News from nowhere…

If you aren’t linked to Mexican Journalism Translation Project, you should be. They’re doing a bang up job of making this site rapidly obsolete. Although originally intended just as cultural and historical observations and comments, by necessity, The MexFiles often translated news stories and political commentary that was missing from U.S. and English language media… and over the years, I have occasionaly had complaints when I try to stick to the “mission statement” of writing not just about politics and news, but about “history, culture…and the general weirdness that usually floats down from the north” instead. MXJTP is designed to do what I have been doing just on the side, so really recommend that those reading this site simply for politics and news look there first.

Here is a story, originally published in Ecuador, on immigration issues largely ignored… or only mentioned in passing in the U.S. media: the unescorted (and unprotected) minor migrants passing through Mexico on their way to join family already in the U.S. Original story by Lineida Castillo for Ecuador’s El Comercio, translated by Debbie Nathan

Noemí was on her way to meet her parents, who had left her ten years earlier to look for the “American dream.” Last 11 March, two months before her twelfth birthday, Noemí was found dead in a room in a house in Mexico. A District Attorney in Mexico determined that the child had committed suicide, hanging herself with a shower curtain in a shelter where she had been taken after being caught with a smuggler who was trying to take her to the US.

The trip was her second attempt. In August, Noemí had left her native Molino Huayco, El Tambo for the first time. She lived in Tambo with her grandparents Cipriano Quillay and María Guamán. On her mother’s instruction, the little girl was put on a regional bus to Tulcán.