The Cross-Border Issues Group, in its third year of summer immigration studies inside Mexico, gave UNM and Mexican media students an opportunity to meet a few of the many waves of migrants who travel north each year to find work. This year, the bi-national group focused on the difficulties and dangers young migrants from Central America face when they attempt to enter and travel through Mexico and eventually cross its northern frontier without documents.
Photo: CBIG student Paola López Meneses listens to a Honduran migrant's story as they walk the tracks in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. Photo and story by Carolyn Gonzales.
The CBIG family this summer included the project’s director, Richard Schaefer, UNM associate professor, Communication & Journalism; Carolyn Gonzales; Arturo López Durán, Schaefer’s counterpart at Fray Luca Paccioli University; López Durán’s students Paola López Meneses and Josué “Owen” Sarabia Tapia; Tec de Monterrey student Carlos “Rodrigo” Guzman Serrano – who did an exchange at UNM this past spring; and UNM students Jennifer Vieth, a second time member of CBIG; Leah Valencia and Amanda Skotchdopole.
The group spent its first week in its “home base” of Cuernavaca, Morelos, where Schaefer, gave workshops in the use of video and audio equipment. Equipment included a large video camera that has an attached microphone, but can also take an external mike. Schaefer had all the necessary tapes and the batteries for the care and feeding of the camera, too.
He also brought down two Flip cameras – they are about the size of a cell phone and can take up to an hour’s worth of high definition video. What they can’t do very well, we soon learned, is zoom effectively or capture high quality sound. And they don’t take an external mike. We also had good audio recorders and still cameras.
“Backpack journalists take what they need with them to capture the story,” Schaefer said. He also brought down two Mac computers with editing software and extensive memory space on FireWire drives so that we could reuse tapes and save the interviews in more than one place. Needless to say, Schaefer’s luggage surpassed the 50-pound limit imposed by Continental Airlines.
The students took their video lessons to the streets of Cuernavaca as they practiced what they learned on street vendors and performers while keeping an ear open for possible migrant tales.
Prior to the start of the program, Schaefer spent about a week and a half in Oaxaca studying Spanish and getting a sense of where CBIG should focus its efforts once it arrived on scene. He met with Randy and Susan Hinthorn, Maryknoll Lay Missioners, who were instrumental in forming the Centro de Orientación del Migrante de Oaxaca., A.C. COMI was organized to address the lack of services for Mexican and Central American migrants. The Hinthorns worked with Fr. Fernando Cruz Montes to create a safe place for migrants to rest and receive vital information regarding their rights and the risks they face on their journeys. It was fortuitous for CBIG that Schaefer went down early because the Hinthorns were visiting their family in the US by the time we made it to Oaxaca. They put us in the very capable hands of Nancy Garcia.
Garcia’s official title is COMI “secretary,” but she is much, much more and was our guide in Oaxaca. Fr. Fernando was the first person she arranged to speak with us. He was great because he spoke slowly and deliberately, giving our ears and minds a chance to pick up and understand what he had to say.
Migration moves poor people off the land and to large cities and motivates them north to the United States. What happens to the pueblos from which the migrants leave? Both community and the family breakdown. Agricultural communities are abandoned to become ghost towns inhabited only by old people, he said.
The stories of those who leave to take the journey to a new life are fraught with exploitation. They are robbed, beaten and kidnapped, and the women often raped. The stories include those who are taken off trains and forced to strip to make sure they can’t hide any money from the thieves. Other stories tell of coyotes abandoning people on the road, an unfamiliar path in an unknown country.
“Migrants suffer in transit. They die on the trains, in the rivers and roads. They die in the desert. And their dreams die with them,” Padre Fernando said.
We conducted several interviews with migrants at Casa Buen Samaritano after Fr. Fernando left. It was our first time in a safe house. We trod carefully – asking migrants if they would be willing to talk to us, knowing we’re probably exactly the kind of people they’ve been advised to avoid. Schaefer pulled out his computer to show them prior interviews and demonstrate how we could distort their faces to protect their identities. Surprisingly, many agreed to be interviewed and only two men asked to have their images distorted.
Nancy Garcia also took us to Ixtepec, a small town in Oaxaca. There, Padre Alejandro Solalinde runs an “albergue,” or mission for migrants who ride atop freight trains the migrants call “La Bestia,” “The Beast,” because of the many limbs and lives lost by those riding or attempting to board the moving train. Within minutes after entering the camp, the students, who were roughly the same age or a few years older than many of the migrants, had scattered throughout the public areas of the camp, and begun to share experiences and stories. Few of the migrants had any experience with desert environments, although most of young men planned to traverse the Sonoran Desert on foot later in the summer.
The second day we visited the camp, we saw fewer migrants than the day before. Schaefer wrote to his family, “The night before, most of the men in the camp had caught the early morning freight train bound for Mexico City. I had tried to stay awake, charging old worn out batteries that would hardly take charges in the heat and furiously digitizing video because we were burning through tapes at a rate I had not anticipated. Once digitized we could re-use the tapes. I had fallen asleep about 4 a.m. and the train came a half-hour later. Some of the ‘alumnas’ had heard it and ran out to catch cover video. I was distraught when I heard that I had missed the train, but delighted to hear that Paola had gotten about three minutes of ‘cover video’ of it and the men as they slowly passed from our view.”
Padre Alejandro took us for a two-hour walk along the tracks. He openly pointed out homes kidnappers use to hold people while awaiting payment. He talked about the officials who are as corrupt as any kidnapper or drug dealer. He pointed to restaurants and bars that preyed on the naive migrants – making them serve as mules for drug dealers. We fear for his safety because of his openness in describing the wrongdoers and his persistent call for migrants to file “denuncios” when they are victimized.
In the ensuing weeks, the group traveled twice to Mexico City – once to meet with officials in the office charged with helping Mexicans in the United States, and once to visit a much smaller albergue near the Lecheria freight yards on the northern outskirts of the city. Most of the few migrants there were recuperating from common injuries suffered on the journey. One man had been electrocuted by a high voltage wire when riding atop the train, another had been kidnapped and beaten regularly before escaping, while another had slipped and gashed his face when trying to catch a moving train.
Now back, we are working to transcribe and translate video, identify good sound bites and pull together scripts for broadcast reports. Schaefer and I entered the program this summer thinking it would end this year. Because of our partner institutions, and the persistent need to help our “hermanos migrantes,” the program will continue.
For more CBIG stories, visit cgonzal.wordpress.com.
Story by Carolyn Gonzales