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January 17, 2018 - Image 12

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Wednesday, January 17, 2018 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, January 17, 2018 // The Statement
5B

In Search of a Home

by Abigail Muro, Daily Staff Reporter

I


get homesick when I look at
pictures of the Sonoran desert.
The gray-green Saguaro cacti,
reaching their limbs past the

distant, jagged mountain peaks toward
a radiant blue sky, feel like family. Home
is a white and gray tent, small enough
to look natural among the desert brush
and stones.

I was born in Tucson, Arizona, but

by the time I was old enough to know
what a home was, I had already moved
to Washington, D.C., where I grew up.
So proud was I of the camping I’d done
as a toddler that I used to tell my ele-
mentary school friends I was born in a
tent so close to the Mexican border that
my parents never knew for sure which
country I was actually born in.

When I was five or six, my father

taught me, while reading me a book
about the desert, that the only place in
the world Saguaro cacti grow is Arizo-
na, California and Mexico. I thought, for
a long time, that meant the cacti grew in
clusters, that they stopped at the border
and restarted a few miles away. I fig-
ured that Arizona’s border was sealed
off, like a hockey arena; that on one side
of the plexiglass was Arizona and all its
wonders and on the other was the rest of

the world. Needless to say, I was wrong.
The place where Saguaro cacti grow
is really just one big area, similar in
shape to Florida. The main concentra-
tion of cacti is divided up pretty evenly
between Arizona and Mexico so that if
one were to walk through the Sonoran
desert and let their mind wander, they
might accidentally walk from the Unit-
ed States to Mexico.

The first time my family went back

to visit Arizona after the big move
was when I was in second grade. We
stayed a few days with friends in Tuc-
son and then headed to Organ Pipe Cac-
tus National Monument for a few days
of hiking and camping under the huge
desert sky. The monument is a compel-
ling spot: It’s nestled right up against
the Mexican border, in some of the most
rugged desert in the United States. It
glows orange in the morning and a deep
magenta in the evening as the sun rises
and sets, reflecting off the grays and
browns and greens of the landscape.

We went in the spring, the best time

of year to camp in Arizona, and pitched
a tent amid a blanket of orangey wild-
flowers that dotted the desert floor.
After our first night under the stars,
my dad woke up early to take one of his

usual long, desert walks. This particu-
lar morning, my older sister Olivia and I
decided to tag along too. I padded care-
lessly across the desert sand, my lime
green sneakers crunching against the
gravelly desert floor. It was a perfect
Arizona morning, exactly like how I’d
“remembered” based on the stories and
pictures in my head from family lore and
memories. The jagged mountains looked
like they had been etched into the sky
and the air felt so clean and clear, it was
like a sip of water.

Much to my delight, my dad let us

wander slightly off the path until we
discovered a small ravine that had been
eroded out of the rock and dust by water
some hundreds of years before. Ever the
explorers, Olivia and I were intrigued.
Attracted to the terrain and intriguing
depression we climbed carefully down
it, examining the rough boulders and
rock faces as we went. Olivia took the
lead and I followed, my dad helping me
find firm footing amid the grit.

“Hey! Someone littered here!” Oliv-

ia suddenly called out, once she had
reached the bottom. My dad and I
looked up to find her squatting close
to the ground, prodding at what looked
like a candy wrapper. My dad looked

surprised. Most of the people that
camped in a location this hard to find
loved and respected the Earth enough
to bring their trash with them when
they left. So when Dad and I reached the
bottom too, we went over to investigate.
It seemed that whoever had been there
had used the ravine as their personal
trash can. There were several pieces of
paper and some empty plastic bottles of
orange juice thrown haphazardly onto
the ground under a Palo Verde tree.

“It’s in another language,” Olivia

reported, with a piece of paper with
funny looking words on it in her hands.

My dad peered at it curiously, before

deducing the language was Spanish.
“It’s likely that this trash was left here
by Mexican immigrants that were prob-
ably walking across the border from
Mexico,” he said.

“Why don’t they take a plane, or

drive?” my nine year-old sister asked,
not missing a beat.

“Well, these people aren’t allowed

to come into our country because they
haven’t gotten permission,” my dad
explained, not mincing his words. “But
they probably can’t find a job in Mex-
ico. A lot of the people that come here
illegally would rather stay at home with
their families, but need some way to
make money and they can’t do that in
Mexico, so they come here.”

“So it’s not allowed?” Olivia probed.
“No, it’s not.”
“Is it against the law?”
“It is.”
“So the trash was left by bad guys?”
My dad paused a second. Olivia and

I stared at him, and then at the pile of
trash at our feet, in wonder. “Well, it’s
complicated,” my dad said.

Many parents would have left the

conversation here, leaving the dis-
cussion about illegal immigrants for
another day, but my dad went on, “Yes,
it is technically illegal for them to come
into the U.S. this way, but they are not
bad people. They want a better life in
America, for themselves and for their
families, just like so many people that
are already here do. So you can under-
stand why they walk. They are not
doing anything bad or hurting anyone.”

That was enough of an explanation

for Olivia and she seemed to be out of
questions, but she, like I, seemed to
be having trouble wrapping her mind

around how much it must take to leave
one’s home and family. This is some-
thing that I now, years of experience
and education later, realize I will never
be able to understand. I had listened to
the whole conversation, wide-eyed and
now couldn’t stop myself from gawking
at what the immigrants had left behind.
Whose hands had touched those pieces
of paper? Whose mouths had sipped the
last bit of orange juice out of the plastic
bottles?

For the first time, I was able to see

the desert around me as a barrier or a
challenge, rather than just as a vaca-
tion sanctuary. I thought about how hot
the desert gets during the day, about
the rattlesnakes and scorpions that
scared me so much I had to have my
mom shake out my shoes for me in the
morning. I wondered if the immigrants
had a tent, and pictured them sleeping
out in the open, at the mercy of the dry
lightning strikes and howling coyotes. I
wondered what could possibly be so bad
about their home to make them want to
leave everything and everyone to come
to the United States. Where were their
families? How far had they walked?
Didn’t their feet hurt?

We
continued
puttering
around

among the cacti and scrubby trees, but
these new thoughts stuck in my head.
When we got back to the campsite, my
sister and I tripped over our sentences,
each wanting to be the one to explain to
our mom what we had seen and what we
had learned. There was excitement in
our voices and wonderment in our eyes,
but in the back of my throat, there was
a tightening of concern for these people
and the loved ones they’d left behind.
I never forgot that scene in the arroyo
and those candy wrappers — evidence
of other lives doing the best they could.

A couple mornings later it was time to

head home. With the sun getting warm
again, we packed up camp and my sister
and I climbed back up into the rental
car to head back to civilization.

I was half asleep against the window

when my sister squawked, “LOOK!” My
eyes flew open and I craned my neck out
the window to see a big army-green tint-
ed bus along the side of the road. Sitting
in the dirt next to it was a group of men,
with brown, dark hair and dirty clothes.
My parents exchanged a look.

“What are those people doing there?”

Olivia asked.

“Remember that trash we saw in the

desert?” my dad said gently. My sister
and I nodded, wordlessly. “It’s possible
that the men who left it there are the
same ones sitting right there. If it’s not
those same people, it is probably people
like them, who have also crossed the bor-
der to try to make money to send back to
their families. It seems like they are get-
ting picked up by Border Patrol and they
will likely be sent back to Mexico.”

My sister and I sat in silence, twist-

ing ourselves around to stare out the
back window until the men and the bus
faded into the distance. I still remem-
ber some of their faces. They looked
tired like they hadn’t slept in days and
maybe hadn’t slept well in years. None
of them seemed particularly surprised.
Rather, they looked blank. It was like
what they had been running from had
finally, inevitably caught up to them.
It was very apparent to me: They were
simply waiting.

For the first time, I saw the faces

attached to the statistics. I had seen
the evidence of their journey, had even
tried to imagine what it might be like to
walk all day under the blistering sun. I
had caught a glimpse of the end of the
first leg of their journey. I imagined
them being picked up like pawns on a
chessboard and placed back in Mexico,
right back at the starting line. I won-
dered if they’d try again and if they did,
if they’d be caught once more and stuck
in an endless cycle. And while I’d seen

enough to think of the immigrants as
human, I knew that I’d only seen snap-
shots, that I didn’t know the full extent
of their suffering and didn’t know any
other pieces of their lives. I wondered
if I would do the same thing if I hadn’t
been born in this country, if I’d walk the
world for myself and the people I love,
even if it was breaking the laws, to find
a place I could call home.

My parents have always taught me that

laws are to be followed. Even today as I
near my twenties, I am still told to only
cross at crosswalks, to stop at all stop
signs and red lights and to read every
legal document completely and follow it
to a T. So it took me a long time to figure
out how my parents could excuse these
people for breaking the law.

The pursuit of comfort, happiness

and safety for one’s family is a univer-
sal pursuit. Before there were countries
and states, there were just territories,
and before that, there was just land.
And while of course, it’s not as simple
anymore as letting people come and go
between countries as they please, this
idea, of one Earth, home to anyone and
anything grown from it, is one that in
some cases comes before politics and
legislation. For me, this was a beginning
to an understanding that not everything
is black and white. There is a vast and
complicated gray area involved with
almost every issue.

My dad had told me, back at the

ravine in Organ Pipe National Monu-
ment that the immigrants were not bad
people, but he didn’t have to. I saw it
on their faces as we drove by. I didn’t
see, the way some people seem to see
malice, greed or laziness. All I saw
were humans, walking from one side of
the Sonoran desert to the other, in the
search of a home.
Emma Richter/Daily

Emma Richter/Daily

I had seen the evidence of

their journey, had even tried
to imagine what it might be
like to walk all day under the

blistering sun.

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