By Ilka Oliva-Corado on November 6, 2022
He first encountered salmon in New York when he saw it laying on trays in the supermarket deli. Twelve dollars a half-pound piece. Twelve dollars, he wondered what he could do with twelve dollars in his native Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala, no doubt feeding his family for at least three days.
In Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Clementino worked from adolescence in the cemetery, first as an assistant to his uncle where he learned to tinker here and there: days as an undertaker, others as a bricklayer, days of maintenance, and days as a painter with a big brush and a small paintbrush.
He learned by heart the flag of the United States when the bodies of migrants who died in that country began to arrive and who had adopted it as their second homeland, people who were so grateful for the sustenance that they asked to have the flag of the United States painted on their graves along with that of Guatemala. They made clear requests for landscapes of U.S. cities and the mountains of Todos Santos Cuchumatán.
From El Norte came the dollars to build large cemeteries for entire families, Clementino was impressed by the luxury of those who had left with one hand in front and the other behind. Surely they were doing too well in the United States to waste money like that, he thought.
Much of the town had migrated by the time Clementino came of age, and where adobe houses had once stood, three-story block houses were being built with ample space to park the used cars that rolled across the Mexico-Guatemala border. The young people were excited to see that fortune and began to emigrate en masse, among the hustle and bustle Clementino also left, promising his family to send weekly remittances for the construction of the block house with large parking for the cars he would send.
So it was that he came upon entire villages in New York that he imagined he would find living in opulence, as evidenced by the remittances to build the pantheons and the three-story houses. But to his surprise they were crammed into buildings located in the poorest parts of the city, with three and four families renting in a one-room apartment. He found crews of workers living in basements of the homes of other Guatemalans who did them the favor of renting to them.
Most of them traveled by train because they didn’t have a car, who also like him wondered about one day what they could do in Guatemala with the twelve dollars a half pound of salmon was worth at the deli in the supermarket.
Source: Ilka Oliva-Corado’s Blog, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US