La Jornada: Poet portrays the growing criminalization of the migration phenomenon

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chis., In his most recent book, Central American family album, Published in Guatemala, the writer and poet Balam Rodrigo (Villa Comaltitlán, Chiapas, 1974) addresses the issue of migrants, a social phenomenon that “has become even more criminalized.”

The axis of the work, he said, “continues to be migration, but also to talk about the family and personal part; that is, the presence of these migrants in my life and that of my family. It is not recent; it is historical migration; it is not something that began 10 or 15 years ago with the mediatization or politicization of the caravans.”

In an interview, he added: “now there is greater control; it is more difficult for migrants and it is more risky to cross (to the United States) due to the pressures exerted by Donald Trump’s government and here.”

doublespeak

He pointed out that the above “has caused them to surrender, literally, to organized crime; on the other hand, we can see that while the Mexican government continues to demand respect for the migrants who are in the United States, raids are carried out in Mexico City, for example, so as not to disfigure it, or they build migrant camps, and in Chiapas also, they clean the roads of the caravans, because the World Cup is coming and this has to be beautiful to give the big cat that nothing happens in the country of disappearances.”

Balam, winner of the Aguascalientes Fine Arts Poetry Prize, José Revueltas Fine Arts Literary Essay Prize, and the Guillermo Ruset Banda National Literary Essay and Criticism Prize, which is convened by the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, among others, stated that “we have to collect, reflect, and leave at least a record and memory of the situation that is happening these days.”

He recalled that since he was a child he experienced the migratory phenomenon, since his parents provided shelter, food and other support to many Central Americans who passed through the coast on their way to the United States. Several maintained contact with the writer’s family once they settled in the northern country or were deported. Due to his approach to the subject and other reasons, Balam assumes himself to be Central American.

“My book was recently published in Guatemala, which came out of the press in 2026, and is published thanks to the participation and encouragement of the Zacapaneca Society of Storytellers and Anecdotes, and the Metáfora publishing house. It is a collection called Lumbre, which includes Guatemalan authors, mainly of poetry,” he reported.

An ember for the fire

He added that works by “other writers from that country were also released, such as Ana María Rodas, Mario and Javier Payeras, and Vania Vargas; I am very happy that they have included me as another Central American, as another Guatemalan; I am a Central American from Chiapas.”

He remarked: “I had to open this fire, I contributed an ember to the Lumbre, to the stove of these authors; there are more than 10 of us who participated.

“My book brings together poems by Marabunta, the first book I wrote in this tetralogy about migration, about Central America; poems also from the book Central American of the dead, perhaps a little better known, and other materials that were originally part of the first versions that I made of that work; textual materials that include a letter that a Guatemalan comadre wrote to my mother in 1981, when the armed conflict was still going on.”

He added: “she and her family were deported to Guatemala and from there she sent a letter. I recovered it, integrated it into the first corpus that formed Central American of the dead, and for different reasons I later decided to remove some of these materials.”

Connection with Roque Dalton

He commented that now, “to make it more Central American, more our eastern Central American family album, I decided to also incorporate some photographs in which Jorge Dalton (son of the poet Roque Dalton, murdered by his fellow guerrillas on May 10, 1975), our Salvadoran countryman, and I are in the migrant’s house from Saltillo, Coahuila, where I went to teach a workshop and present my books in the company of Father Pantoja, now deceased, and other migrants; I took a photograph of him and he took one of me, and I include those materials there with texts that evoke our presence in that place.”

The writer stated that the volume was presented in recent days at the home of the migrant Scalabrini, located in the border city of Tecún Umán, Guatemala, with the support of the Mexican consulate in that Central American country; in the Soconusco archaeological museum, in Tapachula, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and in San Cristóbal, Chiapas.