Publication: Race and Class
Publication Date: 01-JAN-05
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Andersson, Ruben
Article Excerpt
Abstract: Through a mixture of oral testimony, analysis and personal encounter, the harsh and deadly penalties meted out to those attempting to travel across the Mexican border into the United States are evoked. Many have already suffered extensively at the hands of corrupt police and marauding paramilitary gangs as they travel into Mexico, even before risking their lives to go further north. Devastated economies, in hock to 'trade' agreements dictated by the US, render these journeys essential, for migrant remittances now outstrip oil and agriculture in many national economies. Yet failure--and many do fail--can entail robbery, rape, mutilation and murder.
Keywords: Central America, Guatemala, Mexico, migration, remittances, US border, wetbacks
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Everybody talks about the North. In the forgotten and noisy Mexican town of Tapachula, close to the Guatemalan border, this is perhaps all there is to talk about. And especially so among the transmigrants. Transmigrants are those migrants who, unlike the 'immigrants' so hotly debated in Europe and North America, are 'not-yet-there'; they are people in perpetual transit. Like their African colleagues in Morocco, across the Atlantic, the Central American transmigrants arriving in Mexico are reluctant visitors to a 'third country' turned buffer zone for international migration. These buffer zones are the new and neverending frontiers of despair, where hapless regional middlemen run errands for powerful northern neighbours. This is where the American dream, el sueno americano, most often ends, and transmigrants find themselves talking about an elusive North in wayward migrant shelters.
As I enter the migrant shelter of my choice to partake of some of this contemporary travel talk, I find people sitting and standing around everywhere, on the street, in the entrance hall, on the spacious patio. All waiting. The Central American transmigrants gathered here are the so-called mojados or 'wetbacks', referring to the ordeal of crossing the Rio Grande or the Suchiate River just around the corner: these are the two wet borders that have turned Mexico into a never-ending contemporary frontier, a social desert. Tapachula could, actually, just as well be another outpost on the trans-Saharan migration trail, and the oasis-like ambience of this outpost is immediately apparent. I have arrived at one of those humanitarian rarities, the Casa del Migrante or 'House of the Migrant', located on a sleepy back street at the city's edges. In this House, transmigrants without papers find a place to rest for a few days outside the reach of the long arm of Mexican law.
The House is a node in a network, being part of a series of migrant shelters across the region run by Scalabrinian missionaries with the help of volunteers. It is a paradox of a place. Though not legally recognised and in apparent contradiction to Mexican migration policies, it is nevertheless allowed to operate due, perhaps, to the goodwill generated by its previous social work on the US border and certainly due to the Christian nature of its humanitarian mission. It is a space strategically 'forgotten' by the authorities and thus left to care for the similarly forgotten global travellers of today in an increasingly tight global political climate. It is also, luckily, a space where a wayward European travelling south can meet his northbound counterparts without fear of police jumping on our conversation.
In the world of migrants, words are cheap and ever present. Government officials across the region spread sweet phrases around them wherever they go--about human rights, safe repatriations, legal openings and the like--without making any substantial changes for the better. Words are spent on endless documents, on getting the discourse right. All that the transmigrants are left with is words, and words they spend in the vacant moments of their tragic journeys. The House of the Migrant is such a vacant moment.
In the office, the receptionist from El Salvador is busy registering the multitude that has showed up this day at the House. It is a perfect context for pursuing some casual conversation on the topic of an elusive North, or so I gather. Consequently, I sit down on the patio on an old leather stool, next to Hector from Guatemala. He is probably close to the age of my dad, with a kind and rounded face, a bit unshaven after many days on the road. Without much introduction or questions, words start pouring out. Hector has tried to go north four times already and...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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