The Morenos pt. 3

The next morning, someone knocked on my bedroom door before sunrise. It was Sabina and Cruz’s son, José. Though I hadn’t seen him at the family gathering the night before, I instantly recognized him from Minnesota, from Lakewinds, the grocery store where we both worked. I didn’t know him well, but it was still José.

José who worked in the produce department.

José who religiously cleaned the lettuce every day except for Saturday.

José who I remembered to be quiet and whom I had suspected of pretending not to speak English.

(I have since found out that he actually doesn’t speak English.)

José said he’d woken me so that we could climb to the top of the peña – the rock I had heard so much about and glimpsed the night before -- and that we’d better get an early start since the sun would be too hot come midday.

We walked out the door with his dog in tow and a roll of toilet paper in my hand and headed toward the volcanic rock.

It took an hour (without a bathroom break, so the toilet paper was a waste) to scale. Most of the climb was walking, and we only used our hands to climb the steep rock at the very top. We didn’t speak, I was out of breath and José’s quiet anyway. I was scared but filled with adrenaline, the drug that quelled the fear and propelled my body up the face of the rock.

Out of breath and tired, we reached peña’s peak, and sat, looking out over the puebla. To the east, I saw a coalmine, to my right, there was a shrine on the mountain for those who had died on it.

I felt like I should say something like “We made it!” But instead the silence of the rock froze me and I did not know what to say to my companion. I began to feel out of place, like I had blindly journeyed with someone and had forgotten to ask their name and then arrived, only to sit in silence.

I had known Jose, but I had known him in another life in a snowy city where we worked together in a grocery store. I hadn’t been friends with Jose. We were cordial at work and I would ask him for bruised apples to take home for free, but other then that, we had never really talked.

For me, Jose was one of the hundreds of faceless, nameless Mexican workers we see in every city in America.

And now I was next to him, alone on some magical rock in the middle of the Mexican desert. My mind began to spin. I wanted to ask him questions about his journey home and if he liked it here and what he missed most about Minnesota. But before I could say anything, I looked over at José and noticed that he had covered his face with his cowboy hat and fallen asleep. I took his picture.

After a while, José awoke and began to walk down the mountain. I followed in silence.

When we got home, he said he had to go to work – selling water – and said he’d drop me off with Araceli and Jorge.

Araceli worked nights with me at the Lakewinds. I knew Araceli as the kind of woman who, instead of showing pain or fatigue, exhibited endurance and courage with a laughing grin. She had a lot of energy to clean and cook at work and I knew she had two kids at home to care for.

Her husband, Jorge was a goofball. He dubbed the white dishwasher at Lakewinds, Paul, “Pablo,” and often mocked the management’s strict rule of writing the name of the salad on top the dish by labeling tuna salad “spaghetti,” enchiladas as “tomato soup,” and so forth.

Araceli worked nights and Jorge worked days and they made it work. They bought a house, and in the sixteen years they lived in Minnesota, had three children who went to public schools.

I found Jorge, Araceli and their three children digging out a dirt hole alongside a dirt road in the desert.

When I saw them, I felt excited right away, like I could not possibly say or ask enough. I shed the dissonance I had felt with Jose and talked and talked and talked.

I updated them on others we had worked with, I told Jorge that Paul/Pablo, who is developmentally disabled, had been moved out of the kitchen since he had problems focusing after Manuel left and was now Lakewinds’ janitor. I asked about their children, I told them about my family, and, at last, I saw the baby that had grown inside of Araceli’s belly while we worked together.

His name is Joshua and he is almost four. He looks exactly like Jorge.

It took only an instant to realize that life was not easy for Jorge and Araceli in Bernal. They explained to me that they were in debt to the person who had smuggled them across the border so long ago, and that the coyote had confiscated their house long ago. The hole that they were digging was to become their house.

The Morenos, pt. 2

I decided to visit the Morenos after I was settled in Guanajuato. In the weeks pending my visit, I read about Bernal and daydreamed about seeing Araceli’s children again. I realized that the baby boy who kicked in her belly while we worked at Lakewinds would be three.

There is not much on the internet or in travel books about Bernal: it is tiny. The town has received some attention in the past few years, though, because Mexico’s new age-ers have identified the volcanic rock in the town as having healing energy. (see: http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/2003/the-magic-of-bernal/) When I did read about the town, words like “magical” and “healing” came up.

I suppose this is all to say that I had no idea what to expect from Bernal.

I took a bus from Guanajuato to Queretaro and then another bus to a town outside of Queretaro and then asked a taxi driver to bring me to Bernal, which I expected to be a few miles away. Forty minutes later I arrived at the state prison. The taxi driver had heard penal instead of Bernal.

After paying the driver a sum unheard of as far as rural Mexican taxi drivers go and winding through the desert for another hour, I arrived in Bernal.

The taxi let me out in the center square, and I stood and looked around, tired and confused and not sure how to carry my recording equipment, backpack and the flowers I had picked up to give Manuel’s mother.

Manuel’s only instructions had been to arrive in Bernal and ask for his mother, Sabina Jiminez.

I asked the first person who walked by where Sabina Jiminez lived. The person whom I asked (who I’d later be formally introduced to) told me that Sabina was her cousin and brought me to the gates of the Jiminez home. I rang the doorbell but no one answered. I sat on the curb outside of the door and prepared myself for a wait.

A few minutes later, an old man opened the door. I asked “Sabina Jiminez?” and he smiled and waved me inside. Manuel had never told me that I’d be visiting his father too.

I’ve since found out that Sr. Moreno was absent for much of the family’s upbringing – he drank too much and rode a mule an hour a day to get to the family’s farm outside of town, where he sometimes slept. A few years ago he had a stroke, and he hasn’t been able to speak clearly since.

He showed me inside. I asked him what his name was and he pointed to the crucifix on the wall.

“Jesus?”

He crossed his opposing index fingers and muttered.

Cruz. Cruz Moreno.

He looked like Manuel. He dressed the way elderly men sometimes do in the states, wearing a cardigan and slippers, only he also wore a cowboy hat. He sat down and pointed me to the garden, the horse, the kitchen and the bedrooms. The house consists of several rooms that the Morenos have spent the past fifty years building from wood and concrete, there are no hallways, and a tropical garden is in the center of the compound. I had chosen the wrong gift: the carnations I brought were pale compared to the orchids.

I didn’t know what to say to a man I had never met who could not speak. I smiled, we sat together waiting for Sabina.

Sabina arrived with dinner and half of the town in tow. I was not petted or admired. I was not chased around or stared at. None of the things that happen to the Hollywood movie white girl when she lands at an unknown third world location happened to me. The Morenos and their cousins and friends just asked me a lot of questions and then carried on with their conversation, they offered me food and I helped to cook. I felt, almost instantly, at ease.

The Morenos pt. 1

I’ve been back from Mexico for over a month and my experience haunts me. It haunts me because the drug war is in the news almost every day, it haunts me because I remember faces and names of people who are struggling or scared, and it haunts me because I am back in Minnetonka and so everyone asks about the Morenos.

The Morenos are the family of Mexicans I worked with in high school. Santiago and his brothers, Manuel and Jose had worked at Lakewinds, a local natural foods store, for nearly ten years before I started in 2003. Their cousins, Joel and Araceli, her husband Jorge had followed and also worked in the kitchen.

When I first came to work at Lakewinds, Manuel was the person I wanted to impress. He wasn’t my boss and he had no official title in italics below his name on his name tag, but everyone knew that he was the one who ran the kitchen. Manuel was shown the food before it went to the deli to be sold, Manuel made the food for the Christmas parties, Manuel had the last word. The kitchen worked like a finely oiled machine – everyone came to work on time, the food was beautiful and perfectly cooked and it was a wonderful place to smell.

I’d purposefully do dishes in front of Manuel to try to show him that I wasn’t just another white girl earning mall money; I’d try to ask him about Mexico and show an interest in his past. But he never really showed approval or opened up.

I became good friends with Santiago, his younger brother, because we worked the night shift together.

I got to know Araceli, who had a lot of energy and usually made me laugh, and befriended her just as she got pregnant with her third child. During her pregnancy, I’d ask a lot of questions about what she was feeling and, one time, I went over to her and Jorge’s house to meet her older two children and have dinner.

Time went by, and I really got to know the Moreno family. Manuel started to at least laugh at my jokes and acknowledge my pathetic efforts to prove my worth. Through Araceli and Santiago, I was gradually told a little bit about the part of Mexico the Morenos are from: a little puebla outside of Queretaro named Bernal, famous for its gigantic rock.

One day, I found out that the Morenos were illegal immigrants and had been fired from Lakewinds. There was no threat from outside; the human resources manager for the company had returned from a week vacationing in Cancun paranoid about their status and decided to get rid of them.

Work was never the same. Lakewinds burned through managers and the turnover was incredible, the food didn’t look right and I felt strange walking through the kitchen. I left for college but kept Santiago’s phone number and called him when I was home for breaks.

Joel, Araceli and Jorge went back to Mexico because Joel and Araceli’s mother was dying and Araceli wanted her children, who had been born in the United States and had never traveled outside its borders, to meet their grandmother in Bernal.

Manuel cleans houses in Minneapolis and Santiago does landscaping.

Jose, their brother, went back to Mexico to try to help on their family farm.

More time passed, memories of the Morenos subsided as I went through college.

I graduated from college in May and decided to spend the summer after graduation studying emigration from Mexico. Each time I was pressed to explain my interest in the issue, I'd think of the Morenos but would only sometimes explain my relationship to the family and how affected I was by what happened to them. They were always in the back of my mind but the thought of seeing them again was more fantasy than feasible.

About a week before I was to leave for Mexico, Manuel called. He had heard from a friend of a friend of my mother that I was going to be in Mexico for the summer. He wanted me to visit his mother. He hadn't been home in nearly twenty years and he wanted to send a visitor.

I accepted the task wholeheartedly.

Money

There's a lot of money in Mexico. The richest man in the world and telecommunications mogul, Carlos Slim lives here (his attorney's desert mansion was pointed out to e a few days ago). There thriving industry in Mexico City and Mexico has oil.

The problem is that none of this money is invested in the development of the country.

I've spent a lot of time in Brazil -- in Rio and in the northeast cities of Macio and Forteleza -- so I find myself drawing comparisons between the development of the two countries. In my experience, there is a much larger sense of nationalism in Brazil: the police are less corrupt, people believe in Lula, the president who rose from the favelas to take charge of the country's labor party, and people are, generally, proud to be Brasileiros. Of course none of these ideologies directly translate to investment in the country, but they sow the seeds of success for the next generation of educated young people to reap within the boundaries of Brazil. People want to come and work in Brazil, people want to work within the confines of Brazilian industry.

In Mexico, though, the next generation is dying to leave. The rural poor NEED to leave to survive and the educated youth are often too scared to stay. The violence in Mexico is at the point of driving its youth away.

In Brazil, there was this sense of connectedness with the crime. The favelas had drug lords who were at war with the police and the government and the networks of the drug lords spread to the prisons and the pick-pocketing youth.

This connectedness allows for the rich to distance themselves from the crime. The beef is between the police, the government and the drug lords and gangs. That being said, there are still kidnappings.

In Mexico City, however, the beef is between the rich and the police and the criminals. Only the police are on the side of the criminals. I spoke with a friend from a wealthy area of Mexico City yesterday who explained to me that the rich are simply without protection. My friend, Mariana Azarcarte, knew a girl who had been raped by the police, had a neighbor who had been shot in the eye when he refused to bribe the police, and she said that nearly everyone in her neighborhood had had "an incident."

"An incident" means a kidnapping. My friend's own mother was the victim of an express kidnapping, where the victim is kidnapped for a day or so and in those desperate hours, as much money is taken from the person as possible.

Mariana said that she felt like the border was safer than being rich in Mexico City.

"In the border, you know that you are not going to be killed when you're asleep in your bed. No one is after you unless you are a drug dealer. Of course you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in Mexico City violence can happen anywhere, you can open your front door and they're waiting for you. You can get into a cab and they're waiting for you. It happens anywhere at anytime and you are the one they're looking for. And forget the police, they'll take your money too."

All of this unorganized violence breeds a terrifying and divisive sense of "us" versus "them." The idea feel victimized by, quite literally, the rest of their country steers investment elsewhere and oushes the dreams of the nation's best educated youth elsewhere.

"So Close to the United States, so Far from God"

The Arizona law goes in to effect in a few hours and Mexico City is abuzz. Shelters in the north of Mexico are bracing for a influx of deportees and everyone I spoke to today mentioned tomorrow's importance. There is a banner in the main square protesting the law.

A taxi driver asked where I was from, and upon hearing my response, told me about his daughter in Phoenix. He's worried because the rest of his family lives in Juarez, and he fears that if she is deported she'll go there.

In Bernal, though, people hadn't heard about the Arizona law. The newspapers don't reach into the small towns and somehow the information hadn't reached.

I realized after a few days in the small town in Queretaro that most of the men working in the United States are working in Minnesota. Apparenently this is common in small towns in Mexico -- a few men go and pick a city and the rest of the puebla follows.

I've always had an idea about a small town but, before Bernal, I had never been to the kind of small town of my imagination: a place where a few large families marry each other and everyone knows each other or is somehow related. It's strange for me to imagine this kind of environment transplanted a thousand miles away in the snowy Midwest. It's also strange to imagine the Midwestern economy being so directly tied to the functioning of a desert town in Mexico.

Everyone I meet in Mexico has a relationship to the United States. For the educated and often wealthy, this means the eventual goal of working in Miami or New York. Everyone else either wants to leave to work there or has a brother or father who already has.

It's simple and it happens all of the time:

"Where are you from?"

"The United States, are you from Mexico?"

"Yes. Where are you from in the United States? I used to work in (Phoenix, Tuscan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas)"

"Why did you come back?"

Here the answers vary. People come back for all kinds of reasons. Jose and Araceli, a couple I knew from Minnesota but saw in Bernal, returned because her mother was dying and Araceli wanted her children to meet their grandmother.

But then almost everyone says the same thing: "Life is hard in Mexico, it is hard to make money, it is hard to live."

The US dollar is everywhere, figuratively and literally. Today at the supermarket I waited for a while in line because the woman in front of me insisted on paying with a fifty dollar bill.

When Corn's the Culprit

As the debate over the constitutionality of Arizona’s controversial new immigration law dominates Washington’s discussion of immigration, new pressure has been put on Obama to come forth with a concrete stance on immigration policy.

Within this discussion, there lives the idea that if we change immigration law, somehow our nation’s immigration crisis will cease, or at least improve. If we have better protection at the border, less people will enter illegally or if we create a path to citizenship for those who are already in the United States, we will have somehow done due justice.

Though changes are no doubt necessary to our nation’s outdated immigration policy – nothing will change unless we address the underlying factors that cause migration to the United States: agricultural, trade, and labor policy.

When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the bill promised to allow Mexico to “export goods, not people,” by increasing employment opportunities in Mexico and closing the gap between U.S. and Mexican wages. Mexican migration since the agreement, though, has more than doubled, we are to the point where about nine percent of the population born in Mexico is now living in the United States. (http://www.migrationinformation.org).

Part of this mass migration has to do with the fact that, from 1994 to 2010, US exports to Mexico have increased 400 percent, while Mexico failed to invest in the technology, infastructure and research and development to effectively compete.

Looking to where people are migrating from helps solve a part of the puzzle: the states with the higest rates of emigration are Guanajuato and Michoacan. These are the states with the largest sector of their economy vested in agriculture.

With NAFTA came a flood of exported below-cost corn from the United States. Between 1995 and 2006, the government paid out $56 billion in corn subsidies (http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn). Corn is our most lavishly subsidized food crop by a long shot; since 1995 it has drawn more subsidies than wheat ($22 billion), soybeans ($14 billion), and rice ($11 billion)–combined.

All of this government aid helps corn flow south in a torrent and all of this government aid helps to put Mexican corn farmers, well, out of business.

I saw this all to much in Bernal – a place with empty farms, hungry mules (and people) and a unifying hope in the town of sending sons northward.

For more info, check out:

http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/index.php/2010/04/nafta-and-u-s-corn-subsidies-explaining-the-displacement-of-mexicos-corn-farmers/

Bernal pt. 1

I´ve spent the past few days in Bernal, a small town in the state of Queretaro, a few hundred kilometers northwest of Mexico City. It is the home to a large rock that came from outer space a long time ago and the Moreno family, among other people, quite a few animals and several less interesting geological formations.

I got to know the Morenos when they worked in the kitchen at Lakewinds Natural Foods. I remember the moment I realized that the people who worked in the kitchen were related -- Santiago and Manuel are brothers and Joel and Jose Luis are their cousins and Araseli is their sister and Jose is her husband.

I remember hearing stories about Bernal (about the horses and the farms and that big, magical rock). I remember admiring their work ethic and how much they were giving up to make under $8 an hour.

I also remember the day the management found out that they were illegal immigrants. many of them returned to Mexico, some of them stayed in Minneapolis.

My directions to the town were simple: get on a bus, get off in Bernal and ask for Sabina Jiminez Moreno. I did these things and arrived safely at the birthplace of the Moreno family.


Santiago and Mauel's father, Sr. Moreno used to farm -- the family has several acres of land outside of the pueblo, but it´s not worth it for him to farm anymore. He can´t compete with the larger farms that use expensive equipment to sow the fields, and he simply doesn´t have the capital to invest in new farm equipment. So, the mules are fed once a day but they do no work. They just stand there, in the unfarmed fields, aging and getting dusty.

The cost of living in Bernal is relatively low, but the town (like much of Mexico) operates within this weird system where sometimes things are valued at a peso that is equal to 10 cents and sometimes things are valued at a peso that matches the US dollar. Wealth, at least in Bernal, is measured by how many of your sons are working in the states.

Many of the women I met were empty-nesters: photographs line the living room walls, pictures of their sons who cannot return. The photographs are from years ago, before their songs became old enough to cross the border or rich enough to pay the Coyotes.

Sra. Jiminez Moreno, the mother of Manuel and Santiago, visited the states five years ago to see her sons. When she told me about this, I imagined her getting on a plane in Mexico City and disembarking in a cold Minnesota, an airport-type reunion. Snow on the ground, maybe.



The reunion was actually quite different.

Sra. Jiminez Moreno, who is in her late 60s, was smuggled across the border with a Coyote. Once she arrived in the California desert she was picked up by a friend of her daughter´s and then rode several busses to arrive in Minnesota. Sra. Moreno hasn´t left Bernal either before or after this venture, though she said she loved the snow.

Santa Julia

Last week I went to Santa Julia, an orphanage in San Miguel. It was the first time I’ve ever been to an orphanage – I had no idea what to expect. I’d heard about it from a friend of a friend who handed me a card and briefly said I ought to go check the place out.

When I got to Santa Julia, I found that it was, in ways, grimmer than the orphanages I had imagined: the girls at Santa Julia have not been orphaned because their parents have died; instead, most are there because their families simply can’t afford to feed them.

Most of the girls come from single mothers. Some have court ordered placements here because of abuse or neglect, but the vast majority is from families too poor to have another child. Mothers and fathers come to visit, and sometimes if circumstances have changed, a child is reunited with their family.

Santa Julia is run by four nuns with elementary-level education and gigantic hearts. They work from five in the morning until midnight and demand that volunteers do the same (probably explains why they rarely have them…). Together the nuns care for 48 girls ages one to 24.

There are poor kids everywhere in the world. There are orphans and neglected children everywhere in the world. But seeing Santa Julia and interviewing some of the people who work there made me realize that Mexican poverty has a distinctly female face.

In the world of international economic development, the education of a nation’s females is one of the best indicators of human development and potential for economic growth. Lack of education for females in Latin America, though has proven to have disproportionate effect on the income levels of women; that is to say, if a boy and a girl are equally uneducated, the girl will probably make less money.

And then there is the mass exodus of men to the United States and Mexico City: a survey of Mexican rural women conducted in 11 of the country’s 32 states by the National Network of Rural Promoters and Advisors revealed that in 7 out of 10 rural Mexican homes, women are the sole breadwinners in the family and that only 31% of rural households headed by women have an income above the monthly minimum wage.

If drugs and emigration are the only viable economic options for poor men, both leave women faced with hard decisions, alone or abandoned.

P.S. I’m thinking of trying to start an online pen-pal program between girls Santa Julia and kids in the states. The emails could be translated by the social worker at the orphanage, or they could be an interesting way for English-speaking kids to practice Spanish. Email me if you (or your kids) are interested in trying to make something work …

Guanajuato vs. Michoacan

I’m of two minds about the safety of this place: one the one hand, it seems like everyone I talk to is on a campaign to tell me (and everyone else they meet) how safe Guanajuato is. I want to believe them because so many businesses are failing and because, well, I want to think it is a safe place because I feel so safe here.

Yesterday I interviewed Jesus Ibarra, a local reporter who had recently written a memoir piece about Mexico’s freedom of the press luncheon with the Attorney General in May. He assured me that it was safe here if you’re not dealing drugs. He explained that La Familia Michoacana, the drug gang that has taken over the neighboring state of the same name, has begun to kidnap kids who are selling drugs in Guanajuato towns to threaten them into selling La Familia’s drugs.

He said that this kind of violence shouldn’t bother good citizens because it is only happening between criminals as a way to expand turf.

But, Michoacan has been taken over by its drug cartel and the violence is no longer only entre ellos, between them.

And even if the violence was only within the drug cartels, violence is still violence is still people being hurt, regardless of the victim’s legal status. As for me, I know that kids shouldn’t be selling drugs. But I still I don’t think anyone should be kidnapped and I don’t think that journalists and politicians should let it fly, even if it is entre ellos.

Ibarra and I also discussed the emigration from the region. He connected emigration to the lack of jobs and the lack of jobs to the rise of gangs; Guanajuato and Michoacan are the two Mexican states with the highest rates of emigration. What do they have in common? They are the two states whose economies are most dominated by agriculture.

In my next few interviews (one with the District Attorney and one with a small non-governmental organization), I am going to be looking in to why Michoacan has fallen to a gang of drug lords and Guanajuato has not, I’ll get back to you if I figure it out.

Living Outside the Grasp of the State

It seems to me that Mexico’s very poor and Mexico’s very rich live beyond the reaches of its struggling government.

I first thought about this when I took a taxi to a market outside of town in a desert area; it wasn’t the market of our imaginary Mexico (with ceramics and silver and turquoise jewelry), it was the selling grounds of the hand-me-downs of the first world. There, in the vacant field, people shuffled through plastic bags full of unwanted American clothing. JC Penny’s line from last year, clothes from Target and K-Mart and I bought a swimsuit I recognized from my high school trips to Old Navy. I saw where our clothes go to die, or maybe to get a second life…

Either way, these clothes leave the regulated market when they reach Mexico’s poor. There are no taxes on them, I don’t know who is making a profit (is it the guy in the plastic chair whom I paid $1.50 for the swimsuit?).

I do know that it’s the end of their line.

And then, last weekend, I saw the other end of the spectrum of detachment from the government…

Two friends of mine came to San Miguel de Allende for the weekend; a Mexican art student, Rafa, I met one summer in Rio de Janeiro and his girlfriend Mariana – we had a wonderful time.

On the first day of their visit, we took a day trip to Pozos, an old silver and gold mining town that was deserted years ago and now stands as a dusty memorial to Mexico’s working days past.

Gigantic vacant warehouses filled with street dogs, rolling hills with wildflowers and big cacti (Mexico’s national plant and, I have found out, quite tasty in a burrito); I loved this town.

We went down an abandoned silver mine, several hundred feet beneath the grown and several levels beyond my comfort zone.

On the way home, we past the military police.

“Ojo, militares.”

“Why are they here?”

“These guys are in a war with the drug lords. These guys, the militares, are the worst. Rapists, thieves, whatever. Last week, we got stopped for speeding and they drove us to an ATM and told us to take out 5,000 pesos or they would confiscate our car. We couldn’t do that, though, because our laptops were in the car and they’re valuable so we had to give the money…”

Their disdain for Mexico’s national guard of sorts is only one aspect of my friend’s detachment from their nation and its government. When I talk with them about the future, their plans have little to do with Mexico: “It’s just too dangerous here. And people don’t make enough money, in any profession…”

Rafa wants to make art and Mariana is getting a degree in psychology. Of course Mexicans like these have a national advantage because they are educated; with this education, though, comes a link to the global network of internet, media, and travel, and through this network, Mexicans like my friends get another education: they learn that their work is of more (monetary) value elsewhere and they learn that opportunities abroad often surpass those within Mexico. They know too much to stay…

The Migra

I feel like I have begun to find my footing in Guanajuato—by chance I found a local maternity and reproductive health center called CASA, where I am now volunteering part-time. It began as a midwifery school and now includes sexual and reproductive education, early-childhood care and domestic violence prevention – all on a need-based pay scale.

(http://www.casa.org.mx/hospital_esp.html)

So far CASA seems well-organized and locally important: the organization teaches women about reproductive health and also trains many of the same women to become community health practicioners themselves, so that the impact, at least in theory, grows exponentially.

I am excited to work with CASA because I think it’s a great place to see first-hand how emigration has affected the lives of women in Guanajuato.

On Monday I went out in “the field” with an educator named Beatrice. A Kombi dropped us off at a small town in the middle of the desert…

We spoke with two groups of people: first, with fourteen and fifteen year old kids in public school and later, with a group of single mothers.

Beatrice greeted the school-room class and said that today we would be having a lesson on female sexuality. She opened a diagram of female anatomy and proceeded to explain the functions of various reproductive organs. I was stunned at first and found myself blushing, but then realized that most of the kids were listening quite attentively and I should probably pull myself together. The presentation was interesting and quite progressive: Beatrice said that CASA is the only group offering sexual education to these public schools and I was surprised when she told me that her best guess was that 75% of the fourteen and fifteen year olds with whom we spoke were sexually active…

During Beatrice’s presentation, I took a look around the room. There were two posters geared at English vocabulary, one was the days of the week in English and the other was a handwritten poster with select English vocabulary words: palabras extranjeras.

If you look carefully at the poster, you’ll see a word that you may not immediately recognize: migra. When I first saw the poster I was confused about why what seems like a Spanish word was on this English-language poster. Beatrice told me that it is short for inmigracion and migra is the Spanish word used to signify any government entity that enforces immigration laws.

Is the word migra on the poster because of mere association with the United States? Is it there because the teacher of this classroom thinks that it is an English word? Is emigration just that ubiquitious?

Later, Beatrice and I moved on to the mothers. Beatrice told me that the only work in this town is farming goats and sheep or scavenging the nearby dump for plastic to sell to the state for a recycling refund. Indeed, I saw sheep, goats, pigs and cows in the streets and women hauling carts of plastic garbage in the town…

Beatrice made the immediate logical jump from the shortage of work to the abundance of single mothers, explaining that there are the most instances of single-parent households in areas devoid of local work.

Ghost Town

I have arrived in San Miguel de Allende, a relatively small city in the Southern state of Guanajuato. It’s been known a Snowbird getaway and art haven, but tourism has dropped 85% in the past two years, so it’s feels like a bit of a ghost town. Restaurants have closed and the sighting of a gringo is surprisingly rare. I am the sole occupant of my hotel.

I have talked to restaurant and hotel owners about this phenomenon. A few people named the famous Mexico City outbreak of the Swine Flu as the impetus of the Gringo-flight, but most point to the violence of the drug wars. But to say that the violence of the drug wars has scared tourists off would be an over-simplification. It has much to do with the American media tradition of sensationalizing the violence of the “other” and our particular coverage of Mexico as lawless and bloody.

Dianne, the owner of the hotel where I am staying, held up her copy of the New Yorker when I asked her about the hotel’s emptiness.

“See this? This is actually a good story and it is still very bad for me.”

I knew exactly what she was referencing—William Finnegan’s piece in May 31st’s issue, Silver or Lead. I recognized the article right away because the magazine had been splayed open at my seat at the table at a dinner so that I wouldn’t miss Finnegan’s harrowing tale of the Mexican drug cartel, La Familia Michoacana.

Dianne’s right: Finnegan’s is certainly good reporting. I generally trust the New Yorker and don’t regard their reporting as sensationalist, so the violence depicted in the article hit me hard. Finnegan’s piece is also different because it’s not about border trouble: Michoacan, the state where the drug cartel appears to have taken over, is in the south of the country.

(Here’s link to the article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/31/100531fa_fact_finnegan)

When speaking with locals, I feel embarrassed to tell them that I’m here to record stories of immigration and emigration. These topics are ubiquitous realities here – Guanajuato is one of the Mexican states with the highest rates of emigration –but the stories of broken families and cultural violence remain so personal.

I suppose my embarrassment comes from the inherent meaning of my presence here: I can cross borders for vacation or work or study, or whatever, really. The cost of my plane ticket only one small aspect of what it means to be mobile in our globalized world…

But sometimes I take a chance and tell why I am here. Yesterday, I was sitting at a bar watching the USA-England game (how about the sheer luck of that ‘merican goal?) and I began to speak to the guy next to me. He was in his thirties and from the northeastern state of Tamaulpias—I told him about my project and he told me that he had things to share.

He told me that his state has been overrun by the drug war and is currently in the hands of the Gulf Cartel, one of the country’s four big drug operations. He kept saying that his uncle had lost so much power to the drug lords, that his uncle had had so many people bought off by the cartel – it took me a minute to realize that his uncle has been the governor of the state.

He then told me about his own kidnapping.

Part of me didn’t actually believe him until I went back to my room and verified the names he mentioned; I believe him now. He told me he was in a room for seven days, that he was fed and that there was a small television. He told me his parents paid $100,000 for his release. I didn’t ask more details because after he outlined the story, he got quiet about the whole thing.

From this and the other conversations I’ve had in my brief time here, I’ve gathered that the violence of the drug wars is a reality that stings far below the border. After my talk with the guy at the bar, I’ve decided that I have to become more open about my project – one never knows who has a story…

Border Crossing

Hello!

My name is Hannah Olson, a senior graduating in Comparative Literature (Portuguese) and Development Studies. I am from Minnetonka, Minnesota by way of Munich and Cleveland.

We’ve read a lot about Mexico in the news recently: Arizona’s new law geared at identifying, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants and politicians talking about whether or not they support this measure.

The pictures showing us what Mexico is like depict the country, especially along the border, as a violent and dehumanized place.

Photo from Intel Hug Blog

Photo from Huffington Post

I am traveling to Mexico this summer to look behind the pictures and the reports at some of the root causes of Mexican emmigration. My interest in the Mexican border has been a long one, though its place in thew news as of late has been particularly provocative–pundits have labeled it a “Pakistan to the South” and the violence caused by battling drug cartels and police interventions has dominated the portrayal of the border.

So when I decided to go to the border, it raised some eyebrows. I got quite a few emails from friends and family that said things like:

“I would proceed with considerable caution.”

“i’m not super hot on you going to juarez…”

“The Mexican border metropolis of Ciudad Juarez now has a higher murder rate than Baghdad as drug cartels battle for turf.”

I did not take these warnings too seriously (I am someone who is never too worried about safety and we’re all invincible at 22, right?) but I did decide to contact some people who I thought may have a better idea about Mexico than my worried mother and best friend.

I wrote to Luis Alberto Urrea, the author of “Devil’s Highway: A True Story,” a book about life and death on the Rio Grande as people struggle toward the United States. He wrote back and very kindly gave me the names of a few contacts on the United States but told me (in all caps): STAY OUT OF JUAREZ

I then wrote to the authors of “The People’s Guide to Mexico.” Carl Franz and Lorena Haven. Carl replied saying, “First of all, Lorena and I definitely think that making a film in the border region is not a good idea. The drug war there is extremely violent right now and the risks to your safety would be quite real.”

Hearing the cautions of experts made me, for the first time, think quite seriously about the violence.

I went camping in Baja two years ago, and pitched my tent in the sand in the desert without worry, but the drug violence has apparently escalated since then. I started to think about the violence and immigration and the Arizona law and all of this thinking just generates more questions: What are people in Mexico thinking about the border? What is the media coverage of the border like in Mexico? Has the Arizona law changed how people see the prospect of emmigration from Mexico? What happens to the towns vacant of men? Do these towns even exist? What about the women, the families? Cultural preservation?

I’ll spend the next few months thinking about these questions and documenting my search for answers.

I head south on June 10…