Yessica Arambulo traveled to Mexico for vacation in April 2017. It was a festival in the Mexican family town of La Moncada, Guanajuato state, in the center of Mexico. She never expected that this short visit would change her life and lead to finding love.
At the time, Arambulo was 20 years old and still studying in Chicago, but her excitement to experience firsthand everything her family had told her about the festival motivated her to make the trip. That’s when she met Ramon Vega, an auto mechanic.
“We met in the garden,” Arambulo recalled. “There was kind of chemistry ever since, but we didn’t know each other. He was a friend of my cousin.”
Despite that first encounter, love arrived a little late.
Mexico, Chicago, and the relationship between the two
That year, in 2017, Arambulo returned to Chicago to continue her studies in accounting, but she felt the urge to stay longer in her parents’ hometown. “Like when I was little and I was with my parents for a couple of months on vacation,” she said.
The 29-year-old American has had a deep love for Mexico since childhood. She says she loves the color of life on the other side of the border, the people, the food, the festivals of patron saints, and the sense of community.
“I love Mexico. When I was little, I cried and asked my parents why I couldn’t live in Mexico. In Mexico, people live very simply, but it feels so full of so much. I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like there’s a whole world,” she says.
In January 2018, she returned to Mexico with the intention of staying for a few months. She and Vega then met again, dated, and spent time together, but neither was ready to move on to a serious relationship. She returned to Chicago and he remained in Guanajuato, and soon afterward they both began relationships with other people.
Long distance relationship and baby death
It wasn’t until September 2020 that Aramburo returned to Mexico and again, this time definitively, met the man with whom she would bear her child, but things did not go as expected.
“That’s when all the romance started. But 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,” Arambulo said. “A few months later, in November, I found out I was pregnant.”
From that moment on, distance became part of their relationship. She returned to Chicago for the December holidays to tell her family and stayed there until February 2021, then boarded a plane to Mexico to throw her baby’s gender reveal party.
The following month, in Mexico, Arambulo suffered complications and had to see a doctor. Doctors advised him to rest and return to the United States because his amniotic fluid was decreasing.
“So I went home. After a few nights, all the fluids were gone. I had to go to the hospital, but on April 11, 2021, the baby was born. The baby was 20 weeks old. I was with him for 30 minutes and was able to baptize him, but then he passed away,” she said.
At the time, the hardest thing for Arambulo was being separated from her partner. Even if she wanted to grieve over the baby together, she knew she couldn’t because her partner didn’t have a visa to visit her.
“It was very difficult for me because I had to do everything alone. I couldn’t run and go and see my son. And he supported me, but he wasn’t physically there. I had doctor’s appointments and I couldn’t bury my baby. We cremated him because we didn’t want to take away the opportunity for him to be there at that moment,” she explained.
When the medical examination was over, a grieving Arambulo placed the baby’s remains in a small heart-shaped urn and headed to Guanajuato, with no date set yet for her return.
Marriage and 3 years of consular procedures
Once together, Arambulo and Vega were able to grieve and underwent psychotherapy. “Grief caused a lot of problems. He didn’t want to show his emotions, but I’m a very sensitive person and I cry when I want to cry. So, the way he grieved was so different that I didn’t feel understood. Therapy helped us a lot, brought us closer, and we realized we didn’t want to be apart,” she explained.
That’s when they decided to become stronger, heal, and honor their baby. Their decision led them to travel to Puerto Vallarta in the Mexican Pacific, where he proposed marriage and she accepted.
On February 14, 2022, the couple held a ceremony that Arambulo described as “small and very simple” as they wanted to begin the consular process for applying for a green card.
“We started the process in April 2022, but they didn’t give us a reservation until 2024,” she explained.
Mr. Arambulo then returned to Chicago due to the requirement that U.S. citizens must be working in the country to apply for admission to the United States. This situation forced them to live apart for several months or only meet for a few days when possible.
“It’s been a complicated year,” Arambulo said. “There were times when I wanted to quit my job, and there were times when I thought, ‘What if I quit my job and go to Mexico?'” There were times when I felt desperate, depressed, and had negative thoughts that the relationship wouldn’t work out. And I looked for a way to go see him, but I had to save on the plane fare. ”
In August 2023, the couple’s application was accepted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and they received an email inviting them to an appointment in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in late 2024.
“In November of that year we went to a consular appointment and he was kept under administrative processing for two months. Our lawyer told us they might just be investigating the case thoroughly, but they took his passport and we were very scared,” she added.
Finally, in January 2025, the couple received the notification they had been waiting for for so long. It turned out that my immigrant visa had been approved. They cried tears of joy over the phone and shared the news with family and friends. Once the formalities were completed, all that was left was to find a flight to take Vega from Ciudad Juárez to Chicago.
“When he got on the plane, I was so happy and so excited. I gave him the welcome sign and went to pick him up at the airport. I was really cheeky,” she recalls.
For just over a year, they’ve been living out their love story in Chicago. “The real reason we’re here in the U.S. is that we’re planning on having another baby, and the idea is that if something happens, we’ll have a hospital where we can be treated and nothing bad will happen again. But we also plan to go back to Mexico and build a home there someday.”
