BERKELEY

Patricia Hernandez has the unenviable job of cleaning up the mess left by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.

"Whatever they break, we fix it," she said, sitting on a dormitory couch during her morning break. "Change light bulbs, fix furniture, fix toilets, unclog toilets, replace toilets."

Hernandez, 48, is not complaining, she's just describing. She is proud of the job she has held for 18 years and the financial security it brings. She loves that her brother is a cook at a nearby campus cafeteria and that her daughter works as a pharmacy technician a few blocks away.

She loves it because 40 years ago, she was living in a Mexican orphanage. Twenty-five years ago, she was living in a car in Southern California and struggling to find work because she was an illegal immigrant.

"Like everybody else, I jumped the border," she said. Then, about 23 years ago, she got lucky.

For Hernandez and thousands of other Bay Area residents, 1987 marked the end of a life of hiding and the beginning of life as an American.

It was the year the Immigration Reform and Control Act, approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan, went into effect. In a matter of months, Hernandez went from being undocumented to having a green card, and years later she was able to obtain citizenship. She sighs today as she imagines how life would be different without it