News Immigration Of Two Guatemalans, the Road to Mt. Kisco and Divergent Fates
| Of Two Guatemalans, the Road to Mt. Kisco and Divergent Fates |
|
|
|
| Sunday, 22 June 2008 | |
|
By PETER APPLEBOME Back home, there wasn’t much difference between Mauricio Arriaga and Rene Perez. They grew up at the same time in the same poor rural area in the mountains of eastern Guatemala outside the town of Esquipulas, where they would join the pilgrims visiting the famous Basilica of Esquipulas, with its dark wooden image of the Crucifixion known as the Shrine of the Black Christ. They worked together in the rice and bean fields. They shared the meager life of the fields and the mountains with its abject poverty, its rampant alcoholism and its one avenue of escape, the arduous journey that took the most ambitious of them north, often to Westchester County, N.Y. They lost contact when Mr. Perez joined the Guatemalan army at 16 or 17. But it came as no great surprise to Mr. Arriaga that about five years after he arrived in Mount Kisco in 1989, following his cousin Tony, he ran into Mr. Perez one day on the street. By that time, the exodus was in full swing and Mount Kisco was filling with young men from the villages around Esquipulas. And then, there was all the difference in the world between the two men. READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/22towns.html?ref=nyregion
              |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|