© 2008
by Bill Jungels
The core of the story though comes from Gerato from Las Margaritas in Chiapas. I know something about his conditions because my work for the past 3 years has been in Chiapas and if the people I know in the highlands are really, really badly off, it is even worse for some of those in the Lacondon jungle area where Las Margaritras is located. Gerato’s point is that in Chiapas they treat American’s with “care” and respect, (of which I am living proof). Why then should they be treated so badly by us?
Gerato fears for his return. Having spent a great deal of money (no doubt borrowed at the going extortionary interest rates), he says that he will bear a heavy fine (multa), that he is dañado (damaged) but that his family “can’t leave me abandoned in the streets.” Having hoped to provide a support for a family living where there simply is no work, Gerato will return instead as an increased burden to a family unable to bear more.
The following day, Sunday, is a slow day. I count the damages, Two men with cactus spines driven through their knees when they tried to run. A man with a thick gash on his stomach from barbed wire. Numerous people, including several young girls, who can hardly walk from the skin burned on the bottoms of their feet and nasty blisters on top. Several sprained ankles. Volunteers give them water with epson salts to soak their feet. Sometimes they are able to provide them with better shoes. Then a man who has been sitting quietly off to the side goes into a grand mal and lies shuddering on the ground while volunteers try to help. Later an ambulance is called and takes him away to be evaluated. At the end of the day as I prepare to leave I give 50 dollars to a man with a shirt tied tight around his hips so he can go get an x-ray. When I come back the next morning to say goodbye to people, Gilberto, one of the Mexican workers, tells me the man has a fractured hip.
On the positive side, some hairdressers from town have shown up to give people free hair cuts.
Romero is in charge of the center. He is thankful to the volunteers. He is working on schemes to find employment for returned immigrants with a Mexican retail chain. Which I applaud while thinking that even Mexico’s largest retailer couldn’t handle more than a weeks worth of returnees. (Yup. You guessed it. That’d be Walmart.) He says in the most diplomatic way (and in near perfect English) that he would like to be able to talk to U.S. immigration so that they wouldn’t drop off pregnant women and underage children at three in the morning.
A young guy who speaks a little bit of street English tells me he has the job of arranging transport home for returnees who want to go. There is some sort of arrangement for half price bus fare. But many will probably be heading right back to Altar, the jumping off place for another try. A couple even tell me they are going to attempt it right here in Nogales. The ever present Migra vehicles just a few hundred yards away make that seem a long shot.
The angriest man I meet here is an American. Pancho Marina is an activist Mexicano from Tucson, here as a No More Deaths volunteer. He’s been involved since the 1970s and says the racism is the worst he’s ever seen, accusing Arizona of ethnic cleansing. Alomost speechless with righteous anger: “We’re criminals. What we’re doing, we’re criminals.”
What in particular has him “pissed”, and, he adds, “feeling guilty for his privileges”, is a woman sitting a few yards away.
The mother, trying to control her emotions, is looking at some place infinitely far off, perhaps Phoenix where her husband still walks the streets. Not knowing their car was stopped that afternoon by immigration and now they are here, without anything.
No más quiere alimentarse como nosotoros….Así salió. / He no longer wants to nourish himself like we do…That’s why he left.”
Her look too is far away as she says this and she does not hold back the tears. Perhaps she is looking for him in that far off North, or perhaps she sees the broken dream of their life together with their youngest son.
That’s how they explain. They don’t talk about how free trade neo-liberalism propelled the withdrawal of support for small coffee growers and destroyed the market. Nor how the government has opened the doors wide to U.S. subsidized corn. Nor that these actions have made it next to impossible for their sons and daughters to survive there. That the government economic “plan” for their survival is remittances sent home by sons, daughters, husbands, parents. They don’t say this, but many know it. And they resist, living in autonomous communities, forming cooperatives, trying hard to hold the faith that having risen up can still make a difference.
