| The Risk of the Road | |||||||||
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For the past year and a half, Joe and I have been following the
three surviving siblings of the Chávez familybrothers Florentino
and Fernando and their wives and kids, sister Rosa and her husband
and daughteras they've crossed the border north and south several
times since the accident, and I've frequently visited the matriarch
and widows back in Cherán. |
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| The amazing thing is precisely that the Chávez siblings continue
to move back and forth despite the brothers' deaths. Florentino
and Fernando can do so with easethey have migrant worker permits
and sometimes even hop on a Mexicana Airlines flight that takes
them from Guadalajara to San Francisco; from there it's only an
hour and a half by bus ride to the picking fields of Watsonville.
But Rosa, who was working at a greenhouse nursery in St. Louis,
Missouri when the accident occured and returned home immediately
to bury her brothers, has crossed illegally since the accident.
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What does this say about Rosa? That she is fearless? Or that she's a mother who should be brought into court on child endangerment charges? (After all, she took her two year-old daughter on the harrowing, 2,000 mile overland journey, for almost half that distance travelling in an overloaded van with balding tires along freezing roads often patrolled by the BP.) Is she an Indian with a vision? A New American pioneer? A woman so desperate she'll do anything for a chance at the American Dream? | ||||||||
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After several trips to Cherán, I gained the family's trust and began getting to know other migrant families. This last Spring I undertook a cross-country trip Stateside and visited several townsWatsonville, California; Nogales, Arizona; Dallas, Texas; Warren, Arkansas; Benson, North Carolina; Norwalk, Wisconsin; where natives of Cherán live and work before returning home in the winter. In each a different story, a different point on the migrant cultural and economic map, a different impact on an American city or town, and, of course, more change back home in Cherán. | ||||||||
| So what's this story about? Certainly about deathabout the risks of the road taken by the migrants. And it's not just a risk of physical death. Migration might mean the "death" of particular family when a father leaves to try his luck in the north and then shacks up with a woman in the U.S. and never returns. Some people see cultural death resulting from an Indian culture coming into contact with MacDonald's, Michael Jordan, and Protestantism. | |||||||||
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But most of the migrants I know from Cherán feel the opposite:
that they are fleeing economic and cultural death at home and
are finding life on the road. The people of Cherán, after their
stints in the States, have become quite enamored of postmodern
media. They want their MTV. In Cherán, there are hundreds of satellite
dishes crowning the homes. At Christmas, the Indians dress up
the dishes like Christmas trees. It is quite a site to approach
Cherán at night in the winter and see the great bowls blinking
red and blue and yellow and green, a sight that can only be seen
from above, as if it were a messsage to the Indian gods: we've
arrived, we are no longer chained to history, we are riding it.
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