A Face of Hope

As a teenager, Malena remembers playing at the river and seeing the Honduran and Nicaraguan mothers clutching the hands of their children, a look of sheer terror on their faces. They did not know how to swim, but crossing the river was the only option to continue their journey. Growing up in Chamic, a border town with Guatemala, Malena lives the reality of the immigration struggle. Her three month old daughter will be the next generation.

Malena operates a quesadilla restaurant a few hundred feet from the Mexico / Guatemala border crossing of Chamic. She counsels the young women who eat at the restaurant who are caught in a vicious cycle of prostitution and addiction. These women work at local bars, lured by the false hope of higher wages and passage to the US. It begins with one drink, but it ends in a cycle of addiction and prostitution to pay the debt of their coyote or the bar owner.

After years of working at the restaurant, she can easily tell who the scared migrants are and where they are from. She engages them in conversation, very slowly shedding the layers of distrust in which they wrap themselves. She listens to their story. She offers advice. She helps.

The Guatemalans cross easily with a day pass. Their features are so similar to the Chapanecos (those from Chiapas) that they easily blend in and have fewer problems at the checkpoints further north in Chiapas, the most difficult area in Mexico to pass through for migrants. For the Hondurans, it is their features that are the death of them, but there is nothing they can do to change them. She has given some migrant men different T-shirts so that they look more like the men from surrounding villages. She has lent several a bicycle so that it looks like they are commuting to work. She counsels women to abandon the tennis shoes and dress up. She gives them makeup so that they look like they are out paseando.

I asked her how she began and why she does this type of work. “It’s the reality that I live. I’m surrounded by it and can’t avoid it.” Immigration is a fact of life in Chamic. Everyone knows who the polleros (people who migrants pay up to $5000 USD to help them cross) are as well as the narcotraficantes (drug traffickers). They bribe the border officials with sums of up to $20,000USD. But, nobody says anything.

In recent years, there is increased violence due to the rise of the Zetas, groups of organized crime. They are the unknown and the most dangerous. It is said that the originator of this group, a former army official trained at The School of the Americas, was named Zeta. His followers were there after named Zeta 1, Zeta 2… and so on; the birth of the Zetas.

Everyday Melena goes to work and is a face of hope to these many faces of fear. By listening, she exults the humanity of the migrants who all to often will be abused and caught in violence for not having the face of a Mexican.