YouTube sensation LiL MoCo did it again. This time, the choice for his new parody was Drake's "Started from the Bottom."
The "mexicanized" version of the song is called "Started from the Border" and features the struggles most immigrants face when coming illegally to the United States.
The video description read: "Mexicans cross the border everyday...now, we're here in the USA." But that only reminded me of the time I met a girl who opened my eyes to the reality undocumented immigrants face, and how that changed my life.
A little over a year ago I went to get my weekly mani-pedi. My manicurist of the day turned out to be from Ecuador, and I felt so nice to be able to speak in my own language after a day of immersing myself in a foreign tongue.
Us Latinos tend to be very friendly, and we don't really have a filter when it comes to asking people about their personal lives or telling people about ours. My advantage is that when I don't seem to be connecting with someone, I appeal to my journalistic training and that seemed to be the case. So I asked about her experience in Beauty School to get her talking, because that specific day, I just needed a good conversation.
To my surprise, she told me that she didn't go, and I asked her how she got her job. She said that when she came to the States this was the first thing she found, so she learned with time. To confirm, I asked again, "So you didn't go to school." To which she replied: "It's a lot harder given my status."
And I swear the first thing that got out of my mouth after that was: "Why, 'cause you're Latina?," but the truth was terrifying: "Because I'm illegal," she said.
I was shocked, I wanted to know so many things, mostly to verify or deny the things people say about crossing the border. So I kept asking, and our conversation went something like this:
ME: How long have you been here?
HER: Three years
ME: How did you get in?
HER: By plane from Ecuador to Guatemala, and after that we took buses, walked, hid between the bushes...
ME: We? How many people were there?
HER: When we got in we were seven, but the original group was larger. Once you get to certain places they separate you. You go with a guide, and as soon as you get to a specific spot, they hand us to another person, give us addresses where to go and who to ask for. It's a different address for each group, depending how they separate us. They also give us money from each country we cross, so we can move faster. We went through a lot of underground tunnels, but we spent more time walking outside.
ME: How long did it take you to get to the USA?
HER: About a month
ME: How much did you pay?
HER: $15,000
After that there was a silence. When I came back to my senses I asked her why she decided to do it. She told me that she had no opportunities where she was from, and her sister had already crossed the border that way. It was that sister who found a person to pay for this girl's trip, someone to lend them the money that they would have to pay eventually with a low interest rate. So she took her chances.
What shocked me the most was that this girl did this by herself, and she wasn't even 18 years old. She had to deal with the fear of getting caught, maybe going to jail if that happened, long days, even longer nights, and compromise her education, only to start working and probably making less than the minimum wage in a country that's not her own. A country where she arrived looking for opportunities to improve herself, to be a better person, better professional, but all that hope was flushed down the toilet when she had to face this cruel reality.
The worst part is that she told me that I wouldn't begin to imagine the amount of people who do what she did every day.
Here's LiL MoCo's video. And even though it's intended to be a parody and make us laugh, there's a lot of truth behind his words. So maybe instead of watching it just to laugh about it, we could watch it with a critical eye, and read between the lines.
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