Silvia’s story is the story of a Na Savi (Mixtec) girl that, after leaving her indigenous community has had to face and cross many barriers. Barriers of gender, class, language, identity, and race. Here we present, in short-film form, a narrative we have been building as a dialogue at different times and with different rhythms since Silvia was eight years old. The conversation started in 2008 with workshops in art, theater, and games. In these workshops, Silvia, her sisters, and other girls and boys from her migrant community narrated their lives—expressing the yearning that migrant children feel for their hometown—, and shared their ethnic knowledge. This narration continued in a photography workshop and a series of interviews in which Silvia and her younger sister, Carolina, shared their experiences in Mexico as indigenous and migrant day laborer children. These experiences are the basis of the two stop-motion animations that are part of this short film. In a third instance, several years later, towards the end of 2018, the rise of violence in her community led Silvia to migrate to the United States seeking asylum.

This presentation is an exercise in self-representation and documentation. It weaves different periods and moments in Silvia’s life—very closely intertwined with that of her younger sister, Carolina, and the lives of their other siblings. They have had to separate various times because of migration (she has reunited with some of them in the United States). This story enables us to understand the forms migrant children create and recreate in the (trans)national space. How they connect, through their mobility, discontinuous territories like their indigenous community, the day labor fields where they worked during their childhood, and the United States, where Silvia lives now seeking asylum, and where Carolina longs to go to reunite with her siblings. The narration has let us also interweave, from conversations at different times, the present, past, and future of the two girls—currently young women of 17 and 20 years of age. 

This story is unique and simultaneously very similar to the accounts of many indigenous and peasant girls in Latin America. Silvia and Carolina have had to face inequality, migrating far from their home community to work, with their family, in the farmers’ fields in the center and north of the country. For these two sisters, playing and working in the fields have been concurrent experiences, but now that both have stopped being girls, the struggle for economic livelihood continues. Silvia works exhausting shifts of more than ten hours as part of the cleaning crew in a company. At the same time, Carolina overcomes precariousness in her community. She dreams of returning to the United States—the country where she was born and had to leave as a baby—, to offer her son a “better life.”

Silvia’s story is that of a border that marks the difference between a life of permanent struggle against financial precariousness and the possibility of living far from violence and threats. A better life where getting a job provides her with enough income to build the future she wishes for herself, her sister, and her children. Hers is a story of how the border has divided the life of a family. Of how the experience has deepened the ties of blood and affection between two sisters that accompany each other from a distance.