MEXICO.- After 38 minutes of racing to reach the five kilometer finish line, Martín Fuentes fell to his knees. It was not a premeditated act , but a tribute to life that manifested itself naturally, as soon as he crossed the finish line by force of will.
Despite being blind!
It was any given Sunday in April. Day 11 from 2022. There was nothing to commemorate, but a competition organized by a radio station aimed at migrants in the United States as a pretext to coexist. An exercise to overcome challenges.
With that call they met 50 competitors. All in perfect condition, except Martín Fuentes, who gradually lost his vision from 2015 until he became totally blind at his 52 years old and in a country where you were not born.
The doctors were blunt with the diagnosis: aggressive retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited, degenerative and rare disease. In his case, he jumped from his maternal grandmother to his generation of grandchildren It affected him and his older sister who lives in Mexico.
In two years it evolved to the extreme. At first he only had lateral vision deficiency. He constantly collided with objects and people that he did not see on the sides. Then the field of vision was closed until the blindness with which he went to the race in the city of Atlanta.
He arrived at the competition sharp with the rest of his senses. All touch, all smell, all ears, taste and touch as allies. He was accompanied by a friend to whom he tied himself with a bow and gave three instructions.
1. If I get out of the way, pull me with the rope!
2. If there is a danger (rocks, grass, mud, etc.), squeeze my hand!
3. If you have to cross a bridge, stand behind me!
Martín Fuentes trained for more than two months. He had never been a runner , started from scratch. The son of 17 years scheduled him for a band from the gym and the father began to jog.
He had four when trying to release the lateral grips of the machine. She got up from each one with more encouragement than fear.
At the same time, she started a diet to lose weight. He only ate two meals a day with a lot of fruit and vegetables that gave him the lightness to cross the threshold of his own limits.
That day of the race, under the overcast sky of his triumph, knew that the earth was kissing him to correspond to his knees bent after the finish line. And he knew it because the ground was warm despite the bad weather, the rain and the cold!
“We blind people see other things”, says Martín Fuentes in an interview with this newspaper, far from Mexico.
Migration
Martín Fuentes emigrated to the United States to raise money and buy a car. He had 19 years. A change of scenery from Mexico City, where he was born, seemed fun to him in the early 1990s 90,
Those were times of migratory waves, when the Latino population grew by 58%, according to the census: from 22.4 million to 35.6 millions.
He crossed without documents and headed for Georgia, where an uncle lived. Like many Mexicans, he worked in restaurants. The family wanted him to get into the world of construction but he found it very hard.
His work experience prior to migration had been as a desk clerk in a coffee company to which he Came on recommendation. There he read the newspapers to find information on the market, prices, competition and legal changes. In Atlanta he was looking for something similar, an office job.
His opportunity arose when Consul Teodoro Mau invited him to be the liaison with the migrant community. “I met him asking for support for the soccer team and he liked the events he helped organize.”
He was in that activity during years, although his contract said “driver”.
At that time he had a work visa, married a Colombian, had two children: the boy who today has years and a girl who turned 13. Later he found work in a bank, but illness forced him to resign. Luckily, he had taken out life and disability insurance in case it got complicated one day.
Fighting Blindness
The little bench was an exciting project. “We were one of the first in the state to open accounts with any ID” regardless of immigration status, recalls Martín Fuentes.
Although his work was about the security of the accounts, many times I attended to people. In these chores he discovered that he was losing his visibility because he collided with customers
When the doctors confirmed that he would go blind, the executives advised him to look for another type of job . Letters from lawyers arrived at his house offering help of all kinds. and that there were many programs for the transition to blindness such as the one they called “Orientation and mobility”. A woman who was blind from birth used to go to her house twice a week for an hour.
With her she learned to move furniture to avoid knocks, to use textured decals to identify objects like the stove , the washing machine, the toaster, the television…
The biggest challenge was going out into the street. Face the world differently. He cost him several falls, but he learned to love him and to converse with life in other codes. “He constantly sends us messages in the form of hunches and we don’t see him even if we have the sense of sight.”
The consul who helped him decades ago gave him a job at an altruistic radio station for the migrant community. It was closed after the death of the diplomat, but it left Martín’s anxiety about broadcasting and today he has his own local station.
At the same time, he acquired another hobby: traveling. Since he became a citizen through his wife in 2017 he has been to Haiti, Jamaica, Cozumel and Mexico City, his hometown. He took minibuses again and moved with his cane between the traffic and the crowd.
“Although I don’t see it, the nature shows me its other languages, I listen to it, I feel it the way…”.
Soon you will be at the end of the world. Literally. In Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, by the steep hill that surrounds the Martial mountains. He feels that when he is in front of them, he will describe the landscape to his wife and she will tell him: “Look, my love, don’t fool me, aren’t you blind?”
“I am a blind Mexican in the US”
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