From Durham to Cieneguilla

Chickens peck at feed outside a home in Cieneguilla near a brick house under construction, paid for by funds from remittances sent back from the United States. (photo by Jordan Green)

By Dr. Steven A. Channing

It is raining in Cieneguilla, high in the mountains of southern Mexico. I listen to the sounds outside the window of my host family’s home: rain pattering on tin roofs, turkeys gobbling, children laughing. It’s a good moment to reflect on the 1,800 mile journey I’ve taken almost to the border of Guatemala, as one of 20 delegates with the organization Witness for Peace. For the past 25 years, Witness has shepherded “gringos” to places south of the U.S. border, to observe and sometimes help amend the effects of U.S. economic, political and military policies in Latin America. I am here to better understand the roots of migration from Mexico and Central America to Durham and countless other communities across North Carolina and the United States.

Concerned about the drumbeat of fearful calls against supposed “illegal alien” threats to our economy and national security, I chose to come to Mexico, and specifically to this little village of Cieneguilla, for a surprising number of young men and women from this place have lived and worked – are living and working today! – in Durham. They look familiar to me, short of stature, their skin a bronzed brown, black eyes and hair…. you’ve seen them too, busing our tables and cooking our food in local restaurants, painting and hammering, cleaning our toilets. From this little place of barely 2,000 souls, many hundreds have passed through our city, walking and working among us, seen and invisible.

Why do they take the long, expensive and dangerous journey to Durham? Frankly, this mountain-top community is prettier, and unlike Durham, at least thus far, they have chickens and turkeys in their back yards! They love their ancient Indian culture – Chatino is everyone’s first language, Spanish second, a smattering of English third. They leave a tight, tradition-bound place for the disorienting individualism of American life, to be hassled and hustled, charged upwards of $2,000 to be spirited across desert borders at night, be separated from families, often for years, to work 12 and 14 hour days off the books. They come for the same reason my grandparents came from Europe a century ago, to feed hungry children, to find jobs where there were none at home, do work many of us would find demeaning. They come in order to send remittances home that have helped lift up the lives of the old folks and children left behind.

Most of us are familiar with this story, and I understand how the current economic downturn has accentuated the fear. But would we be as hostile as many are if these folks were white, Canadian “illegals” desperately trying to earn meager livings? Do we understand how U.S. trade policies, including NAFTA, have crushed small farmers, as they benefit corporate agri-businesses? Do we acknowledge how an insatiable appetite for marijuana and cocaine and heroin right here in the United States is what’s really driving the “drug wars” south of our borders?

Like most of his friends, my host came to work in Durham not to stay but to return and live in Cieneguilla with a modest but real improvement his and his family’s life. They now live in a small concrete home he built for $1,200 with the money he earned following three years of harsh and unfriendly conditions working on North Roxboro Street. They no longer live in what is now the chicken coop, and to me at least, that seems like a good argument for a more fair and humane trade and immigration policy. I don’t claim to know exactly what it would look like, I just hope for a change for the better, in Durham and world wide.

Dr. Steven A. Channing is a historian and documentary filmmaker in Durham, NC.