Hometown heroes
Latin American immigrants in the United States who send aid to their families are exalted in their homelands.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — The modern, geometric monument towering above the Autopista Sur freeway on the way from the airport to downtown San Salvador is one of the most prominent public artworks in the capital city. It pays tribute to returning emigrants in a country that reveres those who leave on behalf of their families to find work and prosperity in America and other foreign countries.
“Hermano, bienvenido a casa” the monument says in letters that can be read from the freeway: “Brother, welcome home.”
Most cultures honor and erect such monuments to war heroes and presidents, and sometimes great writers and artists. In Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, they add emigrants to that litany.
Their exalted role stems from recognizing their essential contributions: With remittances, they help their families to get out of poverty. And in so doing, they help their countries’ economies, since their financial contributions represent one of the main sources of foreign exchange reserves.
“Migrants in our era,” Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, said recently during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, “are our new martyrs and are the new heroes that, on foreign territory, struggle to overcome adversity, work tirelessly, do the hardest works in the toughest conditions, and they still come out ahead.”
The image of the emigrant in the region is sort of a “heroic entrepreneur of life” who dares to cross borders, “defying numerous dangers in search for better opportunities for him and his family,” said José Santos Portillo, acting mayor of the small town of Intipucá, in southeast El Salvador.
Not surprisingly, the central square of this picturesque village is called El Parque del Migrante (The Migrant’s Park). At its center is a statue of an emigrant carrying a backpack. He is turning his head back to catch the last glimpse of his homeland, but his body walks decisively north. The monument was built after Sigifredo Chávez became the first officially registered person who emigrated from this town to the U.S. in 1967.
Some say that Intipucá is a ghost town. “We adore those who are not here with us … many of us live out of what our emigrants send,” Santos said.
Carefully built homes are spread around town with ornamental ironworks and adornments only affordable through the remittances of those who have emigrated.
“They say they will come back to live here one day. You know, making it in America and then coming back,” said the mayor, rolling his eyes, knowing that most likely will never happen.
Approximately 60 to 70 percent of residents have emigrated from Intipucá, a town that didn’t offer much more than a decaying agricultural base for villagers.
The park and monument are just some of the many ways in which the imagery of the immigrant adorns the town, where the U.S. is talked of as a promised land. Intipucá has a “White House,” as the mansion of a local who migrated to Washington but who still visits every year is called.
Hundreds of undocumented emigrants head north every week from Central America to the United States. To get there, they often must survive an arduous journey thousands of miles long filled with hunger, thirst, exhaustion, degradation, often humiliation, and even at times extortion and rape.
Many say the prayers of the migrant before leaving.
In Salcajá, a western city in Guatemala, residents printed the prayer on a metallic plate that accompanies their own monument to the emigrant: “As I must go to other lands to seek a decent life for my family, I ask for protection and interception before God for those of us who are on the way, since you did not leave the Migrant People. Help us achieve our purpose.”
Many emigrants never complete the journey. If and when they do, they become heroes in their old countries, if not in their new one.
Olivia P. Tallet, a Houston Chronicle reporter, and Marie D. De Jesús, a Chronicle photographer, traveled to Latin America and produced this report as 2017 Adelante Latin America Reporting Fellows with the International Women’s Media Foundation.