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About the Author

Meagan Chuckran, '07 is a Spanish major from New Hampshire. She spent last semester studying and living on the border of Arizona and Mexico through the Borderlinks Program. This May, Meg will return to Mexico as one of two student coordinators for the 2006 Holy Cross Mexico Program.

Thinking Out Loud

I woke up in Mexico every morning around five thirty. A truck selling donuts drove down my hill. It played music through a bullhorn attached to the top of the truck, singing about the deliciousness of the "donos". I waited for the truck to pass, dozed for a few minutes. Then came the water truck, chirping in Spanish about the low, low prices, and delicious, refreshing water. It passed. I dozed. Then the brick factory outside my window started production. Grinding rocks around six a.m. By six fifteen, my dad was up. Chester was making him beans and tortillas, and telling him to be quiet, so he didn't wake me up. "Teresita todavia duerme" She would remind him. Teresa still is sleeping.

Junior woke up next. Then Mia, Patty, Alma, if she was home. Then I woke up. I got dressed as fast as ever, behind the curtain that divided my room from the kitchen, and went outside to the bathroom. I threw toilet paper in the basket, flushed by holding a bucket of water above my head and dumping the water in, and tried to keep my jeans from touching the floor, or else they would be muddy for the rest of the day. Sometimes, there was a hose running into the bathroom and into the washing machine. Then, I'd prop the door shut with a bucket. The rest of the time, it was held securely with a string wrapped around a nail. I went back inside, used some antibacterial gel to wash my hands, took a vitamin, tied back my hair, and sat down at the table with Chester. Eggs, beans, and hot dogs. Tortillas instead of a fork. "Buenos dias, Teresa," she would say. And then I would start my day in Mexico.

For four months I went by a different name. Meagan was too hard to say, and Therese is my middle name. So I became Teresa. My family, the nuns down the street, my classmates, the women in the kitchen, they all called me Teresa, never knowing that when I am here, in the United States, I am, even in my name, a very different person.

I introduced myself as Teresa when I attempted to explain to a pregnant woman with no shoes that making the four-day journey across the desert to the United States was very dangerous. She looked at me blankly, terrified that I was the migra tricking her into not making the trip. As Teresa, I went back to the migrant shelter at which we were staying, and wept for this woman who had no choice but to risk her life.

Another day, Ninfa gave me a hug, "Oh Teresa," she said, after she told me the story of how she attempted to cross into the United States four times and is now stuck at the community center in Nogales, Mexico. She cannot go home, cannot be with her family, and is completely isolated from any sense of normalcy. Her sister has died, she is in need of surgery, and she cried for hours when we baked her a birthday cake. She is without anyone consistent in her life, but carries with her more strength and joy than I could ever hope from myself.

When Madre Beti brought me along with her youth group, and talked to me along the way about where God is on the border, and how she lives amidst the suffering but still keeps her faith, she periodically squeezed my arm. "Escucha bien, Teresita" Listen well, little Teresa. She reminded me that God is always there, in the tortillas, the sickness, the parties out in the street, and in the struggle to buy food.

To all those who I spoke with, who told me of their suffering, their struggle to make life on the U.S.-Mexico border work, I was Teresa.

And then on December tenth, nine hours in an airplane changed my name back again. With no warning, I was rocketed back to the first world, and my name changed. It was the concrete something about myself that shifted as soon as I left the place where I had discovered so much. It was a time in which I grew in my understanding of the world leaps and bounds. I showered twice a week, went to the bathroom outside, but knew I was in the right place. I found things about which I was passionate, and I found it so easy to live the ideal of simple living. There was no choice. Nothing to complicate life.

It is the coming back home again that is the hardest. When so much has changed, and everything at home seems so much the same. It is in the coming home that I have struggled to find God again, find my place again, re-learn how to do college, and start answering to my name again. I am so far, in so many ways, from my experience there, that I hardly know where to begin, or how to approach God, my family, my friends after I have changed so profoundly in my understanding of the world.

I still flinch every time my Spanish professor calls on Teresa, the Spanish Language Assistant. It is still my inclination to go back to that time, to re-embrace the life that I had in Mexico.

But I am discovering that it is the coming home that is important too. It is as important to be Meagan, as it was to be Teresa. To find God in what I did there, and bring that conception of Her back here. To share my experience with anyone who will listen, and through that bring meaning to what I did, and bring alive the stories of the people that I met, knew, and loved so much.

To be home no longer means to be at the place where everything is familiar. It is returning to the place where everything once was familiar, and trying in some way to reform that place to fit the new me. It is discovering the difference between forcing myself into what once was my routine, my spirituality, my life, and allowing my new-self to find a new routine, spirituality, and life. I am bringing Mexico home, in tiny baby steps, while at the same time, having to let go of so much that was mine there. The least of which is my name.