"Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp besidethe golden door!"
Excerpt from the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus', engraved on the pedestal of The Statue of Liberty.*
The boy’s father was killed in a construction accident. The boy was 15
years old, the head of a household that consisted of his mother, two sisters,
and a little brother. He grew corn for a living.
Every year the price of corn was going down, this year the co-op manager told
him not to bother planting it. “Plant only what your family can eat,” he said, “Mexico
will be buying American corn because it is cheaper.”
“But how can they sell it any cheaper than we do?”
“The government is subsidizing the farmers, to keep them in business.”
The boy’s family was barely scrimping by. His mother said they might have to move to the city. The boy knew what that meant—his mother would be another woman sitting on a corner waiting for hand-outs. He didn’t know what would happen to his sisters. His little brother was always hungry. That cannot happen.
He wasn’t a brave boy, but what to do? He didn’t have coyote funds for smugglers to take him across the border like his friend did. He had to cross the border from Mexico into the United States where he could find work and send money home to his family… He had to make a run for it.
Did he make it?
I don’t know. I haven’t yet finished
Will Hobb’s book, “Crossing the Wire.”
