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 Editorials | At Issue | July 2005 
Indian Migrants Strive To Save Customs
 Teresa Borden - Cox News Service
| Mexican drug gangs are forcing Indian tribes to abandon their traditional crops and grow marijuana and heroin poppies.
A report by Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute said armed drug gangs were driving communities of Tarahumara, Guarijio and Pima Indians to give up their age-old way of life in the mountains of Sonora and Chihuahua states.
More than 50,000 members of the tribes have lived in caves and log cabins in remote canyons in the Western Sierra Madre mountain range in the area for millennia, surviving on subsistence corn crops. |
Honorato Hernández Trejo, a Hnahnu Indian who travels regularly to Atlanta to work, is pulling his people into the 21st century a dollar and a brick at a time. But every time he makes the trip, he loses a little more of himself along the way.
Since 1972, Hernández Trejo, 52, has been illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexican border to work at Atlanta construction jobs, and the money he has earned has brought school buildings, piped water and street lights to this mountain village. But for Mexican Indians who have kept their culture intact for centuries, the price of this progress is a language lost, a custom forgone, a history forgotten.
"It's our memories; it's our heritage," Hernández Trejo said. "People have become more modernized." The 2000 census recorded about 400,000 Mesoamerican Indians living in the United States. Observers believe they are migrating to the United States in ever increasing numbers, driven by a host of circumstances.
Some are granted asylum or temporary protective status because of disasters or civil war at home, but many more live here illegally. And they face even more formidable language problems than other illegal immigrants. Never mind English; many don't know Spanish either. So, when they end up before a judge or in a hospital, eliciting something as simple as a name may prove nearly impossible.
To deal with that problem, Mexican indigenous groups in California have banded together to provide part-time, traveling court interpreters and hold civil rights workshops for Indians. In Georgia, Alan LeBaron, a Kennesaw State University professor, has taken a more modest approach. He eases the transition with a program to teach traffic safety to Maya Indians in Canton and Ellijay.
Life As A Community
Mesoamerican Indians, whose ancestors lived in what is now Latin America, remain a significant part of the population in many countries. In Mexico they are one-tenth of the population, and the Mayas in southern Mexico and Guatemala make up the largest indigenous group in the Americas.
Through centuries of wars, land grabs and other upheavals, these groups clung to their customs, language, dress and ways of governing. But in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, civil war, land disputes, religious conflicts and economic dislocation caused many of them to emigrate, first within their own countries and then, often, to the United States.
Rufino Domínguez, leader of a California-based organization for Oaxacan Indians, said indigenous migration has recently grown so much that the group last month changed its name, from the Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front to the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, to reflect new membership among other Indians.
Domínguez says that, besides facing barriers of spoken language, these immigrants often are illiterate.
"They don't know how to read or write," he said. "Education doesn't reach to them. And economic necessity comes before education." But Domínguez and others say the indigenous migrants' communal lifestyle, which stresses respect for elders, makes it easy for them to organize and advocate for their interests in a foreign land. Word-of-mouth networks that immigrants typically use to get jobs and advice are even stronger among Indians.
"We understand life only through the community," explained Juan Cuyuch, who is part of a community of about 4,000 Guatemalan Mayas who have lived in Canton, Georgia, for years. "That is a genuine Maya value. The number 'one' does not exist for the Maya." Social life revolves around Our Lady of LaSalette Catholic Church, which put together a special mission for them. They gather on Saturdays and Sundays for Mass and Bible study in their language, and on Feb. 5 for the feast of Santa Eulalia, a sort of regional patron saint who has come to stand in for other hometown patron saints whom these Indians cannot honor in the United States.
They fear that their very identity is being erased by the constant contact with the outside world.
Like practically all the men in his hometown, Hernández Trejo no longer wears the traditional cotton pants and blouse of his ancestors, opting instead for jeans, a buttondown shirt and a baseball cap.
"When I went to the United States, I said, 'Well, why wear the clothes over there?'" he said. "But yes, it is necessary to do it." Even the women, who in Indian communities are slower to give up their traditional costume, wear sweaters, Tshirts and jeans or slacks here.
Cuyuch, who comes from the Guatemalan town of Momostenango and has been in Canton for six years, says he and others cannot go home to take up their "cargo," a community-assigned obligation that ranges from organizing feast-day celebrations to acting as town judge or sheriff. Those who can't go home, he says, end up paying someone there to take their place.
Mistreated At Home
Hernández Trejo says that, economically speaking, indigenous people do better in this country than at home, because they generally don't get treated any differently from other immigrant workers. In their homelands, they face discrimination from bosses who pay them less because they consider them backward and take it for granted that Indians can't get along in modern society.
"They behave badly," he said. "We can't defend ourselves because they're in command." For María Marcos, the new environment is liberating. In this country for 13 years, she is becoming a legal resident and runs a clothing store in Ellijay. In one corner, she stocks traditional woven Guatemalan clothing that she receives in regular shipments as migrants from her region arrive in town. In the back office, she keeps an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom she gives thanks for her family's prosperity. But she misses home.
"When I first arrived, I used to cry," she says. "I missed my people. Who could I talk with? I didn't have anyone." Indians in the United States face the hurdle of learning to navigate a culture that is bewildering even to their city-bred countrymen. And efforts to tighten the screws on those who are here illegally, such as by denying them drivers' licenses, don't lessen the shock.
LeBaron got a grant from the governor's office and the state Department of Public Safety to teach the Indians who are legally here the rules of the road so they can get around safely. The classes also warn those who can't get licenses not to drive, and teach them how to use buses and other public transportation.
"We just try to teach them to be safe," LeBaron said. |
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