to see Jose on Sundays in Weber County Correctional Facility in Ogden. “He was doing gang prevention in prison,” Hunter recalls. “All these young gangbangers were looking for some kind of attention.” Behind the visiting room glass, Jose introduced other inmates to Hunter so he could help them when they got out.
Facing his second deportation, Jose doubted he would make it back to Utah again. He wrote Hunter from the Weber jail: “I’m not having a good feeling this time about coming back through the border, I’m not afraid of death but I’m afraid I won’t be able to see you anymore. That’s my worst fear.”
A chained Jose shuffled off the plane in Tijuana, Mexico, with a few hundred dollars. Tijuana police, he told Hunter, stopped him minutes after he left the airport and stole his money.
Several weeks after Jose was deported, Hunter received his effects from the prison. Among them were three extraordinarily delicate rosaries Jose had fashioned using underwear elastic.
In April 2010, Art Access II gallery exhibited one of the rosaries as part of an exhibition called Outside Is In, which celebrated Outsider art. Art Access’ executive director Ruth Lubbers says, “There was something so human and so emotional in Hernandez’s art, you couldn’t help but be touched by it.”
BEAUTIFUL LIFE
Before Jose was deported, he wrote to his sister that their mother “left for a reason,” Gloria says. “He didn’t want me to keep that hate within me. He had learned to get over it.”
Indeed, therapist Cetrola believes that Jose found “a new purpose, something to keep him alive” after his second deportation: a quest to find his mother. After weeks of homelessness in Tijuana, a near-starving Jose traveled to his hometown of Uriangato, where, Cetrola says, he lived close to the woman who had abandoned him, something “he had been longing for since he was a kid.”
On April 2, 2010, Hunter gave a sparsely attended lecture at Weber State University titled “Kids Without a Country.” He concluded that poetry had saved Jose’s life from gangs and drugs. “In turn, that saved hundreds of gang-affiliated kids from a life of crime and violence.”
A month later in Uriangato, Jose’s efforts to reconcile with his mother took a tragic turn. Now 26, he was living with 34-year-old Noemi Perez Puente, but he planned to return to the United States. He had found little work in Mexico, his sister says. On Sunday night, May 9, 2010, after returning from a party, Jose told Perez he was leaving her. She responded that if he abandoned her, she would kill him.
Jose ignored her threat and she stabbed him in the throat with a kitchen knife. He stumbled out to the street for help but fell down close to the house and bled to death. Puente was incarcerated, but for how long is unclear.
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| I Stand Alone
I stand alone in this world -Jose Hernandez |
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“All he wanted was to be loved,” says Jordan School District’s Sonia Orozco. “All he wanted was for people to believe in him.”
Hunter still works with youths he met through the Boys & Girls Club and still yearns to fulfill Jose’s dream of a clubhouse for undocumented youth. On Sundays, he attends Mexican soccer leagues to catch up with his former club students. “There’s a sense of finality now,” he says. With the anti-immigration fervor that has gripped Utah in the last few years, “the world is just collapsing upon these kids right now. It’s the end of their dream” of finding a home in the country they were brought to but that no longer wants them. “They are part of our society,” says Cetrola, who expresses genuine fear for the future of this generation of undocumented teens growing up in the face of such overt social hostility. “We face the same choice we have with other marginalized populations. Do we build bigger fences or share what we have?”
Miguel still sees kids Jose helped keep out of gang life. “They’re not banging,” he says. Instead, they’re wearing reggaeton clothing, casual clothes; “just normal,” he says. Chuy echoes him. “A lot of kids Jose worked with are doing real good right now.”
Hunter says, “Jose’s heartbreak was he could use his skills and charm to talk others out of gangs but he couldn’t save his brother.”
At a New Year’s Eve party in 2009 in Salt Lake City, Miguel was stabbed in the back and was flown by medical helicopter to the hospital. His assailant “cut me real good. That opened my eyes. You’ve always got to keep your back to the wall. Jose taught me that.”
Gloria sits in the basement of a Kearns’ house where she rents a room from a friend for herself and her 3-year-old boy and 6-month-old baby. Now 18, she lives off state assistance and the few dollars she earns as a cashier. Her children’s fathers, she says, provide no financial support. “I never planned on being like this,” she says. “I just hope my children don’t grow up like them,” she says, referring to her brothers.
And yet, Jose left an emotional mark on so many lives, and they in turn marked him. In a letter Jose sent to Hunter, he wrote, “You know, Walt, one thing about me, my old friend, is that I’m not afraid of death or to live because I lived the most beautiful life with all of you.”
This is the third in a series of articles by senior staff writer Dark about gang members and at-risk youth counselors who met at the Midvale Boys & Girls Club between 2001 and 2004. The first story was “Members Only” (March 30, 2006), the second “Far From Home” (Dec. 13, 2007).
Check back soon to watch Jose Hernandez’s five-minute documentary “The Assignment,” in which he performs “I Stand Alone.”
