Nestor Gomez - Undocumented Journey

 

 

It's 1980. I'm about 10 years old, living in Guatemala with my siblings and my parents. But we are very poor. There are times when the only food that we can afford to buy is black beans, which is perfectly fine with me because that's my favorite food. [audience chuckles] But Guatemala is in the middle of a civil war and things are getting really bad in Guatemala. There are times where my family doesn't have any money to pay the electrical bill, the gas bill. And those times what happened is that the beans that my mother keeps in the fridge were spoilt after a couple of days without electricity.

 

To this day, I can clearly see my mother adding baking soda to the pot of beans to cure them so we could eat them because the baking soda will take away the bad smell and the bad taste of the beans. But things continued to get worse in Guatemala because of the civil war, and my parents had no other choice than to travel to the United States searching for jobs, leaving me and my siblings in the care of our grandparents and uncles. Now, the plan was for my parents to work for a couple of years, save money, and then go back to Guatemala. But the civil war got so bad that my mother realized that it wasn't safe for us to be in Guatemala anymore. So, she decided that she was going to bring us to the United States instead.

 

But she couldn't wait for visas, so she was going to bring us undocumented to the United States. And since the journey was going to be very difficult, she sent my father back to Guatemala to help us on the journey. The first thing that my father said when he arrived to Guatemala is that we were going to be reunited with our mother. The second thing that he said, is that this was not going to be a pleasant trip. We were going to travel silently across Mexico and then cross the border into the United States. This was going to be a dangerous undertaking, not only because at that time, I was only 15 years old now, but because my middle brother was five years younger than me, and my other brother was 10 years younger than me. He was just a little baby. But also because my sister and a friend of hers that were tagging along were both teenagers, and as such, they could be victims of sexual assaults along the way.

 

We took a bus that took us all the way to the border with Mexico, and we crossed into Mexico using tourist visas that allow us to be in Mexico only for a couple of hours and as long as we didn't travel too far into the country. But, of course, we ignored those regulations. Now, the first thing that we learned when we arrived in Mexico is that Mexicans spoke Spanish different than what Guatemalans did, the same way that somebody from England speaks English different than somebody from the United States. So, our father taught us a couple of Mexican words. Chingado, [audience chuckle] pendejo. You guys know those words? [audience chuckle] In hopes that if we got caught by the Mexican authorities, we could pretend to be Mexicans, and then we wouldn't be sent back to Guatemala. But as soon as we spoke, it was obvious that were Guatemalans. So, our father instructed us to remain silent the rest of the way. Now, every time that you think about an adventure or a journey, you think battles, noises-- exciting noises everywhere, but ours turned out to be the most quiet adventure ever. [audience chuckles] 

 

After many weeks of silently traveling by bus, we made it all the way to Guadalajara. And for those of you who don't know, Guadalajara is kind of like in the middle of Mexico. And a lot of people that travel undocumented, they take a train from Guadalajara all the way to Tijuana, the same thing that were going to do. But most of the people that travel undocumented don't have any money. And what they do is that they jump on the freight trains and they travel on top of the freight trains. Our mother had been working here in the United States, doing four jobs, sometimes eating nothing but beans so she could save all her money. And she had given the money to my father, so we didn't have to travel on a freight train. We were able to buy tickets and travel just as normal passengers.

 

But halfway to Tijuana, the train suddenly made a stop, and the Mexican immigration authorities boarded the train. They started to question everybody and we remained silent, just like our father had instructed us. Our father tried to tell them that were just shy, but of course, they did not believe him. They handcuffed him and they took him out of the train. A couple of minutes later, he came back into the train, and he told us that the Mexican authorities were going to let us go, but they had taken most of his money. Luckily for us, he had hidden some of his money in one of his shoes. When we got to Tijuana, our father contacted a coyote, which is a person that helped you cross the border. And he was going to give the coyote the rest of our money. And the coyote was going to take us to a safe house in California, where my mother was going to send more money to take us all the way to Chicago, where she lived. So, the coyote took us running as silently as possible in the middle of the night.

 

At first, were part of a big group of people, but as we kept running, the group got smaller and smaller. Soon enough, our group consisted only of the coyote that was running in front of us, my father who was running behind the coyote. He was carrying my youngest brother in one arm, and with the other arm, he was holding the hand of my sister's friend. Behind that coyote, me, my middle brother, and my sister ran holding hands. We continued running, and suddenly I saw a light and I heard a noise far in the distance. At first I thought, "Oh, it's going to rain. It's probably thunder." But then I realized that it wasn't thunder. Those were helicopters. Now, I was only 15 years old, and I had never seen helicopters in my life before. So, I got really excited, and I started to try to look at the helicopters, where they were coming from. And the coyote grabbed me and threw me on the floor and told me, "This is not time for sightseeing. [audience laughter] This is time for hiding." So, we hid behind some bushes.

 

Now, we have been praying and hoping that we're going to get some rest from all this running. But the time that we hid from the helicopters wasn't a fun time, we were afraid that were going to get caught and not be reunited with our mother. The lights of the helicopters illuminated where we were hiding, but they didn't find us. They flew away. We stayed hidden for a couple more minutes until the coyote told us that it was safe and we started to run again. Now, I cannot tell you how long we ran, how many hours we ran. I just know that we ran for a long time until we finally made it to a spot where a car was waiting for us. They put us into this car and they told us to be quiet and to hide. And that car drove us to a safe house in California where they put us into a little room and they told us to be quiet. The coyotes started to call my mother, asking her for money.

 

The coyotes were charging my mother an extra $100 every day for our safekeeping. She had saved some money, but she wasn't prepared to pay extra money for our safekeeping as she had not been prepared to pay for an extra person, my sister's friend, who had tagged along. But after a while, my mother was able to get enough money and send the money to the coyotes. They took us from the safe house to the airport and put us on a flight. In Chicago they had a contact that helped us get out of the airport and took us to the train station. We got to the train station and we took a train there all the way to my mother's apartment.

 

And as my mother opened the door, we were finally able to break out silence when we cheered and cried as we hugged our mother, who we have not seen in many, many years. After a couple of minutes, our mother asked if were hungry. We were starving. So, she took us into her apartment, into her little tiny dining room, and she served us food. As she began to say grace, I pretended to do the same. And then I opened my eyes and I looked around the room. And at that moment, as I saw myself surrounded by my siblings and my mother about to eat black beans from my mother's kitchen. At that moment, I was finally at home. Thank you.