Humanity is on both sides of the Rio
Kate Rowland
El Paso,Texas, is a city set up for movement. Train tracks criscross its streets, serving several active cargo stations and at least one active passenger depot. Greyhound and other distance-traveling buses pull into two different stations. Trucks transport parts to be put together in Mexican factories. Interstate 10 streaks through downtown, intersecting there with Interstate 54. Streets are cleanly asphalted and labeled with signs large enough to assist Mr. Magoo about the city.
Juarez, Chihuahua, is a city transportationally distinct. Two-thirds of the roads in the city are not paved, and cars and buses clog the streets that are. Pedestrians and motor vehicles dodge donkey carts, even downtown. Trucks transporting completed manufactured goods to the U.S. chug around the city. The clean, sleek tourist-attracting trolleys of El Paso contrast sharply with the recycled school buses that carry passengers around Juarez. Some still have familiar signs up: Do not distract driver. Do not use profane language. No standees permitted.
The no standees sign particularly amused me as I rode, standing, on a packed bus back to the border from the colonia of Puerta de Anapra on my last day in Juarez. The other 10 participants of the CSC's Border Issues Seminar and I were returning to the U.S.A. after Mass in the colonia. Anapra is the largest of Juarez's colonias, shanty towns where people live in self-built houses made from cardboard, wood or cinderblock, with no running water and pirated electricity. The residents of the colonia are employed mostly by maquilas, factories run by United States companies. The average weekly income from the maquila is about $35.
The reality of how little money that is came quickly, on the first day of the seminar, before we even saw the colonia. In groups, we were given a scenario based on actual people living in Anapra. My group's family was headed by a single mother with three children. Working on a maquila salary, we figured that our average daily food budget was $1.60, if all of our earnings for the week went to food.
Tim and Oscar, both volunteers with the Annunciation House Organization and our hosts for the seminar, took us over the border to a supermarket, where we learned exactly how far that money could stretch. The four of us walked out with a packet of tortillas, a bag of beans, a box of rice and one small tomato. We cooked lunch in the colonia, toting water in from a cistern outside to boil the rice. As we cooked a sufficient but uninspiring meal, I noticed that one of the groups, who had been given a different scenario, finished off their meal preparations by slicing into a block of cheese that had cost more than our entire day's budget.
For the first time the thought crossed my mind: Wait a minute, that's not fair!
It was certainly not the last time any of us thought or said that during the ensuing five days. We saw all kinds of injustices: children limited to fifth- or sixth-grade educations because their families can no longer afford their schooling, mothers forced to the lone shelter for women in Juarez by sexual threats from family members or by abusive spouses, United States employers who first contact a shelter to offer work to immigrants and then threaten to call immigration authorities to avoid having to pay them.
I had expected to encounter injustices when I signed up for the seminar, but I encountered a lot of surprises, too. While in the colonia, we spoke with Cristina, a mother of four children whose husband was leaving soon for the United States. She told us that she never imagined that he would have to leave Mexico to be able to provide the most basic things for their children.
Another man we talked to at Annunciation House, the shelter in El Paso for undocumented immigrants, said he had been working in the United States for years without papers. He'd gone back to visit his wife and his nine children in Chiapas and was returning to the U.S. just for another year or two, he said, until he had saved enough money to be able to go home for good. We never met with anyone who was looking North for anything but a job.
No one wanted to settle here or raise children here. That surprised me. Despite the utter poverty in the colonia, the normalcy and the happiness that never quite reached contentment of life there surprised me. The attitude of the Border Patrol agent with whom we spent an entire morning surprised me. He admitted freely that the U.S. depends on an immigrant workforce and that the Border Patrol is helpless to completely stop illegal border crossings.
My time on the border was short, but the seminar accomplished what I hoped it would. I have a much better understanding of the problems that make people want to come to the U.S. from Mexico. It is work and little else. I had anticipated feeling differently about the border and about illegal crossings.
I had wanted to come back with some hopeful idea as to how the problem could be solved. I know now that even people who have been there for years still haven't figured that out. They strive for a personal interaction, a little-boy-throwing-starfish kind of approach to helping the poor and the undocumented.
Over and over again, the people we talked with said, "Somos todos hermanos." (We are all brothers and sisters.) That's what I tried to take away from the seminar, the humanity of all people, on both sides of the Rio Grande.
Kate Rowland is a senior.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, January 20, 2000
