Sebastian Medina-Tayac Photo
Third in a series.
Tetlanohcan, Mexico—Like the many New Haven immigrant families she helps reunite, Tlayolotzin Embarcadero is a patient woman.
At 76 years old, she decided to start learning a new style of embroidery. It took her a month to produce a pouch for her thin glasses. As soon as she finished it, she put it down, closed her eyes, and slowly reached for a new piece of fabric and some purple thread.
Every Friday she makes a two- to three-hour bus/metro trip alone from her remote town to Mexico’s Federal District to attend embroidery workshops run by an indigenous women’s cooperative https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.716412898379329.1073741831.168727319814559&type=3) in Mexico City’s Quaker house, Casa de los Amigos (http://www.casadelosamigos.org/en/).
But more often, she makes the trek to volunteer for the Popular Assembly of Migrant Families (Apofam), a group that brought her to the United States last year to see her daughter—for the first time in 25 years. Apofam’s Mexico City office was our first stop on a two-week long trip to Tetlanohcan, a rural indigenous town in the state of Tlaxcala with an estimated 10 percent of its population living currently in New Haven. Here in the central Mexican highlands we investigated why so many Tetlanohquences ended up in the Elm City, and what they left behind.
When she saw her daughter waiting for her in the airport, Embarcadero patience snapped.
“When we got to New York, it was a tear fest—hugs, sobs, laughter—because of the emotion of seeing our children again,” she said.
Rich Communities
In their tiny office in Casa de los Amigos, and in the vast expanse of rural and indigenous Mexico, Apofam congregates “communities of origin” — towns that send a large number of migrants to the U.S. —to navigate the separation of families, the influx of remittances, and a broken immigration system.
Led by Puebla native Marco Castillo (pictured), the group helps the communities cope with the loss of brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, who he says are forced to migrate North by a globalizing economy and a shift in material expectations. He said that communities are looking for an alternative to forced migration and family separation.
“I’m critical of the narrative saying that sending communities are poor and have no resources,” Castillo said. “I definitely see communities that are rich: rich in their human capital, rich in their natural resources, and very rich in their cultural capital.”
Using that wealth and connections to cultural and grassroots organizations in cities like New York and New Haven, Apofam secures visas for people (mostly women) like Embarcadero to serve as cultural ambassadors to the U.S. But for the people who go, their greatest expectation is to visit their relatives working in the U.S. who because of their undocumented status cannot visit Mexico.
“Communities come together to find holes in the border,” he said. “And one of the ways that we have found is the most effective for getting families together again is through the power of culture.”
In San Francisco Tetlanohcan, a rural town in Tlaxcala, the hub of that culture was an organization called the Migrant Indigenous Family Support Center (CAFAMI), which held workshops for embroidery, theater, and other cultural expressions.
Since their first project to reunite women of San Francisco Tetlanohcan with their relatives concentrated in New Haven, Apofam has brought together countless transnational communities and families like Embarcadero’s.
In 2008, Castillo brought a group of women from CAFAMI, teenagers and elders alike, to perform dance and theater in New Haven, where a large number of their family members work jobs in floor installation, construction, and food service. Their reunion, like Embarcadero’s, was emotional and teary.
Since then, the women have been invited back twice, in 2010 and 2012, to perform plays like “La Casa Rosa: Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World” at Yale and Coop High School.
The ulterior motive, of course, was to visit their relatives in New Haven, which is home to a majority of Tetlanohcan’s migrant population; a quarter of the community currently resides in the United States. Castillo and CAFAMI went on to establish a sister city project between New Haven and Tetlanohcan.
Out of this model Apofam was born, and Castillo moved into the nation’s capital to help other communities achieve what the women of Tetlanohcan had achieved.
New Yorktlan
Castillo has worked closely with the New Haven-Tetlanohcan transnational community for the past eight years, but his most recent large project was focused on a festival showcasing Mexican indigenous and folk traditions called New Yorktlan. (The Nahuatl suffix “tlan” designates a place.)
Castillo secured visas for Embarcadero and eleven other women (and one man) from different communities last October to perform traditional dances in a city that is home to a diverse array of indigenous traditions that go largely unrecognized, he said.
“We want to create a space where communities of origin take over a space in the City to bring their message, from those who are being left behind,” Castillo said.
Embarcadero opened the event with a prayer to the four sacred directions and a song in Nahuatl. Unable to burn copal in the Wagner College theater (in Staten Island), she lit candles instead.
After the event, under the radar of immigration authorities, she was able to visit her daughter in Washington. Another young woman on the trip was visiting her mother for the first time.
“I told Marco that if he cold really get me the visa, I would always be supporting them to help other families who haven’t seen their children,” Embarcadero said. “I want to go back because I still haven’t met my grandchildren.”
Apofam Haven
Fulfilling this commitment, several times a week she treks to Apofam, located in the Tabacalera barrio, famous for the Revolution Monument and open-air market, infamous for the prostitution and crime that make cab drivers nervous to drop off Americans there.
Brutal gray office buildings housing Mexico’s largest labor unions (stalwarts of the Institutional Revolutionary Party regime) tower over countless street food vendors and a tent city erected two years ago by Oaxacan teachers protesting what they call “the poorly-named educational reform” (http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/02/us-mexico-reforms-idUSKBN0OI0AL20150602), looking like a more focused Occupy movement.
Inside Casa de los Amigos, the hearth is warm. Volunteers from across the city as well as a cohort from American universities cook, clean, and chat in the cozy reception area. Deported migrants, refugees, and travelers start to settle into foam bunk beds in the two dormitories.
As the night darkens and a cold shower licks the filthy pavement outside the Casa’s unassuming entrance, Embarcadero’s cane precedes her out the door into the night.
Her daughter, now employed and married with children of her own, told her in plain terms that she was never returning to Mexico.
Embarcadero doesn’t know how much longer she’ll have to wait to see her again. But with her culture, and with Apofam, there’s a bridge.
Previous installments in this series:
• From Relative To Friend, A City Finds A 2nd Home
• Families Pay A Price In New Haven’s Sister City