Chased by the soldiers’ glaring searchlights, the young woman walks through the borderland between Mexico and the USA, between Tijuana and the “Great American Wall”, which the president built after the third re-election in 2032. Like millions of other Americans, 16-year-old Vali observed the murder of the girl and the suppression of the protests of the angry crowd by helicopter operations in the livestream.
The beginning of this new wave of violence against refugees scares the young people who illegally immigrated from Honduras with their families ten years ago. Every US citizen is now marked with a chip that monitors him and documents his life. People without such documentation or with a fake chip, like Vali and her mother, are cursed by political propaganda as annoying vermin, as responsible for the environmental catastrophe and the economic crisis in the USA. You are in great danger of being discovered, captured and deported. The tightening of the country’s security laws enables immigrants to be hunted down and captured by any means, including inhuman means.
Is a dystopia from the future really being told here in “Sanctuary. Escape to Freedom”? As the authors Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher had planned? In the epilogue they report that in their fictional plot they were repeatedly caught up with the current policy of the Trump administration against immigrants, for example the brutal separation of families on the border with Mexico.
The many years of work in refugee aid and the experiences of the immigrants who told the authors their fates can be found in Vali’s story. As the danger of discovery for her small family increases, the mother decides to flee with her and her little brother from Vermont to a nun in New York who is hiding refugees. But the mother is arrested and Vali and the little brother have to get by on their own, experience help, but also the brutal treatment by people smugglers. They find a boy who – after New York also became too unsafe – makes his way to California with them. It is the only state that, isolated from the other states, accepts refugees and offers them salvation.
You create in Vali, a personality shaped by her South American tradition, a bearer of hope and passionate fighter,
With their authentically told stories, Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher want to send a positive signal against the “darkness of our collective nightmares”. In Vali, a personality shaped by their South American tradition, they create a hopeful and passionate fighter, as they experienced with the members of the “Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants”. Namely, “that activists are eternal optimists… Who believe that change is possible, even if everything around them tells them otherwise.” (from 14 years)
Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher: Sanctuary. Escape to Freedom. Translated from the English by Stefanie Frida Lemke. Carlsen, 2021. 349 pages. 15 euro.