The Migrant Trail 2010 (& Beyond)

June 12, 2010—Puebla, Mexico
For the first time since I began participating the Migrant Trail, I am writing my thoughts about the walk from south of the line. It’s Saturday night in Puebla, Mexico, and I can hear the well-watered laughter of the bar next door from my patio. Earlier this morning, I awoke to the neighboring church’s campanas ringing out morning prayers. And to think that a week ago I was sitting under a desert sky full of shooting stars covered in days’ worth of dust and my own sweat….

I wasn’t even home with my family in Arizona for 24 hours after the Trail. By 10:30 a.m. Monday morning, I was on a plane to go back south after a week of walking from Sásabe (just over the border in Mexico) to Tucson. On the first leg of my flight from Phoenix to Houston, I flew over the Altar Valley that I had just traveled on foot, this time looking at the sacred peak Boboquívari from above. How strange to fly over this valley of death knowing what I know of this merciless desert. As I gazed out, I was flipping through the heart-rending introduction of Margaret Regan’s The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). Here, Regan describes the January 2008 death of 14 year-old Salvadoreña Josseline Hernández in a desert canyon near Arivaca, Arizona. Knowing what I know about the valley below me, walking what I’ve walked near to where Josseline took her last breath, I cried quietly against my window-seat window.

There, there below was my home. The desert home whose spiny, yet endearing cholla cactus I wrote about after last year’s walk. The home where my dear family goes about daily life, where thousands die in its callous wilderness every year. And now the home that has passed a law that earned national and international infamy in April. Mixed in with my tears was a stiff cocktail of anger and shame at the ignorance, prejudice, and blind fear that lead to such perilous policies. And so these emotions followed me in my voyage south to a land that is directly impacted by the actions of my home state. I have always been ashamed of what is happening in my own backyard—thousands of deaths in a part of the world I call home, not far from Tucson, the city many of you have heard me say is where I’d give my eyeteeth to live again. But this new law SB 1070? This?

Before I left for the walk, I attended—as I always do when I am home—a retirees’ happy hour with my father and step mum. They are both Canadian immigrants with dual citizenship like me. There are others there—an English couple who also have U.S. citizenship; a couple from Chicago’s Irish and Polish immigrant communities; Canadian snowbirds from Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia; a Wyoming-born Chicano who comes with his German wife; regular ol’ Americans coming from Appalachia (one of the nation’s most heavily settled area of Irish and Scottish migrants). It’s always great for a laugh and political jousting (neither of which I ever turn down), not to mention the he’s-buying-a round glass of wine and/or beer.

But this May, just prior to the 2010 Trail, I burned with rage. SB 1070 inevitably came up, especially since this group knows well what I do every year. I expressed my strident concern that the law could and probably would give rise to racial profiling (depending on who is doing the enforcing), that I feared a society that scared out all those illegal-immigranty looking folks, that who—after all—would want to live in a society that was all W.A.S.P.-y? Two—count’em….two—in my company at the table, both Arizona non-natives like me, said in response: “What’s wrong with living in a society that’s all white?”

This is my Arizona? This is my home? Would I ever invite anyone to a home in which it’s ok to be glibly racist at a happy hour?

From Puebla, I have been reflecting on all of this. I haven’t had much of a transition from the Trail, and have had to leave my desert experience behind more quickly than usual. I haven’t had time to let it weigh on me as it usually does. In its place, I’ve been dealing with functioning from dawn to dark in a language that is not my own, and looking at a culture which—up until a week ago—I had only seen pockets of in Arizona and the rest of the nation.

I do stick out like a sore thumb here. Though Puebla prides itself on its Spanish roots, it is a town in and around which the indigenous population’s presence can be seen, tasted, heard, and felt. With my hair/eyes/skin/stature, it’s pretty darn clear that I’m not from around these parts. And when I open my mouth, trying to twist it around names I have a hard time pronouncing (Tlaxcala, Cuyoaco, Cuauhtinchán) or a simple roll of the tongue to pronounce back-to-back r’s, I lay my foreign-ness bare for the whole country to see.

What do I get in return? ¡Güerita! Yes, a diminutive form of “white girl,” but it comes with a warm smile and a helping hand.

29 July 2010—Williamsport, Pennsylvania
I did not write anything else while I was in Mexico, in part because I managed to get ill while there. But it was also because, on a daily basis, I was reminded—usually through my tears or others’—why I walk the Migrant Trail every year. This morning I write thinking about a summer of many deaths in Arizona’s deserts and remembering my friends in Arizona as they are protesting again today SB 1070.

I. Ciudad Juárez:

The most important moment for me this summer in Mexico was meeting the man who was my teacher.

The Tuesday after returning home from the Migrant Trail on Sunday evening, I was sitting in class in Cholula, ready to begin my intensive Spanish studies. I was a little nervous because I had never really been more than a dilettante in Spanish, and now I was there in a more serious capacity. Plus it was one-on-one instruction so I couldn’t hide behind someone else’s desk.

My instructor walked in, and we began. In those first hours, I am pretty sure he was trying to assess my levels in Spanish. We talked about everything—a little about the walk (what I could articulate), my nationalities, my profession, my apartment in Puebla, my dog. The usual suspects.

As I was aware that the conversation was somewhat one-sided, I began to ask more questions about him. We turned to the niceties of all first conversations. Where were you born? Juárez. Where’s home? Juárez. Where’s your family? Juárez.

But *he* wasn’t in Juárez. He was in Puebla working with folks like me, and with students that universities like mine send to study abroad. And there wasn’t much need to explain why. Ciudad Juárez is a human butcher shop right now with the daily drug cartel violence. That someone would leave there—if they could—seems a perfectly understandable thing to do.

So I asked next what he had done in Juárez before coming to Puebla.

He was a journalist, working as an editor.

Oh man. They killed a journalist in Juárez, a journalist who had been covering the cartel violence there, didn’t they?

He tipped his chair back, put his arms over his face. He was quiet for a moment. And then he began, while apologizing, to cry.

They did. They killed a friend and co-worker of his.

I was silent, knowing that he was about as naked emotionally as ever happens in life.

From this moment on, he and I continued on this deeper level of conversation. Though we did laugh, our classes and discussions centered in on the hell of our borderlands (cartel violence and immigration), political corruption, unbearable poverty, and the hopeless job market. The vision I walked away was of a beloved country, but one that is very broken. I also cried in his class.

There is so much more I could say about him and about our time together. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so moved on such regular basis as when I was talking with him. He is a man who profoundly loves his country and his hometown, and who clearly loved his work as a journalist. But because of the strange Mexican universe that he lives in, he struggles with staying in Mexico and trying to find decent work in a town far from his homeland.

The really good news—as he carefully reminded me—is that he has found new beginnings in Puebla. No longer in journalism, he’s doing an amazing job as a demanding, yet infectiously fun teacher. This job is where he belongs, and where he shines. What is more, Puebla (to the great difference of Juárez) bubbles over culturally. And he revels in this. It is thanks to him that I discovered: 1) the bar next door, 2) the Paleteria El Carmen (all roads in *my* Puebla lead to this wondrous popsicle shop), and 3) roasted bananas from the camotero’s cart with a little condensed sweetened milk (the best thing I have ever eaten in my life).

In Puebla, it’s a different world. He has come alive in Puebla in a way that wasn’t possible in the borderlands. He is a migrant in his own country. And Mexico is all the luckier that he has stayed.

II. Malpaís:

About a two weeks into my stay in Puebla, I was invited to a quinceañera in a small town northeast of Puebla. The drive was fascinating. To leave Puebla’s terrible pollution behind to stare out of a car window to the countryside (volcanoes, piñon trees, big prickly pear cacti) was the perfect way to spend part of a Saturday afternoon.

We arrived at my friend’s uncle’s ranch and were greeted with by a goofy bunch of teenagers who were getting ready for the big party. I was the spectacle of the day (see “Güerita” above), but again, I felt perfectly welcome.

From there, we left to drive to a nowhere town called Mancuernas. It is such a small, poor town that there isn’t even a sign marking which way to turn to get there. No one really ever goes there. They are just there or gone from there.

We were pointed off to the left once we asked for directions. We traveled down a dirt road, on all sides surrounded by milpas (corn fields). The corn was about 3 inches tall, burned at the edges. There had been no rain. And it was pretty clear that the whole area depended on the corn getting that rain. And if that rain didn’t come….

Up above the milpas were outcroppings of weird rocks, covered in yucca and cactus. I felt like I was travelling through one of Cormac McCarthy’s novels. As I was staring out the car window at a disaster of a corn field, I overheard that that area was called malpaís. Yes, indeed.

III. Jesús, No. 2:

Not long before I returned to the States, I was at a friend’s, getting ready to eat lunch. Eating solid food was a small miracle for me,and I was still relatively excited to sit at a table to eat something other than chicken soup. Before we sat down to eat, however, my friend’s cousin and aunt showed up unexpectedly. I was introduced to them both, and the cousin greeted me in English. He was also wearing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. jacket.

After the usual family greetings (and the invitation to join us for lunch), I found out that the cousin (Jesús) had lived in the U.S. for a while. He crossed with an 18 year-old female coyote into Texas in the late nineties, when doing so was only about $1500. Once across, he got to the Carolinas, working as a dishwasher, pulling down more money than he ever would have at home. And, of course, he sent that money home to his mother.

She looked sick when he was talking about his time in the States. She spoke about not knowing if he was alive or dead as he was crossing the border, about him being cut off from family when he was working. He is her only child, and clearly talking about all of that made her revisit those very real fears of loss and death.

Trying to lighten things up a bit, I asked what he thought were the biggest differences he noticed between the States and Mexico. Without batting a lash, he said, “The waste, you guys waste a lot.” Working in a restaurant, he saw how much food was thrown out every night. Enough to feed his family and many friends. He couldn’t believe it. “It’s a different world. A really different place.”

IV. Doña María—San Miguel de Canoa:

My last full day in Mexico…. Though I had (of course) not packed a thing, the last thing I wanted to do was stay inside my apartment, even on the rainy day that it was. So I snatched up the offer of going to a small town outside of Puebla called San Miguel de Canoa. I knew of it because my teacher had mentioned a classic Mexican film, Canoa, set in the town. The town—hyped up by the local paranoid priest—had killed several students (¿Commies?) from Puebla at the beginning of the 70s. I had seen the film while in Puebla, and was curious to see the place today.

So we set off. This in spite of the heavy rains that were threatening to wash out the roads we were to take on the twenty-minute drive out of Puebla. We drove towards La Malinche, one of the local volcanoes that surround Puebla and Cholula. The town is settled in at the base of the volcano, precariously situated in gulches and ravines, at the top or bottom (it always seemed) of some crazy incline. It’s tightrope-wire architecture. And it’s just recently been paved.

We were looking for Doña María, the woman who takes care of a friend’s sister’s kids (got that?) when she’s in Mexico for the summer. Doña María has no Internet, no cell phone, no landline. The only way to contact her is to go see her.

We showed up at where we thought she might be. She wasn’t home, but one of her granddaughters was. She pointed us down the road. Which one? She didn’t know. None of the roads really had names. Over there. Down the hill. To the right. Up a hill. Off to the right again. Something like that.

We took a couple of stabs at finding her. We had to stop to ask, though, and we were pointed to a one-room concrete block building (just like all the rest) where Doña María was making tortillas. She immediately recognized my company, pulled back the sheet at the entrance, and invited us in.

We sat on small stools as she expertly ground the corn, pressed it, and cooked it on her big comal. She never stopped working the whole time we were there, though she did carry on conversations with us (in Spanish) and with those customers who came by to pick up their tortillas for the day (in Nahuatl). We talked about the death of her young great-grandson, of the rains, of the recent elections, of her children in Mexico and in the States. She apologized for not being able to offer us proper food, but handed us freshly made tortillas with a little salt.

As I ate my tortilla, I looked around the room. We were in the front part of the room, divided from the rest of the room by another sheet. Behind this, I could see a bed, and a small kitchen area. That was it. I’m not sure if there was a bathroom.

My friend asked me if I wanted to take pictures. I had my camera with me, but I just couldn’t. I’d never seen such poverty. And I’d never been more grateful for a tortilla.

15 August 2010—Mount Pleasant, Michigan

My summer is almost over. The goldenrod along my river running paths is turning yellow—a sure sign of 1) oncoming hay fever and 2) the beginning of a new semester and school year. And I haven’t yet posted anything to my blog about the Migrant Trail.

Normally, I post as soon as I can after returning from the Trail. I spend hours, late hours especially, crafting something tight, something that (hopefully) hangs together well. It’s exhausting, but cathartic.

But this year was different. It was a summer full of thinking about Mexico & Central America, and about the migrants who come to Arizona and to the U.S. from those places. It was a summer full of talk about SB 1070. The protests in Phoenix. The Trail. Then it was living in Mexico. Puebla. Discussions with those who have lived in or travelled through the borderlands of the U.S. & Mexico. Poverty. Bad harvests. And all of it, all of it seemed to tell me more about the story of migration to my home from the south. Day after day, it has seemed like there is more information. And I haven’t quite known how to write about it.

So I offer this up to you, as messy and as loose as it is. Because it is a snapshot of what I felt, what I saw, and what I learned. It tells some small part of the story of why they are coming north from their homeland, something often ignored here.

But don’t trust me. Learn more about why this migration exists (and will continue to do so) in spite of the walls, legal snafus, desert terrains, and racist laws set up against it. Join me on the Migrant Trail next year, or on a trip down to Café Justo in Agua Prieta, or out in the southern Arizona deserts to fill water tanks with Humane Borders. Learn what you can because the media and both political parties have got the whole thing wrong. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

And I want more than anything for the U.S. to get it right at the border and beyond because there are really wonderful people hanging in the balance.

As a person of faith, I am called upon to side on the side of the poor, the hurt, the homeless, the stranger, the migrant. That is where the Migrant Trail comes into my life, and why I write what I write. But I want to stress here as well how much I love Mexico, how much I have come to care for it and for so many friends and people I have met there. I’ll go back again, as often as possible.

Mexico is a frightful and beautiful place, all rolled into one crazy country. It is our neighbor, something I have felt palpably most of my (American) life. And it’s high time that we really think hard about how we’re behaving right next door. What can we do to help Mexico out of its poverty, corruption, trafficking? What can we learn from them about family life, good eating, helping each other out?

Let’s sit down together, put aside all the rhetoric and racism, and figure out a better way to deal with this border and migration. Isn’t that what good neighbors should do?

--Christi Brookes, 15 August 2010