Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

Almost all the Indigenous Guatemalans in Florida at the time had come from somewhere in the Cuchamatán mountains, in small groups beginning in the early 1980s, as the repression in the western highlands of the country grew more intense. More than a million Maya fled to Mexico and the United States during those years. But their legal standing was difficult to discern. Carmelina lost an aunt, an uncle, and nineteen cousins to military murders; her father was so traumatized by the killings that he began to drink after the family reached Mexico, and he eventually landed in jail. Yet Carmelina and her mother, like most of the others who reached the US, were reluctant to speak about what they’d suffered. They figured their best move was to prove their willingness to work; the first words in English that many of them learned was the phrase “I need a good work.” This made it even easier for the government to write them off as “economic migrants.” Those who applied for asylum were almost all rejected. Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted. The denials didn’t stop the flow of people heading north. They simply clouded any understanding of who was coming and why.