Poster Child
In Tomasa Mendez, the Immigration Debate Now Has a Very Public Face

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 20, 2007

The girl in the picture has grief in her eyes, fear on her lips. Only later, when you meet her, do you realize she has world-class dimples. In the picture, fear has swallowed her dimples, while a maternal hand, with fingernails gnawed to the quick, strokes her head.

This is Tomasa Mendez -- or her image, at least. At 2 years old, she cannot comprehend the drama swirling around her, the national debate she has come to symbolize. But she can miss her "Papi," and cling ever tighter to her fuzzy green Dora the Explorer blanket.

She is a girl who became a picture who became a poster who became an icon -- or a piece of propaganda, if you like -- in the push and pull over immigration reform. The girl in the picture visited Washington the other day, where she kept coming face to face with . . . the girl in the picture, her picture. And more cameras, making yet more pictures.

What is the degree of separation between the girl and the girl in the picture? Some pictures mean exactly what they say, and that is why they are seized upon by shrewd adults to make into icons.

Some background: Tomasa lives in New Bedford, Mass., where on March 6, agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided a factory and detained 361 workers suspected of being in this country illegally. The workers at Michael Bianco Inc. were making backpacks for U.S. military personnel. Tomasa's father, Hector Mendez, was one of those arrested.

Tomasa's mother, Dominga, ran toward the factory with Tomasa in her arms. There were people in uniforms everywhere. "La policía," Dominga said to Tomasa. (Dominga asked that her last name, different from her husband's, not be published for fear that authorities would detect her own undocumented status.) The parents came from Guatemala six years ago. Tomasa, who was born in this country, is a U.S. citizen.

The next day, families crowded into a church basement for information and assistance. Tomasa was crying in her mother's lap.

Standing nearby was Peter Pereira, a photographer for the New Bedford Standard-Times, who had been taking pictures on this big breaking story for two days.

A priest started talking. Everyone hushed, except for one little girl, who couldn't stop crying. Pereira understood enough Spanish to know that Dominga was trying to reassure Tomasa that "Papi" would be all right. He raised his lens to shoot . . .

Let's freeze the frame right there, with the photographer poised and the girl not yet a picture. It is 3:04 p.m. on March 7, and here the stories of the girl and the girl in the picture diverge. They'll meet again later, in Washington.

The girl: Tomasa's father was the family's provider, bringing home about $300 a week. Dominga hasn't found a job because she can't afford the $160 a week that she says it would cost for child care. (Tomasa has two brothers, Diego, 7, and Melvin, 5.)

"They say, 'Why doesn't my father come home?' " Dominga says in an interview in Spanish. "I don't know how to answer them."

Money raised by the community helped the family with food and rent for about six weeks. Now that money is gone. The rent is due. The phone and cable service have been cut off. Their church helped them find a lawyer, and organizers from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition visit twice a week to do what they can.

Hector Mendez ended up in a detention facility in Massachusetts, but Dominga can't visit because she is undocumented. She and the children were able to speak to him on the phone, until they lost phone service.

"What am I going to do with the children?" Dominga asks.

Immigrant-rights organizers say the family's plight is typical. Scores of families have been separated in the recent wave of workplace raids. The human cost of enforcing the law is much greater than the violation, and many victims are children, organizers say.

Pat Reilly, a spokeswoman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responds that the government isn't to blame for the families' straits. "You should look back to the decision the parents made in coming to the country without legal status," she says. "Our job is to enforce the laws."

The girl in the picture: That's Tomasa's Dora blanket in the foreground. And Diego is the blurry boy to the left. Those are Dominga's nail-bitten fingers lingering over Tomasa's right ear, from which hangs a little gold hoop.

What is it about this photo?

"There's something about that face," says Pereira, the photographer. "If you look at her mouth -- her mouth is fear. And her eyes are sadness. That's the contrast that makes that photograph so powerful."

There's another quality in those brimming eyes, those sprouting pigtails. "Innocence," Pereira says. "This innocence of not having any control, and being completely influenced by the events."

Pereira happens to be an immigrant himself, legal, who arrived from Portugal when he was 7. Now 37, he chucked a career in computers six years ago to pursue his passion, telling stories with pictures. "The best you ever hope for is to capture a whole story in a single frame," he says.

The photo did not make the front page of the Standard-Times, circulation roughly 35,000. It ran inside.

But activists working in that frantic church basement saw Tomasa's picture, and it struck them.

"It was Katrina-like in the basement," crowded with desperate families whose lives had just been upended, says George Goehl, field organizer with the Washington-based Center for Community Change. "That image showed up. It was so clear that it encapsulated what the whole story was about."

The center and other groups made thousands of posters and fliers featuring Tomasa's tearful visage. Electronic versions were beamed from coast to coast. The little girl in the picture looked out beseechingly from placards carried by marchers at immigrant-rights rallies from Denver to New York to Washington. Slogans appeared with the image: "Where's My Mom? Where's My Dad?"

You could argue that a weakness of the photo is that it lacks context. The girl in the picture needs a caption or a squad of immigrant-rights marchers to give her tears meaning. If you waved her picture at a rally against hunger or child abuse, it would not appear out of place.

In that sense, Tomasa's is the universal face of stricken childhood.

The girl and her picture: On the van ride to the Rayburn House Office Building, another photo comes out of an envelope, showing Tomasa in white sitting on a man's knee. They have the same big eyes. "Papi!" squeals Tomasa.

A row of reporters and several television and newspaper cameras join the standing-room-only crowd for a "children's hearing" on the raids before a panel of family advocates. When Tomasa and her dimples arrive, she pauses in the hall for a photographer to click off a dozen shots. With each click, Tomasa subtly changes her pose and expression, with a precocious model's sense, all smiles and curiosity, carrying a pink Dora the Explorer backpack.

Some Capitol Police officers happen by. They are friendly and joking, but Tomasa bursts into tears. On her face is that look again. Dominga scoops her up. The girl is remembering "la policía" from the morning of the raid, her mother says.

Half a dozen children attend the event. For them it is long and boring. Pink fliers are lying around with Tomasa's face on them. Tomasa shows no sign that she recognizes the girl in the picture. At least not this photocopied, grainy, black-on-pink version.

The children of the raids turn over the fliers and use the blank sides to color and scribble.