El Paso
The city of El Paso viewed from an incoming plane looks very much a sleepy town in the middle of a no-where-desert, a town I remember from the Western movies I liked to see in my younger days. Located right in the geographical middle of the ongoing disputes about migration, it continues to generate a discourse which, as in the movies of old, gravitates perilously between the good guys and the bad guys. In the case of migrants, one may even include the 'ugly' with the bad. More modern versions of the traditional Western film have lost their relevance in a world that has become dangerously polarised between the good (legals and documented) and the bad (illegals and undocumented).
Visiting a government-run 'house' for undocumented minors, a detention centre humanely managed, I came across many children from Guatemala and Honduras who looked at me with eyes sunk deeply and sadly in their sockets. They looked to me like children from indigenous communities.
I was disturbed by the haunted look in their eyes. When I talked to them they talked little but kept looking into my eyes. Their eyes were emotionless, dried and possibly empty. I tried to imagine the long journey that had brought them to El Paso, the innumerable difficulties and humiliations they must have put up with. Hard as I tried to figure out the unsung and unrecorded tragedy of their lives, I felt unable to gauge the depth of that empty look.
What struck me forcefully when I left the renovated building that houses 95 minor boys and girls was the profound disappointment those children must have felt when they were caught by a police patrol inside US territory. All that effort, and that long journey for nothing! All the money paid by their families in vain! They will return, rather, they will be deported, to the despairing poverty they came from. All for nothing... or perhaps to try again.
Fernando Franco SJ (10 March 2007)