"And you walked. You walked for hours. You'd lose your toenails. Your feet just start breaking apart. You start getting hungry. You start hallucinating. Just crazy things go through your mind. But for me, I just wanted to be with my mom. That's what kept me going. I just wanted to see my sister again. I just wanted to be happy."
“For a second, I thought the future of my children was in jeopardy, my dreams were on the ground, and [I was] totally discouraged; I cried until my chest began to hurt. We lived day-by-day. I remember one Friday in June 2006, I ended up with $3 in my bag, and I wouldn’t get paid until Tuesday.”
"Then we were running scared, scared because we could hear gunfire in the distance. One little girl ran out in front, with the rest of us all behind her, all scared. We thought they were going to shoot us from above”
The Road
A presence is essential to the practice of being human. We assert ourselves, define our world, create, and experience through our voice. But when that voice is denied, illegalized, intruded upon and warped - more rhan a mere presence is taken, the very prospect of living and continuing is stunted. The voices of undocumented immigrants from Mexico into the United States is often ignored in favour of statistics and propaganda about them, rather accounts than by them. Presented below are excerpts from personal accounts of crossing the border and the difficulty of a life lived behind it, spoken by immigrants who have experienced the horror and hunger of the road.
