Maria Full of Grace

A few months after I quit, I went out for drinks with the bartender and his wife. The conversation quickly turned to Calida...

We are a few beers in and bonding, and the bartender and his wife just told me all about what happened with Calida and what they knew of her. We talk about her wedding with Alejandro, and I wonder out loud whether or not I might be able to stay with them if I go to Colombia for the wedding. Both the bartender (I'll call him Gringo) and his wife immediately say there is no way I'd be able to stay with her--they are kind of appalled that I thought of it. See, the area where she lives is not so great; no one has a lot of money, the whole family lives together, and they wouldn't have space for guests anyway. I should have known that; I forgot because when Calida and Alejandro were here, they each drove a decent car and had their own place for just the two of them. I forgot that even though they were well-off here, Colombia is Colombia. Things are different.
To drive the point in, Gringo and his wife tell me about this movie they recently saw, Maria Full of Grace
Aquí.
In the movie, a young Colombian girl, pregnant and tired of working hard labor on a flower plantation, quits her job when she finds out she can get a better one--as a drug mule. What does that mean? It means she carries drugs from Colombia to the US...inside her body. Someone stuffs condoms with heroine, wraps them into perfect little balls, and she swallows them (62 of them), and gets on a plane. She makes more money for one trip than she could make anywhere else, but it's dangerous. If she is x-rayed, she can be caught. If just one of the heroin balls breaks open in her stomach, she dies and her body will be destroyed by the traffickers. But she goes through with it because there are no other options in the small town where she lives.

Gringo and wife tell me all about this movie, the uncertainty and fear and brutality of it...how the women are treated like animals, and then they say what the worst part of the movie was: They knew that Calida was from the very same area as the girls in the movie. As they watched it, they knew that girls who live near her and even people she knows work as mules. Calida herself has probably been offered the job. It's scary to watch a movie and know that the terrible things in it are real; it's much worse to personally know someone who lives close to it.

Thinking about what people like Calida go through in their everyday lives helps me understand why immigration is such a huge problem. If I lived in a place where it didn't matter how smart or hardworking I was in trying to escape poverty and danger, I would be mighty tempted to get the hell out. They know that it's fairly easy to get to the US and fairly easy to get a job without a social security number. They know how numerous Hispanics are and that they can live here for only a few years if they want and then return--they don't even need to learn English. They probably know people who have done it and come back safely, so what's the worry? Sneaking across the border is a lot less scary than staying in their current situation for a lot of people. If I lived right on the edge of the most powerful country in the world, wouldn't I want to sneak over for a bit?