A few years ago I was visiting a little town called El Bosque, up in the mountains of southern
Mexico, about two hours north of Tuxtla Gutiérrez. I was traveling with the interfaith fair trade
organization, Equal Exchange, and we were studying coffee farming and marketing
crafts for churches in the states. While I was there, I met the families of two
young people, Daniel Hernández and Jasmine Díaz-Pérez. They would have been about
nineteen when I was there, and had just gotten engaged. Their parents were
wonderful, hard working people, and their families had been growing corn and
beans and coffee in that region for over a hundred years.
However, in 1989 that began to change. Before then prices for
coffee beans had been set by an “International Coffee Agreement,” led by the
US. We had created the agreement back in the sixties as a way of providing poor
farmers in Latin America with just enough income to keep them from joining
rebel movements like Fidel Castro’s in Cuba. But in 1989, Cuba was hit hard by
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US pulled out of the Agreement,
allowing coffee prices to swing wildly on the open market. Within three years prices
paid to poor farmers had fallen to a thirty-year low. According to World Bank
numbers, over 600,000 people lost their jobs and homes in Central America and
Mexico alone.
In addition, after 1994, when the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA)
took effect, allowing the US to export cheap, subsidized corn into Mexico, their
sales of corn also collapsed. Local prices fell from an average of $5 a bushel
in 1995 to $1.80 in 2000, and it wiped out tens of thousands of farmers.
With each economic hit, the Mexican countryside emptied out
more young people creating abandoned ghost towns in its swath.
Some of those farmers were from Daniel’s family, and the
summer before we arrived, their conditions had gotten so bad that many decided
they had to leave. The options weren’t good. They could join the rebels,
migrate to the sweat shops, grow cocaine, or put together a delegation to make
that terrifying journey north into the US to find work. Typically if a group managed
to get in they’d rent a room together, take turns sleeping and working, eat as
little as possible, and send money back home. One day’s work, picking
vegetables in California, at below minimum wage, could feed a family of six in El
Bosque for a week.
So, they chose six young men who would go north and try to
get in. One problem was that Daniel was one of those, and he and Jasmine had
just gotten engaged, and they couldn’t stand being apart. Maybe they could go
together, they said, and both find jobs? Maybe they could afford a place of
their own. Maybe they could finally get married… So the family relented and Jasmine
was added to the group, and then they left.
They walked north along the spine of the westward side of the
Sierra Madre Mountains, sometimes hitchhiking, but mainly walking for almost three
weeks. Then, exhausted and nearly broke, they stopped at the town of Altar,
Mexico, about sixty miles south of the border, where they hired a coyote. “Coyotes” are those often unscrupulous people who, for a fee, will
smuggle people like cargo over the border. Whether the families succeed or
fail, the coyote still gets paid.
Typically, they don’t really care.
But he shouldn’t have. They were too weak, the journey had
been too long, and the heat was too evil. After three days they collapsed and couldn’t
travel any further. And about 100 miles southwest of Tucson on the Tohono O’odham
Indian Reservation the coyote abandoned
them. Daniel and two of Jasmine’s uncles struggled on ahead to search for help.
They turned themselves in to border guards and then led them back to the
others.
When they got back they found everyone in critical condition,
weak from heat and dehydration. Two recovered within a few days. Two more were
placed in intensive care but recovered. But young Jasmine, Daniel’s fiancé, didn’t
make it. They tried to resuscitate her at the hospital, but she was already
gone. Daniel survived but no one knows where he is. They say he ran screaming
from the hospital when he got the news, and there’s no word on what happened to
him since. He never made it back home. He never contacted anyone about getting
a job. He simply disappeared, in grief.
I don’t know how to solve our complex story of immigration. I
can’t begin to work through all the legal and historical issues that brought us
to where we are today. What I do know is that Jasmine and Daniel are not our
enemies. They didn’t come here to hurt us, or take our jobs, or soak up our tax
dollars. They came here because they were hungry, because they were desperate,
and because they loved each other. Their lives were caught up in economic
forces that were larger than they were, and over which they had no control.
And I know that little Jasmine died for our sins. She died so
that we could continue to worship a market system that destroys families and
crushes human beings far away, so that we can live well here at home…a system
that forces wages down so that we can drink cheap coffee and wear cheap shirts,
and forces immigration up so that our
farms and services can have cheap labor. Whatever we decide to do in the next
months about immigration, we should never, ever blame those who are drawn to
the American dream and risk their lives trying to attain it.
And I know that whatever punishment the judge gave to the coyote who abandoned them in the Sonora
desert, at the end of the day, you and I and all of our families are
co-conspirators in the crime.
