Quotes About Struggle

She's donated money. She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

They're both smart, quick to learn. But their lives have been so expansive, their traumas so adult. They are young women and now they're meant to clip themselves into a three-ring binder each day. They're meant to hang their jackets in lockers and flirt with boys in the hallways. They're supposed to regress into shapes that were never familiar to them.

There are twenty-three migrants here, and despair has settled into their features like a powdery dust.

into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

Luis Alberto Urrea, Óscar Martínez, Sonia Nazario, Jennifer Clement, Aída Silva Hernández, Rafael Alarcón, Valeria Luiselli, and Reyna Grande.

It was exciting for him to be good at something after a lifetime of mediocrity in Tamaulipas.

She fights at every moment against the scream that pulses inside her like a living thing.

this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

migra. When has she ever

come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

perímetro. Lydia move o corpo na direção dessa

Despite everything he's been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation.

from the glass, 'Abuela,' and renews his attack

a few miles outside Culiacán, the monotony is broken by screaming. A lone voice repeats the words over and over, like a siren: ¡la migra, la migra!

When the coyote herds the migrants back to their route,

como «plática motivacional con crisis de identidad»

También de este lado hay sueños.

Jeanine Cummins

Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.

She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.

Before dawn, Lydia, Luca, and the sisters walk deeper into the city, where they discover that the railway fence in Hermosillo is serious business, expensive infrastructure. Tax pesos at work. In fact, it's not a fence at all, but a concrete wall topped with razor wire in threatening coils. Inside that wall, a train rumbles past with migrants asleep on top, their arms folded across their chests, their hats over their faces.

Lydia understands that it's not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she's pitied those poor people.

She thought that here in el norte, she'd have to worry more about Border Patrol, about the possibility of Luca being taken from her, and less about random men with guns enforcing their own decrees.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.