In 2005, I met Epifanio, a Na Savi (Mixteco) indigenous boy who had migrated with his family from the Montaña de Guerrero region to Oacalco, Morelos, in search of work in the fields as a day laborer. He was eight, and I was an Anthropology student. I was trying to do collaborative research with migrant children. From the very beginning, I was captivated by his intelligence, liveliness, and personality. Since that day, Epifanio “adopted me.” He welcomed me into his life, his family, and his world. He understood what I was searching for, and sparked my curiosity with the enthusiasm, generosity, and wisdom that only a child can bestow. He became the most important teacher, collaborator, and guide I could have ever come across. Since then, I have had the immense privilege of learning, working, and accompanying Epifanio in his journey through life. 

Fifteen years after that first meeting, we have created together an audio-visual aid that shares decisive episodes in his life. With an extraordinary sensibility and intellectual clearness, Epifanio knows how to inhabit several worlds, and his history is a web where many roads and borders intertwine. These roads plow, divide, and also join discontinuous territories, cultures, languages, belongings, identities, families, and loved ones. His memory, his speech, his personality, and the way he looks at life are a result of an unceasing journey between his town, in the Mixteca region of Guerrero, and the fields for temporary laborers in Central and North Mexico, and various cities in the United States. He moved to the U.S. as a child in search of better financial and work possibilities.

The videos we show are the result of a dialogue that has extended for more than fourteen years, during Epifanio’s childhood, adolescence, and youth. It is a conversation with time for listening and a time for silence. These videos are the outcome of a journey in friendship, of being a godmother, of intercultural learning, solidarity and affection. They are also a long conversation intending to narrate through Epifanio’s experience and wisdom, the life of a Mixteco child and youth marked by constant migration. The videos emerge with the certainty that only someone like Epifanio could transmit. He exposes with such clarity what it means to be simultaneously a migrant, an indigenous person, and a child—deeply interrelated experiences. The videos communicate ways of being and of becoming someone that should be understood as inter-weaved. 

This work is a tribute to a child who, from a very young age, witnessed his family’s separation by borders built up by inequality and financial vulnerability. A child who had to travel way too early through a desert that has killed an inordinate number of children and adults. A homage to a child who understood the meaning of being an indigenous person when he left his town for the first time and learned what it means to be a “foreigner” in his own country. A recognition to the child that took on the responsibility of minding for his mother and sisters to reach the “other side,” who buried a “small ‘time box’” with his most beloved treasures before leaving, hoping to recover one day the life he left behind. It is an appreciation of the kid who learned how to face racism, discrimination, and the worst contradictions of our economic and political system to become a young man of beauty, integrity, and freedom of spirit that knows no limits. 

This exercise combines exercises in ethnography, autobiography, and memory to build the narrative of a journey that continues today for Epifanio, who, a short time ago, had to cross the border again in search of the means to earn the livelihood that his country has denied him. A journey that crosses many boundaries: territorial, ethnic, racial, cultural, linguistic, class, and even age. In recounting his life, Epifanio helps us understand that crossing and defying these limits is an experience lived through the body: exposed and in danger in the desert. An experience lived in one’s skin, whose color reveals him as an “outsider,” even in his own country. Something he experienced through his accent and manner of speaking, which stigmatized him as an “Oaxaco.” This experience representing and building off of the beliefs, knowledge, and abilities he inherited from his community, and that differentiated him from other children his age. In this exercise in autobiography and remembrance, Epifanio crosses one more border, the boundaries of time, to go back to his childhood and travel through the territory of recollection, to inform us what he felt and what it meant for that boy to become a migrant, to live crossing borders since then. 

The creative process of these brief autobiographical short films has been especially important because, during the last years, they have sparked the creation of numerous workshops and spaces for collective reflection, art, and conversation with and among migrant children. The shorts have helped Na Savi communities from the Montaña de Guerrero—and their members who have migrated to Morelos, México, and to Alabama and California, in the United States—to meet and communicate again in social media, thanks to the photographs and drawings shown below. The films have also facilitated different kinds of conversations: intimate, familiar, collective, and communal, which had not taken place for a long time.

The visual material we present includes film, photographs, drawings, accounts, and animation in stop motion. It was produced by boys and girls from communities in Yuvinani, Guerrero, and Oacalco, Morelos, in Mexico, and Union Springs, Alabama, in the United States. To be able to relate Epifanio’s life through these materials is an exercise of commemoration and reaffirmation of the lives and wisdom of indigenous, peasant, and migrant children and youth in Mexico. 

The first video in the series narrates Epifanio’s first migration experience. He was born in a Na Savi indigenous community. A few years later, still a young child, he became a migrant in his own country. It is the story of the development of an ethnic identity and the birth of consciousness of a child who discovers the meaning of being an indigenous person in a mestizo society. These components intertwine with the experience of being a migrant at such a young age.

As signaled by indigenous tradition and knowledge, after birth, the placenta and the umbilical cord of the newborn must have a special treatment and bind to some element of nature: buried, thrown into the river, or hung on a tree. This fact determines the sense of belonging, personality, and destiny of the person who arrived in the world. Through this collective and familial act of welcome and opening of life, the Na Savi will forever be united to their people. Wherever they go, they always dream of returning. 

This video relates parallel experiences between the passion Epifanio feels for working the land since he was a child, the deprivation and hardship of livelihoods in agricultural labor, and the early separation from his family because of migration caused by poverty and precariousness. Epifanio’s childhood, like that of thousands of indigenous children and peasants, was marked by the experiences of learning the language, the worldview, and the customs of the Na Savi, growing and developing physically, socializing in the heart of an indigenous family and community. It is also marked by the intimate connection between all this and the knowledge of nature and peasant labor.

Epifanio describes the experience of crossing the border by the Altar Desert and the Mexico-U.S. border for the first time when he was eight. We can understand the amazement, fear, and responsibility he felt for taking care of his mother and sisters at such a tender age. His testimony helps us question the idea of the “American Dream” and grasp the differences of how adults and children experience migration, as well as their ties with places and people left behind.

Many years passed between Epifanio’s return from the United States and the moment illustrated by this video. Here, already 23, he narrates his experience as a teacher of a group of migrant children day laborers in northern Mexico, very near the border where he crossed the first time. During the long period between his return to Mexico—when he was around 13—and the moment illustrated by the video, Epifanio finished high school. After that, he studied for a degree in agro-ecology at the Center for Rural Development Studies (CESDER), a college conceived for young peasants and indigenous people. This situation allowed Epifanio to continue working as a day laborer in different farmer’s fields in Central Mexico. Also, at this time, Epifanio had his first son. 

When he was 23, Epifanio returned to the farmer’s fields of Sonora as a teacher of agro-ecology and the Na Savi peasant knowledge. He fulfilled his dream of working with indigenous children that shared his experience as a child migrant and child worker. 

Unfortunately, this period was brief because these tasks rarely assure a financial livelihood. A few months after this, Epifanio had to emigrate once more to the United States, forced by financial need and lack of a salary to support his family. Currently, Epifanio works in an agricultural produce processing plant in California. His story, now as a young Na Savi, immigrant, and peasant is still writing itself.