On a warm evening in early August, friends and family gathered in Juan Ramón González’s Pasadena, California, backyard to eat homemade tacos and share stories about the kind-eyed 56-year-old who had lived in the neighborhood for three decades.
González, who entered the country in his 20s without authorization, had recently been reassessing his life in the United States. Amid challenges that once seemed unimaginable, he had been wondering whether he could — or should — stay here, or return to the homeland he hadn’t visited since the mid-1990s.
