Playwright Hilary Bettis Is Fighting to Dispel Misconceptions About Immigration in 72 Miles to Go

While writing 72 Miles to Go, Hilary Bettis found herself at the Mexican-American border. She traveled to Arizona so she could research locations, setting the play in the same city where her grandfather had crossed the border decades ago. Amid the saguaro cactuses of Tucson, she thought of him. Like many immigrants of his generation, Bettis’ grandfather “believed that to be in the United States you had to prove you were more American than Americans,” she says. “A part of that meant denying his culture, denying his language.” Her grandfather never spoke of his crossing, and her mother didn’t know that he spoke Spanish until she was a teenager. “Visiting, I had this stark realization that it must have been a lot of conscious, everyday work to hide that part of himself,” says Bettis. 

Bettis' off-Broadway debut play, 72 Miles to Go, which opens at the Laura Pels Theatre on March 10, tells the story of Anita, a mother (played by Maria Elena Ramirez), who is deported to Mexico, leaving her family behind. “As a writer, all of my work is journeying to try and understand that: Who we are, where we come from and what it means to be Mexican-American in the United States,” explains Bettis.

From those questions—about the private costs of immigration and assimilation—Bettis shaped her play, setting the stakes of illegal immigration within a family. “We’re living in this era where this issue is so front and center in our news,” she says, “and we hear all these horror stories about ICE coming in and dragging people out of their houses. Hollywood is really obsessed with this Narco cartel, violent narrative. I wanted to get as far away from that as possible.”

When Anita is deported to Mexico in 72 Miles to Go, her family members back in America are left at varied and precarious immigration statuses. The father, Billy (Triney Sandoval), is a Mexican-American citizen. He's a pastor who discovered Anita and her son Christian (Bobby Moreno) when they attempted to cross the border illegally. Billy and Anita fall in love and have two additional children, Eva (Jacqueline Guillen) and Aaron (Tyler Alvarez), both born in the United States. They are citizens, and their half-brother Christian is not. 

Each of these subtle differences in social positioning have drastic implications for the characters’ lives, including what opportunities are afforded to them. “I wanted to have that mixed family dynamic because the lived experiences of Mexican-American immigrants are incredibly nuanced and varied,” says Bettis. “We try and fit the Latinx experience in the United States into a black and white box, especially the further away from the border you get.” 

In turn, what Bettis creates in 72 Miles to Go is an expansive—and by no means unrealistic—cross section of the U.S. immigration system, contained in one family. “There are so many misconceptions about immigration that I’m trying to question in this play and that are borne out in the circumstances of Anita’s home,” says Bettis. For example, the longtime assumption that marriage to an American citizen will lead to legal residency has changed drastically under the Trump administration, and Anita’s deportation reflects that change. Audiences might be surprised that Anita and her son have no pathways to citizenship, and that’s the point. “People don’t realize how convoluted our immigration system is, how it’s set up purposefully to keep people out of this country.”

Strategically, Bettis removes a big distraction: 72 Miles to Go isn’t set in the present, but from 2008 to 2016, under President Obama. “I wanted to show that this is a cycle that’s been happening long before this particular administration,” she says. “The detention centers, locking asylum seekers up—things that we at look at Trump for and say, ‘He’s so terrible,’ were started under Obama. That truth might be inconvenient, but it’s something missing in our cultural narrative right now."

Yet, 72 Miles to Go isn’t a political play, and it’s not caught up in didacticism. Bettis stays focused on the family. With Anita gone, Eva must assume the role of mother, forfeiting her own goals. Christian stresses over his potential deportation. Meanwhile, Billy fights to keep his marriage alive from a distance. Allowing that family drama to play out is central to Bettis’ larger conclusion: Ever-changing debates over immigration policy are not just a fixture of American politics, but of the Mexican-American experience itself. “Every character in this play has their own survivor’s guilt, shame, anger and resentment that they’re struggling with,” says Bettis. “All of them make decisions for the family that is putting aside their own dreams or their own talent. The very subtle, real tragedy for me in this play is the lost potential and the lost opportunity in the children—not the sort of trauma porn that we’re obsessed with right now."

For Bettis, who studied playwriting at Juilliard and was a writer on the two final seasons of FX's The Americans, 72 Miles to Go is a story she feels an obligation to tell. "I’m very much the beneficiary of people coming across the border and trying to pull their kids out of poverty, really embracing the American dream,” says the scribe, who is pregnant with her first child with husband (and cast member) Bobby Moreno. “I’m able to follow those dreams because of the sacrifices my grandfather made. And I recognize that there’s a lot of baggage that comes with saying the ‘American dream.' But it’s something I actually believe in.”