Recently, I was invited to Chiapas, Mexico, to assist the Chiapas Education Project in setting up a computer lab in the impoverished town of Malpaso. For the project’s DACA founder, Chris Esponda, this journey marked the realization of two lifelong dreams—returning to his hometown for the first time since leaving as a child and bringing technology to the youth there so that migration wouldn’t be their only option.
Just three hours from the southern border, Malpaso sits at the meeting point of town and country—marked by a shallow river where I spent many afternoons watching the locals fish with nets and graze their sheep, or marveling at the fireflies dancing at dusk, or conversing with one of the migrant families who’d stopped to rest their feet in its cool waters.
The shelters were all full, as were the park benches and streets. So some migrants, with nowhere else to go, came to sleep in the bushes on their journeys from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and beyond. We’d see them walking by the hundreds along the steep mountain highways for miles, many with children on their backs. Offering rides to them is punishable as human trafficking, buses require documents, and the government recently shut down La Bestia—the infamous Death Train—so now, many have no choice but to walk.
The people of Malpaso know all about migrant life. For generations, most families have watched at least one of their young ones leave for a better life in El Norte. Before, many would return seasonally, intending to come home for good one day. Now, with crossing so difficult, elders watch their children leave, knowing they may never return.
When a southern migrant passes by their doorways, locals tell me, they offer them food if they have it, and pray that someone else will do the same for their loved ones up north. Already an exodus point with few resources, the area has become a full-blown transit hub, with even more demand for the little that is left.
Sometimes I’d walk the streets of the largest town within an hour’s drive, Arriaga— a ramshackle collection of aging buildings, railroad tracks, an always busy Western Union, and a growing number of tents set up in the shadows—and imagine what it was like to grow up in a place where most of your classmates left for good, the streets were full of foreigners passing through on their way to somewhere else, and the only way to survive is to go work in a tourist town for the Digital Nomads who’ve driven up rents so high that fewer locals can afford to remain.
I’d regularly see “Missing” posters for teenagers and wonder if they were amongst those who’ve been disappeared by narcos, or if they’d joined a caravan to the Land of Dreams.
At times, I worried that by bringing computers, we’d be contributing to our students becoming even more influenced by social media to risk the trek too. But that message is already everywhere. Instead, by providing the ability to access and influence that media and technology themselves, it’s our hope that they will have the skills and the voice to be able to thrive in this new digital landscape wherever they end up.
And maybe enough of them will be able to stay that one day, Malpaso can once again be a place to call Home.
To learn more about the Chiapas Education Project (and how you can donate funds or donate used computers and accessories) visit https://chiapaseducation.org. It’s truly a beautiful and inspiring program that is greatly needed.
Reflections on the Wild beneath our skies and skin: the understory, the mulch, and the wild grief and bliss of living in these times.