by Lidiana Soto, master’s candidate, UO School of Journalism and Communication
Everything about how we physically crossed the border is like snapshots. Small vignettes and blurry, patchy, unreliable memories. We left the village in southern Oaxaca under a waning gibbous moon. My mother woke me in the middle of the night, wrapped me up in a blanket, and carried me onto the bus. I called the driver manejador and my mother chuckled and corrected me; chófer she said as she held on to my six-month-old brother. I settled onto the bench seat and watched the moon light the dark landscape as we drove away from Santa Maria Tindu.
We stopped in Huajuapan de Leon, and I met my aunt for the first time. We ate her food, slept under her roof, and received her blessing as we proceeded north. I’m not sure if my father was with us the whole time, or if he met us at the border. Regardless, at some point we were together, Mom, dad, and five kids. The baby was six months old, I was four, and my siblings were about six, eight, and ten. The rest of my older siblings were already in Oregon.
Many hours, many states, and some time later, the coyote passed around plastic bags for the adults to wrap their feet and try to stay dry as we crossed the Rio Bravo. I piggybacked on my father and watched everyone wade across as I nestled comfortably on his back. At some point, we reached a desert. My tiny chanclas kept slipping off in the sand and my dad tugged at my hand and pulled me faster. So I scurried along on my four year old legs gripping onto my chanclas with my toes. At some point, my toes could no longer clutch at my shoes. I took a step in the sand and my plastic shoes slipped off and stayed there, half buried in the sand. My dad said, “Don’t worry, I’ll buy you another pair when we get to the other side.”
"Migration is a point of departure, not only of the physical place that we leave, but a departure from who we are and the people we may have become …”
I think back to that as an adult and feel kind of bad. I wonder if people saw that shoe and thought a little girl died there. The first time I recalled that memory as an adult, I wished I could tell them—anyone that may have seen it—that I’m fine. That I made it. That I was lucky. That a mixture of luck, money, strategy, and policy didn’t push us more east into the desert and that we faced better odds and that my dad indeed replaced those shoes and many others that I wore out and grew out of and lost since then.
Others cross hotter deserts, or cross that same desert in the more precarious eastern parts. And those que se la rifan across oceans. And they might not have the combination of luck, money, strategy and policy to survive. There was a photograph that horrified the world last summer. This particular photograph was of a young Syrian boy that drowned and washed up on a Turkish shore. A photographer captured him, lying face down as the waves lapped around him. He was one of 22 refugees that drowned trying to cross into Europe. One artist depicted this young boy, Alan Kurdi, in the same position he was found in. Face down, but in a cradle at night, with some baby toys hanging above him. The caption read: “How his story should have ended.”
The scene where Reyna comes upon a man lying down and wonders to Mago: “Is he dead?” And Mago replies, “He’s sleeping Nena. He’s just sleeping.” That’s how his story should have ended. I, too, am grateful that back then I was too young to fully grasp the extent of the danger we were in. Crossing borders for adults and children has always been a precarious endeavor.
While I pondered my participation on this panel during the last month, I thought about the precarity of the physical border crossing, and I thought about how little distance divides those of us that survive a crossing and those that die in their attempts. When Reyna encountered the dead man behind the bushes, how much was actually separating her fate and his? And my shoe that some might have mourned, how much distance was there between the shoes of other little girls that didn’t make it and my own? Those of us that made it, or at least survived, will always have ties with those that didn’t, because of how narrowly they missed our fate, and how narrowly we missed theirs.
On the other side, the distance between us sometimes becomes so wide and expansive that it’s hard to bridge the gap between then and now. Between here and there. Between four year old me, and who I am now. Migration is a point of departure, not only of the physical place that we leave, but a departure from who we are and the people we may have become because identity is so often grounded in territoriality and temporality. So that image I described, and this book, these stories, give names, face, identities to this phenomenon. They give a name and a face to the structural violence that pulls people to the United States during times of economic prosperity (Bracero Program, IRCA), that punishes them during times of economic downturn (Mexican Repatriation, and recent deportations by the Obama administration). And it means taking very few belongings, but cumulatively, joining hundreds and thousands of others that leave weakened local infrastructures in exchange for a potentially prosperous future. A precarious future that builds on top of and despite harmful immigration and border policy and interventionist foreign policy in imperialist countries. And you know, all those terms start to become vague, and they start bleeding into each other and disappearing. And what it takes to highlight structural violence is a captivating story, like this one, or a stunning and horrific photograph to really highlight what it means to be a child immigrant and to face [death].
I’d also like to draw attention to the weakened local infrastructures that Reyna described in her book. In Iguala, prosperous businesses crumbled to the point where having a “future” was aligned with leaving Iguala. And while I haven’t been able to make all the conceptual connections, I think it’s important to at least acknowledge that the forty-three disappeared students in Mexico were from Iguala, where half this book took place. The violence they faced was horrendous.
Reyna puts a face to the story of children immigrants, and to the struggles and successes that many of us face and struggle with and overcome. Likewise, I want to say that there are also faces and names behind all those structural forces that move us… Somali-British poet Warsan Shire has a poem called “Home,” and she says, “no one leaves home unless home chases you.”
—Activist, graduate teaching fellow, and wildlands firefighter, Lidiana Soto is a master’s candidate in the UO School of Journalism and Communication.