One more figure

By Edmundo Pacheco

“I used to document the journeys of people traveling to the United States; now I’m just another number in this country’s statistics.”

Photos from the “MIGRATION” series taken in 2012–2013 in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico; the photos depict the journey of people from Central America as they travel to the United States via the western route. 

I am a free wanderer in this world. Free from nationalism or allegiance to any flag (archaic, foul-smelling rags, stained with blood, brimming with pretensions of power and oppression).

I don't consider myself an immigrant, since I regard the entire world as my home. I wander wherever I please, paying no heed to those ridiculous divisions called borders.

I turn my back on nationalism; my commitment should be to my fellow human beings, but I am ashamed to say that I abhor the way we treat the planet and the other beings around us.

How could I possibly feel proud to be called simply “Mexican”? My identity is greater than a mere adjective. My identity is vibrant and bursting with color, like a little girl playing at being grown-up. My identity has been nourished at every step along my journey across this beautiful planet, by the songs of thousands of birds and the roar of thunder; it has been shaped by time and memory.

Classifications separate, divide, and isolate; labels are for sheep who need to be guided and fed with pathetic creeds—I leave them to the poor in spirit, the blind hypocrites, and the pagans who worship plaster figures draped in gold thread. 

I would be pretending to feel proud to call myself Mexican when, on this journey—this experience—far from where I was born and raised, it has been at the hands of my own “compatriots” that I have experienced the very racism we complain so much about, simply for daring to think, to question, and at times to oppose our violated and imposed identity, and for not having understood popular folklore long ago.

My identity is rooted more in the animal instinct to know when to hunt in order to feed and clothe myself—in survival—than in the compulsive obsession with hoarding for the sake of power alone.