Woman's 'political work' keeps her locked in Chicago church

Most of the country is watching to see what President Barack Obama will do during his first 100 days in office.

To Flor Crisostomo, the scrutiny takes on a more personal meaning: the native Mexican undocumented immigrant, who has been in sanctuary at a church in Chicago since Jan. 28, 2008, said she might go back to Mexico if the Obama administration takes early steps toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Then again, Crisostomo said, her commitment to what she calls her "political work" is such that she still might decide to stay in the little apartment atop Adalberto United Methodist Church, a tiny storefront church in Chicago's Humboldt Park.

"I talked to my mother (on the phone), and she gave me great strength," the 29-year-old said. "I can't disappoint my children, I can't abandon this battle halfway."

Crisostomo says she's fighting for a more just U.S. immigration system and for human and workers' rights worldwide, rights she believes have been trampled on by large corporations and international trade agreements. She devotes her time to staying in close contact with activist groups in the United States and across Latin America, even participating in workers rights' conferences via videotaped addresses.

The Internet has allowed her to remain relevant even though her case has received much less attention in the media than that of Elvira Arellano, an undocumented Mexican immigrant whose yearlong sanctuary in the same Chicago church garnered national headlines until her very public arrest in California in August 2007.

Crisostomo said she never had any illusions that her actions would have had the same impact as Arellano's. "From the beginning I was aware that it wasn't going to be the same," said Crisostomo, a round-faced, pretty woman with a low-key but resolute demeanor. "What matters is to keep spreading the message."

Crisostomo moved to the United States in 2000, leaving behind her three small children in the care of her mother to find work to support her family. She got a job as a woodcutter at the IFCO Systems plant in Chicago, but was arrested with 25 others, and 1,200 nationwide, during workplace raids conducted by federal immigration agents on April 19, 2006.

That was the beginning of her awakening to matters of social and political justice, she said. "I developed a part of me that didn't exist, because before I was just a single mom who moved to the United States," she said.

Crisostomo is considered to be an immigration fugitive, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement spokesman Tim Counts wrote via e-mail. "Ms. Crisóstomo will be arrested at an appropriate time and place with consideration given to the safety of all involved," he wrote.

So what does she say to those who question her right to defy immigration laws?

"I tell them that you can't read just half a book, you have to look at the whole story," she said. "People say that immigrants come here to live the 'American dream,' but for us it isn't like that. We came for our kids, our parents, our families, because what we left behind were abandoned farms and shuttered-out small businesses."

The real culprit, Crisostomo said, is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States under President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Her family was doing fine living in a small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, and selling food off the busy road that connected Mexico City and Acapulco, she said. But under NAFTA provisions, the Mexican government built a more modern and direct highway connecting the two cities, and when it opened in 1997 business dried up for thousands of farmers and small business owners along the old route. That's why she says she was forced to move to the United States, enduring the heartbreak of not seeing her children for the last eight years, she said.

"For my future, I imagine being with my children, whether here in the United States, or there in Mexico," she said.