The church service is underway in the basement sanctuary. Women wearing traditional huipiles embroidered with sequins pray together with men in collared shirts, while girls with long ponytails run around the tables. The room is festooned with white lace and crepe paper, and crosses in blue and white. In the back stairwell, a man wants to tell his story but prefers to remain anonymous. He knows too many people who’ve gotten in trouble this way: Por reclamar los derechos estan deportados. “For claiming their rights they were deported,” he says. No valemos nada ante la ley, “We are worth nothing before the law.”
The man has been robbed three times while walking home from work, on the long, dark road to the fish factories: “Indian Alley,” it’s been called. The amount of fish caught determined his hours, when he worked cleaning machinery at a fish processing company. Sometimes he would start at 5 pm, sometimes finishing at 10:00 pm, sometimes staying until 3:00 in the morning if there had been a lot of fish.
The worst attack took place at about 10:45 at night. He was walking home when a black car headed toward him. The car passed him, turned around, pulled alongside him. He was nervous, then. There were three people in the car. “I didn’t look at them – I kept walking. Two guys got out and said “give me your wallet, your wallet, your wallet!” I didn’t say anything; I kept walking, even faster. The driver stayed in the car, and two men chased me. When I looked back at them one hit me on the side of the head with a bat. Then he hit me again. I fell on the ground. The two of them fell on top of me – one had a knife – and took everything from me – my wallet, my money, my ID, everything. Then they took off in their car. My head was bleeding. I wiped my eyes – the blood was getting in them, I couldn’t see. I went to the police station on foot, and made a report. The police said I needed to be checked by a doctor, so they took me to the hospital in the police car.”
“These robberies happen all the time, to so many people. When someone comes to work with a black eye I don’t have to ask them what happened; I know what happened.”