The interviewer will see you now.

As we take in and analyze Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, we are shown the experience of the undocumented dreamer inside the United States. In his cultural and independent struggle, Castillo faces his past, his heritage, and his new future as an original resident green card holder to "Be Grateful." Castillo's memoir shows us the reality of immigrant culture and what Anzaldua defined in borderlands on how "Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable,. are transmitted to us through the culture." Castillo's culture of living undocumented in the United States is filled with guilt and questions. Questions like the ones you find in interviews. "Interviews reminded me how much of my life was lived through questions and interrogations and how much of it was just someone waiting for me to tell them an answer how good I got at avoiding giving one." (81 Scribd.) The importance of interviews is shown throughout the book as life depending. The first one is Castillo's interview for his green card, in which he realizes that "An immigration interview follows the same rhetorical form as any other interview. The rules you're expected to follow are the same. It's a structure so common that I sometimes took its usefulness for granted. It happened every time I waited in line at the bank, at the store, or even when I made love. 81" Interviews question and interrogate Castillo as he deals with being accepted and accepting himself. He uses interviews independently from interrogation as a form of self-reflection and self-interviews similar to a confession, a "confession, and although I am not a Catholic, I believed in confession, in repeating the same prayer to dislodge whatever it was that was trapped inside me. I never went to church, but I wanted to confess to my friends all of the terrible things I had done to see if anyone would still love me. (117) We also see how interviews reflect other members of the Castillo family as both the father and mother go through an interview process of their own. The difference of set interviews is wide as "His (Apa's) interview wasn't going to be like mine. They weren't going to ask him who he loved, and if he loved them forever, they were going to ask him to say he was sorry." Interviews are not just a form of gathering information, of proving innocence, is synonymous with an interrogation. Parts of the culture that Castillo has shared are about the hiding of oneself, the losing for survival, the things that are unique not to cause any interest. Although interviews are invasive, and there is a separation of them versus "us," it's still better than the alternative where you are never questioned or asked who you are, and you continue hiding. "Despite our mutual uncertainty and fear, it was a triumph to be in Juarez. For so many years, to sit at a table for an interview was not even an option. It was our version of the Emerald City. We had made it that far. But unlike Dorothy, we had been disillusioned alone before we arrived." (168).

Ultimately what do you think Castillo's purpose was for including the interview purpose? His, his fathers, and his mother's?

 Castillo says, "I ventured to believe that the function of the border wasn't only to keep people out, at least it was not visible, to be seen, to be carried in the imaginations of migrants deep into the interior of the country, in the interior of their minds. It was a spectacle meant to be witnessed by the world, and all of its death and violence was and continues to be a form of social control, the way the kings of the past needed to behead only one petty thief in the public square to quell thousands more." (81) How does the border relate to the immigration "legal" process?