The Luck of the Draw

Imagine that you are living in your home country of El Salvador with your young, US-born daughter after being deported for running a stop sign in your little New England town. You are separated from your husband of 10 years, a kind white man who learned Spanish to impress you. It worked.

You tell your daughter that she can never use English in the streets or at school — she must only use it in the safety of your own home. She is confused about why she must hide that part of herself and change her American last name to your Salvadoran family name.

You left El Salvador for a reason. There are no jobs that don’t require you to sell your body or your soul. You watched your dad beat your mom until he drank himself to death. You watched your little brother die from a very preventable virus while the hospital staff shrugged their shoulders and said, “there’s nothing we can do.” Your family begged you to save yourself and save them, so you did what people have been doing since the beginning of time. You migrated.

You left El Salvador for a reason, but now you are back in your childhood house sweating next to the comal making tortillas with your mom.

Your sister walks into the house and calls your daughter a whore, because your sister is tragically depressed and sees no end to her suffering and the men outside just catcalled her and grabbed her ass and told her that she knew she wanted it. You scream at her, fire spewing from your mouth.

Your brother walks in and calls you a whore, because he is tragically depressed and sees no end to his suffering and because he works odd jobs and makes barely any money and drinks himself to sleep to forget that he can’t even afford the beer in his hand. He hits you in the forehead with a ceramic mug. The same mug that your grandmother carefully shaped out of thick, wet clay with her calloused, worn hands. The same mug that you loved to feel between your hands when you were little. You knew every single ridge and quirk of that mug, of her hands. Your brother shaped that mug into a weapon.

When the police left your house, the boys in the neighborhood found you in you and your daughter. They threw you up against a wall, grabbed your daughter and covered her mouth.

You don’t remember crossing the river, bags above your head, current swirling around your thighs, water like needles piercing your bare legs. You never even felt your ice cold leg scrape against the cacti or the barbed wire pierce your calves or the rocks embed themselves in your knee caps.

All you remember is the instinct to run. The terror inside you that pushed your feet, step by quicker step. You run from your past, the neighbor who raped you after school, the sounds of your mother hitting the wall, the smell of blood, the gunshots at all hours of the day, the feeling of a knife in your side while you walk home from work, the past is the past is the past. You run faster to leave it far behind.

You run from la migra as your group gets smaller and smaller on the horizon. You concede your fate. You raise the white flag and beg for safety.

After la migra throw you in the car, you feel safe for the first time in years, you start to feel the pain in the side of your leg where the cacti needles burn, the cuts in your calves that are starting to swell, and you slowly pick out the pebbles from your kneecaps as you take your first full breath in the United States.

When immigrants and asylum seekers are detained on the US-Mexico border in Texas, they are often taken to detention facilities that are nicknamed hieleras, or ice boxes. Adults, children, pregnant women, the elderly, they all sleep on the concrete floor with emergency blankets (yes, picture the aluminum foil sheets that are handed out at marathons) surrounded by a chain-linked fence. Most arrive to their next facility in poor health.

Stories like these are far from uncommon, on the contrary, this is the norm; yet, 8 of 10 Central American asylum seekers are denied. Fewer and fewer people even attempt the journey to seek asylum, while denial rates consistently rise. When you hear the stereotyping, demonizing, de-humanizing language about immigrants and asylum seekers, remember how you felt when you had to read this story. You never had to live it, they did.

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