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.