No direction home

I get trapped in a lot of places. Before school started, Roberto warned me not to walk down the street that leads from the school to the main road. "Profes have been robbed, assaulted" he told me "I don't walk down that street; you've seen the people that hang out there". Roberto is not a small man. I spend many evenings after finishing my classes hovering around the school looking for rides. Some evenings, I have gotten complacent. Tired of waiting, I have watched large groups of students walk straight down that street and I have followed them. Sometimes a teacher will pass me in their car and stop, instructing me to get in and lecturing me about the dangers. Sometimes not.

One of my students came to school last week with a large bandage covering his right eye. I asked him what happened and he told me that he was jumped and robbed. "Where?!" I asked, "Right down there, by the school" he told me. I asked him when, was it a night? "About two in the afternoon" he told me.

The migrant house is located in a leafy neighborhood near the center of town. At first sight, I wished Alec and I lived there. When I was ready to go home last Sunday, I told the other volunteers that I was going to walk out to the main road and catch the bus or a taxi. "No!" they insisted "Let us call you a cab. The street is not safe". They waived off the first cab that came. "That driver is weird" Raquel told me. The second seemed better. I started to feel nervous on the long drive back to Villa Fontana. I made a loud phone call from the back seat of the cab, hoping it would be easier to ascertain my location from cell phone records if the car suddenly pulled down one of the many dusty roads to nowhere in Tijuana. The driver started asking me about Casa. "I lived in L.A." he told me "My daughter was born there". The family returned to Tijuana for various reasons. "She is a senior now" the driver told me. "I take her to la linea every morning and she crosses over and goes to a high school in California. We use my sister's address". Sometimes he is able to pick her up in the afternoons, other days she takes the hour long bus ride back to east TJ. "She can never say her dad didn't help her" he told me, dropping me in front of my house.

"You have to be careful here" the Colombian priest at Casa told me yesterday. "They know I'm not Mexican the minute I open my mouth but you are American, you stand out". He encouraged me not to be paranoid but to be cautious. "When they sent me here I wasn't sure if I wanted to come. I was in the Philippines. I don't walk around here alone at night".

"Migrants are bad people. They have tattoos. And they use drugs" Roberto told me after hearing of my volunteerism. I was surprised. I thought all Mexicans had sympathy for migrants. "Please tell me if I am wrong" he added. I told him he was. He said that he would reconsider.

I went to mass again with the migrants. A mentally disabled woman hands out a flyer when people enter the church, a big cheat sheet for what you're supposed to say when. She tried to hand it to the migrant that entered behind me. "No sé leer" he told her. "¿Queeeeé?" she asked loudly. "¡No sé leer!" he answered brusquely. "¿¡No sabes leer!? ¿¡No sabes leer!?" she called over and over again.

"My wife had a miscarriage today" the man whispered to me, after pulling his head out of his hands. "She was five months pregnant, it was a boy". The seminary student continued explaining the rules of the house to the migrants. "You are not allowed to go near the gate because we don't want people buying and selling drugs here". The man showed me his wife's ID. It had a Tijuana address on it. "She is still at the hospital" he said and abruptly stood up and walked toward the gate.

"I was doing everything, meth, cocaine, smoking hierba cronica" the man who slipped into the kitchen told us while we prepared dinner. "I went to jail. Did you know there are two kinds of black people in the U.S.? Real black people and others that are part black and part white". He described the large builds of some of his fellow inmates and how he aligned himself immediately with his Mexican paisanos. After his release, he cleaned up his act, got a dish washing job and started a family. While picking up flautas to bolster the dwindling food supply at his daughter's birthday party, he was picked up by ICE agents. "I begged them to let me say goodbye to my daughter, we were right around the corner". The agents refused. The man went into a tirade, describing all of the things he said to the agents. His eyes repeatedly locked on mine as he angrily said "We are helping this country, contributing by working, you should be arresting dangerous people, drug dealers, not obreros" then in English, "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Don't you have families?!". I don't think he actually said any of these things to the agents. But, he got to say them to me. "My family is still there. That is why I am going back".

Level of education: primary school. Home state: Michoacan. Date of arrival: 10/05/2009. Other comments: was shot in the arm and doesn't know why. Years in EUA: 3. Condition of health: diabetes, fragile. Home state: Oaxaca. Years in EUA:9. Family members in EUA: 2. Other comments: spent 3 years in jail for illegal entry. Date of exit: 10/08/2009. Level of education: middle school. Condition of health: healthy. Contact information: Maria Bustamante Veloz, Los Angeles, California. Other comments: arrested for aggression in EUA. Family members in EUA: 3. Years in EUA: 7. No sé leer. No sé leer. No quería leer más.