In the Juan Bravo theater, the Mexican writer and journalist Valeria Luiselli has shared the stage and conversation with Javier del Pino, well-known Spanish journalist and director of the successful A vivir que son dos días of the Cadena Ser, moderated by the journalist Aurelio Martín.
This conversation between colleagues revolved around the current subjects that most interest Luiselli and that are at the centre of her most recent book, Desierto Sonoro, which she read a passage of to the audience’s delight. "The project began in 2014, when the immigration emergency was declared," she says, and since then the project has led the writer to investigate the migration phenomenon from both sides of the border. Luiselli told anecdotes of her trips, both for leisure and research, along the southern border of the United States, which she says she “had crossed many times as a child, but had never seen from this perspective. In Arizona there is a wall, a wall that Obama built.” The unveiled political discussion made an appearance.
Javier del Pino contributed his own analysis, based on his experiences in the United States and his career as an international political commentator. Despite having felt welcome in the country, he concedes that in a country where there are 70 million Spanish speakers there is a kind of Anglo-Saxon fear that other languages ??coexist with English, as if they threatened the very essence of the country. This idea was mirrored in a story told by Luiselli, where she recounts that in a survey conducted by the State of New York following her daughter's infection of a disease in Mexico, where the first question was, "What language do you speak at home?" as if "Spanish carried diseases." Del Pino also referred to race: "If you are a white immigrant, they call you expatriate; if you are not white, immigrant."
As the conversation progressed, however, it became clear that the system that keeps thousands of migrants detained in centers on the border is not born exclusively from the xenophobic panic that is present in the country. It is also a self-sufficient economic-political system that has to do with private prisons, political lobbies and communication. For the companies that run the detention centers, hired by ICE, are the same ones as those that run the prisons; and as is the case in the prison system, contractors have quotas to meet. Del Pino comments that "in the paradise of capitalism, companies do not distinguish between criminals and children." And Luiselli adds "a detained body generates about two hundred dollars a day, a child twice as much." They both concluded that migration will not stop. Luiselli went further. "Many people are willing to spend a year in jail, because the other option is death.”
If at any time sadness was palpable in the words of the Mexican, it was when she alluded to American society, to talk about the "sadness" that causes her not to see protests in the street. "Until another judge Garzón [for Baltasar Garzón] comes out to make an international trial, or there is pressure on the United States, I find it difficult for the situation to change. The Spanish journalist concluded:" It is the cancer of the 21st century."