James Cordero (29:18)
Among the cool rocks. Last weekend, I found a Minnie Mouse doll. It reminded me of Noemi, the little girl I'd met in Bao Chikito. I give my number to hundreds of people before leaving Panama and heard from dozens. But up until then, I hadn't heard from Noemi and her mom. I'd heard of people being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and ransomed in Mexico. Some of them had been caught by authorities and pushed back to Chiapas, and others had been unable to leave Tapachula after having all their money stolen. I wondered which of any of these fates had befallen Noemi and if she was still having a Peppa Pig adventure. Sadly, between where I met her and where I found the Minnie Mouse doll, there's nothing else I can do. But here in the mountains outside San Diego, where the wind blows so strong sometimes you can barely stand up, I can do something without the ability to do something. Something which I know is meaningful. I don't know how I'd manage to stay on this beat. It's just too heartbreaking to meet good people, share meals and laughter and deep conversations with them, and then see them fed into a teeth of a machine that robs, brutalizes, and kills them so that Joe Biden can stand on a podium and say that border crossings are down. This month. They are down, and that's largely due to enforcement in Mexico. But I want to make sure that everyone who does cross the border can do so safely and they don't have to die on US soil after fighting so hard to make it here. This hasn't been the case for everyone this year. My friends up and down the border have carried far too many little memorial crosses into the mountains. And depending on the election results next week, what we're doing might be illegal soon. But that'll never make it wrong. Since early September, nine people have died in a little part of Southern California alone. My friends have searched for them sometimes found their remains and undertaken the thankless task of sharing the bad news with their families, then constructed memorials in their memory. This is just one of the many dangerous parts of the migration route north, but it's the one that I can help with if you're nearby or visiting for a while. There are several organizations dropping water on the border, Border Angels, Border Kindness and Borderlands Relief Collective here in San Diego. Ajo Samaritans, Nomas Muertes in Arizona, groups you search and rescue as well. Obviously not everyone lives here at the USA's southern border, but more than half of the population does live within 100 miles of a border. Even if you don't live in the usa, or maybe you do, but you don't live anywhere near the border, I guarantee there are migrants in your community. In the last year, I've worked with migrant welcome committees in Maryland, church groups in the rural South, Sikhs on the west coast, and Kurds on the east coast, to name just a few. Without a ton of fanfare, people all over this country are making space in their homes and their hearts for strangers, feeding them, housing them, and helping them get set up in a new place. For the most part, it doesn't get coverage under a Democratic administration. It doesn't get much public support either, but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary. Aside from all the reasons it's important, dropping water on the border is also fun for me. It's helped me learn more about where I live. I appreciate the desert and make new friends who generally share my outlook on the world. I love being outdoors, and I'd be outdoors anyway. But this way my hiker is about much more than myself. Yeah. What's that mean when you get somewhere with signal? Yeah, please. To all of you, please share it. Like I'd like to follow your journey, if that's okay. And maybe we can talk again when you're in America. Yeah. I gave my number to hundreds of people in the Dalian, as well as some websites they might find useful ones are NGOs, explained the CBP1 app, or the ones that might direct them to resources along their route. Last Sunday night, as I was absent mind least farming through a shotgun reloading manual in my living room, as I love to do, my phone started buzzing. It's done this so many times in the last month. Mostly it's a photo of someone I met updating me on their journey, or one of the little wooden animals that I give to children which has made its way to Mexico and hopefully given them some comfort along the way. Often it's less positive news. Someone's been robbed or simply run out of money and they need help. But I got two messages this Sunday which lifted my spirits. Noemi, the little girl who had an adventure like Peppa Pig in the jungle, wanted to know how I was doing and she sent me a photo of the tiny stone bear that I'd given her. She also wanted to know if we could still go to see Minnie Mouse as she came to America, which I assured her we could. I think it'd be quite apt to visit a place which bills itself as the happiest place on earth with someone I met in one of the most desperate parts of the planet. The second message was from one of the migrants I'd met in the jungle, telling me she'd made it to America. Not just to America, but to a part of the border where I'd been dropping water with my friends. Just a few weeks before I left for Panama, she sent me a photo of a rock with a message on it, one with which I'm very familiar. She told me about her walk, one which I've made myself. She taught me how hard it was. I said I knew, but really I don't know because I wasn't carrying months of trauma with me on the mountain. She's the only person out of a Hundred Sun I met who's made it here. Most of them are in Mexico now, and most of them will remain there or maybe get sent back home. Or maybe they'll make a desperate attempt to cross this week as you hear this before the election, it made me so happy to see someone safely here. One person out of hundreds. For so many of the migrants I met, America was a dream and the journey was a nightmare. Since this series began airing, I've seen videos of people I care about clinging to freight trains, their bruised bodies after being beaten. I've helped them find health care after they were sexually assaulted and tried to find room at overcrowded shelters. I've helped Trans ladies navigate all of this and transphobia and misogyny, and tried to find resources in French and English and Portuguese for non Spanish speakers. I'd hoped that I'd finish this series with a single good story, a story of someone who made it, who is living the American dream that people died for in the jungle. But I can't, because even the people who made it here are here temporarily, and broadcasting anything about their journey would put them at risk whoever wins the election next week. So instead I want to end with how you can make a difference. And I'll start with a story and how little things can make big differences. One day in Baja Chiquito, I was sitting around with a few Venezuelan kids, probably 4 to 8 years old, ripping pages out of my right in the rain notebook to make paper airplanes. Before I interviewed their parents, I asked them about the jungle. They said it was scary and they had nightmares. Now I often find kids in these places get scared of the dark, and I used to bring these crappy little electric lights for them, but they're bulky and they're not very good. Recently I've been carrying little packets of fishing glow sticks instead. They cost about 10 bucks for maybe 100 of the little green lights. So I pulled out my glow sticks, cut my hands and snapped one. The children were amazed at the little glowing rod, so I gave them the rest of the packet and told them they could keep them for any time. They were scared of the duck. Nearly a month later, I sometimes get a message on my phone with a photo of a little tiny glow stick and a note of thanks. One thing that Father Elias said that really impacted me is that when he meets migrants, he asks what he sees of God in them, and his work for them is where he finds what there is of God in himself. I think I've struggled so much with this series, in part because I have seen so much of the best of other people, and indeed the best of myself, in such hard places. I always struggle a little to readjust after trips like this, but this one's been particularly hard. In the jungle, I saw people helping, and in a sense, we were all in it together. When it rained, we all got wet, and when it got hot, we all huddled together in the shade. We shared bottles of water. We sat at the same tables and ate together. I can't really begin to experience a full Verian experience, because I've been lucky enough never to have anything that bad to run away from. But I have experienced the incredible solidarity and kindness of the people who went through it, I've also experienced the incredible indifference of people at home and indeed of the states and governments of the world. The Colombian friends I met in Lajas Blancas and Bajo Chiquito, who are handcuffs and deported and ripped from their families, have already invited me to come and stay in their homes in Colombia. But if their families make it here, they won't encounter that kind of hospitality. Just last week, I helped translate for a Venezuelan family living on the street in San Diego. Some of my friends do sponsor migrants, and that's something anyone can do if you're able to. It's an incredible thing you can do to change someone's life, and I can't encourage you enough to do so. I really do see the best of myself, of my friends, and of humanity in our work to help migrants. I would say that, on reflection, I wasn't really an anarchist until 2018, when I watched the state to the world, abandoned thousands of migrants in Tijuana, and climbed a fence with my friends to take care of them and specifically to distribute three huge backpacks full of waffles another friend had sent from his waffle factory. I'd stopped believing in the benevolence of the state a long time before, but it wasn't really until then that I really understood the power of people organizing horizontally to provide each other with dignity. Ever since then, I've drawn a lot of hope for humanity in the same places I despair for people. Maybe that's why I keep going back. Since then, at the border, I've seen people die. I've held crying babies and crying parents. I've also shared meals with people from around the world, made friends for life, and learned Kurdish disco songs about killing people. I've danced around campfires with people I couldn't have imagined meeting. When I first made my own journey here last Christmas, when I'd normally be at the bar with my friends, I sat on a rock in the desert, eating a cold Vegan MRE with an Ecuadorian family. Some of my friends, in all the Christmases I can remember, I never felt so much like I was in the right place, doing the right thing with the right people. While I've seen a lot of terrible things at the border, in the jungle, and I'll never forget those. More importantly, I've seen that together we can do incredible things and we can make the state irrelevant, especially in the places it's chosen to be absent. I don't think we should make demands of the state anymore. It's simply not in its nature. To care. But I do think we should make demands of ourselves. I don't believe in God, and I've written a whole dissertation about people who burn churches. But I think I see something that's just as special to me in the experience of mutual aid. And in a way, it fulfills not only people's material needs, but also our human desire for dignity and mutual respect. When I drop water at the border or carry someone's bags in the jungle, I see myself in them, and I hope they see themselves a little bit in me. But right now, our sign up system is so broken that very few people even make it far enough to drink the water. I leave at the border. And despite the border featuring heavily in this year's election, there seems to be no national concern about the way our tax dollars brutalize people across the continent. So I want to end by asking you what you can do. It might be coming down here to drop water. It might be sending some money to one of the links I'll include in the description. It might be offering to translate for asylum seekers. I might just be talking to people and helping to change the narrative. You can vote or not next week, but there isn't a box you can tick that will change the things I saw in the jungle. Trump wants to deport millions more people. Harris wants to pass a bill that will kill more people. You can't pass your commitments off to someone whose box you tick every four years. You have to take them on for yourself. The way we change things is in the way we do things every day, every week, not once, every four years. I want to end with Noemi's mum and her message to the American people. I also want to ask if anyone knows how to get cheap tickets to Disneyland, because I've just looked that up and I cannot stress enough how unable I am to afford it.
