By Ilka Oliva-Corado on February 13, 2022
remittance
He left the second shift at three in the afternoon, after he had worked from 5 to 10 a.m. in a furniture store cutting wood and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the second shift, cleaning offices. On his way to the third shift where he works as a waiter’s assistant in a Lebanese restaurant he stops at a Mexican supermarket to send his weekly remittance to his family in San Sebastian, Retalhuleu, Guatemala, it is Sunday and he is working like every other day of the week.
A huge line awaits him at the supermarket, there are always people sending remittances at any time on day of the week, the radio is always at full volume with Mexican music, he smells fried meat, a few steps away there is another line waiting to buy the meat tacos that are the specialty of the house. He sees the boxes of ripe avocado piled up, which will be gone in no time, it is what most people buy on weekends and the tamales that are sold in a bag, also in a bag they sell the cactus leaves, something that never ceases to amaze him because in Guatemala they are not eaten, He saw them once when he went to Zacapa, huge cactus plants that nobody touched and it turns out that where he is, Mexicans buy them like someone who buys a bunch of tortillas or a bag of bread, they seem to be the “conqué” and not an accompaniment to a plate of food.
At the beginning, when he first arrived Hilarion was struck by the fact that people put remittances, recharged phone cards in their countries of origin, cashed their checks and dropped every penny left between the supermarket and the liquor store next door, he never imagined that so many years would pass and that he would have a routine so similar to those people he saw when he first arrived in this place where it snows at the time when the mango trees are at their peak in his hometown.
Hilarion emigrated when he was just 17 years old, with three children to support, he left his wife and children at his in-laws’ house and promised to return in two years, if he did well and bring money to start a business, 25 years have passed since then, he has yet to graduate from college the last of his children and the last of his siblings, he does not plan to return until he does. In Guatemala he worked in the sugar cane farms, if they were to check his body they would still find in his skin the sugar cane prickles that like thorns bury themselves deep down, in those farms he spent his childhood and adolescence working with his parents and uncles. He does not know how to read or write because school was never an option for the poverty of his family, he had to help his parents in raising his younger siblings.
He has noticed that in the line waiting to send his remittances there are many as him, in charge of parents, grandparents, younger siblings and children, when he talks to them they come up with similar stories, no matter where in Latin America they come from, there are even great grandchildren of the braceros that began in 1942 allowing Mexican men to work legally in the US on short term labor contracts. Hilarion learned of the existence of the braceros when one day several years ago he went for a few beers with a young man after they had both sent their remittances, his great-grandfather had been a bracero. He was not the only one with a family burden on his back; he was the majority of undocumented migrants, that is why they did not return in two years as they thought at first. Like him they also carry photos of their children and on their cell phones, they didn’t see them grow up, but they managed to raise them with remittances. And he also met over the years so many who have never told their families in their home countries how they really live in the United States, he has never told his family that he rents a space in a basement of a house where fifteen other undocumented people live.
Hilarion leaves the supermarket, that day it has not been so cold, the sun has been visible at times and the temperatures are not so depressing and desperate, he breathes the fresh air that for a second brings him the aroma of corozo and tender mango trees in his native San Sebastian, he wonders as he drives to his third job if the other migrants will also miss as he does when the sun peeks through the leaden sky of the American winter.
Source: Ilka Oliva-Corado’s blog, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English