Migrant mourns death of child, one of the many unaccounted for in Chicago: ‘Without money, you’re nobody’

Karis Calderon, 25, walked across seven countries to make it to Chicago for a stable job. Four weeks later, she couldn’t even afford to pay for the funeral services of her youngest child.

The Venezuelan mother lost her 3-year-old — Luciana Valentina Suarez Calderon — at the end of April to a bacterial infection in Chicago. But without the $2,750 needed for a funeral, Calderon had to wait in mourning while her daughter’s body sat at the morgue for days.

“I wanted people to be able to visit her body to say goodbye. If I had the money, I would have taken her out immediately,” Calderon said. “Uno sin plata no es nadie. Without money, you’re nobody.” 

Those who helped the mother in the days following Luciana’s death on April 25 at Stroger Hospital say it is difficult to say how the city could have prevented it from happening. Chicago has received 41,000 migrants, mostly fleeing desperate poverty and violence in Venezuela, in the past 20 months since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing them here.

But the number represents just those migrants whom city officials have tracked. Some, like Calderon and her daughter, arrive through channels that aren’t included in Chicago’s daily census totals. While they don’t have to rely on the city’s existing shelter system for housing, they often have high needs and can miss out on social services — such as vaccines — as a result.

Last year alone, almost 100 million passengers passed through Chicago’s airports, and a spokesperson for the city said that officials do not screen travelers to Chicago to determine whether they are migrants.

“The city does not provide health screenings for every person who comes to Chicago, whether through our airports, bus stations, train stations or in personal vehicles,” Cassio Mendoza said in a statement. “The city provides basic health screenings for new arrivals seeking services at the City’s landing zone and will continue to welcome new arrivals with dignity and care.”

Calderon said she still doesn’t know how her child got so sick and why she couldn’t be saved. After the tragedy, she couldn’t get answers.

“The fact that we had to have this conversation (about why her child died) days later is a policy failure,” said Jaime Grothe-Searle, a volunteer helping asylum-seekers, after watching Calderon struggle to find enough money to honor her daughter’s life. 

Luciana Valentina Suarez Calderon

When Calderon arrived by plane to Chicago at the end of March, she reunited with her two sisters who were already in the city. Her family moved to Ecuador from Venezuela after struggling to find stable work in their home country, so she hadn’t seen her sisters for eight years.

“We were so happy,” she said. “They met my daughter for the first time. They’d only ever met her before through a video call.”

In late April, the sisters gathered on a Sunday afternoon along the beach of Lake Michigan. Calderon didn’t let Luciana enter the water because it was cold. Luciana played around in the sand.

“She was running around, dancing and singing,” her aunt Gleidys Calderon recounted.

Three days later, on Wednesday, April 24, Luciana woke up in the afternoon and told her mom that her head hurt. Calderon went to the store to buy medication — which Luciana threw up. Calderon bought her suero, a mix of electrolytes that helps ease nausea and vomiting.

Calderon waited, the child’s fever went down and she fell asleep. But the next morning, Luciana’s legs hurt, and a rash developed. Calderon said the splotches on her daughter’s limbs were turning purple instead of red, which worried her.

Without insurance, Calderon didn’t know where to go. She called one of her sisters, who told her Stroger Hospital was her best option.

Nearly two years after migrants started coming to Chicago in high numbers, Stroger Hospital has become the go-to provider for the health needs of the thousands of asylum-seekers. According to a spokeswoman, the hospital has served over 30,000 new arrivals with over 91,000 hospital visits. Its lobby is now full of people speaking with the distinct, rhythmic Venezuelan accent.

Calderon and Luciana were brought into a room at the hospital, and as they waited, the previously healthy, happy child — who had brown curls and soft skin — developed more splotches across her body.

“The doctors started giving her this strong antibiotic to kill the bacteria,” she said.

The mother and daughter went to the upstairs intensive care unit, where doctors administered more tests. 

“They started to put oxygen in her little nose. Her legs were swollen,” said Calderon, who stayed by her side for hours.

At one point, Calderon gave her daughter her phone to watch cartoons.

“But I realized she couldn’t see it,” Calderon said.

The doctor started putting colorful objects near Luciana, hoping she would react. More doctors came to help. They said they would give Luciana an injection to lessen the pressure in her head, and that the bacteria was affecting her brain.

The doctors then made Calderon leave the room, she said, while they administered anesthesia and put a tube in Luciana’s body so oxygen could reach her lungs.

During the most difficult moments in the hospital, Calderon said it was hard to communicate through the language barrier. She had to wait for someone to speak Spanish to translate what was happening. Sometimes the doctors spoke among themselves and Calderon didn’t know what they were saying.

They told her they planned to do an X-ray of Luciana’s head, but as they wheeled the child out of the room, she went into cardiac arrest. They started compressions on her body.

“They tried to revive her, but they couldn’t,” Calderon said.

Luciana died around 8:45 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, less than a month after arriving in Chicago. 

‘I came here for a better future’

Calderon had decided to travel to Chicago from Ecuador with her 3-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son after violence, robberies and protests there started to rival what they’d left in their home country years earlier.

They left Ecuador in December and walked through seven countries — from Colombia to Mexico —  before arriving in San Diego, where local officials flew them for free to Chicago at the end of March. They were not vaccinated at the border, according to Calderon. 

The family experienced a number of hardships along the journey, but she said their time in Mexico was the most difficult. She said she was kidnapped for hours by armed men who thought she had money stashed away.

“They touched me all over. They also felt up my daughter and my son. They looked through everything,” she said. “I had to do things I’d never done before, stand on the corner and beg for money, to continue.” 

When Calderon arrived in Chicago with her two children, she opted to live with a friend, who had an apartment on the South Side.

Normally, when migrants are bused to Chicago and have no one to live with, they receive routine health screenings and immunizations at the city’s “landing zone,” a parking lot in the West Loop with large white tents where city officials greet asylum seekers. 

But because Calderon and her two children were flown to Chicago and went directly to a friend’s house, she didn’t go to the landing zone, according to Mendoza. Calderon’s daughter didn’t receive her routine vaccinations upon arrival, which health experts say may have put her at greater risk for infection.

Regardless, Calderon said she isn’t sure if her daughter’s reaction was caused by bacteria or the medicine they gave her. 

“I don’t know where she picked it up. I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if she picked up the bacteria in the lake, in the food here.”

She still runs the events at the hospital through her mind every day, she said.

“I would have preferred that it was me in that moment, and not her,” she said.

Scrounging for answers, she went to the hospital on May 1 to try to talk to the lead doctor and ask which antibiotics her daughter was given, and what exactly happened. She was told she would have a response in a few days.

Her eyes were glazed over outside as she held the paperwork.

She said it was challenging for her to coordinate everything because the staff at the funeral homes she called spoke only English.

In Venezuela, it’s traditional to have a three-day wake where loved ones of the deceased can pay their respects, according to religious scholar Candi Cann.

“It allows the family and the community to kind of come and go,” she said. 

Without the thousands of dollars needed for funeral costs, Calderon had to wait more than a week in uncertainty.

Volunteers eventually stepped up to help gather the funds she needed, but the funeral was one day and sparsely attended compared with what she would have had in her home country.

Dany Bahar, an economist born and raised in Venezuela, said that even if Calderon was living in economic despair in the northern city of Maracay, at least there she had a support network.

“If this had happened in Venezuela, she also would have struggled,” he said. “The biggest difference is here she doesn’t know anybody. She doesn’t even know who to ask for help.” 

Calderon misses Luciana’s kisses. She said her daughter knew her numbers up to 10. She liked to dance.

“As a mother, you always look at your kids as different from others,” said Calderon. “Yo veo a mi hija única. I saw my little girl as one-of-a-kind.”

Since Luciana died, Calderon has received dozens of texts offering condolences but she doesn’t have it in her to respond. She said she cries only when she’s in a closed room because she doesn’t want anyone to see her.

“I need to be strong because I came here for a better future,” she said. 

Cremation was her most affordable option, she said. She eventually wants to return to her country and hopes to bring back her daughter’s ashes.