Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

A report by the Department of Homeland Security (2018) indicates that most undocumented immigrants arriving in the US during the actual migrant crisis are coming from Central America - particularly from the Northern Triangle region (i.e. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), but also an increase of the migrants from the Caribbean region (e.g., Cuba, Haiti). Although I concede some efforts and collaborative agreements among the regional nations have been made, I still maintain that we shall not see a solution soon. Most of the scholars in the field find the roots of our migrant crisis trace back to decades of US interventionism and bloody coups in Central America (Gordon, 2019). However, as a result of my study, I found a more complex cluster of reasons such as indigenous prosecutions, poverty, unemployment, lack of opportunity. In the middle of this migrant crisis, a group of Mexican teachers organized freely and instinctively to trying to teach the hundreds of children and adults trapped in Juarez, Mexico, both waiting to cross to US soil and ask for refugee or waiting for their court appointments. This paper narrates an oral history of the main actors involved in this beautiful project (e.g., teachers, priests, Mayan children, and their families, migrant children, and their families, the Juarez community).