Also known as: jose
http://about.me/byroNsuni was born in Guatemala into the poverty that my father inherited by marring my mother. By the age of three my mother and i had crossed all of Mexico. It took us one month because the coyote wanted to sexually abuse a younger woman in the group. The train helped us escape, taking us closer to the border and to the hands of another coyote. “¡Aaaa-puuu-ren-se!†Darkness... the smell… the rats… the American Dream… the sewage tunnel dumped us in San Isidro; La Migra arrested us; i vomited in the back of the patrol-truck; they stripped us of our clothes checking for drugs; a few days went by and we got bailed-out but never returned for our hearing, disappearing instead into an undocumented life in the US.By the age of nine, i had lived in Van Nuys California for seven years. i was educated in English and spoke Español at home. My little brother was born in 1989. For Halloween i dressed up as Superman, Spiderman, Batman, and the Ninja Turtles. My father worked two jobs and my mother sometimes worked and when she didn’t she would pick vegetables from the back of the supermarket. In 1995 INS agents told my parents that my mother and i had ten day to leave the country with the possibility to return ‘legally’ one day; otherwise we would be Deported right there. Those ten day vanished quickly, disposable and hopeless, like the dreams of my parents that were destroyed with them. By the age of 12 in Guatemala City, i became accustomed to the violence, to the Indigenous people begging, to the drunken men fighting over a dime, to the gun shots, to the dead bodies the next morning, to husbands beating their wives, to all the children with a plastic bag huffing the fifty cents worth of glue to forget their hunger, to the clapping of hands covered in corn dough making tortillas, to the blessings that i got from elderly women, to the hundreds of people walking in the streets talking, to having a small room with five pieces of furniture, to having to sleep in the same queen bed with my mother and brother, and to being separated from my father, who stayed in the US. It has been a life full of challenges but also full of lessons. i was able to observe the acts of the wealthy as well as the poorest people. Physically i was able to escape, but their stories are still with me.
