The Right To Grow Old

Triggered by a decade of violence, corruption, and scarcity, Hondurans are fleeing collapsing communities toward perceived shelter across borders at the rate of hundreds per day. This project renders visible the man-made catastrophe of forced displacement of a people who refuse to be dehumanized.

Set in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, this work tracks the vulnerabilities that a young family faces before and after crossing borders and reflects on their shifting identities as they endure crossing emotional and physical boundaries. Their plight attests to the fight to preserve life as an act of resistance in itself: migration as survival.

Such as the barrio where gangs rule. Where selfless love between neighbors and generational hatred between enemies coexist. Where father figures fight to preserve family, both biological and chosen. Individuals choose to flee for their lives, while others offer holy salvation in the next. The young Moises confesses: he lays awake at night wondering whether to live, die, or flee from the barrio.

His family urged them to leave before the violence of his San Pedro Sula took their loving bond they found in their corner of Honduras. His friends told him he's better off staying with them, while the police persistently harassed him for being from "one of those bad neighborhoods." While his girlfriend, Meya, now suddenly pregnant, urged them to leave for the sake of their unborn child.

Fighting increased in cruelty yearly and in the wake of undeclared wars between state and gangs, depopulated neighborhoods, civilians struck by stray bullets and inflicted by trauma of daily horror, Moises, Meya and their baby Jimena were left no choice but to leave Honduras to age far away somewhere safe in peace. They cross borders in busses and trains until the young family reached the US-MEX border when the tracks ran out in Mexicali; where they wait to secure sanctuary. This is a chapter from an ongoing project that illustrates Honduran youth who have had their lives undermined by violence, corruption and dispossession, called The Right to Grow Old.