OPEN BORDERS - UNITED STATES - WEST - Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows :

INTRODUCTION

[Note: this introduction is accompanied by excerpts —in English or Spanish—of the stories told by Mexican farmworkers and their families. See the accompanying articles by clicking on Open Borders: Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Our Stories (in English); Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Nuestras Historias (in Spanish).]

Jesús Villicaña López,  sixteen, came across the Mexico-Arizona border six months before I sit down to interview him. He doesn’t want to meet me at his camp, one room that he shares with eighteen other men that sits over the mushroom barn. He agrees to meet me at Taquería Moroleón, a local restaurant frequented by Mexicans in Kennett Square.  We meet on Sunday afternoon—the only time he has off in his 80 hour work week.  We order enchiladas, and he recognizes the young waitress—she’s from his village of forty families. Neither knew that the other had come north.  Bienvenido—welcome—she says, and they nod with slight embarrassment. I set up my tape recorder and Jesús puts his hand over the start button. Not yet, he has some questions. Why are you (a gringo) doing this? How do I know you won’t report me to la Migra? Are you getting paid for this, are you going to make money off my story? What do you intend to do with my story, how will I know it’s safe? I’m thinking who’s doing the interviewing here? while wishing I could include his interview of me has part of his story. The enchiladas come. He points at my recorder. Bueno, let’s get started. Evidently he’s satisfied with my answers.

Jesús and I talk for four hours over two sessions. At first he doesn’t want to use his real name, no photos either. When you have no documents, you don’t take chances. José Duran, that will be his name. After editing his story down to ten pages, I meet with him in the park and read it to him paragraph by paragraph, want to be sure this is the story he wants to tell, that I have it right.  I read a paragraph, look to him for his approval or disapproval. He says nothing, just a nod. Paragraph after paragraph: nod after nod. Finally we finish. Silence. I wait, being the good interviewer, honoring the silences. And wait. After five minutes I finally say, Jesús, can you tell me what you’re thinking? He says I didn’t know I had so much to say. What will your mother back home think when she reads your story? Jesús says nothing, then: She will be very proud. As we leave the park, he says, I think I want to use my real name. Later on, when the entire group meets with the artist to plan the design of the cover of their book he says take a photo—I want my picture to be part of my story. [Read excerpts from Jesús’ story, I Left Moroleón at Daybreak, with Great Sadness.] 

Jesús is one of six million undocumented Mexicans who live in the United States, and one of three-five hundred thousand more who find a way to make it to the U.S. every year.  Why do they leave their homes and families in Mexico and choose to be strangers in an often hostile land?  Seventy-five percent of rural Mexicans live in poverty, and the underemployment rate is over 60%.  Most who do find jobs are paid at a minimum wage equivalent of $4.15 a day, a wage that has dropped dramatically with devaluation of the peso.  The economics is compelling: in 35 minutes working at minimum wage in the US, a Mexican can make as much as in an entire day back home. Some may argue that free trade has benefited people on both sides of the Mexican-US border, but it has been a disaster for small Mexican farmers who cannot compete with the cheap corn and beans and rice grown on the US factory farms that are subsidized to the tune of over $3 billion a year by the US government (and which, ironically, use Mexican migrant laborers to harvest their crops).  Every day in Mexico, 60 small farmers go out of business and head for the shantytowns of Mexico City—or for the border.

In the last few years Mexicans have had to pay a dear price for having their food tied to the world market and “free trade”: as American farmers found more profit in producing corn for ethanol to fuel cars, the price of scarce corn—the staple of their diet founded on tortillas--has doubled in Mexico, while farms lie abandoned.

The Mexican government, shackled with huge inflation and unemployment rates, does not discourage this exodus.  Mexicans living and working in the United States send over $24 billion a year back home—the largest source of foreign exchange in the Mexican economy after petroleum exports.

Close to three million farmworkers—almost all of whom are Mexican, and close to 80% of whom have no documents—cultivate and harvest the food that feeds Americans. Over 15,000 Mexicans have found their way to the area around Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, “The Mushroom Capitol of the World.”  They live and work in the Brandywine Valley, lush with horse farms and Civil War battlefields, one of the richest areas in the United States. Parallel, interdependent lives, a clash of class and culture: uneducated, poor, brown Spanish-speaking immigrants, desperate to work and support their families back home; and wealthy Anglos who depend on their labor to work the mushroom barns, yet resent the invasion of these aliens. An uneasy truce, beneath the specter of immigration raids, deportation and employer sanctions.

Salvador Garcia lived separated from his family for twenty-two years, sending money and letters back home, going back and forth through the desert a couple of times a year when the borders were more porous. In 1986, when amnesty was granted to farmworkers, he got his green card—legal permanent residency—and, one by one, began to bring his family north to join him. I ask him to show me his green card and describe the day he got it. He pulls the laminated tarjeta verde from his wallet and holds it reverently. He recalls the day he went before the immigration judge, who said, “Prove to me you are a Mexican—sing La Bamba for me—then I’ll know you truly are a Mexican.” So, Salvador sang the song he had to sing before the judge, the song that got him his green card:

                        Para bailar La Bomba / Se necesita una poca de gracia

                        To dance La Bomba / You need a little bit of grace

[Read excerpts from Salvador’s story, This Green Card Represents Years of Sacrifice.]  

 Espejos y Ventanas, Mirrors and Windows:  A mirror for the Mexican community, to reflect on their own lives and the journey that started in Mexico.  Mushroom workers and their families tell their stories in their own words, stories that are rich and profound.  On one hand, they express very personal feelings of hope, daring, loneliness, guilt, pride, loyalty, fear, anger and aspirations; on the other hand, they discuss political and social realities such as  the economic relationship between Mexico and the United States, the interdependence of Mexican workers and their American employers, unjust wage and labor practices, US immigration policy, and racism.

I interview Margarita Rojas two days before she is to appear before the judge who has threatened to deport her if she hasn’t left the country by their hearing date. Her church has raised money to purchase a ticket for her to fly back to Mexico; but the day before her court hearing she decides to stay so that her daughter Adriana can get the medical care she needs. The day of the hearing she packs a small bag and hugs her husband and children goodbye, assuming that the next time she will see them is at the detention center, two hours away. She describes escaping her abusive husband in the middle of the night with her two young children, living in a car, holding down three jobs at once, then finally marrying Pablo, who has American citizenship. Thinking she is safe to come out of the shadows, she goes to Immigration to apply for a work permit—instead she gets a deportation order. [Read excerpts from Margarita’s story, I Left Half My Heart There.]

Espejos y Ventanas: Mirrors and Windows: A window for the Anglo community in the United States, to see into the lives of their Mexican neighbors, people who some call wetbacks, illegals and aliens.  If they look carefully, they will see people who came across our southern border with the same dreams as our ancestors who crossed another line—the Atlantic Ocean—60, 80, 120 years ago, also mostly poor people who were ghettoized and struggled with language and hostility from people who considered themselves true Americans.  They will see families with the same aspirations for their children as our ancestors had for our grandparents and parents—to learn English, to get an education, to get a good job and end the cycle of working in sweatshops or agriculture or hotels or fast food restaurants, to have their own home, to make it in America. 

Myra Castillo surprises me with her ambivalence about having made it, living the American Dream—the dream her parents had for her when they brought her across the border at age twelve. A graduate from college who has travelled to other countries, she now works in college admissions, helping other Latinos pursue their dream. But…but…: she reflects on feeling inferior while growing up, drifting away from her Mexican roots and confronting racism. [Read excerpts from Mayra’s story, I’m Trying to Find a Midpoint Between Both Cultures.]

If you define hero as someone who takes great risks and makes great sacrifices, who will endure with dignity whatever it takes to achieve a dream, then read these stories, these odysseys, and witness the daily acts of heroism of the narrators and their families. They are stories that need to be told and to be heard. More than ever, in the climate where Immigration Reform has become the flashpoint of public debate between those who want to throw illegals—twelve million in all-- out of the country, and those who want to find a way to bring them out of the shadows and integrate them into our society, these voices need to be heard, to be listened to.  Jesús Villicaña López, Margarita Rojas, Salvador Garcia, and Myra Castillo are such heroes.

[Note: This introduction is accompanied by excerpts —in English or Spanish—of the stories told by Mexican farmworkers and their families. See the accompanying articles by clicking on the Open Borders icon in WWR: Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Our Stories (in English); Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Nuestras Historias (in Spanish).]

Read their entire stories, as well as the stories of eight other farmworker families, by ordering Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Families, at:

http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/spring-2008/mirrors-windows-oral-histories-mexican.html  

The book is in Spanish and English. A Teachers Guide for the book can also be downloaded from the website.

Wild River Review is funded entirely by reader support and donations.

To support our mission and passion for good storytelling, please help support my work and make a tax-deductible donation by clicking here:  Wild River Donation.

Sign up with your email address below to join our mailing list and receiveWRR Monthly.