Family: Separation wears on father as his daughter toils in Iowa
November 29, 2008
TONY LEYS, tleys@dmreg.com
Des Moines Register
El Rosario, Guatemala — Family means everything in towns like this.
You can hear it in the way residents rattle off multiple last names, describing everyone they're related to. Some names are Spanish. Some are Mayan. Many people have both.
In a poor, dangerous place, it can be a great comfort to live among your kin. Three generations routinely squeeze in under the same corrugated-steel roofs. In-laws, siblings and cousins often live up the street or in the next town. But such ties are being stretched and broken by the wave of emigration away from rural Guatemala.
Carlos Monzon feels the loss every day.
Monzon, 54, is a hard-pressed farmer with two daughters and a son, all in their 20s. The oldest is a nun in Guatemala City. The other two are living illegally in the United States. One of them, his 21-year-old daughter, Emilsa, was an Agriprocessors employee who managed to escape the dragnet during last May's immigration raid in Postville, Ia.
Emilsa was among scores of Guatemalans who took refuge in St. Bridget's Catholic Church in the days after the Postville raid. She talked by phone to her father, who was back in their mountaintop town.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20081129/NEWS/81129009/1001/NEWS
