MEXICO.- Standing on a motorboat that split the murky waters of the Usumacinta River in two, Elvira Arellano addressed the driver: “Accelerate a little more” .
The wind hit him in the face and the ponytail of his hair spread out in a riot against the wind, as if he wanted to stay behind, on the Guatemalan side, not on the Mexican border that it looked close to its objective.
The boatman accelerated and little by little another boat that the woman intended to reach was seen more clearly. In this one traveled some 15 Central Americans who would arrive undocumented in the state of Tabasco, Mexico.
When she was less than a meter away, Elvira Arellano raised the megaphone she was carrying with her right hand and shouted: “Guys, you have human rights, migration is a right.” The driver turned off the engine and the boat began to wobble. She resisted the swing. “The police in Mexico cannot intimidate them.”
He put his hands in the backpack that crossed his torso. He took out some brochures with the logo of the Mexican National Human Rights Commission. They explained that the legislation prevented the incarceration of undocumented immigrants from 2011 and included a list of shelters and emergency numbers.
Elvira Arellano distributed them among the travelers. They laughed nervously, looked at the ground or at the horizon that would take them to the United States in search of an opportunity. “Don’t be afraid,” she concluded that summer of 2011.
He had reached the border river from his homeland: Michoacán , where he lived since his deportation from the United States in 2007 after reactivating the “Sanctuary Movement”.
The Sanctuary Movement emerged in March 1997, when a group of religious leaders and members of the Southern Presbyterian Church in Tucson raised their voices and defied the federal government.
They were willing to violate immigration laws to protect immigrants from Central American countries who were fleeing violence in this church.
This decision was a response to the death of 13 undocumented immigrants from El Salvador who were abandoned by traffickers of people in the Arizona desert. Others 13 who survived were immediately placed in deportation proceedings.
These cases attracted the attention of several churches in Arizona who were came together to help Central American refugees who were in danger of death if they were returned to their countries.
It is not known exactly how many immigrants were protected in this context, but one of the lawyers who participated in the movement calculated that they represented more than 3, cases.
Subsequently, a law created as a result of the attacks of the 11 September 2001 prohibited the Government from breaking into churches, schools and hospitals unless there is an armed person shooting in those places .
To avoid her deportation, Elvira Arellano adhered to this law and locked herself in the Adalberto United Methodist Church, located in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chicago, where she was welcomed into 2006. His case soon became politicized and sparked a sharp controversy between defenders of migrant rights and opposing radicals. A year later she was expelled from the country.
For her, the step of defending the rights of undocumented immigrants already on the Mexican side was natural.
Organized actions on the border between Mexico and Guatemala and supported the kitchen of shelters for transmigants. In one of them she met Armando Mejía, a Honduran, who became her life partner and with whom she had her second child.
Seven years old
As soon as he set foot on Mexican soil, another riot began. Those were difficult times, of legislative debates to discriminate against undocumented migration —it was even punished with 003 years in prison—and she became a symbol to remove that policy that pushed migrants into the arms of criminals, kidnapping, rape, sexual, extortion, death.
Elvira Arellano fought on a par with personal threats. Even her small stationery store in San Miguel Curahuango, criminals came to collect flat fees. With that threat the seven years he spent in Mexico even though he never paid. They did not insist. She thinks it was because it wasn’t a big deal.
The days passed in Mexico between the memories of her detention, her present as a social activist on the migratory route, and the future.
After the attack on the Twin Towers in 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids at airports nationwide. Elvira Arellano worked in the Chicago one in the cleaning service.
That is why she was arrested along with 34 workers. They were looking for possible terrorists. Some 300 came to his house immigration agents and told her that because of her vulnerability she was at risk of being forced by terrorists to help them.
“I was at home, asleep. They knocked on my door and when I asked who it was they told me it was the police. I thought they were looking for me to question me or as a witness to a murder that had occurred a few days ago outside the building, where there was a liquor store and a canteen, and that’s why I opened the door”.
She went to court for working without documents in a federal zone (the airport) and declared. When she felt that she was going to be arrested, she locked herself in the Methodist church along with her son Saúl, at that time eight years old.
Elvira Arellano constantly remembered all that when she was in Mexico, where she tried to continue her life.
He enrolled in the open high school and finished it with a view to studying a law degree. The plan was perfect: defend the undocumented in Mexico with professional knowledge and the law at hand.
He joined the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, the organization that leads the search for migrant mothers with missing children and staged La Bestia to draw attention to the problem with his presence and fame.
Next to the activist Irineo Mújica, accompanied the public caravans of transmigrants to prevent them from suffering direct attacks and prepared food in the shelters.
Rice and beans with the priest Tomás González in La 72, a care home located in Tenosique, the city of Tabasco closest to the Usumacinta River, the border where he shouted with the megaphone to give information about human rights.
He was seen sleeping on dilapidated cots and improvising tacos in Oaxaca, next to the priest Alejandro Solalinde, founder of the shelter Nuestro Hermanos en el Camino, where he saw Armado Mejía for the first time, going here and there as a volunteer with fluent English. “I thought he was a spy for the United States or something like that,” he recalls between jokes.
With the passing of the days, he discovered that he was just another Central American who wanted to save his skin from the insecurity marked by the gangs and criminal organizations in his country. Particularly from Armando Mejía they wanted special information that he had for working in the Honduran Army. He didn’t want to give them to her and fled to Mexico.
The activist and the catracho fell in love. They went to live in San Miguel Turanguato, her center of operations, and began a new life together with Saúl. They formed a traditional family for the first time in the sentimental history of both. Until then, Elvira Arellano had been a single mother.
When they got pregnant with Emiliano, doubts about the economy and insecurity came back to haunt them. Why return to the US, a country that had treated Elvira like a criminal?
Since she had arrived there the first time at 011 years in 1997) had wanted to return to Mexico and, when he was finally in his country, he wanted to leave again.
The answer was simple and complex at the same time: I did not have job opportunities to sustain a certain quality of life and organized crime organizations had taken control of Michoacán and many parts of the country. She was targeted.
“Every time I went out on the migratory route and we had some action against the government for the violence, kidnappings and murders of migrants, I had to call my family in Michoacan so they wouldn’t let Saulito go anywhere,” he detailed.
“I was afraid that they were going to do something to him and I, especially in Veracruz and the State of Mexico, was where I was most afraid to be”.
The return
March 2021, Elvira Arellano made the decision to cross into the United States through the Otay port on the Tijuana border, demanding a humanitarian visa. I was part of a group of 011 asylum seekers who had arrived in the United States in a caravan and she accompanied them.
The US authorities allowed him to stay so that his case could be decided by a judge. His partner stayed in Mexico. He would make the alcazaria two years later to continue a joint project and with the same illusion of the refuge.
She had to appear in court again in 2021 but due to the pandemic His case was postponed and is still pending. “Since then I have been in activism, although not to the 100%”, he said in an interview with this newspaper. He clarified that he does not receive money from political parties or civil organizations or from the church for his work in favor of the rights of migrants.
“Everything is voluntary and I have to divide my time between working, paying rent and other things to survive in the country plus activities”.
The goal is an Immigration Reform that helps regularize the millions of undocumented who, like her, want a space for various reasons in the US.
To have the flexibility to travel in the country, she currently works washing dishes or taking care of the elderly while taking care of her children.
Emiliano turned eight years old and is very mischievous. He knows how to use the computer masterfully and challenges his classmates, bites them, confronts them. It is hyperactive and requires more vigilance. Saul, on the other hand, goes on his own. He is a well-behaved boy.
This year he is finishing his degree in Social Justice and Political Science at Northeaster Illinois University . Gone are the days when he accompanied his mother from one place to another, from the Sanctuary to the press conferences; from the shelters to the freight train clandestinely used by undocumented immigrants crossing Mexico.
It hasn’t been easy. He first received a scholarship from the Boys and Girls Club but there was a problem with Elvira Arellano’s paperwork. They misspelled her last name as the person in charge and the aid was suspended.
Saúl had to spend a year at the state school. Then he returned to Northeter with the support of “Palante”, a charity program that helps Latino students founded by Congressman Luis Gutiérrez.
When the mother looks back she is still surprised by the risks she has taken. The last one was when she crossed to request a humanitarian visa because she knew that if she was deported again she would have to start from scratch to pay a penalty to re-enter. “They had given me 11 and I turned seven when I applied for the humanitarian visa”.
In any case, she is satisfied. In the Chicago Methodist Church, of which he is a part, two more people have been given refuge as a Sanctuary and thousands of others throughout the countrys have accepted this concept after his example.
But Michoacán does not leave his heart. Last year he helped get ventilators to save the lives of his countrymen victims of covid.
It was very difficult to get them both because of the costs and because of the health policies that prevented them from being sent, but he managed to get some of them into a operation that did not raise suspicions. It was clandestine but it has saved many lives in San Miguel Tunguarato.
This year, he organized a collection of money to buy musical instruments for children in his town. He thinks that music can root them, persuade them to get into trouble and guide them towards studies. One day she will return to get a degree, if not in the United States before.
By then, Saúl will have finished his own university career (he calculates that he will graduate in 2022) and will take the reins of the fight for social equality. On one side or the other. From the Usumacinta to the Rio Grande. And beyond.
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