No place to call home - immigrants running from environmental disasters

Sierra, Nov, 2000 by Mary Jo McConahay

Where do immigrant come from?

Many are fleeing environmental disasters in their homelands--acts of God compounded by growing population, poverty, and corporate greed.

In the dry, deep-East Texas town of Nacogdoches, Jairo M. usually spends seven days a week on his assemby-line job, fast-tying the splayed legs of slaughtered chickens and whipping them onto a revolving ring above his head, filling every third passing hook. On a recent Sunday afternoon, however, he sat quietly in his rented room among a dozen bungalows near La Nana Creek, gazing through a screen door into a shared yard filled with the music of ranchero songs and croaking frogs. But Jairo couldn't relax. "Here if t here's a day off," he said, "you worry about home."

Jairo, 23, is an environmental refugee. He is among the millions, mostly from developing countries, who are forced from their homelands each year by flood, drought, hurricane, earthquake, volcanic eruption, or other calamities. Once known as acts of God, such disasters are no longer necessarily natural; they are often provoked or amplified by human activities such as damming rivers, clearing forests, over-extracting groundwater, or building unsafely in hazardous zones. In 1998, for the first time, more people were forced to leave their homes because of environmental disaster than because of war, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Environmental refugees now number 25 million people, 58 percent of the total worldwide population of refugees.

Every single one carries mental pictures like those that plague Jairo. In October 1998, Jairo survived Hurricane Mitch, which killed 15,000 people in Central America, mostly in Honduras. He remembers hearing rather than seeing the implosion of a treeless hill above the capital city, Tegucigalpa, covered with the jerry-built houses of landless squatters. Jairo remembers the muted rumbles as the sodden mountain slipped and shifted and swallowed houses and people in a series of gulps that lasted hours. "We told each other, `Don't move from the house,' "said Jairo, so he and his family--mother, wife, and infant son, plus two sisters and their three children--huddled on their own hill. The electricity went out and mortar fell from the walls, but the foundation held.

If they could have seen through the pelting rain they might have watched how tons of topsoil turned to mud and flowed down from hills and into a river already raging with branches and boulders. Waters jumped banks to cover the huge Fifth Street Market, where the clothing stall that supported Jairo's mother and young wife simply disappeared. They destroyed the factory where one of Jairo's sisters--the one they called Skinny--was employed. They ripped the roof off the shop where he worked as a refrigerator repairman, tore down its walls and carried away the hard-won tools of his trade--blowtorch, soldering iron, manometer, even motors. In the countryside, Mitch transformed the very geography, altering the course of rivers, creating hills where none had existed, scouring islands down to a surface of twigs, blowing away trees and entire villages on the Caribbean coast.

In Tegucigalpa, when the rain stopped, there was plenty of work burying bodies. Jairo earned $5 a day moving mud. But soon the realization came to him that while Mitch might have spared his life, it had still thrown him up with his roots in the air like the trees scattered unnaturally on the rivers' banks. "What do I do now?" Jairo remembers thinking. "Who am I now?"

Mitch left some 2 million homeless, jobless, or otherwise damaged. Even many who still slept under roofs believed the storm had blown them over a fine line: Now they had to move or those who depended on them would starve. Many headed for Mexico and the United States, on foot and at night to avoid the authorities. "I told my sister, `Look, Skinny, don't go,' but she had the two small ones to support," said Jairo. So he and his sister left their children, Jairo's wife, another sister, and their mother at home and headed north. On a clandestine river-crossing between Guatemala and Mexico they lost their packs when a dugout overturned. When they could not find food they ate leaves that burned their throats. They bought off the federales with a wristwatch. Somehow, Jairo became separated from his sister. He looks drowned in guilt when he speaks of that. Her whereabouts are unknown. "You think, and you remember how leaving her, and leaving the others at home, was like removing one of your arms," he said. Jairo's experience is far from rare. According to the director of a Houston shelter that welcomes new arrivals from Central America, "Not many families make it through Mexico intact."

Nacogdoches is a pleasant town, the oldest in Texas, with central streets of red clay bricks and neighborhoods of fine houses with colonnaded porches. But for Jairo, who has no legal immigration papers and sends home what he doesn't spend in rent, it is a prison. "I would have never left home if not for Mitch," he said.