Orientation is almost over. I can sum up the last few days as being completely exhausting, incredibly mind boggling, thoroughly enlightening, and just plain fantastic. I feel like I have experienced every emotion possible in such a short time—from feeling overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and really, really sad to the point of crying to feeling genuinely happy, exhilarated, and laughing to tears. It seems like I’ve learned more in the last few days than I have during entire semesters at school. What I’ve learned has been so complex and so unexpected that my mind is constantly reeling, trying to make sense of it all.
I have so much to say about everything I’ve done but for now I’ll just list some of the things we’ve done. We climbed a rocky hill to overlook the desert and watch the sunset, trekked around the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, crossed the border into Nogales, met with artists who put their art up on the wall on the Nogales side, visited El Grupo Beta to talk with migrants who were just deported, talked with women in Colonia Rosario who meet migrants as they get off the deportation buses to provide coffee and burritos, spoke with youth at DIF (Centro para menores repatriados) who were caught either in crossing or in the U.S. and are being sent back to Mexico, walked across the border from Nogales, Sonora to Nogales, U.S.A., and experienced being pulled over by the Border Patrol on the way back to Tucson and seeing the blatant racial profiling of the officers.
I must also add that I am thoroughly enjoying the tamales, burritos, and salsa that are an essential part of my every day. Oh, and it’s nice to be speaking Spanish again, although it will take a while to pick up the border lingo and to feel confident with my Spanish-speaking abilities.
The most valuable but overwhelming experiences for me so far have been speaking with deported migrants. At Grupo Beta we met 20-30 migrants who had just been deported and were waiting to receive or make telephone calls and to either travel back to their homes in Mexico or attempt to cruzar la frontera again to reach their homes in the U.S. I spoke with one young man who had crossed three times and had lived in the U.S. for a total of ten years. He told me he would not try to cross again because walking through the desert was too difficult and scary—the last time he had walked for three days and three nights. Another man had crossed at least six times without a problem and had been living in the U.S. for twelve years. He would not try again either because he claimed that there are just as few jobs on the U.S. side as there are in Mexico. There were also two fourteen-year old kids who were there. They had not tried crossing yet and were waiting for the rain to stop before attempting. They said they would not hire a coyote and didn’t seem to know much at all about the difficulty of trekking through the desert. Almost all of the youth migrants we spoke to at DIF stated that they crossed the border to look for work to help support their families back in Mexico. They said they had spent two days to a week walking through the desert. At least one had been trying to smuggle drugs.
What has been most surprising is the migrants’ openness, especially the adults. They seem so willing to talk to us and to tell us about their experiences with border crossing. I was expecting more resistance. One of the young boys at DIF challenged us by asking how we plan to help the situation. This is something we are all thinking about but, at least for me, is difficult to answer. For now, I am on the border to learn. I don’t think it is very possible to change anything until I understand the complexities of immigration. Meeting with migrants is one way of acquiring this knowledge. But it would seem wrong to me to spend a semester here, listening to these people’s stories, if I were not planning to do something proactive. Few people have the opportunity to witness first hand what immigration is like. I must find a way to make this opportunity meaningful. I have no idea how I will do this but as my interests develop and my knowledge increases I will be more equipped to find a way. For now, I will tell as many people as I can about my experiences on the border so that more of us will be aware of the injustices in our country and the human rights violations that our government supports.
