Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Beatriz's strikingly beautiful 22-year-old daughter, Veronica, dreamed of going to the
US. But the “coyote” (as the guy who ferries refugees across Mexico and into the US is
called) would charge $6,000, and she would probably be raped before reaching the US
border as a kind of “extra fee.”
As a chicken with a bald neck pecked at my shoe, I surveyed the ingenious mix of
mud, battered lumber, and corrugated tin that made up this house. It occurred to me that
poverty erodes ethnic distinctions. There's something uniform about desperation.
Beatriz and Veronica prepared for us their basic meal: a corn tortilla. As I ate a thick
corn cake hot off the griddle, it felt like I was taking communion. In that tortilla were tales
of peasants who bundled their tortillas into a bandana and ran through the night as Amer-
ican helicopters swept across their skies.
For me, munching on that tortilla provided a sense of solidarity—wimpy…but still
solidarity. I was what locals jokingly call a “round-trip revolutionary” (someone from a
stable and wealthy country who cares enough to come down here…but only with a re-
turn plane ticket in hand). Still, having had the opportunity to sit and talk with Beatriz and
Veronica, even a round-trip revolutionary flies home with an indelible understanding of
the human reality of that much-quoted statistic, “Half of humanity is trying to live on $2
a day.”
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