For 35 Years, Undocumented, and Chasing the American Dream
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo hoped to obtain legal status, his family said. He was killed last week by an immigration agent who was looking for a different man.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had been in the country for 35 years and ran a business framing houses in the Houston suburbs. Credit... Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s journey began southwest of Mexico City, in rural San Antonio del Rosario, where he was the ninth of 12 children.
It was Mr. Salgado Araujo’s brother Julian, the fourth born, who first felt the pull of America, he said in an interview with The New York Times. So he made his way north to the border sometime in the 1980s, he said. Wading across the Tijuana River, he entered the United States illegally and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.
A few years later, when Lorenzo was about 17, he followed, crossing the border illegally and eventually finding work in construction in Houston, where he built a business and where, his family said, he had been seeking to put himself on a path to legal status.
On July 7, Mr. Salgado Araujo, 52, headed to work like he would any other day, wearing a baseball cap, carrying his coffee and a cooler packed with lunch prepared by his wife.
