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After my border escapades, I decided to take a break on the Oaxacan Coast. Oaxaca (pronounced Wa-haka) is a state in the south of Mexico, bordering the Pacific Coast. The beaches of Oaxaca are internationally known for their beauty and simplicity. They are barely developed, offering a few palapas and AC-less hotels. It is a wonderful place to unwind and reflect.

So, after an ill-fated 12 hour bus ride (I bought my ticket last minute and ended up by the bathrooms. Use your imagination...) from Tapachula, I finally arrived in Puerto Escondido. Puerto is a chameleon. Part of its charm is the international vibe. There aren't many Americans (they're all in Cancun), but there are tons of Europeans, mainly French and Italian. On one end is Playa Zicatela, a surfer's paradise, with insane waves and a definite hippie/bohemiam vibe. On the other end is a little fishing village where fishermen leave at sunrise and come back at sunset with their daily catch. About five minutes down the coast is Playa Carrizalillo. Nestled in a little alcove with pristine water, it is easily my favorite beach of all time.

I quickly dropped off some laundry (an absolute necessity, my jeans were getting pretty ripe) and went to the pharmacy to pick up some sunblock. This is when the pharmacist went off on a rant about how all these foreigners love to pet stray animals and then don't understand why they end up covered in flea bites. Damn French people. She then grabbed me and told me intently that dogs in Puerto were highly promiscuous and have begun passing STDs to humans through physical contact, so stay away. Doubtful, yet point duly taken.

My daily routine for the next few days was solitary and wonderful. It consisted of me waking up early, eating breakfast and then heading straight to Carrizalillo. Read a chapter, go for a swim. That's how a graduate student does the beach. Every day, the surfing instructor, Carlos, would try and entice me to take a surfing lesson, or go see the sea turtles, or go watch the sunset, or go get a drink (with him, of course). I would point to my book and he would just shake his head. I even turned down the fedora-clad French guy, Julian, even though I love how Frenchmen say my name. I ended every day watching the sunset alone. It was hard to drag myself away, but I know I'll be back at some point.

I went straight to Oaxaca City, via yet another overnight bus, to go see some friends of mine. These are friends that used to work with me in a New Orleans restaurant. The husband worked there for 7 years, with only one brief break and chance to his kids due to a deportation. He quickly made his way back to make money and care for his family. His wife joined him for 4 years as their kids were watched over by aunts and uncles back in Mexico. They worked daily and diligently, clocking in 80-100 hours a week each. Finally, after years of hard work and living in the shadows, they decided it was time to go back to Mexico. They've been home for about 5 months now.

I had been to their Oaxacan house once before, about 4 years ago. While travelling through, they asked me to go check in on their kids and send back some pictures. At that point, the house was a simple cement block, with one bedroom and a living room. The extension, funded by remittances sent back by the parents, was in its incipient stages. Their children proudly showed me pictures of their parents at various landmarks in New Orleans and asked me anxiously how they were doing. They wanted to know all about the restaurant and the city their parents lived in.

4 years later, they are a happily reunited family with a beautiful home complete with 4 bedrooms, a big screen TV (for Saints games) and a video game room where local kids can come and play video games at the rate of 10 pesos an hour. The husband works down the road in construction and the wife stays at home, enjoying time with her children. Their son is entering his senior year of high school and their daughter is in beauty school, all thanks to the sacrifices made by their parents. We went for ice cream and they showed me pictures of their family vacation to Puerto Escondido they had taken right when they got home.

Studying immigration, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the impossibility of it all. The policies, the violence, the poverty, the discrimination. It's sometimes hard to find hope in such a dire situation. Seeing this happy ending made me remember why I do it.

I am now back in Mexico City, preparing for my flight home tomorrow. I have the same mixture of feelings that I always do. Ready to go home, yet sad to leave the home I've made for myself while here. My Condesa will be dearly missed. Mexico City has been a steady figure in my life over the last decade, constantly gracious and forgiving of my impatience and communication limitations. It has seen me as a flighty sorority girl, as a college graduate just starting the adventure of grad school, and as an inquisitive and slightly unstable PhD student. It has seen me with boyfriends, friends, family, and now, alone. I can only imagine how it will see me next.

In the meantime, I will continue to be grateful for the freedom of movement that I have been blessed with, as I have been so poignantly reminded that this is not a luxury experienced by all.

Border Hopping

My last few days in Chiapas were spent visiting official crossing points at the Mexico-Guatemala border. I'm not really sure what I was expecting. I guess I thought I could just drive up, snap a few pics, ask some questions and move on down the road. Turns out the border isn't really all that accessible.

Starting in Tapachula, we (my PNC and I) mapped out our road trip. Itinerary: Mazapa de Madero, Ciudad Cuauhtemoc, Carmen Xhan, Talisman, Union Juarez. Now, these crossing points are registered on the official website of the Instituto Nacional de Migracion. (INM). As such, you would imagine some sort of pageantry or ritual to mark these crossing points, or a paved road at the very least. Not so much.

Day to day transportation from one small town to the next generally consists of jumping in a combi. A combi is a large white van (think Jon and Kate plus 8, circa 1985) with three rows of seating. Official capacity, including the driver and the "transportation specialist", is 20. Not including kids. No AC, but all the windows open, if your lucky. It's quite an extensive network of combis here in Mexico. Seeing as how large bus companies only travel to certain cities and travel by taxi is too expensive for the average Joe, the combi business is flourishing.

The system is similar to that of my beloved Chicken buses in Guatemala. There's the driver and his helper, who I like to think of as the transportation specialist (TS). As the driver zips along at a nausiating pace, the TS hangs out the door, continuously yelling out the next destination in an abbreviated, diner kind of way. The driver taps on the horn for good measure and slows down to ask every pedestrian along the road/highway if they, by any chance, are also heading to Moto (Motozintla). If it's a yes, the TS swings open the door, tells everyone to scootch and the combi barely slows down as the next rider jumps in and falls into a seat. It's a pretty sweet job, and I've already decided that when and if I'm ever down on my luck, I'm going to head back to Chiapas and turn in an application to be a TS.

So, basically, you take a combi as far as you can and then jump into the next one and then the next one to get to your final destination. One ride rarely costs more than 25 pesos. In order to reach Mazapa de Madero, we took a combi to Huixtla (pronounced weaks-la), then to Motozintla, then to Mazapa de Madero. This took us about 3 hours, so we were happy when we got there. We were not happy, however, to find that the border isn't actually in Mazapa. That's funny, someone should let the INM know. Our trek continued. We had to take another combi to the Bridge Bacaton and then wait for a kind soul to take us up the mountain on an unpaved road, populated by various livestock, to Barrio Veracruz (Gracias a Dios on the Guatemalan side), where we finally found the border. The kind soul (who immediately reminded me of Freakshow from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. He really, truly was lovely) navigated these treacherous terrains beautifully while downing tacos and an orange Fanta.

The border was marked by a series of small white statues and a serious landscaping job. When talking about borders, we (academics) generally talk about them as regions. We like to say that borders aren't impermeable walls, they are transnational regions with shared cultures and economies on both sides. Borders are man-made limits that marcate changing political territories, you don't actually see the border emblazoned in the earth. Wrong. Mexico has taken pains to do just that, using white statues and what must be a fairly large lawnmower. The Mexico-Guatemala border (at least at the spots we went to) can be very clearly seen. This was kind of odd, as the physical border was juxtaposed against a sleepy little town where it was difficult to tell where Mexico ended and Guatemala began.

Our journey continued over the next couple of days, and the other crossing points were fairly similar. Of course, some a bit more busy than others, but all fairly remote.

We finally started heading back to Tapachula to hit up the last two spots, Talisman and Union Juarez. We decided to take an overnight bus (roughly 6 hours) from Comitan, catch a few hours of sleep and then get back to the business of border crossing. One thing I should know by now: never try to plan ahead when Mexican transportation is involved. I wasn't even really all that surprised when we stopped at around midnight and the driver announced that we couldn't get through. Meaning, due to the intense rain (please see flash floods in Pearly Pits), there was a landslide and the highway was blocked indefinitely. The company's solution was to backtrack 3 hours to San Cristobal de las Casas, wait for a 3 hour maintenance check/oil refill, and then take a different highway to Tapachula. This would turn our 6 hour trip into an 18-20 hour trip. Bummer. We essentially held a town (bus passenger) meeting on the side of the road. One particularly riled up man made an impassioned speech about our right to dependable and safe transportation. Why should we just sit back and allow "The Man" to jerk us around like this? Don't we deserve better?? HELL YEAH!! My inner proletariate just couldn't resist. Long story short, 12 hours later we finally made it to Tapachula.

We ended our border crossing journey in Talisman, right outside of Tapachula. The border at Talisman, like that of Ciudad Hidalgo, is marked by the Suchiate River. Here there are no balsas, but there is a nifty little zip-line to illegally cross the border by way of the river. After my last experience as an undocumented immigrant, I fought every urge to get strapped in and fly into Guatemala. Oh, the rush. Anyway, Talisman is also nearby a variety of fincas, or coffee plantations. Mexico, much like the US, imports a lot of agro labor, especially in the Southern fincas, and Talisman serves as the main entry point for Guatemalan finca workers. I watched as they waited on the bridge for their contractor, all tenderly holding their neatly wrapped machetes, until they were allowed to cross, single file, into Mexico to wait for their work visas to be issued by the INM. This was all done silently, underneath a flock of vultures onimously circling closely overhead.

Stupid white girl

Anyone that knows me can probably guess that the very next day I went back to Ciudad Hidalgo and straight to the Balsero launch. I found a partner in crime, a Mexican girl who is also a graduate student studying immigration. We decided to live the high life and hired a triciclo chofer to take us to the river. This means that we first had to cut through blocks and blocks of warehouses (and I use that term loosely) holding packaged merchandise to send across the river to Guatemala. It was business as usual for the Mexican black-marketers, another day, another dollar. However, they were kind enough to pause, whistle, and yell out Guera.

Guera (the u has two dots above it, but I can't seem to find the symbol on this damn PC): slang for white girl. And, yes, I am white. This is something that I have known for a while. However, it seems that all of Mexico has pledged to state my race as a daily affirmation.

Hey, there goes the white girl.

White girl, don't you want to buy this necklace?

Oh man, is she white!

White Girl! You can't take pictures here! (my personal favorite, yelled by many immigration officials over the past few weeks)

Due to the fact that a lot of my time here has been spent in places like black markets and border crossings in which I am, in fact, the only white girl, I've grown quite accustomed to this endearing little nickname. And, of course, it helps solve my previous identity issues. Even if they don't know I am American, they know for a fact that I am white. That much they can tell me. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

So, we finally made it to the river (the Suchiate), which was bustling with activity. The main purpose of this underground crossing point (which is once again located mere kilometers from the official bridge and a slew of immigration officials) is really to facilitate the quotidian activities of a very connected transnational region. I have no doubt that there is also a flow of undocumented immigration of Central Americans and Guatemalans heading to the North, but that is a hidden flow. This is a visible flow which consists of mainly tax-free commerce and shuttling people back and forth to work and/or shop for the day. Of course, they can do this legally by applying for the FMVL (local visitor's pass), but this requires money and time, and the balsas are a fairly established and dependable alternative for illicit border crossing.

We negotiated with a young Guatemalan entrepreneur wearing a fanny pack who agreed to take us across for 20 pesos each (less than 2 bucks). The balsas are large black rubber rafts with a serious of wooden planks strapped across the top. There are usually two transporters, mainly because the current of the river is incredibly strong and one person could not possibly dock the balsa alone. One is the money collector (hence the fanny pack) and the other is the navigator, using a large wooden pole to dig into the ground of the river and propel us across.

We reached the opposing riverfront and I was officially "smuggled" into Guatemala. No stamp on my passport for this trip, no snorting officials, no long walk in the heat....not to mention the 265 pesos I saved. I'm starting to understand the incentives for avoiding migratory bureaucracy.

Due to the fact that I had spent the previous day praying for my life and dodging Dengue in Tecun Uman, I would have been perfectly happy to turn around and go right back to Mexico. However, my PNC hadn't experienced the beauty of Tecun and wanted to check it out. A quick triciclero grabbed us, assured us we could pay in Mexican pesos (20 each to get to the center and 20 to get back), and basically threw us onto his bike. We did the obligatory stroll around the plaza and once again visited the purple church and then headed back to the river, an excursion which lasted for about 5 minutes.

A few blocks from the riverfront, the triciclero pulled up in front of a random house and told us to change our money so we could pay in Quetzales, Guatemalan currency. Immediately, a young kid with a mop of curly hair emerged from the house and assured us the best rates in town. We kindly, yet firmly, reminded the man that he had agreed to being paid in Mexican pesos and that we weren't going to change money and lose out on the exhange rate for a 5 minute bike ride. He, of course, remembered no such agreement, and then not so kindly reminded us that we were in Guatemala and the national currency is Quetzales. This is where it all went downhill, in a fast and tight spiral.

He then doubled the pre-set agreement, saying that the new price was really the standard rate. We loudly objected, causing an old woman in a quilted skirt sitting on the curb across the street to get involved. She recognized this man as a con-artist and started yelling that he was ripping us off. He yelled back, calling her an old crazy hag, and then started pedalling furiusly away, with us still in the triciclo. Not the best situation to be in, and it quickly deteriorated. He stopped again, just short of the river, and another money changer emerged from the shadows. The driver forcibly told us to change money, telling us that we now owed him an equivalent of 200 pesos, nearly 20 bucks. Another yelling match exploded, ending with him expelling us from his triciclo and telling us to leave and live with our consciences.

This is when I had an out-of-body experience. I floated up and watched the whole scene play out: The white girl yelling at the Guatemalan con-man in this wasteland of a city, notorious for its violence and crime. This just couldn't end well.

In his rage, he yelled that we should at least pay him 100 pesos. Still proposterous, but agreed. I threw the money at him, grabbed my friend and ran back to the river where we dove onto another balsa. Safe.

Back in Mexico, we climbed into yet another triciclo and asked the driver to take us to the bus stop. He had a nice, kind face, and only charged us 10 pesos each, which prompted us to tell him how happy we were to be back in Mexico. He agreed, saying that Tecun just had a bad vibe.

Over there, they'll kill you for 100 pesos.

Good to know.

Crossing Borders

The main reason for my visit to Tapachula is to visit the official international crossing points between Mexico and Guatemala. There are four within the general vicinity of Tapachula and four others in the state of Chiapas. My reasoning is that if I'm going to write a dissertation on Mexican immigration policy, then I should probably know what it looks like up close and personal.

So, on my second day in Tapachula I decided to go visit Ciudad Hidalgo and its sister city Tecun Uman in Guatemala. I first took full advantage of a breakfast buffet that I stumbled upon, drinking nearly a gallon of fresh orange juice and eating several servings of chilaquiles, beans (obligatory for any meal here), empanadas de quesillo, huevos a la mexicana, and plantains. I love a good buffet. Then I jumped in a cab and told him to take me to the border.

An hour later, after getting lost several times mainly because every single highway exit was blocked by strategically placed rocks, we finally arrived. My cab was immediately swarmed by vendors and triciclo drivers. A triciclo is a bike that has been adjusted to carry passengers with a nice little overhang to protect you from the sun. This is a popular mode of transportation in small towns because of the heat and the barely navegable roads. Not to mention, it's dirt cheap. In border town, these triciclos will drive you from Mexico to Guatemala, over the bridge while you enjoy a nice plastic bag of coco water. It's really luxurious in a third world kind of way.

I politely declined, opting to walk instead. Of course this means that I was trailed by about 5 triciclos for about 2 blocks in the chance that I got tired or suffered from sudden heat stroke. I finally made it to Mexican immigration and was told very unenthusiastically that in order to leave the country, I had to pay a fee of 265 pesos (roughly 25 bucks). I produced a 500 peso bill which was met by an amused snort. The woman behind the glass, aka the woman with the power, told me she didn't have change. Therefore, I could not leave the country.

A word on change...as in small bills, not as in a political platform. There seems to be a nationwide shortage of small bills here in Mexico. Which means that when you take money out of an ATM and it feeds you nothing but large bills, you are officially S.O.L. Which subsequently means that you have to spend money to have money. You have to go to a substantial business, such as a pharmacy or restaurant, buy something cheap, pay with your big bill and get smaller bills for everything else ranging from groceries, to water, to any mode of transportation. I think this problem is probably symptomatic of a weak economy, but it can also be quite annoying. It also often turns into a strange game of Chicken, due to the fact that many cabdrivers or other streetwise kids will often say they don't have change, causing you to pay more than necessary for whatever service they have rendered. For instance, if you owe 50 pesos and you only have 100 peso bill. Listen lady, you have to pay me, and since I don't have change, well.....Implying that the only right thing to do is pay with the 100 and cut your losses. Not this lady. I know they have change and I need that change for whatever purchase comes next. So I'm giong to pay with my 100 peso bill and they're going to give me that nice little 50 in return. It usually ends in a staring match.

I told you I don't have change.

Well, neither do I. Quite a pickle.

Long, awkward silence.

Until the cabdriver finally gives in with a roll of the eyes and opens his glove compartment to reveal wads and wads of small bills. Busted.

Anyway, so the snorter was going to deny my right to migrate because she was out of change. We finally worked it out (meaning I found change down the road and around the corner) and I'm on my way. This particular crossing point is in the form of a bridge over the Suchiate River, which serves as the official border for a short distance. Standing in the middle of the bridge, right in between Mexico and Guatemala, you can see a thriving business of smugglers just down the river. These smugglers have both Mexican and Guatemalan counterparts and are called Balseros. They smuggle over people and merchandise on large, makeshift rafts called Balsas for a fee of roughly 20 pesos (1.80ish in US dollars). This occurs daily, in plain view of immigration offices, which might help explain the fact that the word most commonly used to describe this border is porous.

I finally made it over to Guatemala and figured I would go for a stroll in this lovely town called Tecun Uman, which kind of has the same feel as Ciudad Juarez on the Mexico-U.S. border. Which means not good so I decided to make it a quick stroll. I walked into town and headed straight for the purple church in the middle of the main plaza. Seeing as how my dear Maw Maw regularly and faithfully lights candle for my poor soul (every Tuesday in Kenner-bra), I always like to duck in and say a prayer for her and whoever else might be on my mind. I sat there for a few minutes but was quickly snapped back to reality by the mosquito going to town on my leg. Remembering the current outbreak in Dengue, I got the hell out of there.

I quickly made it back to the bridge where I was stopped by the Guatemalan immigration official. He stood squarely in front of me and said I couldn't pass because American girls like me had to stay in the country for at least 48 hours and, of course, spend money. I laughed politely as I walked past him and out of his territory. Sorry Buddy, but I'm fresh out of change.