The following excerpt is from a February 7, 2010 article published by The Washington Post. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
IPALA, GUATEMALA — Red-shirted mariachis stroll singing and strumming into the dusty yard of a whitewashed villa where roosters crow the dawn. The lyrics of their serenade compare a maiden’s beauty to the shine of the moon, as homemade fireworks explode in the lightening sky.
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Jennifer’s smile flashes on and off, as if she were groping for the proper response to all the attention. She is thinking about her mother, who was born in a shack around here and left as a famished farmer’s daughter 18 years ago. Now her mother cleans houses in suburban Maryland. And Jennifer has returned: A queen. An American citizen.
This is her day. She hopes her Spanish doesn’t fail her. “I kind of get stuck on big words,” she says.
Such great expectations have been invested in her, such dreams. She is proof of the future available to the children of those who strike out for a better life in the north. But her presence also speaks of a companion dream: The possibility of return, the possibility of never leaving at all.
Jennifer contains both. She is origin and destination. The whole aching drama of immigration might be distilled in the story of one transnational teenager on her special day in the pueblo of her mother’s birth…
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