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 Editorials | Opinions | April 2007 
The Story of Me I Didn’t Know
 Debbie Guardado - New America Media
Editor’s Note: As the immigration debate rages on, the children of many immigrants have no idea how much it relates to them. Debbie, 15, knew nothing about the grueling three month journey her mother took to come to America, all while she was pregnant with the author herself. Debbie Guardado is a sophomore at June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco, lives in the Excelsior District.
In the 1990s, it is estimated that about 400,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants were crossing the border per year. Imagine how many of those people are parents to U.S.-born children. How many of those children happen to know the struggle their parents went through to get here? I would guess, almost none – especially because I was one of those who didn’t know anything until recently. My mom says she never really wanted to tell me or my brother what it took to get here because it was so difficult and she didn’t want to go through those feelings again.
My mother was born in a small town named Ilobasco in El Salvador. She grew up with six brothers and two sisters. By the time she was 16, she was going to school during the night and working during the day. She dropped out of school and became a receptionist during the day, until she got pregnant with her first child – my brother.
During that time there was a civil war going on in her country. The war originated from a six-day war in 1969, known as the Soccer War, fought with Honduras. Some say that the tensions between the two nations were heightened by a soccer competition, but the war was primarily started because of political differences between Honduras and El Salvador, including mass immigration from El Salvador to Honduras. Somehow the war changed from El Salvador vs. Honduras to the Salvadorian government vs. Salvadorian civilians.
At that time, El Salvador was total chaos. The war had turned destructive and bloody very quickly. No matter where you were, you weren’t safe. My mom was once riding the bus and it just happened that there were a group of civilians on one side of the street and a group of soldiers on the other. Fighting broke out and she had get down on the floor to dodge bullets. Another time, my mom went into a university because she wanted to go back to school and got caught in the middle of a violent protest. The students stopped classes and organized a major protest and the government tried to stop it. The soldiers ended up invading the school and my mom had to spend five hours crouching in the bathroom trying to avoid the riot. She said there were bullets flying everywhere.
After that, my mom knew she had to leave. She couldn’t go to work because the city where she worked was chaotic, the neighborhood where she lived was even worse and the university was being closed down all the time because of the shoot-outs between students and soldiers. She planned a meeting with a man named Minor, a coyote or pollero - someone who smuggles immigrants into the U.S. He told her that he could smuggle her into the U.S. for $5000. So in the next couple of weeks, she sold everything she owned – including her house, which gave her just enough to pay him off.
The day after she paid him – November 3, 1990 – she got the phone call from Minor, giving her directions about where and when to meet him. They had to leave early, so she took her 1-year-old son and left him with her sister who lived in a more isolated place. She was devastated and afraid, but she knew it was safer to leave him there than to take him with her.
There were some 20 people that the coyote was smuggling to the United States. They took a 12-hour bus ride to Frontera Hidalgo, which is located by the border of Mexico and Guatemala. There they were sent to a coyote-owned home. She didn’t have any money but since she volunteered herself to help the coyote’s wives’ with the housework, they let her stay and eat. After five days, the coyote took them across Rio Paz. None of them really knew how to swim but they all jumped into the water without hesitation and paddled to the other side. Out of the 20, only one didn’t make it. It was a 46-year old man that my mom had been talking to on the bus ride. It was sad, but there wasn’t anything anyone of them could do.
From there they sneaked onto a bus, which took them to Wiscla, a small village in Mexico. Then they went to the nearest train station and snuck into one of the cargo cars. Since the car had just been filled with cows, there was a disgusting smell and only one tiny breathing hole. But no one complained, because they knew that they would have to face harder things than that. During the two-day long train ride nobody said anything. They were too afraid to make noise since the train would stop every so often to refuel or make sure that nobody snuck on. Finally, they arrived in Chiapas.
After three days of wandering through the jungle and not eating, they found one of the farms owned by one of the coyote’s associates. They were fed and taken care of on their first day, but the next day they were put to work on the farm. The men had to cultivate the land while the women had to pick fruit. After two weeks of work, their coyote came back for them and was leading them back to the train station. Before they were able to get onto the train, three guys popped out of nowhere and held them all up at gunpoint. They asked Minor for all the money but he wouldn’t hand it over, so they shot him right on the spot. They asked the group for all the money they had and threatened them with the guns. The group handed them the money and they left, but not before raping a 20-year-old girl that was with the group.
Left with no money or food, the group began to head back to the farm they had just come from. They lady who owned the house informed other coyotes that had been working with Minor about the incident. As soon as they heard the news, they sent a Guatemalan coyote named Josue to go pick up the group. Josue came to pick them up that day, along with 20 other people he was smuggling. All together there was about 40 of them. They were taken to a train station again and had to ride in another cargo car that had recently been filled with cows. The train took them all the way to Salina Cruz and there, they were given a new coyote named Reymundo. They decided to walk along the coast all the way to San Diego. From Salina Cruz, they walked 75 miles to Puerto Escondido where my mom discovered she was pregnant with her second child. She was shocked that the baby had survived through all the hardship, especially going for days without eating. All the other women who were pregnant on the trip had already lost their babies. She figured it wouldn’t be long until she lost hers.
After that, the group walked for hundreds of miles up the coast of Mexico through Acapulco, Manzanillo, Lazaro, Cardenas and Puerto Vallarta. From there, they took a bus to Guadalajara, then a train to Mexicali and a final bus to Tijuana. From this final stop, they walked along the beach all the way to San Diego.
When my mom first arrived in San Diego, she was amazed by what she saw. Everything looked strange to her. The first thing she did was call one of her cousins that lived in L.A. and he came and picked her up. She moved to San Francisco soon after and lived with her sister until she had her baby, which was me. She moved out a few weeks later and lived in a small one-room apartment in the Excelsior, until she got married. It wasn’t long before my brother came to live with us. All in all, the trip from El Salvador to the United States took three months. Now, she has been living in this country for 16 years. She just became a citizen of the United States a few weeks ago.
The whole time my mom was telling me what happened, it seemed like she was skipping parts of the story. There were times where you could tell that it was hard for her to talk about her journey, especially when she telling us about leaving her son with her sister. You could tell it tore her apart. I realize now how much my mom went through to keep my brother and I safe. Hearing this makes me want to put more effort into school and do better to show her that all her hardship was worth it. |
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