Reply #77: Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives [View All]

by Peter Orner

http://www.voiceofwitness.com/orner_intro.html

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Introduction to Underground America

Permanent Anxiety


In the fall of 2005, I represented an asylum-seeker in a case before the Immigration Court in San Francisco. It was my first case since I left the law to write fiction. My client, Eduardo, was from Guatemala. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan army carried out a campaign of systematic murder against indigenous people like Eduardo. His father was killed, but Eduardo, his mother, and sister were spared death. Instead, they were held captive and terrorized for nearly a decade in the home of a paramilitary officer. It was in this house in a slum far from his native village that Eduardo and his sister grew up.
In Eduardo’s own words:

We stayed in his house. Even when the man was gone, we didn’t leave the house. We didn’t play with other children in the area. When I was about five years old, I pastured cows with my sister. Sometimes we would lose one and stay out until five or six in the evening to try and find it. If we couldn’t find it we’d tell the man, shaking with fear. He’d take out a whip and beat us, leaving our backs bloody. Or he’d use an extension cord or television antenna. When my mother tried to defend us, he would shove her and threaten her with a machete. Anytime there was a problem, that man would hit my mother and tell her he was going to torture her, quarter her. One day I asked my mother what “quarter” meant. She told me, “It’s when they remove pieces of a person’s body when they’re still alive.”

When he was fourteen, Eduardo managed to escape to Guatemala City, where, for the first time, he went to school. Seven years later, his mother and sister also escaped. It was then that his former captor made it known through his network of paramilitary contacts that he was looking for Eduardo. So, at twenty-two, Eduardo fled Guatemala, making his way north through Mexico to the U.S. border. There he swam across the Rio Grande into southwestern Texas, where he was arrested on the north bank. Eduardo requested asylum and was placed in temporary detention, a place he later said was a lot like jail. Later, with the help of lawyers and relatives, he was released and eventually made his way to California, where I took on his case.