CHAPTER TWO
Born near El Salto, Colima
ALEJANDRA HAD TURNED thirty-six recently. Just like her daughter, she was born at home with the help of a mid-wife, but in a different part of the country, in a two-room shack and in a settlement next to an open ore mine. Her place of birth was a shanty wedged on the side of a ravine, along other shanties that hung for dear life on unstable squatted land. The most fortunate families in the settlement lived on higher ground, in small houses splattered on a meadow straddling a tiny section of the road between the port of Manzanillo to the south and Minatitlán to the north. The surrounding area was hilly and rugged and nestled near the northern fringe of the state of Colima. Alejandra’s home was near El Salto, a natural park and an idyllic preserve with a spectacular waterfall that had been around for millions of years, mostly hidden and unnoticed. Burrowed at the southern end of the Western Sierra Madre, El Salto was flanked by small mountain peaks and peppered with encrusted chunks of rain forest. In many ways, the canyon-like enclosure was still untouched by what many people today call progress. The few outsiders that visited the area then were usually awed by the tropical vegetation, the hanging vines, the 20-meter-high waterfall and the warm water lagoon below it. When Alejandra was growing up near that park, local residents had turned that water and vegetation haven into a weekend retreat.
Once of age, Alejandra attended a makeshift primary school near her village. It was a strapped place of learning with few students and few teachers, but a school that Alejandra came to cherish as she thrived there, inspired mostly by her second and third-year teacher, Ms. Eloísa, someone who encouraged her to go after her dreams. Her teacher’s uplifting words found a home in Alejandra’s heart and her soul and by the time she was about to start fourth grade, she was already set on fulfilling a lofty educational goal. She was not only determined to make it through primary, secondary, and preparatory schooling, but to also go on to a university. Although her academic aspiration would have been considered normal in some other areas of the country, hers was unusual there, in a community where many students quit school by the end of third grade, even though the first six years of instruction were supposed to be compulsory.
Both of Alejandra’s parents had never had any kind of formal schooling, although her mother had learned to halfway read and write, mainly because of plain need and personal determination, though it had taken her many years, lots of pluck and self-teaching to get to that semiliterate level. She was a stay-at-home mom just like most other married women in that village. Unlike his wife, her father never learned to read and write for unknown reasons. He worked at the open ore mine, along many other men from that settlement. He worked hard and long hours. He would come home exhausted, with grime covering most of his face, soot that he had picked up as he extracted pieces of iron ore at the mine.
After finishing sixth grade, Alejandra worked on Saturdays and Sundays at a small roadside food stand that catered to the people that visited El Salto on weekends. She would save part of her earnings and give the rest to her mother. The savings were destined, according to her, to pay for university tuition and schoolbooks. Her mother would thank Alejandra for helping provide for family expenses, but she would also worry. She didn’t think that a university would be built soon in a nearby town, as it had been rumored often. “Nothing happens that quickly,” she would tell herself, but wouldn’t share her pessimism with her daughter. She would instead praise her and encourage her to stick to her educational objectives.
“I am glad that you love school; it’s so important,” she said to her daughter on more than one occasion. “I wish I’d had gone to school too when I was growing up.”
“I’m going to be a scientist,” Alejandra had told her mother a few months after starting her seventh grade. “I’m going to learn about plants and animals.”
“I hope so, hija. I am so proud of you,” her mother replied.
Alejandra’s secondary school was roughly six kilometers away, in Minatitlán. She traveled there on a bus, paying for the fare with money she earned at the food stand. It was also a small school with few students, but much larger than the one near her village. She met Teresa there, a classmate that became an inseparable friend. They were both thirteen years old. Just like Alejandra, Teresa was from a home of modest means and a young woman who also wanted to continue to study and eventually enroll in a university. Her dream was to become a veterinarian.
“I want to take care of little animals and make sure they don’t get sick,” she confided in Alejandra soon after they met.
Teresa also worked on weekends, performing different chores at a ranch near her home, just north of Minatitlán. She didn’t earn much, but it helped her pay the bus fare to the school and provide a few pesos for her family’s expenses. Her father worked at the same ranch, while her mother was a stay-at-home mom, just like Alejandra’s mother. Their friendship grew as the years wore on. After the tenth grade, though, Teresa decided to drop out. She had to work full time, she told Alejandra.
“I will go back to school later on, after I save some money,” she said. “Right now, I have to work full time; my family needs money.”
Although they stayed somewhat in touch, Teresa’s absence in school created a painful vacuum in Alejandra’s life. She missed her companionship and her supportive ways, but also her intellect and her knowledge about a myriad of subjects. Alejandra had often called her a “walking encyclopedia.” Teresa had gained most of her knowledge from books, but also from listening to others, observing, and doing a lot of thinking.
“Why would someone so bright leave school?” Alejandra asked herself often as she reminisced about her friend. “It doesn’t make sense.”
As she tried to find other friends to fill the void left by Teresa, Alejandra found a few, but none that fit the mold. To overcome the emptiness, she began to devote some of her free time at school doing additional extracurricular activities, but mainly doing more reading. She spent countless hours at the school library. She read the classics, old and new: Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire. She dug into scientific manuals and tomes, learning about the natural sciences, zoology and biology. Se reread schoolbooks about ancient places and civilizations: Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans. By the time she finished her next to last year of preparatory school, she had in a way become another walking encyclopedia, just like her friend Teresa.
As Alejandra neared graduation, she realized that the previously promised local branch of the state university had been just wishful thinking. The project, according to official sources then, was still stuck in the long line of government proposals that lacked funding. No such institution of higher learning would be available anytime soon in that area, she was told. The news broke her heart. Her dream about attending a university had been shattered. Her only possible option was to go somewhere else to study. But it wasn’t a viable solution since she didn’t have the financial means to do so. She felt that the money she had saved over the years was very little, not even enough to cover the cost of a semester living away from home.
The last days of preparatory school were of anguish and uncertainty for Alejandra. To try to mitigate her woe, she would spend some of her free time at El Salto, contemplating the entire place, but mainly the waterfall. Those were bidding farewell kind of visits, visitas de despedida. She was certain that she wouldn’t get to see the park for much longer, unless she continued to live in the area after her upcoming graduation from school, which wasn’t much of a probability according to her. She was sure she would leave home soon and move somewhere else.
As she pondered over her uncertain future, Alejandra would go behind the waterfall and feel the cool breeze and the soft and light spraying of the mist. She would then walk for a while, on trails adorned with orchids of varied colors, hanging from crevices on the trunks of trees, and wander on hidden paths embellished with perennial offerings of water lilies, poppies, dahlias, and other enchanting blooms. Before going home, she would find some hidden place where she could sit and reflect, to seek clues to help her solve her painful quandary. She would leave home soon, but she didn’t quite know where she would go. Moving to Mexico City was one option, but that urban area was way too big, according to her, and that frightened her, although a school acquaintance had moved there and was supposedly doing well according to another school friend. A second option was to move to the city of Colima, the state capital, work there and eventually attend its public university, but she wasn’t sure that she would be able to find employment that paid well in that city, enough to defray all her expenses. Alejandra, however, soon discarded that and other possibilities except for one. After weeks and weeks of pondering and soul-searching about her future, she opted for an unplanned contingency, a last-minute choice that eventually went awry.
AT ABOUT THE TIME when Alejandra was born, in 1962, there was a feeling of hope throughout the country. In the cities, in the rural areas. The economic failings of the past had been left behind; that’s what most people thought. The future looked bright. The country was still going through tough growing pains but was also enjoying a time of solvency. A couple of Mexican presidents had done well during their respective six-year terms, in the fifties and the early sixties. Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, Mexico’s president from 1952 through 1958, had been able to steer the country in the right direction with tight-fisted monetary policies. Besides doing a good job at belt-tightening and safeguarding the nation’s moneys, his administration was also successful at delivering needed services to the people. Ruiz Cortines and his cabinet had also found ways to provide better access to educational and health facilities for all Mexicans. During his term, the constitution was amended to give women the right to vote. His presidency also made a conscientious attempt to combat government corruption. His predecessor, Miguel Alemán Valdés and his cronies had robbed the country blind. By the end of his term, on December 1, 1958, Ruiz Cortines’ successor, Adolfo López Mateos, inherited a stable economy and a solvent nation on the right path. Under that new leadership, the country continued to grow.
But by the time that Alejandra was about to graduate from preparatory school in 1980, the once flirting era of promise was gone. The economy was in shambles. Corruption was rampant and every president and their inner circles that ran the country after López Mateos completed his term, had shamelessly and brazenly enriched themselves. Just like Alemán had done before, they openly robbed the country. Justice was non-existent too. Judges and legislators were pure puppets of the political party in charge, of the PRI, and of the president. It was a time of terror also. Those that protested against the government were stifled, sometimes killed. Early on in that convoluted era and on the eve of the 1968 Olympic games, close to three hundred protesting students were massacred at Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City. The president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, supposedly had ordered the killings.
Instead of a sense of hope and promise, the prevalent feeling in Mexico became that of ongoing anguish, of exasperation, of despair and of an ominous future, except for those close to the hubs of political power, for the members of the oligarchy, for union leaders and their close allies, and for some in the neo-middle-class, those who accepted widespread governmental corruption because it was convenient. In a trickle kind of way, that crookedness also benefited them. The great majority of the people, though, were on the outside looking in. There were few jobs and other opportunities available for most Mexicans and as the years passed, the rich got richer and the poor poorer. Going north offered an alternative for some of the poor. But it was a sort of a lure, tied to a dangled and inviting shard of a new kind of promise, which shimmered within the confines of the prevailing hopelessness. It was also an embellished lure, promoted by the enticing missives sent by mail back home, that talked of lots of work and easy money on the north side of the border.
“There’s a lot of work available,” some letters would state. “All kinds of businesses are always looking for workers; they need them.”
The part about abundant work was true, but it was mostly for low paying jobs that required hard work. They were jobs for employment in small ranches as well as in large farming outfits, in dicey sweatshops, in hotels and restaurants, and at other places that hungered for cheap labor. However, for those mired in poverty and never-ending misery in the country to the south, going north looked good. It was also good for Mexico. The exodus provided a safety valve for a nation on the brink of another revolution. But it was also good for the United States; the flow of ready hands became a shot in the arm for businesses, for big ranchers, for poultry processors, and for others that welcomed the undocumented labor. It was a win-win-win paradigm. Good for the United States, for the undocumented, and for Mexico.
Most of those that were ensnarled by the lure and crossed into the country to the north were from rural areas, a forgotten lot and a segment of the population that didn’t get to fully enjoy the spoils gained by the twenty-plus-years long Mexican revolution begun in nineteen-ten. Most of them didn’t have much schooling either, except for a few. They were mainly farmhands, laborers, people just looking for a chance to work and earn some money and send part of it back home once on the other side, to help feed those left behind.
The undocumented Mexicans that had some schooling but that also joined the exodus to the United States were usually the flustered lot, mostly young men and women that had come to a dead end in their once promising educational journeys, but who were unable to continue their professional aspirations or find employment that paid a decent wage. Alejandra was part of that flustered lot and so was her friend Teresa.
AUTHOR: Pedro Chávez