By Ilka Oliva-Corado on July 18, 2022
photo: Bill Hackwell
Guillermina leaves the grocery bags on the table and urgently takes out a plum, washes it and takes a bite, the juice drips from the corner of her lips. She closes her eyes and slowly savors its sweetness as she thanks the hands that cared for her since the seed of the tree was planted. Since she was a child, her peasant grandparents taught her to be grateful for the work done by those who cultivate the land.
Originally from Parramos, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, when she arrived in the United States she spoke only her mother tongue, Cakchiquel. Spanish words, one here and there, English she had never heard. She has been working as a maid in New York for twenty years, where she learned to travel by train. The first time she got on a train and saw the worlds of people in the station, she was surprised by the technology and the number of people who travel on this means of transportation. In Guatemala she never saw one, she only knows the melody El ferrocarril de los altos, which her grandparents liked when they listened to it on the radio, she remembers that they told her that one day in Guatemala there was a train that was the most famous in Central America.
Guillermina left Guatemala with her brother Jacobo to help her parents raise her younger siblings, her story is no different from that of thousands of Guatemalans who are forced to emigrate undocumented. She was on the eve of her fifteenth birthday when she left her indigenous clothing behind and packed two pairs of pants and two T-shirts she bought at the market’s second-hand clothing sales in a backpack; she didn’t have enough for shoes and left with her everyday clothes. His mother’s only sweater was his whole coat for the trip.
She doesn’t know how her memory did it, but she managed to block all the memories of the journey since they arrived in Tapachula, but her brother Jacobo remembers them clearly, but he loves her so much that he would be unable to bring them back to his memory the sexual abuse they both lived for twenty days in the hands of the coyotes who later left them in Tijuana. Since those days Jacobo has never been able to sleep a single night all the way through, he is awakened in the wee hours of the morning by nightmares.
He works three jobs. Every Friday they gather money with Guillermina to send the remittance, neither of them allowed their younger siblings in Parramos who work their grandparents’ land to emigrate, but Miguel, the youngest, did not listen to them and emigrated with another group of friends, he wanted to help his older siblings in the economic burden of the house, he has been missing for three years.
Guillermina bites into the plum that takes her back to the memories of the bean fields, the shade of the avocado and orange trees and the furrows of the cornfields where she saw her younger siblings begin to walk while their parents worked.
The plum juice drips from the corner of her lips, Guillermina thanks the hands that cared for her since the seed of the tree was planted, the taste of the fruit that Miguel loved so much unleashes a pain that has been knotted in her throat for three years and she begins to cry inconsolably. When she was in the supermarket she received a call from Jacobo, finally they have news of Miguel, the forensic team that did the tests confirmed his identity. A humanitarian rescue team searching for a missing migrant found his bones in a dry river in Sonora. At last her parents will be able to bury their young son in the town cemetery.
Source: Ilka Oliva-Corado blog translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English