I spent the morning across the U.S.-Mexico border at Naco, commemorating two years of operation for El Centro de Recursos para Migrantes, the Migrant Resource Center. A special part of the ceremony was to dedicate our new toilet, a much appreciated addition by volunteers and migrantes. The baño was built by some of the volunteers and others who are friends of the Center.
Founded by Cecile Lumer and Peter Young, both of Bisbee, the purpose of the center is to offer food, clothing, water, limited medical attention, a telephone call to family, and, for many, money to return home by bus, if the returned migrants so wish.
I will have more to say about the ceremony in a later post. We had people from Green Valley and from Tucson joining us; the community of border activists is quite strong in this part of the world and smart as well.
I am a volunteer at the migrant center, a new volunteer. My job is to work as the sandwich bitch, the sandwich, coffee, and soup flunky when the small center fills up with migrants returned to Mexico by the U.S. Border Patrol. In a few more weeks I will help with "intake," recording the names of those returning migrants, where they are from, and whether they wish to go home again.
I show up every Wednesday morning at 8 AM, parking my car on the U.S. side in Naco, Arizona and then walk across. In bad weather I drive over and park in front of the center. My shift last for four hours, until noon.
Fortunately, I work with Peter Young, one of the original founders and a veteran of this kind of border volunteer work. Peter has pretty good "street Spanish" so I try and listen carefully to pick up some new phrases and idioms to advance my slowly improving Spanish.
It has been fun getting to know Peter better. We are about the same age; I'm a little older. We both grew up with a lot of the same music and share some of the same views on politics. He grew up in Southern California and we both lived there during the 1960s, when so much was changing. I worked in the aerospace industry. Peter has been in Bisbee since the late 1970s and is a well-known artist in town.
The migrants themselves are quite amazing. They are uniformly cheerful, even happy, and courageous. They seem to have no malice toward the United States; many express admiration for our country. One older migrant told me the other day, "I really love the United States. I don't know why. I just do."
About one quarter or less of the returned migrants elect to return home and money to return is supplied by the office of the Mexican Consul in Douglas, Arizona. The consul tries to limit assistance to half of the fare but if the migrant is broke, the consul will usually pay the full fare. Those who don't return usually melt away, most to try to cross again. Many make their way to Altar, Sonora, east and south of Naco. Altar is a major jumping off place for trying to get across.
I have written about Altar, before.
The returned migrants come from all over. Recently, I talked to men from Sinaloa state, from the cities of Morelia in Michoacan state, from Mexico City, the important industrial and historic city of Puebla, and one from Yucatan and a handful from Chiapas1
The great reward for this work is the simple satisfaction of feeling good each time I go over and get to work.
The sandwiches are pretty minimal, marmalade and peanut butter or cheese and refried beans and mayonnaise. All on white or wheat bread. We don't have tortillas as they are hard to keep fresh, lacking all the chemicals we put in bread in the U.S. We also have dried soup which we prepare with boiling water and letting it stand for five minutes. This kind of minimal food is all the center can afford as we have limited money and space.
The coffee is much appreciated and usually the migrants load up on "azúcre" and "la crema." Many turn their nose up at "de mantequilla de mani" or peanut butter, finding it a strange food.
I have been at this for about 6 weeks. Half of that time the number of returned migrants dribbled to almost none; the Border Patrol was "laterally" deporting migrants, taking them from the areas where they were captured and driving them usually to Presidio, Texas (across from Ojinaga, Chihuahua, or to Calexico, California, across from Mexicali), both of them many, many hours from their polleros or "coyotes," the people who try to smuggle them across for considerable sums.
Apparently if you don't make it the first time, the polleros will help you again and again, which surprised me.
The trip to the border and across can be dangerous; there have been many deaths in the desert. The signs in the center warn the migrants "No permita que su futuro se queda en el desierto." "Don't allow your future to be left in the desert." "Cruzar la frontera por el desierto puede llevado a la muerte." "Piensalo bien. Su vida es primero."
But they keep coming. Pero siguen llegando.
(For an earlier entry on life along the border see my Holiday Letter from Bisbee, written in 2007, when we participated in the Rotary Club's annual Christmas morning celebration at the border.)
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