For me, one of the most challenging things about being here in Ruiz is working in the overwhelming poverty. From what I’ve seen, it manifests itself in all aspects of their daily life. The roofs over the people’s heads leak in the rain and some children swim naked in streams that double as sewers. I’ve learned to see beyond these things and become envious of the joy many of the people display even in these circumstances. They are hospitable and talkative, even as many of them go hungry. But what I didn’t realize until today was the ways that the poverty of the area affects people in ways I could have never seen at first glance.

I had the chance to sit down and talk with one of our translators, Carlos, today at a work site and ask some specific questions about Ruiz and the struggle in the area. The biggest problem, he says, is the lack of jobs. The jobs that do exist, mainly construction, pay very little even by Mexican standards. Carlos, one of the top in his class at the University of Nayarit, estimates that only about 8 percent of students make it past high school. With the lack of education and the lack of job opportunities the men of Ruiz look elsewhere. Many leave their homes, families and lives behind to try and find a route across the border to the United States risking life and limb to do it. Some make it across, some stay in the border towns to work at factories and some are sent back to Ruiz.

Carlos personally knows a man of only 24 who has tried and failed three times to cross the border. On one attempt he rode for hours gripping the undercarriage of a freight train inches from the track. He then walked for almost three days through the desert with no food or water. He was caught and sent back to Ruiz.

Once the men leave Ruiz for better pay, the true problems begin. While they begin to send back money for their families it often slows down and eventually stops coming at all. It is common for the men who left to start new families across or along the border and never look back at what they left. The money stops coming in and the boys grow up without fathers to learn the harsh reality of their town on their own.

In the United States, we tend to thing of illegal immigration as an American problem – just another topic for the pundits on television to fight about. But being here has shown me that immigration is not only an American issue, but also a Mexican one. It is not only a political problem, but a personal one as well.

- Matt Grager