AFTER SEPARATING FROM MY GRANDFATHER, my maternal grandmother could not bear to see her children go hungry. Not unlike many poor and single mothers in El Salvador, she had been toiling in domestic jobs for a couple of years and made barely enough for transportation but not enough for food; so she came to the United States in the mid-1960s. Penniless and driven to fulfill her responsibility to her children, she left all four of them with her mother. Initially, she worked in the United States without legal authorization to live in the country. After becoming a legal permanent resident, it took many years for all the paperwork to be processed through the complicated bureaucracy that was known, back then, as Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). Not until she received the last piece of paper from the federal agency was she able to reunite with her children, some fourteen years after her departure. Three decades later, and although they see each other weekly, my mother, who is now in her fifties, still cannot hold back the tears when she recounts the many times in her childhood when she longed to be close to her mother. She and her sisters are grateful to their grandmother for her care, and they would have appreciated their father’s presence in their lives, but it was their mother’s absence all those years that continues to pain them