Solito/Solita: Escape and Fetters Across the Border

In June I am going to be burrowing through a heap of 'To-Be-Read' books that have gathered online and 'in real life.'

~~~

But Solito/Solita, the anthology of stories of asylum seekers (and a few economic migrants) from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, is already read. I stopped between stories because I needed to rest. Parental abuse, knife crime, blackmail, robbery of migrants at gunpoint, and so on and so forth, are not light subjects.

I think there is little redemption in the book. The exception is, of course, that a few interviewees reach a point where they are happy where they are in their lives. For a few it is already a relief not always to fear being gunned down by a gang.

It is true that, after their country of birth is far behind, a few people who tell their stories in the book may have found better conditions: an apartment of their own, college tuition, etc. But I think the book illuminates in likewise absurdist ways the social, moral and political vacuum in the country to which they have fled.

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"U.S. Customs and Border Protection provide assistance
to unaccompanied alien children
after they have crossed the border into the United States.
Seen here is a Rio Grande River rescue." (2014)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]

Note: It needs to be considered that this photo comes from a government source.
Also: It may not have been the photographer's intention
that this photo be used for a skeptical article.

The interactions with Border Patrol recorded in the book
run the spectrum of positive to negative.
License: Public domain

*

In their annotations, the editors don't 'grind axes' against any political party; or at least they don't appear to grind axes. It is emphatically stated that the Obama administration was more damaging than the Clinton, Reagan, or G.W. Bush administrations, to the welfare of Latino-Americans who were residing in the USA but were 'undocumented.'

"A Border Patrol Riverine Unit conducts patrols in an Air and Marine Safe-Boat
in South Texas along the Rio Grande river.
They rescue a child who is stranded on the river bank of the Rio Grande." (2013)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]
See notes above

(PRESIDENT Trump, however, published the infamous order that let authorities take children, and babies, away from parents who were believed to be 'illegally' stepping across the border. Whereas law that President Obama passed near the end of his administration was milder: e.g. the DACA order permitted foreign citizens who had been brought into the US as children to legally reside there, and legally work.)

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— On a personal note: The book describes many acts and institutions of charity, which are all (at times almost literally) life-giving oases in deserts of indifference and brutality. But I wish that societies as a whole were more focused on achieving human justice and respecting basic human rights, less eager to trust to impulses of benevolence. —