Indigenous Migration and its Challenges

(This was part of a research made recently, this is the sum of many points of view from the indigenous people of Mexico that migrates)

It started with the search of work for the benefit of the families and to improve the conditions of our towns of origin, since the severe economic crisis of the 1980's, which sadly it is not overcome yet.

The number of Mexican Immigrants during this 28 years in the United States is now about 26 million, and it is false that many are returning to their communities as result of the recent economic crisis in the U.S. Migration has helped the economic crisis feel a little less because of the great quantities of money we sent to our families and at the same time help the local, regional and national economies of Mexico.

Immigrants have suffered great violation to our human rights, it has been like that and always be, not only in the US but also everywhere, Europe, Asia, Australia, even Latin America. I am aware that in Mexico migrants suffer from that too, immigrant from Central and South America and other countries on its way to the United States.

I talk about human right violations because every immigrant has to give up them when we chose to move: the right to work freely, to have a roof over our heads, access to health services, education, to move freely inside a country, to have no language barrier, legal assistance, in other words we are ghost, no name faces. Besides that there is discrimination, and police and military persecution. But there is also something we need to make a difference about these rights when we talk about indigenous people, because for them the problems are triple: first because for been indigenous people, second for been immigrants and third for been Mexicans. A great percentage of us are monolingual, we only speak our native language, others are bilinguals speaking the native language and Spanish, but that does not help us because for the ones that live in the U.S. because of the English. The simple fact of not been able to speak in the language of the place we work and live means to be at risk, of suffering many of the common right we want: work, cultural and political.

Despite all, this has not stopped us, we still have our capacity of organization and also to be able to defend ourselves. The new generation of indigenous people that arrived when they were really young or that have been born here are trilingual, they can speak the native language, Spanish and English.

It is important to recognize this great strengths if the indigenous people. The collectivity of our origin town, people, has taught us to do everything together. We have been doing it like that ever since we arrived to the US, organizing us to defend ourselves, keeping alive our traditions and native language, what we are and have been for centuries.

The indigenous people of Mexico has been force to leave our country in search of the human, economic, educational, health and cultural survival. On the economic aspect this has been good, but on other not. As immigrant, indigenous and Mexicans we suffer great challenges. We are suffering from discrimination on both sides of the border because or our native language and we are losing that.

Living in a xenophobic country, insecure of itself, where the dominant cultural view is the one from the white and it ignores the rich cultural compositions that is in it. They talk about assimilation and adaptation but on the way they live and think. All we ask is the respect of our identity.