DALLAS — Carlos Joaquin Salinas is finally becoming the person he dreamt he’d be. Someone respected. Someone his mother is proud of.
Monthly he sends at least $200 in remittances to his family more than 1,800 miles away in Guatemala. Lately, he’s sending a few extra dollars to the local church and for the new road into town. When work is plentiful, which is usually the case six to seven days a week in North Texas, he even donates to the youth soccer club.
“Señor,” he said, sipping a Topo Chico, with a huge grin, and three-day stubble beard, “my mom says everyone back home is saying good things about me.”
The migrant who left his hometown in Guatemala three years ago knows his journey could have turned out much differently. Lately, he’s been having nightmares about tractor trailers, the kind that trapped dozens of migrants, suffocating 53 to death, amid a sweltering heat on the outskirts of San Antonio. Among the dead, 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras and seven from Guatemala.
“I can almost bet you that every person who died inside that trailer had a job waiting for them,” said Carlos Joaquin, 34. “People do everything for their dreams, even die. I know this because I have been there.”
On the third anniversary of living in North Texas, Carlos Joaquin has found a renewed sense of purpose, recognition, and a sobering realization: His importance is measured by the remittances he sends home. The more he sends, the more he’s admired by young and old, and especially the poor. He couldn’t be prouder of his new status, he said, and yet worried about the ramifications.
In a post-pandemic economy even more people in his hometown want to head north in the hopes of emulating his success, Carlos Joaquin said. In the three years he’s lived in North Texas, 20 of his family members and friends from Guatemala have arrived in Texas, often at the behest of employers who tell him they need workers.
Overnight, his friends, cousins and a brother have transformed themselves from small farmers into construction workers, roofers, landscapers throughout North Texas — Frisco, Plano, Arlington and Fort Worth — doing just about any job Americans won’t do, he explained. Some of them have left Texas for Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida and Maryland, where the money is better.
Opportunities and contradictions
Since arriving in North Texas, Carlos Joaquin has periodically checked in with The Dallas Morning News to document his experiences as an asylum-seeker and help readers gain a better understanding of the shifting dynamics of an immigrant navigating a country full of opportunities and myriad contradictions, and the impact immigration has back home.
Carlos Joaquin and his son Fernando, then 10, first arrived at the El Paso and Juarez border in the spring of 2019. Donald Trump was president, someone Carlos Joaquin is fond of for “giving me an opportunity” he said.
He and his son were held “like caged animals” under an international bridge, paraded before the media. He requested asylum, citing extortion and gang threats. At the time, he gave U.S. immigration authorities an address in North Texas and promised to make every appointment until a judge rules on his case for asylum. Father and son have waited for three years, showing up whenever they’re told. He’s now required to check in periodically online, until further notice.
“I always show up not knowing whether we will be deported the same day,” he said. “Especially if they find out I’m working, which I’m told I’m not supposed to unless I’m approved to work. But I don’t want to be an economic burden so I must work.”
He has an assortment of jobs — roofing, replacing windows, washing dishes, and sometimes on weekends, working at a flea market, or cutting lawns. “Everywhere I look I see ‘job opening’ signs. Every employer I meet requests more workers. I’m working as hard as I can, and whenever I can.”
The immigrant rags-to-riches story is all too common, especially if “you’re from rural Guatemala,” said Adam Isacson of the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. “You’re not going to get respect unless you have money, and can send money home. Guatemala is one of the least equal places on Earth.”
Annually, Guatemalans working in the United States send about $11.4 billion in remittances, accounting for about 15 percent of Guatemala’s GDP, and overshadowing the $4 billion that the Biden administration pledged in aid to Central America.
Joaquin’s story, added Isacson, “is sort of an argument for temporary work visas so that people can come here, save some money and then have that and get respect and social mobility and maybe chip away at those areas of inequality.”
Pull of migration
Recently, Carlos Joaquin sat at a restaurant in North Texas and marveled at his luck for having found plenty of work, at times too much, he said. He admits he’s put on some weight since he arrived. Gone are the days of ill-fitting clothes hanging loosely over his wiry frame. He blames “junk food because I work so much I don’t have time to eat right.”
Jokes aside, Carlos Joaquin also laments that stories of success like his only lure a longer pipeline of migrants seeking a better life. Many die along the journey, either walking through the desert, falling off barriers or drowning in rivers and canals. The death of 53 migrants outside San Antonio was among the worst cases in the United States in recent years.
Guatemala’s president, Alejandro Giammattei tweeted that the loss of lives was “unforgivable” and called for tougher penalties for traffickers.
Carlos Joaquin blames smugglers and political leaders. He said he could have been among the victims, desperately looking to find a better life because their governments back home are too corrupt, criminal syndicates too powerful and countries too poor to provide for their people. Long droughts don’t help either, he said.
It was a combination of those factors that forced him to sell a small family plot of land, three cows and four chickens to help raise enough for a down payment to a smuggler to leave their hometown in the Santa Rosa region near the Pacific coast of Guatemala. The region is located in the so-called dry corridor, among the most vulnerable to droughts and hunger, and one of the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Leaving Guatemala wasn’t easy, he recalls. He’s faced big setbacks. His family is broken. His wife left him, abandoning two of their three sons in Guatemala. They now live with his mother. His eldest son, Fernando, the one who traveled with him, is preparing for high school in North Texas learning English, and yearning, at times, for home.
Yet, the benefits outweigh the negatives. In three years, he’s gone from regretting his move north because of so “many lies” by smugglers who put his life and that of his son at risk, to fearing he’d die from COVID-19. Last year he vowed that by 2023, certainly no later than 2024, he’d return home to open a business and live in the house he had just started to build.
But in the last year he’s paid off the $6,000 he owed the smuggler and finished building his dream house, the one he proudly displays on his phone. He’s now saving to build one for his mother, with the help of his brother, who arrived less than a year ago and since moved east to the Washington, D.C., area where pay is “much, much higher,” he said.
He prefers North Texas because his son has made friends at school and is part of a soccer team. That’s how he got the idea to donate to the soccer team back in his hometown, the same one he used to play in as a teenager.
His generosity hasn’t gone unnoticed in Guatemala. These days he gets calls from everyone from the local priest and the mayor to candidates vying for office. They’d like, if not his vote in person, his support and endorsement via social media.
Yes, he’s flattered that so many influential people know who he is now, but he’s also frustrated that it’s shadowy migrants like him toiling in the United States that are seen as a solution through their hard-earned dollars.
Sometimes he logs onto social media and goes on a rant, calling out the mayor or local congressman for not doing more to generate progress in his town, progress that might stop the migration north. But it’s during these rants, he said, that he realizes everyone — friends, leaders back home and him — is caught in a vicious cycle, “a trap,” he said.
There are days, he concedes, that “I can’t imagine going back home, at least not anytime soon. Return to what? I’ll be another nobody again.”
Besides, when I left Guatemala, opportunities were rare. Now, with the pandemic, there is nothing. That’s why so many are risking their lives to come here.”
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