El modesto misterio

Unidentified Guatemalan Female Immigrant 

It’s been days, weeks that I’ve been looking and thinking of you. Imagining if you look like the undocumented Guatemalan girl that I found four years ago at the Tapachula immigration station shown like a cage of cold. The girl was about to be deported- accompanied repatriation, as you say it in the right language institutions that report with white gloves and shackles if necessary. It was not the first time in which she tried to go north and cross, it was her second time they deported her and ran like adventures of air, holding with irony in her hand the booklet on human rights.

Remembering her, vital and brilliant, she asked what was your experience, an anonymous dead maid, well deserved. If it was your first time when all 3 women, for sure young, cornered, like being locked in a pen, it was 72 people in total like human beast, threaten and hit to accept the offer that they made to work for them and for the females, to pay with their bodies and bring to disappearance, secret trafficking to the perverse business of sexual meat trafficking and work of slaves

The unidentified girl from Guatemala who I look for in my imagination was willing to try again and again, exit-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 of her same age, they gathered some money, set out the march, and finally crossed the Suchiate 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, blisters on exhausted feet and to get on 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, they did not have the money nor the means, and the two immigrant friends that escaped together from Guatemala looking for another life they were raped and submitted by police and immigration personal, how would you know, and forced to either sell their bodies or die. Noticing that this was not life, that there was no choice, the girl from Guatemala who I think saw in an instant, everything lived and dreamed, and fell on her friend, like an impossible hug, so that together they would 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

By Janitza Solarte and Laura Triana