She traveled to Mexico to reconnect with her roots and found love. What followed next was separation, loss and joy

By Karen Esquivel, CNN en Español

(CNN) — Yesica Aramburo traveled on vacation to Mexico in April 2017 for the festivities in her Mexican family’s town of La Moncada, Guanajuato, in the center of the country. She never thought that this brief visit would change her life and lead her to find love.

At the time, Aramburo was 20 years old and still studying in Chicago, but the excitement of experiencing in person everything that her family had told her about the festivities, motivated her to make the trip. And that’s when she met Ramón Vega, an automotive detailer.

“We met in the garden,” Aramburo recalled. “From then on, there was something like chemistry, but we didn’t know each other; he was a friend of my cousin’s.”

Despite that first encounter, love arrived a little later.

Mexico, Chicago and two relationships

That year, 2017, Aramburo returned to Chicago to continue her studies in accounting, but she felt the urge to return to her parents’ homeland for a longer stay. “Like when I was little and would stay with my parents two or three months on vacation,” she said.

The 29-year-old American has had a deep love for Mexico since she was very young. She says she likes how colorful life is on the other side of the border, the way people are, the food, the patron saint festivals, the sense of community.

“I love Mexico. When I was little, I would cry and ask my parents why we couldn’t live in Mexico. There, even though people live very simply, you feel so full of so much – I don’t know how to explain it – like you have the whole world,” she says.

In January 2018, she went back to Mexico with the idea of staying for a few months. Then, she and Vega met again, went on dates, spent time together, but neither felt ready for a serious relationship. She returned to Chicago, he stayed in Guanajuato, and shortly after, both started relationships with other people.

A long-distance love and the loss of a baby

It was September 2020 when Aramburo returned to Mexico and once again— and this time definitively — met the man with whom she would have a baby, although things did not turn out as they expected.

“That’s when all the romance started, although we didn’t become boyfriend and girlfriend right away. We started as friends because we were afraid of getting hurt, but the relationship was very serious,” said Aramburo. “A few months later, in November, I found out I was pregnant.”

From that moment on, distance became a part of their relationship. She returned to Chicago for the December holidays to tell her family the news and stayed there until February 2021, when she took a flight to Mexico to have the gender reveal party for their baby.

The following month, in Mexico, Aramburo had complications that led her to see a doctor who recommended bed rest and returning to the United States because she was losing amniotic fluid.

“So I returned home; a few nights went by and then I lost all the fluid, I had to go to the hospital and my baby was born on April 11, 2021; my baby was 20 weeks. I had him with me for half an hour and I was able to baptize him, then he died,” she shared.

At that time, the hardest part for Aramburo was being far from her partner, knowing that, even though they wanted to grieve together for their baby, they couldn’t because he didn’t have a visa to go visit her.

“It was very difficult for me because I had to do everything alone, I couldn’t run to see him. And although he supported me, he wasn’t physically there. I had doctor’s appointments, we couldn’t bury our baby, we cremated him because I didn’t want to take away the opportunity for him to be there in that moment,” she explained.

When her medical appointments ended, carrying her sadness, Aramburo traveled to Guanajuato with her baby’s ashes in a small heart-shaped urn, with no set return date.

Marriage and a three-year consular process

Once together, Aramburo and Vega were able to grieve, and they went to psychological therapy. “Grieving caused many problems; he didn’t want to show his feelings and I am a very sensitive person — if I feel like crying, I do it — so I didn’t feel understood because his way of grieving was so different. Therapy helped us a lot, brought us closer, and we realized we didn’t want to be apart,” she explained.

At that time, they decided to get stronger, heal and honor their baby. That decision led them to take a trip to Puerto Vallarta, on the Mexican Pacific, where he proposed marriage and she accepted.

On February 14, 2022, they were married in a ceremony that Aramburo describes as “something small and very simple” because they wanted to begin a consular process to apply for the green card.

“We started that process in April 2022 and they didn’t give us an appointment until 2024,” she explained.

Aramburo then returned to Chicago due to a requirement stating that, in order to request someone’s entry into the US, the American citizen must be working in the country. This situation forced them to be separated for months or see each other only for a few days when possible.

“They were complicated years,” said Aramburo. “There were times when I wanted to resign and thought, ‘What if I quit my job and go to Mexico?’ I got desperate, there were times I got depressed and had negative thoughts that the relationship wouldn’t work. And even though I looked for ways to go see him, I had to save money for the flights.”

In August 2023, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) accepted the couple’s application, and at the end of 2024, they received an email to go to the interview appointment in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

“In November of that year, we went to the consular appointment, but he was placed under administrative processing for two months. Our lawyer told us they might just be doing a thorough review of the case, but they took away his passport and we felt very scared,” she added.

Finally, in January 2025, the couple received the notification they had awaited for so long: The immigrant visa had been approved. They cried tears of happiness over the phone and shared the news with their families and friends. With the process completed, all that was left was to find a flight to take Vega from Ciudad Juárez to Chicago.

“When he took the flight, I was so happy, so excited. I made him a welcome sign and went to meet him at the airport. I was really cheesy,” she recalls.

For just over a year they have been living their love story in Chicago. “The real reason for being here in the US is because we plan to have another baby and the idea is to have a hospital where, if something happens, we will be cared for and nothing bad will happen again. But the plan is also to return to Mexico and one day, build a home there too.”

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