Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship, in June 2016 undergraduate student Carolyn Vilter interviewed Miguel Angel Lopez, a student at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico. In this interview, Lopez reflects on his personal experiences and plans for future work in the area of immigration after spending a year at a migrant shelter.

You attended high school here at Universidad Iberoamericana?

Yes. I entered high school here at Universidad Iberoamericana, and I was part of the second class to graduate, so I experienced a lot of the development, and I formed part of the first class to leave to volunteer somewhere in Mexico.

How did you choose to major in international relations?

Precisely due to the experience I lived at the migrant shelter I volunteered at. At first, I wanted to study law in undergrad, but being there, I said, "Well, I want to understand migration better," because I saw that it was something that we were oblivious to. Everyone is detached from it, and I said, “I want to understand it better, and I like it, so I’m going to study it.”

Tell me more about your decision to go to a migrant shelter and spend a year there.

As a part of the formation of high school, which at the Universidad Iberoamericana follows an Ignatian model, there are various experiences, the purpose of which is to educate through service and being a person for others. So, in line with these ideas, in high school you have certain experiences, including community service, internship, and social service. In addition to this, in each discipline, they organize a visit to some community, and one such trip went to visit the Patronas, a group of people in Veracruz who help migrants, so I decided to go as a part of a group of some 11 students.

There, I met a group of five or so Guatemalans who were traveling to the United States. As I got to know them they told me their story, and it was very impactful for me. I started to wonder why this was happening. So some classmates and I got together and investigated more—how many shelters there are, and what we could do from our position. We decided to hold a raffle for two iPads and donate the money to support the construction of a shelter in Tapachula, and the project was very successful and earned a great deal of money. And so we started to make more noise, and to connect ourselves with other shelters and experiences, and I realized that I didn’t just want to give money, because I feel like that’s not helpful but rather simply intrusive. I wanted to truly live what it felt like to be there. So I said, “I want to go!”, and a former secretary at the Migration Issues Program (Programa de Asuntos Migratorios, PRAMI) and I chatted, and she presented me with some different options. We had never sent someone before, and I didn’t know what I was doing, but we sent emails until one answered and said that I should come—so I grabbed my backpack and went to a large shelter in Saltillo called Casa del Migrante en Saltillo.

What do the volunteers do on a daily basis?

Well, we had very specific responsibilities. The chores the migrants themselves did were formally assigned, and this helped us, because the idea was that through the assignment of these responsibilities and this service to their counterparts, they could overcome the contexts of violence in which they had lived. So, if there’s someone of your nationality who probably would have been your enemy there, and you see him serving you food, it’s like oh, well, things can be different.

Wow, and this worked out? People who would have been enemies got along?

Yes, definitely. It was inspiring.

Who would come to make dinner? People from the community, visitors?

People from the community of Saltillo—a church group, or a group of students, or a school; even a group of friends, motivated by this unsettled curiosity, religious or social, wanting to be there and to get to know migrants. We organized them by day. We also had a system to allow migrants to do paid work in the community. Every day after breakfast, someone would arrive saying, “I need a person to help me clean,” or build, or work in my garden, for example.

Did lots of community members take advantage of this?

Yes. When I was there, I regularized the system, and I assigned a specific wage to every type of work, so they could work for a day and be paid. Since everyone wanted to work, we organized a lineup to determine who would work when. This was what most aided the migrants, because they didn’t have to beg for money in the streets—instead, they could work, and this way, buy passage to the next city by bus.

In your opinion, is it a good thing to have constant community participation in an albergue [hostel]?

Yes. Because when there isn’t, there’s usually a rejection from the community—xenophobia, violence. So, the inclusion of the community is one of the most important steps to sustain a shelter, because it creates a support network. Honestly, it’s like the city, the community, the town is what carries the shelter forward—or doesn’t. For example, El Lechería was a shelter here in Mexico State, and it recently closed because the neighbors didn’t want it there.

Why is there this type of hostility?

Why didn’t they want the shelter? Because they think that migrants rob, that they kidnap, that they bring drugs. So they do everything they can to close the shelter.

What did people who had been working in the shelter before and after Plan Frontera Sur [Mexico's Southern Border Plan] think about it?

Yeah, they were very critical of the plan. They always talked about the trash it was, and the human rights implications it had, and really they were always conducting public denunciations of it. But by March of the next calendar year, we had so many people that it was as if the plan didn’t exist.

And why were were so many people arriving?

Because of the train station. I think also because they moved the checkpoints. Something happened so that there weren’t so many armed forces scanning the region, so lots of people arrived. But in reality, the vast majority were caught. They detained them leaving the shelter or before they could get there—the vast majority. It was rare for someone to cross undetained.

Are there still people arriving having injured themselves on the train?

Yes, normally it was difficult dealing with them, because public healthcare in Mexico is pretty bad but even worse for foreigners, since there’s a great deal of discrimination. For example, we obviously couldn’t personally attend to someone who had broken their leg—I was the person running the nurse’s office! But hospital care was complicated, because we always had complaints from migrants who’d arrive at a hospital and they wouldn’t want to attend to them. And that’s illegal, because in Mexico healthcare is a human right for all; presumably no matter whether you’re a foreigner, or you don’t have papers, you’ll be attended to. But no—the hospital wouldn’t attend to them, solely because they’re foreigners. This is a structural problem in our healthcare system: discrimination. Every week we volunteers from the shelter would fight: we’d send a letter or complain to the national human rights organization.

And did these complaints make a difference?

Yes, in that we’d return with the person who had been refused care, and they’d attend to them, but the problem continues to this day. In fact, now there’s a law that allows migrants to get a social security number for three months and function like any other person working in Mexico—it’s a public policy, but it’s very little known. Almost no one uses it; I’m not even sure if it’s still in place. When I was at the shelter, we even had a pregnant woman who was going into labor, and the hospital didn’t want to accept her, either, because she was a foreigner. Eventually she was able to give birth at the hospital.

Many public officials, on all levels, aren’t trained in human rights. So they just say, “Well, no, I’m not going to provide you with care, because I say so, and that’s it.” Until someone comes with a complaint and they have to do it. But there aren’t consequences. No one’s been fired for this. And this was pretty frustrating from my perspective—imagine if someone died because the hospital didn’t want to help them?

How do you think you can make the greatest impact in this issue area?

I’m not sure. I don’t know, but what is clear to me is that it’s not something I can solve by myself: I’ll do what I do, but even if I’m in a shelter for my whole life, the people will keep coming. I want to get a master's in human rights in order to understand more and be able to help specific situations. Perhaps I can’t change an entire problem, but I can change one narrative and by doing so change someone’s life. I believe that a regional effort is definitely required, because you can’t make a difference from Mexico or from the United States or from Central America or from Canada, but it is something that concerns all countries in the region.