When Esperanza Mendez went into surgery in January, her two youngest children had nightmares about what could go wrong. They had spent the past few weeks in fear. Arguments between their parents filled the apartment.
Empty liquor bottles covered the kitchen table. The fighting got so bad, their dad moved out. Now, their mom was being put under anesthesia — something they didn’t even know existed — to remove a large lump on the right side of her neck.
If it didn’t go as planned, they worried they would be completely alone. “I want to go with you!” Esperanza’s 11-year-old daughter, Yuledy, said the night before the surgery, hugging her tightly. Though doctors assured them the procedure was routine, it was hard on the Mendez children, who had just moved to the South Side of Chicago after a long trek from Venezuela.
Everything was hard in those first few months: school, meals, family disputes, their unresolved immigration statuses. In 2023, the Tribune followed the Mendez family of five — Esperanza, her adult son, Fabian, his girlfriend, and Experanza’s two youngest children, Yuledy and Pedro — on a bus and train from El Paso, Texas, to Chicago last July . They had risked their lives to make it to the United States.
A year later, they find themselves in deep isolation. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2014 in the largest population displacement in Latin America’s recent history, and city estimates show that roughly 45,000 of th.