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“I Have Undrowned”: A BitterSweet Monthly Story About Abara and the Borderlands
What does peace look like at the border? For Abara, it looks like a friendship waved through a fence. A blank book filled with recipes, drawings, and goodbyes from people far from home. A bakery in Juárez sending fresh bread to migrant shelters every day. A woman named Lica sitting across from 40 strangers, asking them to tell her about their Christmases, their dogs, their home.
BitterSweet Monthly writer Kate Schmidgall and photographer Steve Jeter traveled to El Paso and Juárez to spend time with the people at the heart of Abara’s work — Rosa, Abara’s coordinator of migrant services; Yorch, the baker and artist whose murals turn resistance into beauty; and Roberto, whose home on Río Bravo Drive faces the border fence and the friends he’s made on the other side of it.
The title of their piece comes from a word Lica heard again and again from the people she sat with through Abara’s Asylum Narrative Project. In Spanish, desahogar — to un-drown. To let the water out of the lungs. To finally be heard.