Guatemalan lives upturned after failed immigration bids
After pandemic lull, tens of thousands again take up journey north with support from relatives; many already here
Alvina Jerónimo Pérez tries to avoid going out. She doesn’t want to see neighbors. She’s even changed the chip in her cellphone since her failed journey to the United States.
The 42-year-old woman is fearful her unsuccessful migration could cost her more than she can bear — even the single-story concrete block house her husband built on land passed down from her great-grandparents in this mountaintop hamlet in south-central Guatemala.
Her husband, Anibal García, had recently added another room onto the back. The family had borrowed money to pay for the addition and was having trouble paying. Jerónimo thought she might be able to find the money if she migrated.
From afar, it seemed a safe bet. Many others in town, even in her own family, had made similar journeys. “Since people were passing [the border], we thought they were going to let us pass,” Jerónimo said.
The smuggler told her to bring her daughter to make it a sure thing, banking on the idea U.S. authorities wouldn’t deport a minor or her parent.
He promised her a job in the U.S. that would allow her to pay her debt.
So she put the house up as collateral to pay the smuggler $7,700. “The deal was that when we had arrived there, we were going to pay that money and they would return (the deed), but it wasn’t possible,” she said.
In March 2020, she and her daughter Yessenia, then 14, left Tizamarte. Three weeks later they were caught entering Texas. They were deported a week after that.
When Jerónimo realized they would be sent back, she cried. “I thought of everything the trip had cost me. I asked myself, ‘What am I going to do?’ I’ve lost everything.”
Jerónimo’s story is similar to that of thousands of Guatemalans who scramble to gather the money needed to migrate to the United States. Often it comes from relatives already living in the U.S. or networks of informal lenders. Sometimes migrants must sell their possessions, including their homes, or like Jerónimo, use the deeds as collateral. They are driven by the chance of breaking the cycle of poverty that affects 60 percent of the country’s population.
The COVID-19 pandemic initially blunted migration to the U.S. last year, but numbers were soon on the rise again. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 30,000 encounters with Guatemalan migrants at the Southwest border this April.
President Joe Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of finding ways to address the root causes of migration, and Harris is scheduled to arrive in Guatemala Sunday.
She has been talking with officials and nongovernmental groups about the forces at play, including poverty, corruption, violence and climate change. She has also expressed interest in groups historically facing discrimination, including Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and LGBTQ communities. The Biden administration fears an unmanageable number of migrants, especially children and families at the border, will distract from its domestic policy goals even as it tries to present a more compassionate face than its predecessor. Jerónimo is among more than 228,000 Guatemalans deported by the United States since 2015. For many of those, the dream failed. They were sent home with the stigma of failure and staggering debts that can’t be paid in a country where the minimum wage is about $11 per day.
She, like many others, sees no way out but to try again.
There’s an old and rusting white refrigerator in Jerónimo’s house, though most of the time it’s not plugged in: She often has no food that needs cooling and has to save money on electricity. Most of the time it just serves as a stand for the television perched on top.
In the dry winter months, the house is dark and cold under its corrugated tin roof. In the rainy season, it is hot and stifling. It sits tight to the dirt road at the entrance to Tizamarte, a village of some 110 families, about 700 people.
A five-hour drive from Guatemala’s capital, Tizamarte is in the so-called dry corridor, a swath of land extending from southern Mexico to Panama where climate change has evolved into a series of punishing droughts and devastating tropical storms.
For people in Tizamarte and other settlements, that means eking out a living with subsistence agriculture to feed their families while harvesting coffee for cash to pay school fees or medicine.
Chiquimula, the department or state, where Tizamarte is located, accounts for 10 percent of Guatemala’s exported coffee, according to the National Coffee Association, Anacafé.
During the coffee harvest from November to February, the village comes alive with an influx of cash, albeit modest. A picker makes about $8 per sack harvested and can usually fill one or two per day.
Jerónimo’s husband makes a little extra money by cooking up orders of fried chicken and french fries on a stove at home and selling them for a little under $2 to the pickers. Jerónimo sells basic groceries to passersby from a tiny store in the house’s front room.
The couple doesn’t pick coffee and does not have land to grow it. García raises corn and beans for their own consumption on a small rented plot. They typically get by on two meals a day of corn tortillas, beans and coffee.
Their home is unusual in town for having running water. Women and children line up at Tizamarte’s five public spigots to fill containers.
As in many other parts of Central America, migration to the north has become a tradition. Someone in nearly every family in town has gone to the U.S. or tried to.
“Anyone who has the opportunity should go,” said Adán Rivera, a 40-year-old farmworker. “Migrating isn’t easy; you put yourself in danger. But there is need.”
Rivera himself takes his three young sons to harvest coffee.