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Oaxaca Trip: Migrant Shelter

Posted January 14, 2010 by Ted Hesson

Before I begin writing about the time that our delegation spent in the rural Mixtec village of San Juan Sosola, I’d like to write about what has been, for me, one of the most moving experiences of the trip so far.

On Tuesday, before we left Oaxaca City for the campo, our group visited the Centro de Orientacion del Migrante de Oaxaca (COMI), an organization that provides shelter and information for migrants who pass through Oaxaca. On average, 350,000 migrants travel through Mexico each year, usually with the aim of relocating to parts of northern Mexico and the United States.

For Central American migrants, who make up the vast majority of the shelter’s visitors, Oaxaca isn’t normally part of the route that they take north. The majority of migrants take buses or ride on the train, which no longer passes through Oaxaca. Migrants therefore tend to seek shelter in the towns and cities along those routes, and there is a network of 42 migrant shelters throughout Mexico.

The Oaxaca shelter’s visitors instead come largely from referrals, when the head of a Oaxaca-area shelter on the route deems that a migrant seems too vulnerable to continue on the train, which is nicknamed “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” because of frequent robberies and attacks. In those referral cases, the migrants are pointed in the direction of the Oaxaca shelter.

The shelter can host up to 30 migrants at a time, but on the day that our group visited, there were 14 migrants staying there. No migrants are turned away, except for coyotes—human smugglers who are sometimes hard to identify, according to shelter staff. Almost all of the visitors are from Central American countries like Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

The shelter typically gives migrants three days to rest and either continue their journey north or return back home. In some cases, those at the shelter are given time to work in Oaxaca and earn the money they might need to move on to their next destination.

Aside from offering refuge, the shelter also informs migrants about the risks that they face if they continue on their journey, which could mean anything from being robbed by bandits along the train route, or dehydration and death in the Arizona desert.

With so many people passing through the shelter, the proprietors have scores of stories to share: Brenda from Guatemala, who arrived at the shelter eight month’s pregnant but crossed the border in a taxi before giving birth; Roberto, a young migrant in his 20s who was left behind by coyotes in the Arizona Desert, and whose body has never been recovered; and a two-month old migrant, the youngest to have spent time at the shelter.

After getting some background info on the shelter, our delegation broke into small groups and met with migrants currently residing there.

My group met with a 24-year-old migrant named Selvin, who came from a small farming village, populated by 125 families, along the southern coast of Guatemala. His family worked land that was owned by someone else, and he earned $4.18 a day. Selvin’s hope was that he would be able to travel to the U.S. and earn enough money to rent a plot of land and hire someone to work the land for his family.

Selvin had connected with a cousin in the U.S. over the phone, and, as Selvin understood, his cousin would be able to send him the $2,000 that he would need to hire a coyote to help him cross the border when he arrived there. He had no idea where his cousin lived in the States, but felt confident enough to leave his home on January 2 with enough money to ride the bus—much safer than the train—to the Mexico-U.S. border, along with three other men he knew.

However, at the Guatemalan-Mexican border, Selvin and two of the other men traveling with him had problems with Mexican immigration agents (one man in Selvin’s group passed through without issue). After spending a short time in a border jail, the three men were released.

They joined up with two other men in the jail and decided to circumvent immigration authorities by traveling through nearby mountains. In the mountains, they met with a pair of men wielding machetes, who hit them with the flat edge of the machete and demanded money from each person. The attackers thought that the person in the front of the group was the guide, so they demanded more money from him, poking him with the machete in the process. It was “only through the grace of God” that the man wasn’t cut, Selvin said.

They rode the bus further, but in another town a few days later, the group was robbed again, this time at gun point. Selvin and those with him were forced to strip, and the robbers checked all of their clothing for any hidden money, which is commonly sewn into jacket linings. The robbers took the $130 that Selvin needed to reach the border, and he was left without options.

Meanwhile, Selvin’s cousin hadn’t been answering his calls. When the cousin finally did answer (I was unclear about the exact chronology here), he said that he didn’t have any money for Selvin, “not even $10.”

His family didn’t have enough money for the bus, even to help him return to Guatemala, so Selvin and some of the other men went to a church, where they were eventually channeled to the shelter in Oaxaca. Only one week had passed since he had left Guatemala, and he had been detained by immigration,. robbed twice, and still only reached southern Mexico.

When we asked Selvin what he planned to do next, he was leaning towards returning home, but not 100 percent certain. I found out later that the shelter will pay the bus fare for men returning home.

I’ve heard stories about migration, some firsthand and some in books, newspapers, and documentaries. But sitting there with Selvin, who had invested so much hope into a trip with so little chance of success, made the experience of migration much more tangible. If he could reach the U.S., Selvin thought, maybe his family could move up “just a little.”

Before we left the shelter, we took a group photo in front of a mural that had been painted by migrants who have stayed there, a stark portrait of the dangers awaiting those trying to make their way across the border.