Mayan Migrants Speak Out

Foreword: Mayan Migrants Speak Out From abUSed: The Postville Raid to Education and Advocacy: One Individual’s Journey Luis Argueta When approximately 900 heavily armed agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entered Agriprocessors, Inc., the largest kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in the country, on May 12, 2008, and arrested 389 undocumented workers, I was in a different place, in a different time. I was living in New York City directing four episodes for We Are New York, a TV series geared toward recently arrived immigrants in the city. I didn’t pay much attention to the event then. However, about a month later, on July 11, I read Julia Preston’s article on the front page of the New York Times, in which she discussed Erik Camayd-Freixas’s essay about his work as an interpreter in the post- raid Postville context. Camayd- Freixas and 12 other interpreters were hired by the federal government to assist in the legal proceedings following the raid. After reading Preston’s article, I went to the link and read Camayd- Freixas’s personal account of his experiences interpreting after what he called “the largest ICE raid in US history” and I said: Everybody who believes in democracy, everybody in this country, should read this essay. I immediately contacted Camayd-Freixas and asked him about the rights to publish his essay in Spanish. I then contacted my friend and colleague, Raul Figueroa Sarti, founder and editor- in- chief of F&G Edi- tores, and asked him: “If I get the rights to this essay will you publish it?” Both Camayd- Freixas and Figueroa Sarti agreed and that essay became book #8 in F&G’s series, Cuadernos del Presente Imperfecto (Camayd- Frexias 2009). My next move was to call Saint Bridget’s Catholic Church, the site widely reported to have been the refuge to thousands of family members xi xii | Luis Argueta of the primarily Mexican and Guatemalan detainees from the raid. I asked them if they could help me set up some interviews with people in Postville affected by the raid. They also said yes. On the morning of July 23, 2008, my friend and co-producer, Vivian Rivas, and I left for Postville. Our plan was to spend four days there, tape a few interviews with the immigrants who remained in town, return to New York, and edit these interviews into short segments for a web series titled And there I am: Documenting Silent Voices that I had begun a couple of years earlier. I undertook the web series project as a result of several visits I had made to the Guatemalan Mobile Consulate1 during the time when Rosa Maria Mérida de Mora was Guatemala’s General Consul in New York. I traveled with her to New Bedford in the wake of the March 6, 2007, ICE raid on the Bianco factory where mostly Guate- malan and Mayan undocumented workers were employed to make U.S. military uniforms. These people would tell me their stories on camera; I would then excerpt them and post them online. Another time I inter- viewed a gentleman at the Guatemalan consulate in New York City who had been brought there by ICE to secure a one- way travel document so he could be deported. Today, the process is done by videoconference. I posted his interview under the title Deportee (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ovQ22X8sJGc).2 He was the first future deportee that I met. I was developing an interest in the subject; but I was very ignorant of immigration policies and enforcement practices. My real immigration education began the day I arrived in Postville. My initial interviews included women whose husbands had been sent to jail while they had been sent home with ankle bracelets to wait for a court order that took months to arrive; children whose mothers were detained and who—afraid that ICE would also detain and deport their children— denied being mothers, and local members of the Postville community who had formed a first response team to support those detained and the families left behind. Those were my first immigration enforcement lessons. My first visit to Postville included the weekend of July 26 and 27, 2008. On Saturday, Congressman Luis V. Gutiérrez (U- IL) led a Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) delegation which included Chairman Joe Baca (D- CA) and Congressman Albio Sires (D- NJ) in a visit to Postville to meet with those most affected by the raid of May 12. On the following Figure 1. Fermin Loyes was sent to prison for five months and then deported to Guatemala. Photo by Luis Argueta. Figure 2. Ilvana Loyes Zamora (three years old), Rosa Zamora de Loyes, and Merlin Loyes Zamora (eight years old). Rosa Zamora— Fermin’s wife— was sent home with an electronic ankle bracelet to care for her two underage daughters. Ilvana is a U.S. citizen while Merlin is a Guatemalan citizen. Photo by Ezequiel Sarudiansky. xiii xiv | Luis Argueta Figure 3. Pedro Arturo Lopez Vega (12 years old). Pedro Arturo’s mother, Consuelo, was arrested and— afraid that ICE would take her children to jail and deport them with her— said she was alone, without any family. Photo by Ezequiel Sarudiansky. day, Sunday, July 27, activists from across the country gathered in Post- ville for an interfaith service, march, and rally calling for comprehensive immigration reform, family unification, and just labor practices. I met local residents and people from Des Moines, Minneapolis, Chicago, Madison, and even Boston; nuns, parish priests, Lutheran and protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, labor organizers, and lay people. This display of solidarity and the stories that I had been hearing, both in Spanish and in English, energized me and made me decide to stay for an extra week. By the end of my first trip to Postville, I realized how this complex story was a paradigm of twenty- first- century U.S. immigration. After that week I returned again, and again, and again. It took 29 trips to Post- ville to gather the material that later would be edited to become my doc- umentary film, abUSed: The Postville Raid.3 I realized that through the intersection of these immigrant stories, the stories of the responses of U.S. businesses that employed and sometimes abused migrants, and the stories of people who accompanied and supported the immigrants—or Foreword | xv those that protested their presence in the “heart of America”— I was learning— and could teach— about immigration. Through telling the story of Postville I could give the context of the political, historical, and social forces that brought Mexicans and Central Americans north. The interviews I was doing helped me to better understand that context, the raid itself, its aftermath, and the human and workers’ rights issues in- volved. For me, Postville was a small laboratory, a crash course on immigration. By producing a film that recreated my findings, I hoped to provide a similar opportunity for a wider public. I realized that to get a complete picture of the situation of the migrants in Postville, I needed more information about the families “left behind” in Guatemala. That is why I offered to accompany a group of five migrant families from Postville who had decided not to fight their case and requested “voluntary departure.” Many migrants in Iowa asked me if I would take photos and letters to family members in Calderas, Guatemala. I recorded people reading the letters and looking at the photos and brought back video- letters to the families in Iowa. This small act of solidarity gave me more credibility with them and with their relatives in Guatemala. However, I realized that, while I was getting some information in these initial interviews in Guatemala, I was just scratching the surface. To obtain in- depth accounts that would lead me to understand why their husbands, brothers, sons, and daughters had headed north would require multiple conversations and deeper trust. Therefore, I Figure 4. Postville Solidarity march on July 27, 2008. Photo by Vivian Rivas. xvi | Luis Argueta Figure 5. From left to right: Beatriz Gallardo, field producer in Guatemala, and Vicente Ordoñez, Rosa Zamora’s brother- in- law (holding photos sent from Iowa). Photo by Luis Argueta. went back to Guatemala a second, and a third, and a fourth time. I traveled to Guatemala 17 times before I completed the film. Because I was born there, and had lived there for the first 20 years of my life, and by now have lived in the United States for four decades, I was able to bridge the cultural and language barriers, that is, the Anglo-Guatemalan gap. There was a joke among many that I didn’t speak Spanish, but Guatema- lan! This made a big difference. (You know how desconfiados [distrust- ful] we Guatemalans are!). Once I had the migrants’ trust, I explained to them that I needed detailed information about their situations to better understand the im- plications of the raid in Postville and other U.S. policies and practices for their families and communities on both sides of the border. Through multiple interviews in Postville and Guatemala I sought to better understand why people risk their lives in the journey north, why they mort- gage their homes and land, go into debt, and take out loans that have Foreword | xvii interest rates of 5–20 percent monthly. At the beginning, these decisions were beyond my capacity to grasp. Finally speaking with a woman who had experienced horrific abuse crossing the borders and the desert, I got the answer.

Load more