How asylum seeker Rosayra Pablo Cruz got her children back

An evangelical Christian asylum seeker and a lapsed Catholic activist join forces to tell a story of family separation in The Book of Rosy, which is available in English and Spanish editions. While the story focuses on Rosayra Pablo Cruz, the Rosy of the title, coauthor Julie Collazo plays a key role after Pablo Cruz travels from Guatemala to the United States and is separated from two of her children at the border.

The book opens with Pablo Cruz hearing her name called at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, where she has been incarcerated without her sons. Her visitor is a lawyer named José Orochena. He tells Pablo Cruz about a group of New York mothers who have raised money to secure release and transportation to New York for asylum seekers who were separated from their children by a new “zero-tolerance policy.” This policy, which Pablo Cruz did not know about when she left Guatemala, went into effect ten days before she crossed into the US.

After the opening scene in the jail, the book flashes back to Guatemala, about which Pablo Cruz writes, “almost everyone has lost someone they love to murder. We are a nation whose ghosts hover in the air around us, a country of walking dead.” Pablo Cruz’s husband was murdered in 2008 when she was pregnant with their third child. His remains were placed in a niche and marked only by initials because she could not afford to have his entire name carved.