Thread: Mayan translator hears 'sad stories' from migrants at U.S. border

Mayan translator hears 'sad stories' from migrants at U.S. border

By Meagan Fitzpatrick, CBC News
Posted: Jul 16, 2014 5:00 AM ET

For some of the many migrant children from Central America streaming across the U.S. border in recent months, Sheba Velasco is a comforting voice at the other end of a phone line. That's because she's the only one in the U.S. who can speak to them in their own language. Velasco is from Guatemala and speaks Ixil, a Mayan language spoken in the country's highlands. Fewer than 200,000 people speak it in and around her village of Nebaj.

Ixil is nothing like Spanish, she explains during an interview at her home near Washington, D.C., which means when migrants are detained at the Mexican-U.S. border, they often can't communicate with authorities.

Her services are mostly called upon to translate Ixil to English during immigration court proceedings and lately, she's been very busy. Last year, Velasco would get maybe one or two calls a month and now she gets two or three a week. Most of her work is by phone but she also travels to Texas, New Mexico and other states that are handling the bulk of migrants trying to get into the country.
Many of them are children. Velasco said they are "mostly sad stories" that she interprets for the courts.

Sheba Velasco translates Ixil, a Mayan language in Guatemala, to English and her services are used in many immigration hearings in the U.S. With the recent flood of migrants from Guatemala trying to cross the U.S. border, Velasco has been busy. (Meagan Fitzpatrick/CBC News)

"I hear children, when I translate for them, very sad, scared. They don't know where they are and they don't know what's going to happen," she said. "No one is waiting there for them. When I see them crying, it is emotional for me." She tells them not to be scared, that even though they might be sent home, the immigration officials will not hurt them and they are in a safe place. Stories of young girls being raped during their journey from Guatemala are familiar ones to Velasco.

Velasco, 47, came to the U.S. in 1981. She lived in Minnesota and later moved to New York City and worked as a cultural interpreter at the National Museum of the American Indian, then came to the capital to work at the museum's Washington branch.

She is immensely proud of her Mayan culture and works hard to preserve and promote it. She dresses in a traditional shawl called a zute and a colourful shirt called a huipil. She made them both by hand herself; she was taught how to weave by her grandmother as a young girl. Part of her work with the museum involves her going back to her village and taking photos to illustrate the culture.
It's not always easy for Velasco to go home. People expect her to help them get to the U.S. and they become angry when she tells them she can't. The same pressure is put upon her when she's in court interpreting for them in the U.S.

"They don't understand that I'm only translating," she said. She’s not a lawyer or adviser, she can’t get involved in the cases. All she can do is translate and that's not easy for some of these people, desperate for help, to accept. "I'm sorry I tell them, I can’t."

Velasco knows of only one other person living in the U.S. that speaks Ixil, but they are not a U.S. citizen like she is, which means they can't work as an official translator for the court. It’s all up to her.

When asked about the volume of unaccompanied minors flooding the border from her country, Velasco said she doesn’t agree with parents sending their children on these dangerous journeys. For starters, their safety is at risk, but second, she’d prefer they stay in Guatemala where they can practise their cultural traditions and language. She knows many families are poor and struggle but Velasco said coming to America is not necessarily how to get a better life. "What I would like to share with them is, you can make it where you are," she said.

She feels badly that families fall for the lies they are told by smugglers. The coyotes, as they’re called, show photos of the U.S. around her village, and tell young people how easy it is to make money there. Parents essentially sign their houses over to the banks to get money to pay the smugglers. Their children get caught at the border, are sent home and everything is lost, Velasco explained. In the worst-case scenario, their children don’t even make it back.
"I would not send my children," she said. "Their life is more important to me."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mayan-translator-hears-sad-stories-from-migrants-at-u-s-border-1.2707816

Related Story:

http://wvpublic.org/post/language-barriers-pose-challenges-mayan-migrant-children

Guatemala, like Mexico is exporting it's poverty to the US and expecting the same big payoff in remittances for the government to spend and it looks like our government is acting on the behalf of foreign interests instead of the interests of the American people.


Integral Family Literacy

Country Profile: Guatemala

Guatemala is a multi-cultural and multi-lingual country with a great diversity of ethnic groups spread throughout its 22 departamentos and 332 municipalities. Although Spanish is the official language, it is not spoken by all Guatemalans. According to a National Population Census in 2002, around 40% of the population is indigenous, and the rest is considered Mestizo (mixed indigenous and Spanish) or descendants of migrants from Europe. The census diagnosed that 54.5% of the Mayan population is bilingual in a Maya language and Spanish, while 43.6% is monolingual. There are 23 officially recognised indigenous languages, such as Quiche and Cakchiquel, which are spoken in rural areas and among indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. Approximately 51% of the population lives in non-urban zones. The indigenous populations in rural Guatemala are among those with the lowest income and the lowest levels of education and literacy.

This low-middle income Central American country has a long-lasting history of economic and social challenges, which have been reflected in the living conditions of its population. It is estimated that 24% live in extreme poverty (i.e. on less than US$2 per day), a percentage much higher than the Latin American average of 15%. Currently, Guatemala occupies the 116th position in the World Human Development Index (HDI), the second lowest of its region. Out of the three dimensions measured by the HDI, education has the lowest rate: .42 as opposed to health (.80) and income (.52). One of the main reasons that might explain the country’s low education index is the low public financial investment on the sector: the total expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP equals 3.2%, which places Guatemala among the 40 countries with the lowest expenditures in the world.

National data from 2004 show that less than 60% of the population aged 15 to 24 has completed at least six years of basic education, the lowest average among other eighteen Latin American countries. The numbers are even more disconcerting with regard to the rural population where as little as 40% of the population has reached sixth grade. Improvements have been observed within the last fifteen years as the net enrolment in early grades has increased by 22%, which has enabled Guatemala to have almost universal access to primary schooling. However, the education system still shows significant signs of inefficiency: the survival rate to Grade 5 is 71%, resulting in only 61% of students graduating from primary school (Grades 1–6, 2007). This results in a continuous flow of new illiterate or barely literate adolescents and young people into the population group with a potential demand for adult literacy programmes.

According to the country’s National Report for CONFINTEA VI, there are approximately 82,839 new illiterate adults each year, of which 60% have dropped out of school before sustainably mastering literacy skills, and the remaining 40% corresponds to persons who have no schooling at all. There has been a decrease in the adult illiteracy rates from 48.10% to 26% (1985–200, but the literacy rate in Guatemala is still the second lowest in the Latin American and Caribbean region. In addition, there are remarkable geographic, socio-economic and gender inequalities with regards to literacy acquisition: 71.55%, out of all adults with no or low literacy skills live in rural areas; 44% of the country’s poorest have no literacy skills, whereas 91% of the richest persons master literacy; and 31% of adult women do not possess literacy skills as opposed to the 20% males who face with this challenge.

The rest of the article is at:
http://www.unesco.org/uil/litbase/?menu=16&programme=94