El modesto misterio

Unidentified Male Immigrant

Author: Martín Solares

For some time now, I dream about lions. There are different scenarios but these animals are always there. In the latest dream I find myself in a desert land, a place suitable for animal survival. The action begins the instant I see myself running with a group of people in a corridor, along which 12 rooms are arranged, one for each month of the year and inside each one awaits a lion. We can see the creatures because the doors are made of a transparent material solid enough to contain these big animals. There are more people with me, stranger’s faces that one may see out in the streets. We are a large group, running in single line.  Every now and then a door opens and a lion comes out to devour someone, causing panic to the people around the scene. Then, someone assigns a number to the fallen and we gradually forget his name. The group continues to progress and at the end of the day we come back to where we started. Today this happened to the person in front on me. I hadn’t notice, but the lions treat us as if we were an anonymous and stupid herd, destined to die. The building is made of a cruel perfection.  The architecture itself is not enough to explain everything. We assume that magic is involved here because something else happens: every time we complete a round we stop using a word. I wouldn’t have believed how fast certain words can be forgotten; how poor it makes us to lose sight of these words. Perhaps that explains why some people have started to howl. Contrary to what other people say, we are not sitting around doing nothing. We have tried everything in the sleep’s variants. We tried to escape from the lions and even tried to lock them up in the rooms. But nobody wants to die, the walls are too high and nobody ever taught us how to stop these animals. Many succumb to despair or reluctance. It is enough to realize that it wasn’t us who designed this place, nor we deserve to stay here. Or maybe it was enough that we ignore the existence of the lions over the years, for them to be imposed in the place where they are. The lions are strong and the scene is lasting. Perhaps it’ll get worse. On days like this, nothing that comes from the mind or spirit promises to be able to mitigate the pain. But, other nights come, when disappointed and exhausted we arrive at our homes, and conclude that we need a mythology, some legends that talk about those who were imprisoned here before us and their lucky or naive attempts to find their way out.

Translated by: Teresa Cabrera

Unidentified Guatemalan Female Immigrant

It’s been days, weeks now, that I’ve been looking thinking of you looking for you, wondering whether you look like the undocumented Guatemalan girl that I met four years ago at the Tapachula immigration station which was like a golden cage. The girl was about to be deported-joint repatriation, as you say it in the correct language in immigrant institutions, that report with white gloves and handcuffs if necessary. It wasn’t the first time she tried going north and crossing over, it was the second time they’d deported her and she went on smiling with that adventurous look on her face, ironically clutching the obligatory booklet on her human rights.

Remembering her, vital and brilliant, I asked myself what was her experience, an anonymous dead girl. If it was your first time when all 13 women, certainly all very young, were ambushed, as if being locked in a cradle, as if they were animals in which it was a total of seventy two people, threaten and beaten to be accepted for the “offer” that they made to work for “them” and for the females, so they could pay with their own bodies and be brought into disappearance and the secrecy of this treatment, this is  a perverse business in which ones’ own body is used and abused like a slave.

The unidentified girl from Guatemala whom I look for in my imagination was willing to try again and again, leave-cross-arrive, to stop feeling used and abused by her own community, by men who claimed to care about her but who abused her. She kept dreaming about a more valuable and free life, she planned to escape, she got together with a girl her age, they collected some money, set off, and finally were able to cross the Suchiate by paying some quetzals. It was in Mexico where the worst started, although they decided not to get on the train, but to walk as much as possible, they had blisters on their exhausted feet so they decided to take some bus. They were detained because of their skin color and their way of talking, as always, the signs of identity and discrimination, abducted and subjected to threats and calls, from siblings from the other side to pay for their rescue. Siblings did not answer the calls, they did not have the money nor the means, and the two immigrant friends that escaped together from Guatemala looking for another life were raped and submitted by police and immigration personal, how would you know, and forced to either sell their bodies or die. Realizing this was not life, that there was no choice, the girl from Guatemala, whom I think saw in an instant everything she lived and dreamed, fell on her friend like an impossible embrace, so that together they would either resist or die.

Central American mothers who have started today a caravan through Mexico looking for their immigrant “missing” sons and daughters, they will find them one day if we help them, so we will all know disappearance in our country means annihilation, by physical death or mental disintegration.

Author: Isabel Vericat

Translated by Laura Triana and Janitza Solarte

El Salvadorian male immigrant yet to be identified

Author: Guillermo Osorno

Photographer: Ricardo Ramirez Arriola

No one knows his name. It matters, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Rather, at least that’s what I think. I believe he is dead, that’s for sure. I believe the hardest part is over. This is also sure, although I know it was something he was regretting along the way because he didn’t know that things could get any worse. I believe at one point he had to walk barefoot. I believe he was mugged at gunpoint on a train before arriving in Oaxaca. I believe his life in El Salvador wasn’t a good one. I think the Mara Salvatrucha killed his brother or perhaps a family member. I believe he went to the United States to locate a family member, to see if they wanted him. I think along the way someone told him that they had been kidnapped by municipal police officers and that they asked his relatives from the United States for money. The officers then beat that someone, released him and he ended up at a shelter, where the two met. I think he didn’t know what to say to him. I believe he and the rest of people killed in Tamaulipas were caught so that they could beg for money. I believe as he had the blindfold on, before they shot him, he agreed to drink water from puddles and begged to eat.

I wonder when you were on top of that train, if you manage to grab any of the plastic bags filled with water or tacos that the ladies who lives next to the train’s track throw because they can’t tolerate someone in pain and hunger pass so close to them. When do you all three lost your path? How come did “the law” chase you until you were forced to hide? Was it the Samaritan, who promised to take you to Monterrey, who sold you to your killers for some coins? Who authorize those men to call your home asking for two thousand dollars rescue, like they were drunken gods with the right to mutilate lives? Lizardo, haven’t you ever heard the Mexican border is a dangerous territory? Well, at least, have you ever heard there is a war in Mexico where immigrants are trophies and the authorities allow these suspicious purchase-sale activities? Dear Lizardo, your body was found next to your bothers-in-law, Karla and Noemi’s husbands, and next to another 69 immigrants at a ranch in San Fernando. You were just few little cliffs away from Unites States. In Los Astales, the news makes everybody’s lives fall apart like a dynamite explosion and break their hearts. There is a picture of your wife Yesica in the local news-paper; she looks so sad and so pretty. There are no signs that she is pregnant but she is. I wonder if your unborn child Lizardito can feel her anguish. I am sure when he is born; she will tell him about you, and how the president declared you a national hero in a ceremony that you couldn’t assist. Your body is still stranded in a Mexican morgue. Lizardo, who send you there without proper identification documents? There was no way to identify you, even though your family recognized you as the young guy with the crazy hairstyle. There is a small piece of land waiting for you next to your home, where your body will be resting.

Gelder Lizardo Boche Cante, 72migrantes.com, # 37 by Marcela Turati

Me intriga saber si desde el lomo del tren pudiste atrapar alguna bolsita con agua o uno de los atados de tacos que lanzan las doñas avecindadas a la orilla de las vías, que no soportan que el hambre y el sufrimiento se paseen tan cerca. ¿En qué momento ustedes tres perdieron el camino? ¿Cómo fue que ‘la ley’ los correteó hasta obligarlos a esconderse? ¿El samaritano que prometió llevarlos a Monterrey fue quien los vendió a sus asesinos por unas monedas? ¿Quién autorizó a los hombres que llamaron a tu casa, para pedir 2 mil dólares por tu rescate, a actuar como dioses borrachos, con derecho de mutilar vidas? Lizardo, ¿habías escuchado que la frontera mexicana es territorio perdido? Vaya, ¿al menos que en México se libra una guerra donde los migrantes son un botín y que las autoridades contemplan con sospechosa indiferencia esa compra-venta? Encontraron tu cuerpo, querido Lizardo, junto a los de los esposos de tus hermanas Karla y Nohemí, y a los de otros 69 migrantes en el rancho de San Fernando. Nomás tras lomita quedaba Estados Unidos. En Los Astales, la noticia desmoronó como polvorón la vida de todos, desgajó corazones como pasa con los cerros tras las lluvias. ¡En la foto de un diario tu Yésica luce tan triste y tan linda! El vientre aún no se nota abultado. No sé si Lizardito siente la angustia que guarda ella. Seguro que cuando nazca le contará de ti, le dirá que el presidente te declaró héroe en una ceremonia donde no te dejaron estar presente. Sigues varado en una morgue mexicana. ¿Quién te manda, Lizardo, no tener cédula de identidad? No hubo manera de identificarte aunque tus parientes empeñaron su palabra en que tú eres tú, el adolescente de las milpas mal trazadas. Un surco de tierra te espera en casa. Ahí tu cuerpo será sembrado.

Translation
Text 8
Francisco Guzman, Jilmar Avausto Morales Castillo
Translation by William Chimborazo and Karen Cannan

Karla, your husband Jilmar is dead. His body was found in the San Fernando ranch, beside the body of your little brother, Lizardo, and Hermelindo, your brother-in-law, all three of them killed, three amongst the 72 that died. How many more died with them? Your life in shambles, would you die as well, though I expect that you will not die totally, not forever, because your children need you, and life, though in shambles, is life. You are some where in California, with your children. Perhaps you hide the pain in the same way you hide yourself, undocumented perhaps, and with just reason, it is not the time to bring attention to your family. Is it not strange to think of Jilmar in California, and probably you as well, have and have had much more fear of the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents and the United States authority than that of the of the Mexican authorities, who killed Jilmar? Finally, what are the Zetas? The night has fallen, it fills up the desert, within this entire universe across the horizon are the Zetas and ICE, both are simply the Lord of Darkness’ most viable weapons.

Fortunately Jilmar’s brothers are with you, Jilmar was an accomplished cook in a successful restaurant in California, I am not sure about Jilmars brothers, and perhaps this is best all kept in silence.

Were you well off in California? Jilmar must have told Lizardo and Hermelindo something quite promising, that made both of them go along with him and gather the courage to withstand the dangerous trip to California, and with barely two hundred and fifty dollars to share between the three of them. There was the forty two inch flatscreen television on the wall of Jilmar’s father’s wall in Agua Caliente, a gift from his kids residing in the U.S. the fruits of his hard work. To much is not necessary for Guatemala to look more promising than California. But, which employer would not be content hiring Jilmar? A handsome fellow, with large biceps, and a contagious smile, he crossed frontiers prepelled by love. The first time, five years ago, after you left to Califonia, before he did, when you were only 16 and you were pregnant. Jilmar wente for you, and he got arrested, he spent one year in jail, and he accomplished his goal on the second attempt. In May, he decided to come back to Guatemala to visit with his parents. Because he wanted to see alive not in death, this is how his father explained. Only a person who is valiant and has a pure heart makes a trip for such a reason. His father said he returned very different, very loving. Which means he was not like this before, Karla, but rather after he had gone with you to California, when you both were practically kids. Now you cling on to the dream in the same way that before you cherish Jilmars embrace so as to sleep, because it is in your dreams that you manage to him again, and your little brother as well. Even the nightmare are welcomed, since at least he is there still alive, and the horror is not worse than the one you feel when are awake.
What advice can I give you? I, who has also lost my beloved wife. Let people be generous with you, even when at first it might not seem to make any difference. It will be a long trip. Take the love you have now in the future, in such a way that it will help your children grow, and in a way that will help yourself. Look for beauty wherever you can find it, think of it as a way in which he can give you a sense of relief, just as in the same way a father lifts an infant from the tired arms of his wife.

Pedro Antonio Franco

Author: Elia Baltazar
Photo by: Pedro Valtierra
“They didn’t hurt him, did they? They didn’t beat him up first, did they?” Ana Virginia, your wife, asks frantically. She wants to know what happened to you. She wants to find comfort at least by thinking that the darkness fell quickly upon your large and robust body that was no longer able to see. Strong as she remembers you, she just wants to imagine that you left complete and without pain. You had already had enough since you were young, when you left San Vicente to enroll in an army that made war in that small country of yours. You became Sergeant with no wounds. Just a finger broken by a bullet. The worst was your fear when you felt your life ending though the blood of others. She did not know you yet, but you were already looking for her. You always told her that as a compliment, when you spoke about San Miguel, where she had grown up and you hanged around. “Why didn’t I meet you before to steal you?” you would tell her laughing. “Really?” She would ask you. A woman who knew the harsh treatment of men appreciated that you did not yell at her, did not hurt her, that you called her Tinita and that you showed her off: “I have found the most beautiful woman in this world,” you would tell one of your six brothers. You were as affectionate with her as with her three children and grandchildren. You loved them as if they were your own and she was grateful for that. She returned your kindness and love by getting up at dawn to heat up your food and atole before seeing you leave to work at that construction job that would break your back. You had already experienced hard working days before. In the fields and as bus dispatcher. At 55, you were well-trained in the necessities of a poor country. However, you had never carried 80 pounds (approximately 36 kilograms) all day, every day. Until you arrived at Maryland, where you met her eight years ago, on the platform of the train you both took to go back home. One station separated you so you decided it was better to take her to live with you. You traveled to El Salvador to get married and then you returned together to the United States. There she said good bye, you had to leave her: your job had been lost in the real estate collapse, you were sick, and with no work permit. That’s why you returned to El Salvador, to get as a citizen, a surgery that would be impossible to get as an immigrant. In El Delirio, the community where you left land and house, your health and the nostalgia returned. You did not want to be by yourself in San Miguel. Also, you were soon going back there together again. In two or three years, you promised. When there would be enough money to buy some animals. You went to Mexico only with the things needed for the days to come and you traveled more than 1500 kilometers until arriving to San Fernando, Tamaulipas: 300 kilometers before the border with the United States, your future ended. One day before your death, a man called Ana Virginia to tell her you would cross the border that night. On the next day, you were found lying on the uneven piece of land that you got in life. A poet whose last name is Dalton could have written for you: “The night comes and destroys everything/ viscose, devastating sea/ nothing forgives the relentless”

Translated by: Alejandra Garcia and Vanessa Fernandez

Yeimi Victoria Castro

Author: Wilbert Torre

Yeimi dreamed of the most anticipated of her parties. She nurtured pink dreams and there was nothing wrong with it: that is life when you are waiting to turn 15. She lived with her grandparents in the farmhouse Las Peñitas del cantón El Rebalse, in the city of Pasaquina, La Unión, El Salvador, a town with a central park that exhibits gardens of geometrical shapes and a cream color parish. Life had the usual complications – money wasn’t enough, split families, mothers and fathers that cross the border to forge their children with a future from afar- but it’s generally gentle. During vacation time everything happened between runaways to the beach and sunsets under the skirts of the Conchagua volcano. The grandparents Cayetano y Victoria took care of everything with the dollars that Yeimi’s mother sent from New York. The day she turned fifteen years old she looked beautiful in her pink dress with blue details. On the house’s table there was a cake and an album for pictures with pink laces. After that party Yaimi continued to dream. She dreamed of princes and quite often they were near her door: she was being hovered by a young man from Nicaragua that melted for her. She also wished to be with her mother. She missed her. Her mother already had plans for her: she would study in a school in New York, then she would work and maybe one day she would get married. It wasn’t a complicated departure. In the town, in addition to the park, the volcano and the beaches, there were also coyotes that announced themselves with labels outside of the homes. On August 10^th Yeimi took of to the United States. She wore a sky-blue t-shirt and blue jeans. The coyote received three thousand dollars up front of the seven thousand in which the deal consisted. The grandparents gave her their blessing. She called them on the phone twice to let them know she was in Guatemala and that everything was ok. They never heard from her again. A few days later all of her dreams disappeared, scared off by monsters, like it happens in bedtime stories. In one of her pockets she carried her birth certificate: her ticket of entry to a city she didn’t know and in which she would continue dreaming. The story of Yeimi shouldn’t have ended this way.

Translated by: Alvaro Mojica

Author: Luis Guillermo Hernandez

Photo: Javier Garcia

Carlos lived for his mother and she proudly requited his fondness. The love of a Caribbean mother, living near the beaches of Triunfo de la Cruz, in Tela, Honduras, and the love of a garifuna boy, a handsome black Honduran almost 20 years old with a dream in his eyes. “He wanted to lift his mother, Isadora, out of poverty…give his mother everything. He was the only son, and here he couldn’t do that, that’s why he decided to leave.”Alejandro, his uncle, says that he still seems to be seeing Carlos when he was a cipote of 11, 13 years old: he milked the cows and herded the neighbor’s cattle through the mountains of his village, hugged his mother, took care of his five sisters and ran to the beach to play with the other cipotes garifunas: the new blood of a culture born around 1635 when Spanish ships loaded with African slaves shipwrecked near the island of San Vicente and the first garifunas swam, released to the nearby shores, to later mingle and expand into what today are Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala. Tall as the palm trees of the Atlantic coast, well built, muscular, with a wide smile and fleshy mouth that display dark tones, Carlos had two passions: soccer, in which he played defense as if he were a professional, and music. He was born the year “Sopa de Caracol” by the Honduran group Banda Blanca won the heart of half of Latin America with a dance known as “Punta” garifuna– “Watbuinegui consup, watabuinegui wanaga, si tu quieres bailar sopa de caracol eh!” Perhaps that was why he liked to dance. He would go to a club in the nearby town of Tela, because there they played modern music like pop, reggaetton, and “Punta” which his mother liked to dance, as well. But Carlos could no longer stay in his village; watching his mother strive for money hurt him – the pride of the black male. “It didn’t suit him anymore. You know what it’s like; one week there’s work, the next there’s none. It was Carlos’ first time, leaving Triunfo.” He expected to reach Miami and his uncles, who had the money to pay the smugglers for getting him and his other uncle Junior Basilio Espinoza across. The night of their departure, having thought that they would find a job at a restaurant or even in the orange groves of Florida, Carlos sported a red shirt with a bright golden eagle and Junior a white shirt. They decided that’s how they would dress to enter the paradise of abundant pay. “Perhaps they were told they would arrive that same night and that’s why they wore those clothes…and with those same clothes on, they were killed”. Alejandro, who’s talking, moves the phone away from his mouth and begins to cough: 72 murders together annihilate any throat, any soul, any possible hope of any country. Almost three months after his departure on August 9,2010, Carlos Alejandro has not yet returned to Honduras. Isadora waits impatiently for her son. “Every day, every week they tell her he’s arriving, he’s arriving, and he never arrives.” The love of a Caribbean mother, she’s waiting to take him in her arms, to sing him uragas garifunas that tell the legends Carlos would have liked to hear about his own life. She will retell the love of a loving young man and then she will proudly return his body to the sands of the coast of Triunfo de la Cruz. 

Translated by: Lucy Riera and Cindy Riano

AUTHOR

Guillermo Osorno

 Salvadoran still unidentified

Nobody knows his name. If it matters, but it does not matter. Better I will tell you what I think.  I think he is dead, that’s for sure. I think the hardest part is over. This is also  sure.  Although it was something that he was repeating along the way. He did not know that things could get worse. I think at one point he had to walk barefoot. I think he was mugged at gunpoint on a train before he gets at  Oaxaca. I think his life in El Salvador was not good. I think the  La Mala Salvatrucha killed  his brother or some other relative. I think he went to the  United States to meet with a family member, to see If they wanted  him. I think someone told him on the road that he was kidnapped by police officers and that they have asked for money  his relatives from the United States for money. And then the officers hit that someone, released him and he end up at a shelter,where the two met.I think he did not know what to say. I think he and the other people who died in Tamaulipas were grabbed to ask for money. I think when he had the blindfold, before he was shot, he remembered that he drank water from puddles and begged to eat.

Translated by Ruth Morocho

Unidentified Male Immigrant

Author: Martín Solares

Photo: Nicola Ókin Frioli

For some time now, I dream about a device with lions. There are variations, but is always the same dream. In the latest dream I find myself in a desert land, a sheet suitable for animal survival. The action begins the instant I see myself running with a group of people in a kind of corridor, along which, there are arranged 12 rooms, one for each month of the year and in each one awaits a lion. We can see the lions because the doors are made of a transparent material but solid enough to contain these big animals. There are more people with me, strangers, specially the faces that one may find out into the streets. We are a large group, running in single line like we are going to work.  Every now and then a door opens and a lion comes out to devour someone, causing panic to those around the scene. Then, someone assigns a number to the fallen and we gradually forget his name. The group continues to progress and at the end of the day we come back to where we started. Today it happened to the person in front on me. I hadn’t notice, but the device treats us as if we were an anonymous and stupid herd, destined to die. That’s how the building is made of, a cruel perfection.  The architecture itself is not enough to explain everything. We assume that magic is involved here because something else happens: every time we complete a round we stop using a word. I wouldn’t have believed how fast certain words can be forgotten; how impoverishes us to lose sight of these words. Perhaps that explains why some people have started to scream. Contrary to what other people say, we are not idly. We have tried everything in the sleep’s variants: from escape the situation to lock these beasts. But nobody wants to die, the walls are too high and nobody ever taught us how to stop the lions. Many succumb to despair or reluctance. It is enough to realize that it wasn’t us who designed this, nor we deserve it. Or maybe it was enough that we ignore the existence of lions over the years, for them to be imposed in the place where they are. The device is strong and lasting. Perhaps I’ll get worse. On days like this, nothing that comes from the mind or spirit promises to be able to mitigate the pain. But then, other nights come when we arrive at our homes disappointed and exhausted, and conclude how badly we need a mythology, some legends that talk about those who were imprisoned here before us and their lucky or naive attempts to find their way out.

Honduran immigrant shot in Tapachula, Chiapas.

Translated by: Teresa Cabrera