Picture of Lorena (age 21) and younger sister Angelica (age 19). The sisters have been raised in two homes, one with their maternal grandparents and the other with their paternal grandparents. This arrangement is due to the economic constraints faced by their parents in raising eight children. Lorena and Angelica both have expressed sadness about not being able to share much of their lives with their parents, but instead feel closer to their grandparents than to their parents. They also expressed disappointment about not having spent much of their youth with each other. Only after Lorena went to Comitán to join Angelica and another brother to study secondary school did she begin spending time with her siblings.
Angelica has been studying in Comitán since age 12 and is now a college student, studying business administration; she lives alone there during the academic year in a home purchased by her father and another uncle, who both work in the U.S. Angelica travels on weekends back to La Gloria to spend time with her siblings and plays soccer with her sister in an all-woman team ‘Arsenal’��"named after the professional team in the United Kingdom��"which is equipped with replicas of Arsenal’s red-and-white uniforms.
A lack of sustainable income forced Lorena and Angelica’s parents to migrate to the United States (U.S.), where their mother works packaging vegetables during the night shift while their father works in a furniture factory. Their mother migrated after their father got injured in a work-related accident at a construction site in the U.S., which ended the remittances he had been sending back to Mexico. Their mother had to travel three nights and two days to cross the Mexican-U.S. border, with only five litres of water and 5 kilos of apples, and was captured by U.S. immigration authorities (along with their grandfather, two cousins and 50 other members of La Gloria. After being deported to Tijuana, they were able to re-enter the U.S. on a second attempt the same night. As a result of her treacherous experience, their mother advises all her children not to risk migrating to the U.S. After her mother left to the U.S., to supplement the remittances sent to Mexico, Lorena had to leave school for two years to take care of her four youngest siblings (ages: 7, 7, 10 and 16), with the understanding that she would return to school one year after her mother arrived to the U.S. During this period, both her mother and father have sent remittances in the amount of 10,000 pesos per month ($1,000 USD). A little more than two years has passed since their mother’s departure to the U.S., and Lorena has recently passed an entrance exam to enrol at a local University in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas.
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