Editor’s note: During the recent Witness at the Border conference in Ajo, Arizona, the People’s Tribune and our sister bilingual publication, El Tribuno del Pueblo, interviewed Dora Rodriguez, a Salvadorian immigrant who is the director of Salvavision. Salvavision is a Tucson, Arizona-based organization providing aid and support to asylum seekers, migrants that are passing through, or being dropped off by a cartel, or deported by the Border Patrol to the remote town of Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico. The group also has partnerships to support returnees who have been deported to their home countries. A key theme at the conference was the danger migrants face trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona on foot, and Dora nearly died herself in the Arizona desert in making her crossing years ago. Her story is the subject of the short 2023 film Borderlands, which you can view here. She was interviewed at the conference by El Tribuno del Pueblo’s Gloria Meneses-Sandoval.
Gloria Meneses-Sandoval: Could you tell us about your background?
Dora Rodriguez: I am a Salvadorian who has dedicated pretty much her second chance of life to work alongside with people seeking asylum, with people seeking a better life or fleeing. And the reason I do that is because I have my own journey. In 1980, I came with my friend’s family from El Salvador fleeing the civil war. And we were left in the desert by the smugglers. They don’t care. And they left us, and 13 people died in our journey. They sent us in the desert to walk, to cross, with the lie that within an hour the helicopter was going to come and pick us up and take us to California. And we didn’t know any better. We didn’t know that we needed better shoes. We didn’t know that we needed a lot of water. It was 110 degrees in the desert in July, 1980.
We started with 45 people, but the night before, they separated the women and children [leaving 26 of us to walk together] and sent them over through Yuma, which I am so thankful for, because otherwise it would have been worse. The children would’ve died. And then, you know, five days later we were found in the desert, and 13 people had died, including a woman who was pregnant and three sisters.
That to me is the worst tragedy. And I do what I do to honor them. Because I always keep asking myself why I survived it and they didn’t. I always wonder what their life would have been. You know, would they have had children like I do? Would they have had grandkids? So their life was cut very short.
GMS: In the film, you mentioned that people came unprepared, that one of the women, for example, was wearing high heels and had curlers in her hair.
DR: Yes. No one prepared you. You didn’t know what to expect.
GMS: Do you think things are a little different now? Are people coming more prepared or not really?
DR: Not really, no. You know, I see so much lies at the border. The stories that I hear from people there that come to our center, or that I meet, you know, in Mexico, in the borderlands, or already in the United States, the journey is horrendous. And no one ever tells them, if you get lost in the desert and you don’t have enough water, you’re going to die. The lie continues. And the lie is more expensive now, because it’s at least $10,000 per person. And then, you know, even the people who are seeking asylum, the smugglers bring in people from all over this world. In our borderlands, in the area of Sasabe, Arizona, or Organ Pipe, we’ve been getting people from Africa, from Afghanistan, from India, and they’re all paying $20,000 a person. And I have the opportunity to ask, how did you find out about this service? They say there isn’t social media. What the smugglers sell is like a package of travel, and they tell you you’re going to be fine. It is going to be great. You’re going to get to America. You can ask for asylum in your state. So it continues, the lie hasn’t changed.
GMS: Do you have ideas of how it’s going to stop? I know you’re doing your part. What do you think would change some of the suffering?
DR: I wish I had a magic wand, you know, and could say, “treat people with some compassion and humanity.” I don’t think that things are going to get better until the lawmakers change the way they see immigration. They see migration as an invasion. They see it as a political game. They see it like it is bad, it is wrong. But migration is beautiful. We are a country of migrants, you know, we give a lot to this country. This is who we are. And I don’t think that nothing is going to change until we change the mentality of the people who write our policies. Because it’s incredible how the policies are made in Washington, but within an hour they’re already affecting the border, and how the agents are treating people coming in.
GMS: We’re hoping that people will open their eyes. Sometimes they just don’t want to believe it, because if somebody hears a migrant has to pay the coyote $20,000, they say, “Well, you’re not poor.”
DR: Yes. They need to hear their stories, how they got the money. How they are in debt with this ring of smugglers for the rest of their lives. Because the smugglers are so smart, you know, they’re so organized. And we know for a fact that it is banks that the smugglers owned and they loaned this money to these people. Or the migrants sell their little casita, they sell the little land that they have, use all their savings. I had a man from Guatemala in our center one time that was lost in the desert for seven days. This man came to our center in Mexico, in Sasabe, Sonora. He had been deported with blisters, dehydrated, his blood pressure, his sugar level – he was a mess. And he was crying. And he gets the phone and he tells his wife in Guatemala, “I can’t do this anymore.” And she says, “you have to keep going because we don’t know how to pay this debt. You have nothing to come back to.” You know, those are the stories that people need to hear, of the sacrifice of these people.
GMS: Yes. I know when they were separating families at the border and detaining children separately on their own, that hit a nerve, it hit people’s hearts. Because we had a protest where I live, and we had never seen so many Anglos come out, because of the children, you know.
DR: And it continues, you know, it continues. There are unaccompanied minors presenting at the border wall that are five years old. They come. They come and we are there to help as much as we can, but this is the year that we cannot stop. We need to continue to share the stories. We need to just, in the best way that we can do, which is through the truth, through the stories, through the people’s journeys. And to say, we migrants are an enrichment to this country. But I really hope that this year we all together as a community can change the narrative. We have to.
GMS: And I understand that you have a book that’s also being written about your story?
DR: Yes, it’s coming up. And hopefully my prayer through that book is that we reach people, humanity, to put a face to a story. We’re not just migrants. We’re not just asylum seekers. We’re people, that have families. You know, it’s the same story with the people that are found in the desert, the remains. And most of them, they don’t have an ID. They don’t, because that’s what the smuggler tells them. You better hide that ID or throw it away. So if something happened or they lose their life, they can’t be found. I know you guys in California have so much going on with that too, but so is Arizona. We are already reaching 5,000 people [who have died trying to cross the desert]. That’s just the ones that have been found since 2000 to now. But we know there are many, many more.
GMS: Would you like to add anything else?
DR: I want to appreciate you and what you do. I really, I really believe in the stories. I believe in journalism and I believe in the press because it makes changes. It has for us. It has helped us tremendously. And we have to continue to speak up.
