The mexican emigrant story.

---

San Francisco, The Mission,
23-11-2002.

I've decided that today's excursion will have to be The mission, a spanish speaking enclave of San Francisco, one of the oldest neighborhoods and inhabited mainly by mexican emigrants who have left their homeland behind in a desperate search for a better life.

Down in their homeland stories abound in the dusty aldeas of mainland Mexico. Family members, friends and acquiantances who made it across the heavily guarded border, people who came from the impoverished shanty towns of Mexico Ciudad, la gente mexicana who often had less to eat as the rats that inhabited the iglesias locales.

If there was anything at all in their vidas pobres it were the dreams they harboured, dreams of a better life, a big american automobile with a brick house that has many rooms, a kitchen with a microwave and an electric washing maschine, a color TV and kids that can be send to college instead of the village's one room school building that has got only one teacher who spends most of his professional life drunk as a skunk, in no mental state at all to teach young healthy brains.

Those that do manage to get the treasured american green card, those that did not get kicked back across the border losing the whole family's savings to these so-called Coyoteros who are supposed to get them to the american site, those that don't go down in misery, give in to King Alcohol, end up in jail for petty crime or join gangs and get knifed young.....well those do manage to find a new excistence, many of them here in The Mission, this spanish speaking enclave in San Francisco.

These things, facts of life for the average mexican peon or shanty town city dweller from down south in Los Estados Unidas de Mexico, go through my mind while I sit on a bench in a small square making sketches in my book of the local kids playing a game of soccer.

They are smart and soon enough come over to investigate asking me questions in english.
I see a moment of surprise cross their young brownish colored faces when I answer them in spanish, though they accept my spanish easily and with big smiles with the boldest of them asking me "donde Usted aprendiò español, señor"?

Holland? They have never heard of the place though one of them believes it might be in Michigan. Amsterdam...forget it, they can't even pronounce the name.

I pay them all a coke provided they stay around and pose for me so I can draw their faces.

---

Photos

A public toilet in...
The Mission in San Francisco.

A city spider...
in The Mission in San Francisco.