Going Home Will Always Break My Heart

The border that divides my worlds

As the airplane crosses the border, I hug my young daughter to my chest a little tighter. This imaginary line of river and sand along which some would build a Great Wall is fraught with tragedy. The children of my people lie down there in cages, under the coldest blankets invented by man. I kiss the top of my little girl's head. This trip is going to break my heart one thousand ways before it's over.

Migrants at the U.S. Mexico border.

Lest I drag you under with me, I'll tell you a secret that isn't a secret but few people know: the only way through heartbreak is grieving, and grief is like water. When your cup starts overflowing, all you need to do is pour some out. This is why I cry easily although I am one of the happiest people I know. I am friends with sorrow as well as with joy.

*

On our first day at my mother's house we take the children to the playground within the gated community of tall white houses. Kids play soccer. My daughter, niece and nephews take turns at the painted metal swings, slide, monkey bars.

A tiny puppy has found its way into the compound, adorable except for the mange on its neck and the cloud of fleas hovering around it like electrons.

Sophia squeals, “A puppy! I want it.”

I want it too. I want to scoop it up to my chest, take it home, feed it scraps, bathe it, take it to the vet for mange ointment and shots. “Don’t touch it.” I turn my back on it. It’s just another Mexican street dog in a city where they run in feral packs. Supposing I could rescue this one, what would I do about the next one, and all the rest? My mother would never stand for such gringo folly, anyway.

“Poor thing, it’ll probably get run over,” my sister says.

If it doesn't, it'll join the neighborhood pack. In my early years in the United States, I was shocked to discover that some Americans are kinder to pet animals than to other humans. Then I became a pet lover too, and understood that the point was not to transfer people's love of pets to humans, but learning to be kind to all beings.

*

Yesterday we went to see my father, and for the first time in my life I was not filled with trepidation.

He's not that old, going on 74. I wish I could tell you he was dying, but I can't. This Halloween it will be 10 years since he had the stroke that left him paralyzed on the left side and stuck. Stranded. Lost somewhere on the road between life and death.

When he had the stroke, we were relieved, my mother, my sister and I. He'd been slowly destroying his reputation as a brilliant professor in his university department. Feeding his diabetes with tequila, his heart disease with refried beans, my sister had to fetch him from jail for disorderly conduct when he'd been getting drunk with students and kicked the glass door of a bar to smithereens.

This is the thing about my father: the Guatemalan Civil War destroyed his childhood, his family, his country. He never got over it and he never grew up. His brilliant mind, which earned him--a simple village boy from a poor country--scholarship after scholarship and landed him in an Ivy League doctoral program, couldn't save him.

My father has the emotional maturity of a 5-year-old. But of course, when I was a child, he was a giant who ruled our home with rage. I looked up at him in equal parts admiration and fear. I still don't know how to reconcile the fantasy that we’d earn the Nobel Prize in Economics together for solving poverty, and my memories of him beating me with his leather belt.

I have grieved him as if he'd died many times. Maybe I have nothing left to grieve. Maybe all that's left is the tragic theater of his life, worthy of Shakespeare or Euripides.

My daughter met him during our last visit two years ago, but I doubt she remembers the white walls of the nursing home spilling over with bougainvillea. I don't talk about her grandpa much, so my announcement seems to surprise her, “We are going to visit grandpa Lito.”

We cross the hallways with lazy ceiling fans and enter his room plastered with crayon pictures from my niece and nephews. My father, who had always been fat, is wasting away. We brought him pure cotton shorts to withstand the heat. He is a size medium. With diapers. His eyes, graying with glaucoma, meet mine, “My daughter, I love you, I am so glad you came.”

Where is the man with bloodshot eyes who used to scream at me from the top of his apartment stairs, “I wish you’d never been born, malparida”?

“Mi Sofi, preciosa.” He is all sweetness with my daughter and me, but he still relies on delusions to cope with his condition, “I am planning to move back to Guatemala. I will found two middle schools, one in my village, one in Antigua, and I'll be the principal. You see, that way I'll be sure to have a job there. Maybe I can teach some algebra too.”

I know better than to crash through his defenses or try to return him to reality. There is only one place my father will go from here, the spirit world. Clearly, he's not ready to confront that.

My husband, ever the chaplain, is thinking up an Intervention, but his Spanish fails and he settles for small talk.

We visit for a while as my father sips soda from his sippy cup. Eventually we must leave. I rise with my daughter clinging to me with all four limbs like a baby monkey.

My father reaches his hand to hers and clasps her chubby toddler hands with his bony fingers. His gaze bores into me and his voice goes down a register, “Please be there to bury me when I die.”

I have always wanted to return to his village with my sister and scatter his ashes there, but I don't want to make a promise I may not be able to keep, “Yes, of course, Papito.” I kiss the top of his head. “When you do go, stop by and say goodbye, will you? And go in peace. You have my permission. All is forgiven.”

*

Twenty years ago I migrated to the United States by choice, but now my family are refugees from the drug wars. When I left, my father taught Economics at a public university and my mother was Research and Development Director at the Mexican Institute for Women. He had a small downtown apartment and since their separation she had a large suburban apartment overlooking the city. They owned their homes outright and they lived comfortably within their means.

When my mother retired, she moved with my sister, the single mother of a child with a complex disability (Prader Willi Syndrome), to her hometown in northeast Mexico. They were hoping to live more simply, away from the traffic, pollution and crazed pace of the big city.

At first it went well. My mother reconnected with old friends, took my nephew to the Quaker Meeting House on Sundays, and spent her life’s savings building her dream home. When my dad had the stroke, my mother added a special ground-floor bedroom and took him in, despite the fact that he’d been an abusive and undeserving husband.

Then the drug wars broke out.

Drug traffickers in my home state were nothing new. We’d lived there when I was in high school, and it was an open secret that one of my classmates’ dad was a narcotraficante. The boy always looked neglected, with rumpled, unmatched clothes and weird bowl haircut, always falling asleep in class and barely getting passing grades. Other kids treated him with a mix of awe and pity.

Another classmate told me he once went shopping with the sad narco boy in Texas. They drove a shiny red Lamborghini around town. At some point a black car with no plates and tinted windows met them. Sad boy's dad strutted over in his alligator skin boots, peeled bunches of $100 bills out of his billfold and dropped them on their lap through the window.

But by 2009 the once peaceful narcos terrorized the community. The scariest cartel started out as an elite force trained by U.S. and Israeli special forces to combat drug smuggling. They learned every trick in the black ops book, then figured they’d make more money if they started their own gig. Armed to the teeth with American weapons, they waged turf wars on other cartels. Then the Mexican army with its lesser arsenals went to war with them.

Daily shootouts. Corpses on the streets. Kettles of vultures patrolled the skies for carrion. Gore filled the news, and then it didn´t because the cartel bombed the TV station and started persecuting journalists. Drug trafficking expanded to extortion, kidnappings, femicides galore. Every business was hit for “floor dues,” including my sister's restaurant. I can’t tell you her story of extortion because it would put her in danger, and besides, she has never told me all the details. She is still trying to protect me.

The last time I visited my family in our hometown, I went on to Mexico City, to visit the sacred sites of the Aztec peoples where my spiritual roots lie. I stayed at the Quaker Meeting House hostel and paired up with a German tourist—a wonderful queer young woman—who wanted to tag along to Teotihuacan, the majestic place where humans become gods.

We bought tortas to go, and rode the subway to the bus station in the early morning. We climbed up and down pyramids and visited temples, and ended up eating our tortas on the first platform half-way up the Pyramid of the Moon, feet dangling off the edge. My phone buzzed. I fished it out of the bottom of my day pack and noticed I had 43 messages and texts from my mother. Had my father died? I called her back.

“Thank God you're alright. Why hadn't you called?” My mother said, breathless.

“My phone was on silent mode. I'm on the Moon Pyramid. What´s going on?”

My mother had gotten a call. A man on the phone told her he'd kindapped her daughter for ransom and she heard a woman who could've been me screaming for help in the background. We’d never heard of this prank. Given the situation of terror back home, it was totally plausible. My poor mother had been about to hand over money for my life.

“I’m fine, mamita. It´s only a prank.” She cried and cried as I held my cell phone to my ear, desecrating the holy city with its radiofrequency radiation.

*

I came to the U.S. with my first husband to learn permaculture. I stayed when I began doing social work and discovered I could help my people more by using my bilingual-bicultural skills to help immigrants navigate life here.

Now I am married to another American and my child was born in California. The way I see it, the U.S. took this land from my people twice: when it stole the land from my indigenous ancestors and when it annexed half of the Mexican territory during the land grab of the 19th Century.

I live in Santa Cruz, a small university town. An old hippie town. An expensive surf town too close to Silicon Valley fortunes for comfort. We can barely afford to live here, but my husband loves his chaplain job and we all enjoy the beach and the redwoods.

It is also a tweaker town. A drug town. A town with gangs and homelessness. A town where the main job of emergency services is to pick up overdosing people and remove thousands of discarded needles from beaches and parks.

People are destroying their lives with opioids and meth in the U.S. and our lives in Mexico are being destroyed by the violence bred of drug smuggling.

The border, that fictional line of sand and river has always been permeable, porous, malleable. Drugs flow north because they want them, guns flow south although we don't. Workers flow north although they won't admit they want them, money trickles south by the sweat of our brow. Under the wall, over the wall, through the wall, life moves, never standing still.