Just when she was questioning if her loved ones should have come to Chicago, the matriarch of an immigrant family had a chance encounter that restored her hope that, maybe, her family could one day have the life they once had again.
It was late May and Mariser Fernandez was wandering Little Village, carrying her grandson, 2-year-old Jose Mathias. Fernandez, 40, had arrived in Chicago days before and was brought to a temporary shelter in the neighborhood but wound up on the street that day after the shelter staff wouldn’t let her grandson inside without his mother, who had left to find work out of state.
Fernandez, 40, found the shelter’s policy to be strict but realized it wasn’t like that everywhere in Chicago when she met a woman on the street who happened to work for a local nonprofit that’s been helping recent immigrant arrivals find housing.
Not long after, Fernandez, her husband — and the two grandchildren and two daughters they crossed seven countries with — were set up in an apartment in Brighton Park.
Since last August, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of recent immigrant arrivals north, more than 12,000 immigrants have arrived in Chicago. As of early this month, around 7,000 remain in city shelters and police stations, but hundreds of families have begun moving into neighborhoods around the city.
Fernandez and her family were 28th to find a place to stay through the Little Village Community Council. The council found the family a temporary apartment for May and June before moving them into their current apartment.
“We didn’t have to sleep on the street thanks to them,” Fernandez said during a recent visit to the group’s offices at 3610 W. 26th St.
Baltazar Enriquez, who runs the council, said the group first began finding housing for the immigrants in October 2022.
The council has had a program to assist homebuyers and landlords for years, and when recent arrivals began asking for help finding housing, the council opened its Rolodex.
Fernandez’s new landlord, Eloy Ruiz, was himself an immigrant to Chicago, arriving decades ago from Mexico.
Their story reminded him of how hard it was to find a willing landlord then. “Many times those people can’t find an apartment because they don’t trust them,” said Ruiz, 75.
The native of Oaxaca, Mexico, let them stay partly in consideration for what they’ve been through — “they’re coming from so far and they’re suffering” — but also because he needed tenants and four months’ rent came guaranteed by a sponsor.
All the renters through the council program have the initial cost of rent covered by donations or individual sponsors. The council’s program is small relative to the number of immigrants who are arriving and finding housing.
Many have found housing through the state’s Asylum Seekers Emergency Rental Assistance Program, where social services providers approved by the Illinois Housing Development Authority have been connecting immigrants in city shelters and state hotels with landlords willing to offer a short-term lease covered by the state.
Between Dec. 5, 2022, and Aug. 6, 1,166, three-month rental assistance applications were approved, totaling $6.4 million in assistance through the American Rescue Plan Act, said a state spokesperson. Seven-hundred sixteen three-month renewals have also been approved for $3.1 million.
The hope for the Fernandez family, like others receiving assistance, is that at the end of an initial short-term lease, the family will be able to find sufficient work on their own to cover costs.
Until then, the family has the backing of Tom Erd, a retired spice merchant who became inspired to help the new arrivals after reading books on refugees and seeing the busloads of asylum seekers arrive in Chicago.
“This Abbott fella in Texas is dumping them here and you go, Where are they going to put them all?” said Erd, 66.
He wound up spending thousands of dollars for the family on rent and household items.
“Sometimes these people just need a break,” he said. “If they could just catch a break, the trajectory of their lives could change forever.”
Erd was there during that recent visit to the council and Fernandez embraced him when he arrived. “He’s like an angel for us,” she said. “He’s been really good.”
The family’s new apartment is a modest basement apartment on West 46th Street. All together in one apartment, it’s a tight squeeze compared to their life outside of Caracas, Venezuela, the capital of the South American country.
Fernandez ran a butcher shop and until the country began to unravel, life was good.
“We had that for years,” she said of the shop. “We had our car, our house, things were nice.”
That relative success then made them a target for police extortion during the country’s crisis.
“The point of having police is to protect you but it’s the opposite,” she said. “You have a business and they come.”
She still has family there and played for a reporter a recent voice memo from her sister, wondering how to pay the latest sum demanded from her.
For Fernandez, that life was untenable. “There are situations where you have to act,” she said, crying as she thought about her sister.
Sitting in their Brighton Park apartment, Fernandez and her husband talk about how he might find work in the factory Ruiz works at and how to send money home, but their eyes are on their youngest daughter and grandchildren.
ReeShell, 9, had barely started school when the crisis back began and never wound up learning how read. But she’s an avid singer, belting out songs in English with a mostly convincing American accent.
“I think she’ll learn fast,” Fernandez said.
“It’s all for them, the future is for them,” said her husband, Lisandro.
Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.
