Email: Leisha Reynolds

Dear Friends and Family,

Much has gone on in the last month, and I would love to share with you some of the details.

For those of you who have are interested in my personal life, I met someone special in January. His name is Jonatan, and he is from the Mexican state of Puebla. Perhaps this is an important detail to this month as I just returned from 10 days in Puebla, where I got to conocer a la madre (meet his mother) and the rest of the family (and I’m talking about a huge extended family!). The familial aspect of the trip was quite fulfilling, as were the open air markets, the narrow streets, the fields of chiles and alfalfa, the homemade food, and about everything else I lived there.

I got to experience small town Puebla as well as Puebla, Puebla, a very colonial city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the fourth-largest city in Mexico. (For those of you who know of my love for Guanajuato, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, think of Guanajuato and increase it greatly by miles and people).

I also went to Cholula, home of the pyramid that’s a third larger than the ones in Giza, Egypt. Cholula is also home of the Universidad de las Americas, and home of many cathedrals. Originally, the plan was to build 365 of them (one for every day of the year!), although I think they only achieved 200-something cathedrals. It was a good try. I have felt a strong attachment to the interior of Mexico since I studied in Guanajuato in 2005, and although I had returned twice since, I still have carried this feeling of nostalgia with me, wishing to be back there. Puebla for me was both a new experience and a homecoming, both to the land and to the beautiful people. I was thankful both to experience life there and to get to know Jonatan’s raices (roots). How important are our raices!

Being away from the border was good for me in several ways, even beyond freeing myself momentarily from the stress that comes with direct humanitarian aid which presses its necessity in every moment. While for the past several years I have felt a particular calling to Mexico, I haven’t been able to express this well. No es nada que se puede expresar con palabras; se siente. (It’s not something one can express with words; it’s felt.) While I am not one of the people who argue that the Mexico found along the border “isn’t really Mexico,” I do think that the border is vastly different from the Mexico one finds in the interior. There are huge differences in language, an upsetting difference in food availability as well as freshness (with fruits, vegetables, and cheese, mostly), a difference in work trends, economic mannerisms, and how community manifests itself within and throughout.

I’m not one who praises Mexico for its beautiful beaches and because one can buy things more cheaply than in the United States. I can appreciate these qualities, but I don’t choose to base my love for Mexico on either of them, or take advantage of Mexico for them either. I prefer to tread lightly throughout Mexico as its daughter who never was but has always wanted to be, supporting the local economy and the Mexican people, appreciating a culture that is different from the one in which I grew up, getting to know a people that is very different from yet very similar to my own.

I prefer to shop for my fruit at the open-air market, to make my own agua de sandía (watermelon water) after cutting the sandía myself, to walk from point A to point B or to join those around me on the many options available for public transportation. I prefer the conversations with the locals, invitations to eat in the houses of families, the sound of norteña/mariachi/bachata/cumbia/reggaeton/what-have-you at full volume, raging from the truck that drives by me. The sight of families sharing time together in parques and plazas, and the huge mass of children in uniforms leaving school to head home to eat la comida.

While I am pointing out positive qualities of Mexico, my eyes are also open to qualities that are not so positive. I am not blind to corruption, injustice, sexism, and other troubles the country struggles with. Yet I recognize these as points that affect not only Mexico, but its Latin American neighbors, as well as multiple other places in the world. Like any country, there is good and bad. One learns to appreciate most aspects and deal with the rest. I am currently enjoying reading Mexican author Octavio Paz’s book, El Laberinto de la Soledad, in which Paz works to intellectually interpret el mexicano in all his history and individuality in the middle of the last century. Mexico has me, but I remain unable to describe just exactly why. Ask me about Mexico again after I finish this book, and then once more after I start graduate school. Maybe I’ll be able to share with you more, then. In the meantime, es algo que siento.

Meanwhile, back on the border, meetings with the Mexican consulate and various migrant-related NGOs and the State of Sonora continue. We are developing a system of abuse documentation that can be utilized throughout all of the organizations that are involved in the treatment of migrants along the border in Sonora. The meetings are long, and I often wonder what my real role is, as I will only be in this position until August. Still, I listen and take notes. A part of me would love to continue in work like this, with people who are very dedicated to what they do, but the greatest part of me knows that humanitarian aid is not something I could do for much longer. It’s not so much about burn-out as it is knowing that it’s not “the answer.” It’s a crucial part of the puzzle, but it’s not creating the change that is sustainable and necessary for the well-being of the thousands of undocumented men, women, and children who are crossing in the desert and losing their lives daily.

Unfortunately, it’s politics that has the power to change everything, but we all know that politics don’t change “just like that.” Neither do certain attitudes—racism remains, prejudice remains, the collectivist sense of power and control remains. It often makes me want to give up: What are the answers, then? Direct humanitarian aid and assistance is good, and I applaud all those who dedicate their lives to it, but it’s not “it.” Political reform could be “it,” but great change only happens over a long period of time, and we are seeing that now is not the time for that change. If this year has done anything for me, it’s done a great job of smacking a good portion of my idealism out of me and replacing it with some unfortunately realistic mindsets. It’s not that I don’t maintain any idealistic ideology anymore; it’s just that I have learned that we have got to be real, and we have got to work together.

We see many trends here at the Migrant Resource Center. For instance, on any given day, I could probably take a guess as to which states in Mexico the migrants we served came from, and I’d be in the ballpark most of the time. It’s always a given that we will receive people daily from Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Veracruz, as these states are among the poorest of Mexico. Increasingly we see folks from Puebla, a detail I remained conscious of as I marveled at the beauty of the many fields and land in Puebla during my time there; while pleasing to the eyes, those fields simply do not yield enough for its people to remain on the land. Selling dried chiles and beans at the local markets might earn a person enough money for a few meals in a week, but certainly not enough to cover expenses such as a home, an automobile (which I saw very few of—there is good reason why people use public transportation, or bicycles, or their own two feet), an education. Statistics show that the main source of income in Mexico, next to the oil industry, is money sent from those who migrated and found work in the United States. The truth is that without those who have migrated north—whether that means the Mexican side or the United States side of the border—and those who send money home to family members, progress is unable to happen in these parts of Mexico.

Driving through Jonatan’s small hometown outside of Puebla, Puebla, I noticed that essentially all of the trees on the side of the small, two-lane highway were being cut down. Upon asking Jonatan why it seemed that every tree in the town was now fallen to the ground, he responded very solemnly, la pobreza (poverty). People will do whatever they can to survive, whether that means destroying a significant part of the ecosystem, or risking one’s life in the desert. Perhaps this could be kept in mind by those of us who have never in our lives had to worry about food being put on the table, about the car being filled with gas, about there being enough money to pay the mortgage, lights, water, phone, and medical bills.

I recently met a young woman who was working on a photography project on immigration and those involved on both sides of the border. When I asked her what her purpose was in creating this project, she responded, “To capture the humanity of each person involved.” Humanity—that of the people in the villages whence migrants are fleeing; those who serve as guides or coyotes for those without proper documentation to cross into the United States; those who actually cross the U.S./Mexico line without documentation; those who work for the U.S. government in agencies such as ICE and Border Patrol; those who are deported and repatriated back into Mexico. It exists in every person involved. Yet how easy is it to forget the humanity within, and only see a face, or an action?

As I look at the calendar, I see that there are limited months left in my year of mission service as a Young Adult Volunteer, something that I wasn’t quite prepared to admit until now. I thank of each of you who have worked to support me by means of prayer, thoughts, cards, emails, phone calls, and financial donations. I want to say how thankful I am for showing me you care about me and about this work. If you wish to continue supporting me by any of these means, I thank you. Know that even just a prayer makes a difference for me and my life here. Prayers for a movement toward the end of violence and injustice here on the border, for those who dedicate their lives to service on the border and in the Church, and for me personally, as I discern “what’s next” in this journey of life, however temporary it may be—each of these would be appreciated by me, and by those with whom I share my time here.

Gracias por todo, y que la paz de Dios sea con todos Uds.,

Leisha Reynolds

To find out more about my year you can explore my blog.

If you would like to financially support me over this year you can send a tax deductible check to:

St. Mark's Presbyterian Church
Attn: Linda Marshall
3809 East Third Street
Tucson AZ 85716

Checks can be made out to St Mark's Presbyterian Church with "YAV" and my name written in the memo line.