Yajaira has big aspirations of opening her own café. She can already envision herself serving steaming hot drinks, decadent pastries and other delicious sweet treats to loyal customers. She’d like to name the business after her late grandmother, adding a personal touch to her dream.
“My son loves baking. We're kind of planning on doing it together,” Yajaira said, expressing the hope that all four of her children will eventually join the business later down the road. “I want them to be able to do what they want, not necessarily what I need them to do. [The cafe] is something I would hope to be able to give other people employment,” she revealed.
With years experience as a chef in the restaurant industry, Yajaira has the skills and expertise needed for her café venture. “Right now I'm working in a kitchen, and that's what I most like doing,” she said. She enjoys the hours of solitude she finds working in a commercial kitchen. It allows her to focus on cooking without direct, and sometimes stressful, customer interactions.
Yajaira cherishes the time she spends raising her four children, who are between 12 and 19 years old. “I like being with them. I like spending time with my family. We like going out and walking and being in parks. My life is basically in service to my kids,” she said.
Although she was born in Oakland, all of Yajaira’s earliest memories are grounded in Mexico. “When I was still only a few months old my mother and my father went back. I was there until I was 16,” Yajaira explained. She returned to Oakland as a teen, but the move was short-lived. “I was only here for a little bit, and then my mother wanted me to come back [to Mexico], and since I was still underage I had to go back with her,” she remembered.
Yajaira now raises her children in her birth city. One of the most appealing aspects of Oakland for her is how much neighbors look out for each other. “The community just watches out. They watch out for all of the kids. They keep an eye on them. They make sure that they're in class. Like, if they see that kids are outside of class, they'll ask them why they aren't in class,” Yajaira said.
“I value that. As a single mom I have to work a lot, and it’s a lot of time when I'm not home, and I can't be with my children. So I'm just really thankful that people are concerned about them and are keeping an eye out for them when I'm not there,” she continued.
Just before she connected with UpTogether, Yajaira faced a nightmare scenario when she and her children were separated in Mexico due to documentation issues.
“I needed to get their paperwork together, and at the time I didn't have much support, so I was getting people to help me,” she remembered.
The hurdles she encountered while getting their paperwork in order were frustrating. Yajaira kept getting the runaround. The advice she received was well-meaning, but inconsistent. Sometimes it was flat-out wrong, leaving Yajaira feeling lost.
The process to get her children back was lengthy. Hours turned to days - days to weeks and ultimately took a toll on Yajaira’s finances. She contemplated staying in Mexico with her children, instead, she made the gut-wrenching decision to return to the United States, alone. She needed to work to earn money and earn enough to pay for all four of her kids’ applications.
“At any moment they [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] could call me for an appointment, and if they called me it was a 33-hour drive [from Jalisco, Mexico] so I had to stay. I sold my car to be able to maintain us,” she said, describing the lengths she went to ensure her children’s safety.
By then, she’d joined UpTogether. She used a chunk of her investment from the Oakland Resilient Families Guaranteed Income Fund to pay the USCIS fees, eventually allowing her family to reunite in Oakland.
“I’m the only one who can get us ahead. That was basically the gas in my motor, just realizing that nobody was coming to do it for me. I was in a situation of extreme stress, and even depression. And it just provided so much relief,” she said.
Investing some of the money she received, Yajaira also bought a new truck to replace the one she’d sold.
“It was really just a huge relief to be able to receive that help without anybody really asking me for anything,” Yajaira said.
She also used her money to pour back into her community by supporting her children’s middle school fundraising efforts. “We were able to contribute. We would help make Jellos and they would sell them at events. That's money that the school was able to keep. So it was kind of like a donation for the school,” she said.
Yajaira believes in the importance of offering support to those who need it, having experienced first-hand how investing in people can make a significant difference. “I think that people who have the opportunity to get ahead, and they want to get ahead, sometimes they need a little bit of a push. They need the help, they need the support. Like what I got in order to not give up.”