Rios is director, U.S.-Mexico Border Program, American Friends Service Committee. He lives in Chula Vista.
Last month, I spoke with a mother of two teenage boys at the Chaparral migrant encampment in Tijuana, who I’ll call Julia. Julia left her hometown in Mexico because a gang threatened her boys and disabled her husband when he defended them. When she and her family arrived in Tijuana, she discovered that people connected to the gang in her hometown were in Tijuana, and she was strongly considering having her boys cross without her to the United States. Julia had heard that if she crossed with them, Border Patrol would return her family to Mexico under a Trump-era order known as Title 42, which President Joe Biden uses to remove thousands from the United States. This would have compromised her boys’ safety.
“I have no other choice, and I’ll do anything to ensure my boys are safe, even if it means separating myself from them,” Julia told me.
Julia exemplified an unrelenting conviction that she needed her boys to survive in spite of overwhelming challenges. Her story, and the story of other migrant mothers, is what I reflect upon during this year’s Mother’s Day.
In recent news reports, motherhood as a reason for migration remains an irrelevant detail. It’s not until I place the stories next to each other that motherhood is accentuated as an important driver for survival, sometimes with tragic endings.
For instance, 22-year-old Yesenia Cardona died in the arms of her mother, Verlyn Cardona, on March 2 in a violent vehicle collision where 13 migrants died in Holtville. In her hometown in Guatemala, a street gang had threatened Yesenia for not ing its ranks, and Verlyn could not fathom anything happening to her daughter. Ironically, migrating to the United States was the only option Verlyn believed would keep Yesenia alive.
In another incident, Yuri Rios, a Honduran migrant and mother of two young children, 11 and 13, drowned on March 13 attempting to swim around the border wall that extends into the Pacific Ocean between the U.S. and Mexico. The area is infamous for dangerous undercurrents that have claimed countless other lives. Reports indicate that Yuri was trying to the father of her children to make a life together in the United States.
In a third story, Border Patrol shared a video of a frightened child wandering along the Texas border in early April. Missing from the story was that Border Patrol had expelled the boy and his mother in the same way that Julia feared would happen to her and her teenage boys under the Title 42 order. The mother and child apprehended in Texas were immediately kidnapped upon being expelled to Mexico. At the time of the video, family had raised enough money to have the child released by the kidnappers.
Motherhood is a powerful material component of stories about migration. It is an expression of a foundational love for survival. This year, even in the most tragic of stories, it is that motherhood that I want to recognize and venerate.
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