# Tuxtla seen by a cab driver



## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

As I was leaving Tuxta to go to the airport, a man approached the cab asking for a peso. He said he was from Guatemala and needed money for food and to leave for the US
The cab driver told me he did not know what was happening but that there were hundreds of Central American stuck in Tuxtla begging.
He said the coyotes cross them and the rob the and abandon them.
The Beast is leaving from Arriaga . It is a very dangerous place for migrants to get to and they get kidnapped and robbed before getting on the train. Many off them get killed falling off or getting limbs cut off, I have noticed a number of people without limbs all over the place.
For some reason many of them now go to Tuxtla where they try to make a little money to be able to leave but there are many retens on the roads out of Chiapas and many of them get caught.
It is a real sad situation but the good news is that the US State department has declared Chiapas a safe state, obviously many people would not agree if they knew about it or could be heard.


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

citlali said:


> It is a real sad situation but the good news is that the US State department has declared Chiapas a safe state, obviously many people would not agree if they knew about it or could be heard.


Perhaps Chiapas is safe for foreign visitors unless they're desperate immigrants from Central America.


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

yes it has been safe for tourists so far .


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## ojosazules11 (Nov 3, 2013)

There is a good book detailing the plight of Central American children and youth traversing Mexico to try to get to the US - often in search of their mothers who made the trek years before to be able to send money and material goods back to their children left behind with grandmothers or other relatives. The book is "Enrique's Journey" by Sonia Nazario, and is biased on her interviews with real children and youth, but "hung" on the story of one young Honduran in particular, Enrique. 

As part of her investigation into this issue, the author actually rode on top of "La Bestia" (The Beast), the train running north through Mexico, and controlled by gangs. The book is based on her Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in the Los Angeles Times published in 2002.

It's a highly readable book, even though the subject matter is often harsh. She showcases not only some of the worst behaviour of the human race, but also the best. There is a small village along the route in southern Mexico where the townspeople, poor though they themselves are, gather along the tracks whenever the train is due to come through. The train slows down while passing through the village and the villagers throw food, drinks, and sweaters to the people on top of the train. One of the "food throwers" told the author, "If I have one tortilla, I give half away. God will bring me more." One woman who is over one hundred years old and lived through the Mexican Revolution prepares bags of food so her 70 year old daughter can go to the tracks and throw them up to the migrants. 

The book also tells back stories about what drives so many to make this dangerous trip, with its inherent risk of failure, at best being deported back to their country, at worst dismemberment or death.


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

There is also a movie telling a story of a young girl from Honduras who rides the train to the US. It is painful to watch in places, especially some of the opening scenes showing life in the gangs, but it is a good movie. Sin Nombre (2009, Dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga)


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

_


Isla Verde said:



Perhaps Chiapas is safe for foreign visitors unless they're desperate immigrants from Central America.

Click to expand...

_Or unless they innocently and naively wander about places they do not belong without a hint as to the inherent dangers thereabouts.

We´ve lived in Mexico for 14 years and Chiapas part of every year for eight years. In about 2007, we met a U.S. young woman friend who was a student at the University of Californa at Berkeley studying for an advanced degree from that institution who was sent to Chiapas to study illegal deforestion actviities - a serious and ongoing problem there - and was, with a local Mexican colleague, walking through the Lacandon Jungle counting trees in order to assess the progress or lack thereof of forest preservaton efforts and at one point in their tree-counting efforts one day far out in the forest, they crossed a wooded área and suddenly came upon a large group of highly agitated and intoxicated indigenous men armed with machetes. Their demeanor was quite threatening and they informed our Berkeley graduate student friend and her Mexican colleague that they had the choice of exiting the forest immediately or being cut to pieces and, as those of us who have lived in Mexico for some time know, if you are sliced up by machetes on indigenous lands in the forests in Chiapas - you will be gone and forgotten forever and non-indigenous authorities will never come searching for your remains.

She never re-entered that forest again. Is now gone from Mexico and has been for some time - never to return.

Just remember the old song from when you were a child. "_If you go out in the woods today, you never should go alone." _ And don´t piss off the locals, bears or humans.


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## buzzbar (Feb 9, 2013)

I enjoyed Sin Nombre, and also a more recent fictional movie on the subject – The Golden Dream. It is different from many of the other migrant movies by asking if life in USA is reward enough for the dangers that need to be faced and the sacrifices that have to be made to get there. The original name of the movie was “the gilded cage” – is life as an illegal migrant in USA a case of swapping one cage for another? 

When I was living in Cabo I was one of the few non-Mexicans living in the ‘old town’ colonia there so was often engaged by locals who spoke English, most of whom it turned out had lived in USA and voluntarily returned to Mexico. They’d frequently discuss their experiences over there and why they made the decision to return home. 
Obviously these people are an exception, but it got me interested in the issue of return migration and I pulled up a study a while back that surveyed 600 Mexicans in Jalisco who had lived in USA but were now back in Mexico. A couple of the stats that I thought significant were that 89% of those questioned returned on their own volition to Mexico, and that 68% only ever intended to migrate temporarily to USA.

The issue of return migration seems to have been buried under more sexy and panic inducing immigration discussion points, but I reckon it’s one that should be kept alive. It’d be interesting to see a study that looked at Central American returnees – obviously the drivers and intentions of someone fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would likely be very different to a person in Mexico who crossed the border solely for economic reasons, but how different are the reasons for those who return home?


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

Family ties are usualy very strong and what people forget is that many of the undocumented want to make enough money to start a farm, buy a cab, ge something to start their own business in their country and want to return since it is very difficult and dangerous to bring the family. 
By making it difficult to cross the border it aso encourages people who otherwise would go back to their country to stay. Many of them start a new family in the state and many abandon the original family or continue to support the original family but do not go back.
When I was working back in a winery in California many of the men had 2 families and a bunch of kids to support from several different women. 
Making it difficult to go back wrecks the family unit. 
We only had Mexicans from Michoacan working in the vineyard but I would imagine, that many Central Americans who went through the double or triple hell of crossing borders are even less incline to return nowadays as the trip is very dangerous. They also can qualify as refugies more easily than the Mexicans which would encourage the rest of the family to join them. Their situation is different but no matter what I would think that the return back and forth would be more limited now that it is more dangerous than ever to cross the Mexican and Us borders.

In the old days the workers would show up for the harvest attendd the harvest party bought new hats boots, belts and jeans and would hit the road to go back as soon as the harvest was over. Nowadays they seem to want to stay longer to accumulate money and start something back in Mexico and not come back.
The US are under the false impression that everyone wants to become a citizen..what people want is to be with their family and if they can work for a few months or a few years and improve their lot back home they will do that. It is not everyone ´s dream to become a citizen and live there for ever.


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

buzzbar said:


> I enjoyed Sin Nombre, and also a more recent fictional movie on the subject – The Golden Dream. It is different from many of the other migrant movies by asking if life in USA is reward enough for the dangers that need to be faced and the sacrifices that have to be made to get there. The original name of the movie was “the gilded cage” – is life as an illegal migrant in USA a case of swapping one cage for another?
> 
> When I was living in Cabo I was one of the few non-Mexicans living in the ‘old town’ colonia there so was often engaged by locals who spoke English, most of whom it turned out had lived in USA and voluntarily returned to Mexico. They’d frequently discuss their experiences over there and why they made the decision to return home.
> Obviously these people are an exception, but it got me interested in the issue of return migration and I pulled up a study a while back that surveyed 600 Mexicans in Jalisco who had lived in USA but were now back in Mexico. A couple of the stats that I thought significant were that 89% of those questioned returned on their own volition to Mexico, and that 68% only ever intended to migrate temporarily to USA.
> ...


I don't think returned immigrants really are an exception. I meet tons of people in Mexico who spent some time in the US and are now living in Mexico again. It is by no means a one way street. I recently heard a story on NPR stating that the numbers of Mexicans leaving the US each year is currently about the same as the number going north, probably due to the shortage of jobs in the US. I don't remember what program it was.


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## buzzbar (Feb 9, 2013)

Yeah, when I get time I might take a look around for data to see if it matches the claim made in the quoted study, that the thirty year migration cycle to USA ended in the mid 2000’s and since then we've been in a return migration era.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

_


Isla Verde said:



Perhaps Chiapas is safe for foreign visitors unless they're desperate immigrants from Central America.

Click to expand...

_Quite welcoming for Alabama boys and French girls - both from afar. For our friends from rudimentary villages in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Tabasco, Yucatán and other such places, the knives carried by their adversarial functionaries are always greased and in the sneath ready for instant deployment in the event of even minor controversy. In Mexico, remember, there are unlikely to be any consequences for cutting the throats of those considered by authorities to have been inconsequential which includes damn near all the indigenous in the land.

The naivete of foreigners lving on these shores oblivious to their surroundings is astonishing.


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## vantexan (Sep 4, 2011)

TundraGreen said:


> There is also a movie telling a story of a young girl from Honduras who rides the train to the US. It is painful to watch in places, especially some of the opening scenes showing life in the gangs, but it is a good movie. Sin Nombre (2009, Dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga)


Saw that, excellent movie!


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

yes those are movies El Norte was another good one..what is happening right now in Tuxtla apparently a new thing, it is worrysome because that means we have lots of poor and desperate people stuck there and they have to live off something so we can brace ourselves for a crime wave..
It is not that easy to get out of Chiapas without going through retens , when the word is out and the coyotes start charging to get out where is the money to come out of?


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

One scene I will always remember fron the excellent movie _El Norte _was when the Honduran kids, having just arrived illegally in the United States, for the first time encountered their first ever functioning flush toilet. After urinating into that toilet they were transfixed by the fact that they could simply pull a lever and the waste products woud magically disappear. 

When we first moved to Lake Chapala, our quite efficient and meticulous housekeeper nearly burned up our new kitchen sink garbage disposal because she had no idea that she needed to run cold wáter in the sink when utilizing that garbage disposal to grind foodstuffs for disposal down the drain. When we moved to Chiapas, we had to buy a garbage disposal in Guadalajara to take down there with us since such mechanical contrivances were hardly known down there in those days (2006). The guys who installed tha garbage disposal never thought to install an on/off switch and, when we questioned them about how we should start and stop the garhage disposal they responded that we should simply get on our knees and reach under the sink and plug in or unplug the electrical cord to make it work or cease to to function. We informed them that this was not to be and they subsequently remedied the situation. These were good electricians but they had never seen one of those things before.

When we built our new home in San Cristóbal where certain modern appliances are not that well known,, the guys who installed our new dishwasher were distressed because there was no hot wáter inlet. We had to explain to them that the dishwasher heated its own hot wáter within the machine before washing the dishes. Later, we caught them spending an inordinate amount of time coordinating those useless clocks on the stove and other new appliances in our new kitchen to make sure all of those useless clocks were properly synchronized. We finally told them; "F*ck the clocks. Wrap it up and get the hell out of here.." 

On the other hand, we have learned a lot down here from local people with whom we work as well. The propensity of the ubiquitous poisonous Black Widow Spiders to spin their hardly noticeable webs and hide in one´s shoes left lying about the floor as an example. Black Widows are not aggressive creatures but do not take kindly to one´s sticking one´s foot into their lairs so inadverent obtrusive behavior innocently meant as the notion of simply putting on shoes in the morning can result in death and all the Black Widow is doing when it poisons you in reaction to your unintended insolent intrusión on her realm, is protecting her space. and that of her babies . 

God is on his throne but has other things to which to attend over and above your agony over having pissed off a Black Widow no matter how innocent the intrusión resulting in your having to die over such a minor and unintended social infraction.


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