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HUMAN RIGHTS
Coming Home

by Graciela Melitsko

Indigenous Refugees in Mexico Go Back To Their Homeland

They are coming home. After ten long years of exile they are finally coming back to their homeland, with a bit of Mexico in their hearts. Mexico, the land that witnessed so many good-byes and welcomed so many Latin American exiles, the land Guatemala looks up to.

"What shall we do after so many years?", Isabel rhetorically asks herself. And I repeat to myself the first lines of a beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda: "Nosotros los de entonces ya no somos los mismos [...]" (We, the ones from before, are no longer the same.)

I met Isabel one morning at the Coyoacan market and we became very close friends, like sisters. I was enthralled by the wrinkles on her face, which bore testimony to her serene, long, exhausting journeys. And of course, as a woman I could not help but say something about her clothes. When she answered, her words came out in a very soft-accented Spanish, somewhat difficult to understand for someone from the Southern part of the continent: "And what do you write so much for?"

"I go around dressed in words," I said. Isabel laughed, then said: "Maybe you can write about what's going on in my country."

I told her that I wasn't sure I would be able to convey that message. Isabel looked at me, sort of puzzled. I thought to myself that she did not need all my words. All was very well written on her face, her eyes, her dresses. Since Isabel already speaks Spanish, what I should do is lay the emphasis on rhetorical questions, on soliloquies, on all the repetitions and hyperboles that may be helpful in shedding light on her world, without ever betraying its true nature. And once again in this journey, I came to understand why languages are not just tools of communication, but rather a vision of the world, a way of understanding and transforming life experiences. On January 20, the first 2400 Guatemalan refugees arrived from the Mexican state of Chiapas, en route to the town of La Mesilla. International organizations such as the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres, and the Mexican Commission for Refugees accompanied them on their way back home. On the other side of the border, Nobel Peace Prize Rigoberta Menchú was waiting for them. The aborigines had to wait for a week before they crossed the border because the government wanted them to return on a little-used road, half-hidden in the forest.

"Many of them are afraid of coming back..." Isabel says. All her family, except for one child, has died. She learned to speak, read and write Spanish in Mexico with a women's group. They formed a small cooperative of artisans, and now they have to face the loss of friends in exile, of landscapes, and traditions that she had adopted during this long period. I ask her about the precarious conditions in refugee camps in Mexico, but I get no answer. Then she speaks about loneliness and the word nostalgia comes to mind, because it means "homesickness."

Cite as: Youth Sourcebook on Sustainable Development. Winnipeg: IISD, 1995. Online. Internet. http://iisd.ca/youth/ysbk049.htm.

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