From Xela, With Love (Sam Behrens)

Foreword: The students are now in Guatemala beginning their month-long travel seminar. This is the first of many blog entries that will inform us of their experiences abroad!

In an attempt to be energetic and take advantage of a crisp Xela
morning, last night I set the alarm on my phone for 7:30am. However, when the time came, and the alarm sounded, I realized just how ambitious I had been the night before. To quote one of my favorite songs, I slid out of my bed like a baby out of a nurses hands onto hard floor of day at around 8:30. I was still recovering from our long but beautiful van ride from Guate the night before. After a pleasantly warm shower, I ate breakfast and headed over to the DESGUA/Café
Conciencia office for our two morning meetings. The meetings went quite well, and we all did our best to absorb the vast amounts of knowledge that were being thrown down. I´m not going to go into what we talked about in the meetings, I feel like any attempt to relay that information to you would result in a watered down version that would do it no justice. Instead I´m going to tell you about what I did with my afternoon. Although the other BSPers went on a hike to the Voha (volcanic steam rooms), I went to visit some friends. Four years ago I spent a month in Xela at a language school, and I lived with a wonderful family. So to day I took a taxi from the Parque Central to their house, and dropped in for a visit. Although the abuelos were not in Xela today, I still got to catch up with the boys (Fernando and Ricardo), and their parents. Fernando met me at the door, wide eyed and grinning from ear to ear. I asked him if he remembered me, and he replied ¨Claro, y el pato Lucas?¨ referring to my brother Luke, who also lived there with me. I spent the better part of 2hrs at the house, catching up, drinking watermelon juice, and helping with math homework. At the end of our chat we took some fotos
hugged and I left. I was struck by the great hospitality that I received there. I was greeted with a smile, watermelon juice, and quite frankly love. They took in a person from a far away land, who was out of his element, and made him feel as though he was home.
So I write you today, from xela, with love.

Final Words from the Sonoran Desert (Harmony Pringle)

Before I came to Tucson, I imagined the desert as desolate, deserted, true to its name. But one look at the Sonoran desert changed that picture, filling it in with bits of green and splashes of red over the monochrome, tan sands.

The Center for Sonoran Desert Studies bounds this desert at 100,000 square miles, stretching from Sonora to Baja California, and from California to Arizona. It even reaches some of the islands in the Gulf of California, and is home to more than 2,000 species of plants.

We were first introduced to the desert the night we arrived in Tucson. After an awkward half day of smiling introductions and extended silences, we all piled into the van (for the first time) and drove to A mountain to watch the sunset. From our rocky perch, the valley poured down below us in a velvety skirt. Everywhere were buttons of green – giant, knobbed saguaros; skinny ocotillos and palo verde trees. The last rays of our first Tucson sun lit up a new vision of the desert.

It was the first sight, but it wouldn’t be the last. We saw another side to the desert on the bumpy ride up the dirt (mud) road from Altar to Sasabé. And the desert trees hung with backpacks and nylon jackets near a highway rest stop on the road to Tucson, stark reminders of the people for whom the desert is sea that must be forded.

On our last day in Tucson before we fly down to Guatemala City, Rachel and I hike out to Bear Canyon. Its rapid waters flow down from the Catalinas, Tucson’s northern mountains, and are red and yellow with minerals. We sit on the rocky banks, bounded by scraggly trees and cactus, and watch the water. I can’t believe that this, too, is part of the desert.

More than that, I can’t believe the “Keep Out” sign that is attached to a crooked tree by the water. Rachel is equally appalled – how could someone own this? The Sonoran desert is something shared. Arizona shares it with California, Mexico shares it with the U.S. So many people since we’ve come here have shared it with us.

But in many ways, the Sonoran desert has become more of a barrier than a tie between peoples. Through Operation Gatekeeper, the U.S. government pushed people into it, to push them out. Merriam-Webster cites the origin of the noun “desert” as the opposite of the Latin verb serere, to join together. De-serere – desert – means to abandon, to divide.

After five weeks of travel, we’ll come back to a new desert with new minds. With all this rain we’ve been having, there’s hope for blooming ocotillos, and maybe some blossoming new definitions to go with them.

Altar (Leif Johnson)

Foreword: Last weekend, the students visited Altar, Sonora in Mexico. This trip is significant as Altar is a very important staging point on the migrant trail. Migrants from throughout Mexico and Central America come to Altar to connect with a coyote, purchase supplies and prepare for their journey north. Among other things, this excursion included a night at a migrant shelter, one of many places where students had the chance to talk with migrants. The following entry is about Leif's interactions

There are stories of people who have their green cards and are applying for citizenship, but are "accidentally" deported. Even though they're in the final stages of the citizenship process, their application is voided, because to leave the US is to abandon your attempt at citizenship - even when you are driven over the border in a prison bus, illegally.

I've heard some of these stories first-hand. In the past two days, when I was in Nogales and Altar, Mexico, I have talked with a man who was a legal permanent resident, having lived in Los Angeles for 25 years - since he was two - who was deported after being convicted of a crime, serving jail time, and being stripped of his legal status. He seemed excited to meet someone else who spoke English. I talked to an older man, with impeccable gray hair, who told me that he had no other option but to cross the border. His family in Mexico had all passed on, he said, and his life was in Phoenix now, where he had lived for many years, until he was stopped in the street by police, asked to show his papers, and deported when he couldn't comply. He said he never took risks, never drove, never went to other states, all to avoid being detected. It turned out that the fatal risk for him was living in Maricopa County. This is also the story of Jaime who is seriously contemplating the permanent dissolution of his family - cut in half by the US-Mexico border and over a hundred miles of desert that he isn't sure he'll be able to cross.

I've also learned a new term: Economic refugee. The concept that someone can be fleeing the impossible economic situation of their country, rather than revolution or an oppressive dictator, is a powerful one for me. We met a brother and sister in Altar who had been traveling for a month just to get that far. They had paid almost nothing for their passage, hopping trains across the border and through Mexico, where they sometimes had to jump off of speeding trains to avoid immigration officers. They related the stories that I have heard from several groups of Guatemalans, of having seen people killed trying to get onto or off of trains. They said that they stayed in church shelters when they could, and slept in the streets when they couldn't. Now that they got to Altar, they are excited to see that there is only a hundred miles of desert separating them from a job that pays more than two dollars a day, and the money that they need to pay for medical operations for their children in Guatemala City. One child is a US citizen. For these people, as it is for the vast majority, migration is not a choice. Moving to the United States is not a decision taken because of a desire for US culture or the services offered in the US. Migration is a last resort, the ultimate sacrifice of separation for the sake of one's family. The best-case scenario, they say, is that they stay in the US for three years, until they amass the money they need for the operations.

I have heard from people that we need to close the border so that people will come through legally, "like they should." If they could, they would. Nobody in their right mind will risk a hundred-mile death march, without a guide, simply to avoid "doing it the right way." But the people that I have met are doing just that, and they are the strongest and most sane people I have ever met. They simply have no other choice. I'm sorry to end this on that note - it seems really negative. However, I'd like to challenge people to think of that as a positive. Here in the US, my family and friends and I are mostly white citizens who are insulated from these things, and we don't have to think about them very much. We don't often have the chance to make such supreme sacrifices for our families, and I know that I don't know what I would do if I was in that situation. For that reason, I don't feel sorry for the people who are coming. I will fight for a world in which they don't have to make that choice, and I will work to make sure that when they do they will stand as good a chance as possible to make it, but it will be because I am in awe of their strength, not because of their need for charity.

Why Tucson? Stories from the Border (Leif Johnson)

Tucson probably doesn't seem like the most interesting place for someone to "study abroad," especially anyone who has lived here (or, for that matter, anywhere in the southwest.) After all, it's the US. It has Safeways, Albertsons, and Wal-Mart. Signs are in English. There are ticky-tacky housing developments, although they are often in the style of southwestern architecture, rather than the more traditionally "european" stylings that yankee northerners like myself are used to. I had some conversations with my parents before coming that were decidedly ambiguous about where I was going. After all, if I have a semester to travel wherever I want, why wouldn't I go somewhere really different? Bolivia? China?

The thing that I'm really starting to appreciate, however, is the extent to which the Tucson we are living in is not like the Tucson that is advertised in the airport, or the Tucson some of you might have experience with. The Tucson I'm in is a lot of different things - it's the destination point for thousands of migrants walking across the desert, a racially divided city with a significant Border Patrol presence, and the site of some of the most serious resistance to bad border policy in the US. These different versions of Tucson are revealed because, as part of this program, we have been dropped into the thick of things, so to speak. My central point here is not a comfortable house filled with people who are the same color as me. It's a comfortable house filled with people who, because of their color and background, are living a different kind of life than me. My universe in Tucson includes the US-Mexico border, something that I think a lot of people here don't think about that much. Finally, I've been dropped into work at No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, one of the main organizations working on humanitarian aid and human rights at the border.

With No More Deaths, for example, I have been exposed to a concentration of caring people at meetings, and have gone out with them to several of the most heavily travelled migrant trails in the desert on water runs, dropping gallon jugs of water in the desert. For people who haven't been here, this might seem somewhat incongruous. Here, though, it's perfectly serious and sensible. Walking from Sasabe, on the border, to Tucson, the closest real US city, people have to walk more than 4 days through the desert. It is more or less physically impossible to carry enough water for this journey. Lots of people die on the way - there have been more than 400 deaths along the border per year, which only counts the bodies that are discovered. The desert is pretty vast, and nobody is at all willing to calculate how many deaths there might have been in total.

When I go home to my family, Marta (my mom here) usually asks me what I've been learning, with the tacit understanding that its been heavy stuff. She has her own stories, and while I'm not going to relay them here out of respect for her, they are also heavy. There is one anecdote that I want to share, though. It comes from Jorge, my host father, who works at a door factory that is closing at the end of this month. He believes that our current economic crisis is caused, at least in part, by the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants of the past few years. As Marta says, it's like a snowball effect - as you chip away at the bottom of the workforce, the rest of the system comes crashing down on it. Both of my parents have a distinct sense of the racism inherent in border enforcement policy, which extends way beyond the border itself. These are stories like the time that Jorge's workmate severed his finger on a saw, and when they were driving him to the hospital right next to our house, they saw two border patrol "dog-catcher" vans in the entrance, and had to drive all the way to Phoenix to get to a hospital that wouldn't offer a swift deportation along with medical care. Or the stories of how Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff in Phoenix, has made it the duty of local police officers to check for papers, in an all-out campaign that targets more or less all Hispanics. For example, officers will wait two blocks from elementary schools, wait for parents to drop their kids off at school, and then ask the parents for papers. There have been more than one account of kids waiting at school into the night when their parents didn't come to pick them up. Where were they? On a bus to the Mexico side of the border. Then there are the stories of people who don't have papers but marry US citizens. Upon consulting a lawyer, the best advice they are offered is to "wait for an immigration reform bill, because if you try to regularize your status now, you'll spend four to five years in Mexico, separated from your husband."

All of these are things that my family has witnessed first hand, or heard about through the network of family communications. Marta says that people are so afraid of Joe Arpaio that they'll listen for him on the radio, hear that he's at such and such grocery store, and call all their friends, telling them to stay away. She says that even though she is a citizen, she's very afraid. And why wouldn't she be? After all, she tells me stories about the Hispanic Republican state senator jailed for a day when a cop asked him for his papers and he couldn't produce them, or the mayor of Pomona, California, who was deported to Mexico before he managed to get his situation figured out. If that can happen to politicians, the people most likely to know their legal rights and eloquently defend them, imagine what could happen to people who don't have the same strings to pull on.

Operation Streamline (Rachel Neuschatz)

OPERATION STREAMLINE (Rachel Neuschatz)

Last Tuesday we went to the Federal Courthouse in Tucson to see Operation Streamline: special proceedings that bring federal criminal charges against anyone who has crossed into the U.S. without legal permission. A holdover from the Bush Administration's supposed "zero tolerance" border enforcement , Operation Streamline is hoping to get 70 people in court each week day (there were 62 the day we went), out of the 300-400 that cross through the Tucson Sector at this time of year (that number grows to 1000 in the summer; and this is keeping in mind that migration has slacked off significantly in the last few years). The prosecutor (we spoke to him after the proceedings) told us that their goal is 100 arrests and 100 people in court every day, but that that would never happen--the system was past capacity as is, with juvenile detention centers letting more and more people on parole to free up cells for the migrants serving their Streamline sentences, and public defenders meeting with clients in locked courtrooms because there are more defendants than holding cells.

There were, in fact, so many defendants that they had to use the jury box to seat them all. When we came in (the proceedings are public; we were told that there are often immigrant-rights activists there, but today there was only us) they were seated already. The two US marshals watching over them were aided by three Border Patrol agents, another sign of the system being stretched thin: we were told (again by the prosecutor) that more and more marshals were being kept from their normal duties of following up on domestic abuse and outstanding warrants in order to serve in Streamline proceedings, and even that wasn't enough; the three green-uniformed Border Patrol were there also watching over the defendants (if anyone can explain to us how this is legal, please do).

As simultaneous translation headsets were passed out (everyone but two spoke Spanish), we heard and then saw that the migrants wore handcuffs, shackled to a chain around their waists, requiring that their headsets be put on by the marshals/Border Patrol. As groups of 5 were called up to the microphones in front of the judge, we became aware that the migrants were also shackled at the ankles. This is apparently mandatory for all defendants in a criminal trial, due to the often dangerous nature of the crimes, and, in the case, the fact that the migrants outnumbered their keepers 12 to 1. The only eligibility requirement for Streamline is having entered the US unlawfully (as hundreds if not thousands do each day); no previous record of any kind--crime, having crossed before--is necessary to be arrested and tried as a criminal.

The proceedings took a long time--3 hours, with about 10 minutes being spent on each group of 5. That 10 minutes was used to inform the migrants of the rights they were entitled to by being on US soil, but had waived either by signing a plea agreement prior to this sentencing and/or pleading guilty to the charges brought against them. The same 10 minutes recurred over, and over, and over; everyone answered correctly, since to answer otherwise is to go to regular court, which means more serious charges are brought and you spend more time in jail while awaiting trial. We also spoke to a public defender after the proceedings, and were told that in the half-hour or so they get with each defendant, they counsel them to plead guilty as the lesser of two evils.

The seriousness of that extra time in jail was made especially clear in the 2 instances (out of 62) when a migrant answered Yes to the question Do you have anything else you'd like to tell the court? Then, the repercussions of this silly government formality in real peoples' real lives was made explicitly apparent.

A woman (one of four) asked for her sentence be reduced from 65 days in jail--she's a single mother with a child who is about to be 3 years old has health problems. The child was getting care through Medicaid in Florida, where they lived; she went back to Mexico because her brother died. She asks if her sentence could be reduced because her child is sick, and she's a single mother. The judge says that there is nothing he can do: she signed the plea agreement for 65 days, if it is broken, the government is under no obligation not to charge her with a felony, instead of only the misdemeanor she and everyone else there is getting. She says ok and is escorted out by the marshal. One man's lawyer took this opportunity to also ask for a more lenient sentence, 10 days in jail instead of 60: he said his client had been in the US for 12 years, with kids and a wife here, with no record of crime or deportations. He added also that his client and his wife both work in the fields, making $350 per week. When asked if he had anything to say, the migrant said that if he's allowed, he will go to Mexico and not try to come back anymore. Something about his situation was different, and the judge approved the 10 day sentence.

There's little doubt that almost every migrant in the room had a similar story, illustrating the absurdity of assigning a criminal charge. It also reveals the inaccuracy of conceptualizing the trip north as a choice, and migrants as job seekers rather than economic refugees; Operation Streamline demonstrates the results of this seemingly subtle misconception.