“The next migrants are going to be climate migrants,” declared Lina Pohl, head of El Salvador’s Environment and Natural Resources Ministry, at a conference in Panama in October 2018—just as the multiple caravans of Central Americans were converging in Mexico on their way to Tijuana. Most public discourse around such displacements has been caught in a familiar rhetoric of Third World poverty and violence. Central America’s ecological crisis remained in the background until mid-2018, when newspapers reported that more than 3 million people were being affected by severe droughts in the region.

When environmental conditions do enter debates about migration, it is often in isolation from economic and political factors. Rarely do the responsibilities of regional elites, or neocolonial relationships between the global North and South, figure in environmental analyses. The subordination of environmental to political and economic considerations, which are then framed by investors and governments in terms of development opportunities, not only sustains but also aggravates the vulnerability of Central American populations. Here, the case of El Salvador is revealing.

In the summer of 2018, I traveled to El Salvador to learn about urban development in Cordillera del Bálsamo, a mountainous region in the central-southern part of the country. The area I visited lies between the capital city, San Salvador, and the Pacific coast of La Libertad, a popular tourist destination. Its convenient location, pleasant scenery, and fresh breezes, combined with the decline of traditional agriculture in the area, have made the cordillera a coveted site for real estate developers. Although in recent years local authorities have boasted of the region’s economic prosperity, a closer look reveals a very different picture. The arrival of developers and the construction of luxurious gated communities for the upper-middle classes have devastated local ecologies. Land concentration, labor precaritization, water appropriation, and toxic contamination have made the area a microcosm of old and new political conflicts. These processes not only dispossess populations of their land but also put them at high risk for climatological events like landslides driven by tropical storms during the rainy season.

Despite various restrictions on urban development in an area with a history of water scarcity, private-sector groups have maneuvered within political institutions to get their way. An example is the FIHIDRO project, a public–private partnership between the National Administration of Waterways and Drainage Systems and a group of sixteen developers intent on installing water supply systems for elite residential projects. Making use of longstanding patron-client networks and benefiting from the politics of decentralization promoted by the U.S. Agency for International Development, developers partnered with local authorities and presented the project as a great opportunity for economic growth and a solution to the problem of water scarcity. Today, the reality is far from this claim. Testimonies of local people show that the project did not solve the water problem. To the contrary, the resulting real-estate boom has decreased water infiltration, boosted the demand for water in upper-class neighborhoods, and contaminated rivers that historically served as a primary water source for many people.

We can begin to grasp how environmental issues link to broader economic and political processes by identifying two sources of capital for the joint-stock companies behind the FIHIDRO urban development projects: first, extractive industries including sugarcane, associated with old agrarian elites; and second, finance capital, also linked to national elites through bank privatization and transnationalization over the past quarter-century. While the latter has been the driver of El Salvador’s partial shift from an agrarian economy to third-sector activities such as financial services and commerce, the former sits at the heart of national struggles over water privatization. Furthermore, El Salvador’s sugarcane industry, for which processing and commercialization is controlled by just six companies, has been the source of both water scarcity and of health problems including an epidemic of kidney disease now affecting many rural areas.

At the same time, the convergence of the oil crisis in the global North and industrial growth in China has led to industry expansion of both sugarcane and palm oil, which are used in the production of fossil-fuel alternatives. Under a global politics of liberalization, socioeconomic crises in places like El Salvador thus give leverage to transnational capital. As a result of this open-market policy, millions of dollars are invested every year in the development of gargantuan projects of logistics infrastructure, such as roads, ports, airports, and electric supply systems. The sheer proximity of these megaprojects in a relatively small Central American territory amplifies their socioenvironmental effects.

In a recent public forum at San Salvador’s Central American University, the Salvadoran urbanist Sandra Gutiérrez clearly stated: “Ecological impacts know nothing of political borders. If the Lempa River is deviated in Guatemala or Honduras, life in El Salvador is done.” Although a mere handful of Salvadorans enjoy the tangible benefits of new residential and infrastructural development projects, these projects are celebrated by authorities as synonymous with local prosperity and regional development. When environmental devastation is helping to drive migration, it is important to situate this devastation within the context of elite maneuvering—and of ongoing neocolonial relationships between North and South.

In July 2007, at a shelter for migrants in southern Mexico, I sat down with a man in his mid-forties to find out why he had left El Salvador. He owned a small tailor shop in his hometown of Usulután, where his wife and five children remained. In a country where viable employment is hard to come by, his business was relatively profitable and so it drew the attention of local gang members, who demanded that he pay weekly “rents” or extortion. “I paid the rents over several years, but after a while I couldn’t—I didn’t have enough,” he told me. When he started receiving anonymous phone calls threatening his life, he knew that he needed to leave the country. “You can’t tell the police. Nor can you tell your neighbor, your family—you can’t tell anyone,” he continued, explaining why his family was unaware of his whereabouts. “The police are infiltrated. People file a police report and just after they file it, the next day, they are murdered.”

At that time, I was not yet familiar with how gangs had begun to govern the daily lives, im/possibilities, and im/mobilities of Salvadorans and other Central Americans, and so I was surprised to learn that a hard-working father and humble small business owner could be the target of extortion and death threats. I had initially assumed that he was headed to the United States to find a job and send money home, an assumption based on my research on labor migration by Salvadorans following the civil war in their country between 1980 and 1992. But the former tailor instead planned to apply for asylum in Mexico and then bring his family there. Subsequent fieldwork visits to the shelter revealed more unsettling stories, often shared in a whisper.

More than a decade later, in November 2018, I navigated my way through the Ciudad Deportiva in Mexico City, where thousands of migrants were arriving to take shelter. Their faces and stories resembled those I had come to know at the migrant shelter further south. This time, instead of traveling in small groups as invisibly as possible, they came in a caravan originating in Honduras for the world to see. Upon receiving word of the caravan’s pending arrival, scores of Mexico City volunteer teams spontaneously self-organized. Overnight, a stadium was turned into a relief site of the kind prepared for people displaced by a natural disaster: there were medical services stations, a kitchen, information booths, portable bathrooms, and enormous tents in which migrant families slept, closely lined up together, occupying virtually every square inch of space. UNICEF and Save the Children set up spaces for kids to play. Cameras and reporters flooded the grounds to photograph children and snap up caravan interviews. By then the object of an international media frenzy, the migrants were hypervisible and under scrutiny.

This spectacle was particularly conspicuous to the U.S. public amid the political theater surrounding the 2018 midterm elections. Framing the caravan as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and security, President Trump called it “an invasion,” reminding the world of the dangers of the MS-13 gang (which actually originated in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 80s before taking root across North and Central America) and sending thousands of National Guard troops to the border. These actions expanded the discourse of a U.S.-Mexico “border crisis,” an idea that first emerged in June 2014 when media attention turned to the crowded conditions of Central American children held in immigrant detention. The strategic deployment of the term crisis directs blame and attention toward migrants and away from the United States’s role in producing the root causes of their migration: the devastating effects of decades of support for repressive military regimes, corrupt state forces that act with impunity, neoliberal economic policies that deepen inequalities, and hardline strategies that have escalated rather than reduced the everyday violence linked to the proliferation of U.S.-born gangs. These histories and patterns are rendered invisible by U.S. political discourses that foreground the so-called threat of Central American migration.

Crisis implies a particular moment in a time of danger, when problems coalesce to the point that they become unmanageable. For migrants, though, crises can travel. They sprawl across boundaries and reappear in new contexts, reigniting familiar traumas and fears. They are the shatterings that come, for example, when one must suddenly leave one’s home and family to escape death threats, knowing the police cannot be trusted. “The war was hard,” reflected the former tailor from Usulután. He should know: he was a former guerrilla combatant with a prosthetic leg. “But I’d say the war was better,” he continued. “Better than to be suffering like we are today, in silence.”

Polarized representations of the caravan convey either sympathy and credence or dismay and suspicion. Some suspect that a group so large must have been covertly organized. As such, these skeptics conclude, the migrants cannot be trusted; their claims are to be dismissed as disingenuous. Yet these critics fail to see that Central Americans’ history of collective mobility is in fact a resource for survival. In 1987, more than eleven thousand Salvadoran refugees self-organized their return from Honduras to El Salvador despite the ongoing civil war there. Returning in the thousands offered them protection; they could depend on one another along the way, and their mass movement drew enough international attention to guarantee some protection against human-rights violations and state-inflicted violence. Today, the infamous migrant caravan is, tactically, a form of collective caretaking as well as a means of calling attention to the silenced stories that continue to characterize the lives of many Central Americans.

The Violent Landscapes of Sugar and Oil Palm by Nicholas Copeland

To understand the confluence of transnational and local forces that drive migration from Central America, it is necessary to take stock of the misery wrought by sugar and African palm monocultures.

In the early 1990s, an alliance of plantation owners, international capital, and state security forces—encouraged by the U.S. government and the World Bank—massively expanded export monocrop plantations in Guatemala. The political field had been cleared by a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency against a popular revolution focused on land reform. Planter elites proclaimed monocrop expansion as the ideal path to national development, the optimal use of land to maximize economic growth, and the foundation for multicultural democracy. Sacrificed in the process were maize production, the environment, and indigenous communities.

In the summer of 2018, I traveled to Guatemala’s south coast to obtain water samples for testing in a lab at my university and to learn about what it meant to live with agrarian monocultures. My guide, Nicolás Velasquez, a Quiche Mayan environmentalist and water defender who I met at a water-monitoring workshop, wanted to show me how the intensification of export-oriented agriculture has transformed local ecologies and inflicted immense environmental and political suffering on surrounding communities. As a result of revving up the capitalist monocrop economy, indigenous villagers confront a web of dispossession, exploitation, exposure, and harassment—a series of assaults on their existence and dignity, whose periodic intensification pushes them past the breaking point.

Nicolás explained that sugarcane and African palm growers previously rented land to villagers to plant maize for domestic consumption. That stopped when production expanded to meet rising demand due to free-trade agreements and the global market for biofuels, turning villagers into a captive surplus labor force. Scarce cane jobs pay a modest, locally coveted wage. But these jobs are taxing, often extremely unpleasant, and they expose workers to toxins.

In a water-rich ecosystem striated by rivers charged with mountain runoff, water pollution and access are acute concerns for downstream communities. Cane and palm are incredibly thirsty crops, which lower the water table. To extend the growing season, planters divert rivers to irrigate their fields, cutting off downstream communities. Extended drought connected to global warming aggravates water shortages and threatens maize production throughout the region. During the rainy season, waterways are contaminated with agricultural runoff.

Ingenio Tululá behind a cane field, seen through power lines. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.

Ingenios (sugar refineries) fertilize cane fields with vinasse, a liquid byproduct of cane alcohol production that is mixed with human and animal waste, as well as chemical fertilizers. They spray with a cocktail of pesticides and maturing agents like CONUR, 4D, and glyphosate.

Nicolás organized meetings in communities surrounding the ingenio Tululá. At one such meeting, a group of villagers told me that the concentrated stench from the vinasse is so piercing that it can wake them from their sleep like a slap in the face. It also attracts swarms of flies and mosquitoes. The operators of ingenios burn the cane fields before harvesting, creating thick clouds of smoke and causing flies to descend into villages. I noticed that local women carry small towels on their laps, which they use to swat away flies and mosquitos. One man showed me a nauseating photo of a bowl of soup on a tabletop, crawling with flies.

Two women sitting at desks and smiling, holding up the blue hand towels they use to swat flies. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.

Downstream villagers use dirty river water for laundry and, when desperate, to cook and bathe. It is hard to stop children from playing in the river. A young mother showed me her toddler’s torso, covered with a painful rash. Cane workers suffer from chronic kidney disease at high rates, but local health centers withhold the statistics.

Close-up of a toddler’s face and torso with a speckled red rash. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.

In addition to usurping the place of maize, spraying chokes native fruits. Coconuts grow smaller with a brown ring around the center. Villagers remember rivers teeming with fish, shrimp, and crabs—now completely gone, to the detriment of both nutrition and foodways. Villagers plant trees on nearly every inch of community land for fuel and shade, and to break the monotonous expanse of cane.

A yellow coconut, with a dark brown ring around the middle, sits on a table. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.

Community complaints trigger aggressive responses. When one village protested the installation of a wastewater ditch, company representatives advised them to form an organization. They did, and the company immediately denounced the leaders for incitement. They were assessed fines and arrest warrants were issued. The ingenio also pressured a neighboring village to restrict the troublemakers’ water access to two hours a day, pitting the communities against each other. Nicolás has taught himself relevant legal frameworks and helped to coordinate local complaints as president of the community development council. He testified in The Hague against the direct dumping of vinasse into rivers, forcing companies to install pipes and comply with periodic monitoring. He also helped the Guatemalan leftist political magazine, Plaza Publica, to create a short documentary called Desierto Verde (Green Desert). He has been threatened and defamed for his efforts.

Sugar companies combine threats with public relations campaigns and social programs distributed through their corporate social responsibilty arm, Fundazucar. Meanwhile, they hide their profits in offshore tax havens. Nicolás says that these gifts function as tax write-offs, with the consent of the authorities, who get paid off. Villagers feel powerless up against these entities, which corrupt the state to their own purposes. Leaders who fought to halt Tululá’s methane production were blacklisted, bribed by the departmental governor, and threatened. One retired soldier went so far as to accuse the company of counterinsurgency tactics. “The war never ended,” he told me.

Villagers inhabit a toxic, filthy, smoky, pestilent landscape that extracts and debases people and nature to benefit fatted elites and their government cronies. This is what some participants in the migrant caravan leave behind. This is why they walk thousands of dangerous miles to the land where Central American elites vacation and hobnob with U.S. officials—and where sugar and palm oil is traded and consumed.

Grassroots organizations throughout Guatemala denounce the excessive and illegal use of water for monocultures and other extractive industries, like mining and hydroelectric dams. They are working to defend indigenous territories and restore traditional food systems to achieve food sovereignty. Thousands joined the March for Water, Mother Earth, Territory, and Life in 2016. If these struggles prevail against the transnational network that oppresses them, as justice demands, they will do so by initiating a radical democratic restructuring from below.

Gender-Based Violence and the Plight of Guatemalan Refugees by M. Gabriela Torres

The work that now brings me to the crowded waiting room of a federal immigration court in the United States began in Guatemalan refugee camps in the 1990s. In the room with me, women in indigenous dress, fidgeting young men, and the occasional advocate mingle together with overdressed attorneys towing roller bags stuffed with fat files of white papers. There are too many little girls with sparkles: sparkly cat ears, gleaming silver backpacks, sparkle heart backpacks, and one sparkling “happy” emblazoned on the T-shirt of a six-year-old who is constantly scanning the room while clutching her mother’s hand. Armed guards from a private security firm circulate, uselessly asking people to stop blocking the doors to the courtrooms. Worry is palpable in the wringing hands, blank stares, and tired shifting of those who have opted to stand in the middle of the room, hoping for a seat to open on the wooden benches along the walls.

Back in the refugee camps sponsored by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Mayan women spoke with me about the genocide orchestrated by the Guatemalan armed forces in the early 1980s, but also about how they had built new vibrant communities in preparation for their return to highland villages after ten years in exile. Today, much of my anthropological work is done waiting, accompanying, observing, and giving testimony on what drives women and their children to seek refuge in the United States despite new barriers to their asylum claims. Knowledge of how culture works is fundamental to making the legal claim for asylum. It is key to understanding how femicide and violence against women creates refugees and compels families to leave all that they know to risk their lives on a northward journey, to sit (and sometimes die) in detention out of the earnest hope of having a chance at a life.

Gender violence in Guatemala has become utterly naturalized (see Menjívar 2011). The rate of femicide, the socially supported murder of women, is astounding. Based on figures from the country’s National Institute of Statistics, between January 2000 and May 2018 more than eleven thousand women and girls were murdered in Guatemala. Guatemala has one of the highest ratesof violent deaths among women worldwide. The prevalence of gender-based violence is not, however, a result of Guatemalans having an inherently violent nature. Countering the tendency to resort to cultural essentialism, anthropology tells us that—in Guatemala and elsewhere—such violence is a result of particular historical processes that have enabled state authority to rest on misogyny.

Wartime practices leveraged and amplified preexisting violence against women. Sexual violence was wielded as a systematic tool of governance, laying a foundation for the mano dura (firm hand or iron fist) forms of authority that sustain politicians today. Throughout the last century, gender-based violence was entrenched by a state that regularly employed sexual violence in the cause of genocide. During the Guatemalan genocide, the armed forces used gang rape in the massacres of entire indigenous communities in the highlands. Concurrently in urban areas, state agents, including police and paramilitary organizations, violated, mutilated, and publicly displayed women’s bodies (Carey and Torres 2005), encouraging the participation of the press in a display of sexualized and gendered violence that has now become commonplace in both mainstream newspapers and the yellow press (England 2018).

Women’s lives continue to be disposable, as demonstrated by the deaths of forty-one teenaged girls from a state-run orphanage in 2017. Corruption, officially sanctioned sexual assault, and the abandonment of women’s and children’s rights rendered the state unable and unwilling to safeguard the lives of women and girls, who have limited access to judicial redress. The process of seeking justice for gender-based violence is broken, despite comparatively strong laws against femicide and family violence. Laws are limited in their efficacy because misogyny takes place in everyday life—in which laws are applied and when, in how violence against women is sidelined or exploited, in the acceptance of the social suffering of rape, and in the display of machismo as an emblem of political power.

The misogynist bias of Guatemalan institutions and their agents, today as in the past, has costs. State-supported misogyny underpins the violence enacted by organized crime groups. Transnational gangs and other territorial crime organizations that have arisen amid the postconflict dissolution of local economies and authority structures have embraced the systemic use of sexual violence to exert control and to justify hypermacho authority. Gangs enact public executions, monitor and delimit the mobility of persons and goods through their territories, and demand payments from businesses. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, large areas of the country have been deemed ungovernable. All of this begets the tragedy that we see in the groups of starving people maligned and dying while seeking refuge at the U.S. border.

Gender-based violence in a country of origin is part of a continuum of violence faced by refugee populations the world over. Gender-based violence too often continues in the host countries that refugees traverse (Buckley-Zistel and Krause 2017). The current moral panic in the United States with respect to Guatemalans and other Central Americans at the border is adding to migrants’ vulnerability. Emergent humanitarian crises of human trafficking and sexual violence in detention centers loom as we engage in a national debate on the discretionary rights of persons. This is what gets decided in the federal immigration court where I began this story, and why the work of anthropology is as important today as it was in the refugee camps where I began this work more than twenty-five years ago.

The Role of the State in Hondurans Fleeing from Violence by Lirio Gutiérrez

Honduran migration to the United States is not new, but in recent decades it has increased. Violence by criminal groups, maras (gangs), and gender-based violence (domestic violence and rape) form dominant narratives explaining the massive flight of Hondurans. My research and work as an expert witness for Honduran asylum-seekers indicate that violence and insecurity are indeed factors behind their leaving; however, the main reason that Hondurans flee their country is the state’s inability and unwillingness to protect them from violence.

Since the 1990s, Honduras has been witnessing a new type of violence (see Salomon 1993; Koonings and Kruijt 2004). In contrast to the political violence that plagued Central America in the 1980s—taking the form of military death squads persecuting so-called insurgents in Honduras—the new violence is characterized by its mundane ubiquity: robbery, theft, fear of public space—and the summoning of male youth to the maras.

The Honduran government’s 2001 introduction of mano dura (“iron fist”) laws, repressive and punitive policies aimed at reducing violence and crime, contributed to intensifying levels of violence among armed actors. The maras, street gangs with transnational roots in global organized crime as well as U.S. immigration restrictions that saw the deportation of thousands of gang members to their country of origin, began resembling criminal organizations (Cruz 2010). Members started participating in criminal activities such as extorting residents and local businesses in the areas they controlled, as well as kidnapping young women (Gutiérrez Rivera 2018). Other armed actors targeted residents in rural areas or were hired as hitmen to settle scores between families.

Gender-based violence, aimed primarily at women, has become more visible in recent years. Domestic violence, rape, and kidnapping for sex trafficking constitute primary reasons for why women leave the country. In conservative Honduras, women are expected to carry out traditional gender roles. Women are perceived to be inferior to men and viewed as property. The 2014 murder of Miss Honduras, María José Alvarado Muñoz, and her sister, Sofía Trinidad Alvarado Muñoz, by María José’s boyfriend after he saw her dancing with another man at a party exemplifies how women are viewed and treated in Honduras. The country is not a safe place for women. Currently, Honduras has one of the highest femicide rates in the world, climbing by more than 250 percent between 2005 and 2013; a woman there is murdered every fourteen hours.

In court statements, Honduran asylum seekers describe experiencing forms of violence inflicted by maras and by male partners. Many tried to seek protection on their own. They may move to another neighborhood. Female victims of domestic violence may return to their parents’ house. However, members of the gang or the male partner, in the case of domestic violence, usually find the victim and continue to threaten, harass, or physically attack them. Victims of domestic violence are then forced to return to their partner’s home to face brutal punishment.

Leaving the country is usually the last option for most Honduran asylum-seekers. They make the decision to leave only after attempts to seek protection from the state fail. Many Hondurans do call the police. They try filing a report. Yet, they say, “nothing happens.” Some try to follow up only to find that the paperwork is lost in state bureaucracy. They describe how authorities tell them that they have thousands of reports and cannot follow up on all of them. It can take years for authorities to investigate a case. State bureaucracy in Honduras is inefficient, but the real reason that these reports are not investigated is because such cases of violence are not a priority—not compared to drug trafficking or the illicit work of large criminal organizations. State authorities may also discourage individuals from filing reports, especially with women victims of violence. Female asylum seekers describe how police officers would tell them that filing a report is useless because “it’s normal for a man to beat his wife.” These examples show an unwillingness on the part of the state to address cases of violence (see Menjivar and Drysdale Walsh 2017).

More than being unwilling, though, the Honduran state is unable to protect Hondurans. A deficit of institutions, public policies, experts, and record-keeping hinder the state’s ability to track the occurrence and consequences of violence and crime among different armed actors. State authorities simply do not know how many Hondurans have been internally displaced by violence and crime. Staff working at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees told me that experts on forced displacement and social violence had to be brought in from abroad as Honduras lacked experts who could design and implement public policies. Foreign experts pointed out further problems, such as poor coordination between state institutions involved in public policy and the absence of reliable information and data. Maps, censuses, and archives are either unavailable or inaccurate. But a consequence of the state’s inability to produce standardized and reliable information and to coordinate among various institutions is an inability to prevent violence or to offer security to its victims.

Hondurans leave because Honduras is not safe. The Honduran state plays a central role in the exodus, as it is unable and unwilling to provide protection and security to victims of violence.

Reflections from a Daughter of the Postwar by Fiore Stella Bran Aragón

As a daughter of the postwar in Nicaragua, I never thought I would witness a brutal dictatorship like the one my parents and grandparents endured. But right now, for me, it is hard to breathe. I feel like Álvaro Conrado, one of the youngest victims of the protests in my country. I breathe in struggle and death. I’ve been in the streets; I was out there, organizing. It is painful to think that I have the privilege to participate in creating strategy, to think, to write, to migrate, when some of my friends are imprisoned and others killed.

Many reflections emerge in this terrible repetition of a history of dictatorship. Here, I offer a few.

I am a daughter of the postwar period in Nicaragua, one of the millennials who those who fought in the Sandinista Revolution saw as apathetic, apolitical, “social media activists.” They thought we didn’t know how to go out and fight in the streets.

Over the past eight months, my generation has demonstrated just the opposite. We took to the streets to fight against a dictatorship with little more than our Nicaraguan flags. We had little knowledge of how to organize a student movement, much less a political struggle, and we were especially unprepared to defend ourselves against government-sponsored killers.

In the last three months I have also learned how it feels to become a refugee, to lose almost everything, and also to feel solidarity and human love in a much deeper way.

My generation’s lack of experience around political organizing comes from growing up in a postwar context. Since we were kids we have heard the stories of a failed revolution that stole the lives of so many young people, as well as the hope of a new Nicaragua. Depending on a family’s political affiliation, the story varied in tone and substance, but it always shared the same conclusion: the Sandinista Revolution was the only chance for a nation-building project, a unique opportunity to achieve utopia. And it was lost.

I began to ask questions about the Revolution in university classrooms and in activist circles. At home, I encountered an unbreakable silence about the Revolution and its aftermath, about those who died and those who migrated to get away from the disaster. It wasn’t worth trying to talk about “that” because it would mean touching an open wound, because it was already over, because this was a different Nicaragua, and because my parents did not believe that I would ever experience the same thing.

When Daniel Ortega became president in 2006, I was in my last year of primary school. At that time I didn’t understand basic political concepts. I had no idea that another dictatorship was emerging. Today I believe that reflections on our history are more important than ever, for while we may not know the microhistories of the Nicaragua of our mothers and fathers, ever since we took to the streets on April 18, 2018 we now carry the same history in our skin.

We are self-organized, with different identities and demands, but united by a sense of justice and freedom that goes beyond politics, economics, and education. For us, it is a matter of survival. This self-organized movement has taken on an impressive anarchic and collective character, but it has also posed challenges in terms of representation and influence in the traditional political spheres where many crucial decisions are made. After several months of struggle, we are not sure how to move forward. Even so, we continue resisting from wherever we can—especially in the difficult space that is daily life, where the pain is felt deeply in the flesh.

That pain was particularly acute for me on August 25, 2018, when thirty of my colleagues and friends from the student movement were arrested and tortured. Now they face charges of being terrorists. That afternoon I was not with them. I was reviewing the final draft of my thesis, which I would defend the following week. That day changed everything: I went from a safe house into exile with almost nothing but a suitcase.

I arrived in northern Mexico to work in a migrant shelter that adjoins La Bestia, the dreaded train that is the refuge and tomb of thousands of migrants fleeing terror in their own countries only to fall prey to organized crime and the Mexican authorities. La Bestia is a deep source of pain. In these months I have seen hundreds of migrants with their stories and their dreams, many of them scattered from the notorious caravan that fell apart en route. Some of these migrants are young Nicaraguans fleeing the Ortega regime. They ask me questions, and I ask them questions in turn; some questions we share and others are very different. I am grateful for these questions even as answers remain elusive.

After eight months of resistance, solidarity, and exile, I have more questions than when we started: How much more can we resist? Will I go back to Nicaragua and have a home? When the official stories of this insurrection are written, will those of the young people who travel on La Bestia—stories that go against the grain of the official history—be included? How can we sustain an unarmed resistance against a murderous government and somehow avoid another war? Or, to add a question from the young refugees who, on December 21, 2018, turned themselves in to immigration authorities on the Brownsville-Matamoros Bridge: what will happen to us when the Trump administration does not believe us and deports us back to Nicaragua?

Discussion Questions

• What are the push factors described in these essays? What are some push factors you can think of that aren’t described in these essays?
• What are some pull factors described in these essays? What are some pull factors you can think of that aren’t described in these essays?