Passing through Altar

June 2, Altar, Mexico: Four Mexican men and seven visitors sit in a tight circle in the spacious gravel courtyard in the middle of the night. As other residents of the migrant shelter sleep, they plunge deep into conversation, explanation, translation. Omar, the youngest, is from Veracruz. Rene and Mauricio are from Chiapas. Gerardo, the oldest, is from Sinaloa. They listen as Maria introduces the visitors. Todos somos hermanos, she says. The fact that you have such difficulties passing borders is wrong. We would like to know why you had to leave your families and your culture, and also about your work here in Mexico.

 

Rene welcomes the visitors. “I am happy you have come. We are brothers, we have the same blood, the same God.” Mauricio agrees. He was very happy to be invited to sit down and eat the evening meal with another group of visitors, the American high school students. “It makes you feel good inside to sit and eat with people. I never was invited to sit down and eat with Americans before.” He is glad to talk. “We couldn’t sleep anyway,” he explains, “too many things going through our heads. It helps to talk.”

 

CCAMYN is the Centro Comunitario de Atención al Migrante y Necesitado in Altar, a formerly small town in the State of Sonora in Mexico. CCAMYN opened its doors in 2001, as a program of the Catholic Church, with the goal of “being an oasis in the desert for our migrant brothers and sisters.” They serve meals, provide showers and a place to sleep for a few nights, provide some medical care, and support and stand with migrants who are heading north and with those who have been captured and deported back to Mexico. Migrants can stay one to three nights at CCAMYN before leaving – for home or for the border.

 

Earlier in the evening, CCAMYN’s human rights director, Francisco Garcia, spoke to an attentive circle of visitors. He explained how Altar’s main economic activity shifted from agriculture to migration over the past ten years. “The year 1994 is a year marked in the history of our country because that is when the infamous NAFTA agreement took effect. This agreement has been beating down our country. Until now we have seen far more disadvantages than advantages.

 

“This was also a historic year because the first time a guerrilla insurgency appeared, as a reaction to the free trade agreement. In that same year, the United States initiated three big operations on the border. The objective of these operations was to completely end immigration, an objective clearly not achieved…. On the contrary, the migration moved to the most dangerous and remote locations.”

 

Daytime temperatures in Altar climb well above 100 degrees. Located in the unforgiving Sonora Desert, it is a 65-mile van ride from the U.S. border at Sásabe. Francisco continues: “And since 1994, when migration was channeled to these areas, our undocumented brothers and sisters, illegals, migrants, whatever you call them, did not only appear in the United States, but also in statistics. We began seeing a lot of migrant deaths. Deaths grew every year. Every year, more migrants die looking for the famous American Dream….

 

“In 1997, 200 people came through Altar each day. Then there were 400 in 1998, 600 in 1999. In 2000, 2200 migrants arrived here every day. … In 2002, 2,300 came each day, and the number kept growing. In February the last numbers we saw from the 13 of February to 13 of April, there were 3,200 people passing daily, according to the count on a route between Altar and Sásabe.” The high season for migration comes in January through March, with comparatively lower temperatures.

 

Francisco’s message is clear and emphatic: “Who really is the migrant? Is it a human being like ourselves who has a family and no better options for a better life? Whose only hope is to get to the United States to work, to offer the only tools he has, his hands and feet? With the hope that that job will offer them a better salary. …

 

“Go and tell everyone from your family to your workplace to Congress, that migrants are human beings, that they migrate for necessity. Would you leave your home if you had a way to support your family? They leave because they have no way.”

 

Omar, Rene, Mauricio and Gerardo speak more quietly than Francisco, offering personal stories rather than analysis.

 

Omar worked in a business fixing LP gas canisters, earning about $30 weekly. “The wages here are so low that I can’t make it. I want to study and work and then come back to build a home.”

 

Gerardo worked in the fields – onions, tomatoes, fruit, vegetables. “I was just about a prisoner of the company,” he says. He earned 70 pesos, a little more than six dollars a day. But, he explains, a canasta basica, the food for a family of four, costs 300 pesos. So his wage would not even feed a family, much less pay for clothing or housing them.

 

Rene comes from Chiapas. He must migrate because his wages are not enough to support his two children. He has to leave in order to support them. Coffee prices dropped drastically this year, he explains. “I talked to my brother and decided to go and see how luck treats me. I have three brothers in the United States, in New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles. When I told my brothers I was coming up north, they said it is really hard. One of them said he was turned back six times before crossing.”

 

Mauricio, also from Chiapas, worked on a cattle ranch until floods wiped out the ranch. He has looked for other work, picking squash for a while, cutting grapes for a while, never finding a job that lasted or that paid enough to live. “I’m not married,” he tells the group. “I just support my mother and a nephew. I’m her only son and she wants me to go back to Chiapas. I say “I’ve come this far. I’m not going back to Chiapas with nothing. I’m afraid of robbers and snakes. But I’m with my friend and we are going to make it across.”

 

As the conversation winds down, the men have a message for their visitors. “Tell people in the United States that we are not robbers. We are not criminals. We just want to work. All we want to do is work.”