I grew up in the north of México in a city called Tecate, B.C. I used to think that I could, just as well, have grown anywhere else. I used to ignore, as I grew up, the situations of Mexican migrants. My family was not and that is why they always made sure that I didn’t know what, thanks to them, “I didn’t need to know.” My father and my uncles crossed the border as if getting into the neighbor’s yard to retrieve something they had lost. Only they hadn’t lost anything and were looking for what they never had, and without permission but with confidence. The confidence of someone who has crossed a territory that is not theirs many times knowing they shouldn’t. They went back and forth from the United States to Mexico, sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied. Later, they crossed “chickens.”

I grew up while my uncle lived in a gringo jail that I called “the boarding school.” There he read the Bible twice, took classes, learned to draw, made foreign friends, wrote letters to the woman who would later become his wife, and in the eyes of the family, “finished growing up.” Because of all this, it took me many years to realize that it wasn’t actually a boarding school, and many more to know what had led him there: being a pollero.

I have always had a visa, and I first learned about crossing the river or the desert from TV rather than from my family. Even when I heard about it, I was certain that these were things that happened on the screen and just happened to have occurred to them: youthful adventures. I never even considered the possibility that those could happen to me or any of my cousins. When I imagined us in adulthood on “the other side,” it was with such successful jobs that had led us to be sought after over there.

I was wrong. I was wrong like someone who thinks that their own experience is the norm and that what their context allowed them to take for granted also applied to those they cared about. And our families were wrong, too, believing that by granting us an education, they were giving us the opportunity to stay at home. That necessity would not force us to knock on foreign doors in contexts that were intended to not be ours. So when my college-educated cousins used their tourist visas to easily cross to the other side and look for jobs that didn’t even require elementary school, I didn’t understand. I thought they didn’t understand either because if they did, they would realize that everything that had been done was done precisely so they wouldn’t have to do what they were doing, what our parents had done, what our grandmothers had finally stopped crying about.

The thing is, as my cousin Diego always points out to me, if in Mexico with his degree he earned even half of what he earns over there waving signs, he would be here, and he does everything to return, that home is still the goal and home will always be on this side. So he is over there and I am here. And over there, he has come to (mis)understand that what I didn’t want him to do, because it was hard, is still having it easy. And that for others, to be able to do what he is doing, they have had to cross the path in the most violent ways for the most violent reasons.That his degree and English classes have given him an advantage even as a taco vendor.That there are those who are not choosing but are being forced.

The path to freedom, for some migrants, is a path that takes you away from home. When Y.M. crossed into the United States, she didn’t try to get a visa first; she knew they wouldn’t give it to her. She went through the eagle’s nest, crossed the wall, and ran. The coyote abandoned her and her niece on the way, and the police caught them. The police took the laces from her sneakers; she thought it was to prevent her from running, later she found out it was because others had used them to commit suicide. She didn’t cry, she got a lawyer and fought for asylum, but they didn’t grant it. They let her out on bail while they sentenced her case, so she escaped. She has no identification.She can’t reveal her identity.She left seeking freedom from a system that wouldn’t let her earn enough, on the way she lost her name, and still she didn’t return.

For Julio Tadeo, twenty-two, freedom still tastes like a Starbucks drink. Julio had the worst coyote of all, or so he thinks. The most horrible one, he says: she gave him very little to eat, and he had to stuff himself with about twenty tortillas to feel full. On the way, he encountered a border patrol agent who spoke Spanish.The guy was Mexican. He was racist. Julio was a minor, so they didn’t deport him and let him call his mom. The process of seeking asylum in the United States led him to foster homes while they didn’t allow him to be with his mom. Finally, he was granted asylum, and his mom paid for a flight so he could join her. So one Saturday at six in the morning, they woke him up and told him they were going to take him to his mom. On the way to the airport, they bought him a drink from the green mermaid: nothing had ever tasted so good.

For some women, seeking freedom means escaping from those who should protect them. This is the case of a girl from Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, who had to cross the border pretending to be her cousin because her father used to go to her grandmother's house, where she lived, asking her to sleep with him. Her mother had gone to the other side with her brother a few years earlier; she had left her because it is very difficult to cross the desert with two children. The girl had to listen to her father shout outside her grandmother’s house for her to come out, that if she didn’t come out, he would shoot her, that he preferred to see her dead. She told her mom that she didn’t mind if she had to cross the hill alone, but she couldn’t stay there anymore. Before getting on the plane, she kept telling herself: "I’m not Juana. I’m not Juana. I’m not Juana. I’m Erika. I’m Erika. I’m Erika." When she arrived at the airport, they didn’t want to let her board the plane because minors cannot fly without an adult, but just when everything was about to fall apart, an old lady in a wheelchair told the flight attendant that the girl was with her. The flight attendant didn’t ask the lady anything. Juana didn’t have to tell the lady anything. She was like her guardian angel.

The path to freedom, for other migrants, is the one that allows them to return home. The first time Diego went to the United States was because our grandmother left him some land, and he didn't even have enough money to put it in his name. He lived a slow life there, worked like a robot, moving forward almost without feeling. When he finally could return home, home was no longer the same, the town was no longer the same, he had to create the home again, but he did it knowing that there would never be a home for him that wasn't called Mexico.

To be able to leave my small town, I cried, struggled, and studied. To leave, I left. And I exchanged my language for another job, for another country.And in that other language, in that other country, that job was as an interpreter. I want to tell you that who interprets never leaves; those who interpret always returns; always stays. Your voice is their voice. Their words are more than my words. Our broken, inappropriate, incomprehensible words to anyone except a native anchor us. These broken, inappropriate, incomprehensible words to anyone except someone in the middle, these are our words.

I have a job where I'm an English-Spanish interpreter for Latin American individuals deprived of their freedom, that is, people in US prisons. My job doesn't mean I couldn't be an interpreter for Europeans who speak Spanish, but I've never had to interpret for someone from Spain. Instead, American prisons are full of Latin American immigrants. Being a person deprived of freedom inherently implies being a person in search of freedom, serving a sentence, waiting to get out, taking workshops, classes, and doing whatever it takes to spend less time inside.

I had only been working as an interpreter for a few days when I received a call from a doctor who wanted me to interpret for a Mexican patient. He said, "First, we need to understand the reason why he came, so I'm going to spell out the letters in his medical assistance request, and you tell me what he wrote." After a while of him spelling and me writing, him spelling again and me writing once more, I said, "I'm jotting down every letter you dictate, and still, no word is forming."

"Let's see,” the doctor said. “Talk to him first then and ask him what he wrote."

So I told the gentleman everything that had transpired, that the doctor had spelled out, I had written down, and yet, nothing. "

“I don't know how to write," he told me, "I just made some scribbles that look like letters but don't mean anything. I needed to come to the doctor, and I don't know how to write. I was ashamed to tell the other inmates, and I knew that if I filled out the form, I had to end up here." He was an old man, he had been experiencing pain in his penis for years but had never been able to tell anyone out of shame, but he couldn't bear it anymore. I was grateful to be on the phone, and it distressed me greatly that on his next appointment, the voice on the other end of the line may not offer him enough kindness and confidence to address something that, although crucial for his health, seemed so embarrassing for him to discuss.

Seeking freedom inherently implies being deprived of it, and even in that disadvantaged situation, there are those who have to face many more difficulties, as is the case of Latin American migrant prisoners in US jails who don't speak English. In search of freedom, they go through trials where judges cannot hear their stories from their own mouths; often their lawyers also need interpretation to understand them. As an interpreter, I also seek their freedom, I accompany them in the waiting, I echo their words in a system that does not prioritize understanding them.

The paths to freedom are many and diverse. Julián Fuks wonders in La resistencia, "But isn't it that all migration is forced by some discomfort?" And I now respond that yes, it is.That one migrates in search of freedom, and sometimes in that same search, one returns. That in seeking freedom, there are those who end up completely deprived of it, but that it is possible to walk together towards the goal, and that to continue walking together, we must strive to be the kind voice on the other side of the road.

-Claudia Santos

Claudia Santos (@claudiaexcaret) is a Mexican English Major, poet, interpreter, and translator. She is a writer. As a writer, she has been selected by the international Rio Grande Valley festival to have her poetry published in the printed anthology Boundless 2022, and Boundless 2024. She has also been selected as a poet for two years in a row by the international festival Primavera bonita, in Mexico City. Her poetry has been published in the digital magazine Fleas on the Dog, the UNAM magazine Punto de partida, the Blog Libropolis, Letralia, La poesía Alcanza, etc. Her first book translation, Child of Earth and Sky, by Menna Van Praag, is about to come out in 2024. https://linktr.ee/claudiaexcaret