Tommy and me

Whenever I interview someone on the street, I draw a crowd. The smaller the town, the bigger the crowd.

Usually, it’s harmless curiosity. I show the children how my digital camera works. I chat with the adults about politics and the weather. I tell them my background. They tell me theirs.

But two events over the last few days ended differently. On Sunday, I went to the town of Belisario Dominguez to talk to women whose husbands and sons have left for the United States. On weekends, the town’s main street becomes a busy, crowded marketplace where people from the nearby communities sell their goods.

After an afternoon of interviews, my translator and I were walking back to our car when I saw a woman I had begun to talk to earlier. Our conversation had been interrupted by a phone call. Assuming the call had been from the United States, I stopped to talk to her again. She had a stand at the side of the road, where she sold mangoes, oranges, watermelon and corn tossed with chili.

A crowd quickly gathered, and I did my best to ignore them and focus on the woman. But then a man demanded to know of my translator what we were doing there. Another man got in my face. His speech was slurred and I couldn’t make out a single word of what he was saying, but I knew it wasn’t chit-chat about politics or the weather.

I stood up and the man grabbed my upper arm. He held on and kept talking nonsense to me. I shook him off, said “Vamos!” to my translator and started walking away. We were followed briefly, and we didn’t linger in that town.

Before I left Tapachula yesterday, I returned to a shelter for migrants where I had spent some time last week, talking to the people who run it and the migrants who stop for a few days’ rest before continuing north. In the afternoons, the shelter is closed, so the men gather outside, just sitting around really, barely even talking.

When I got there yesterday afternoon, a man in a Tommy Hilfiger hat immediately approached me. I explained who I was and that I just wanted to take a few pictures. He said loudly that no one there wanted their picture taken. He said he was from Honduras, and people there don’t like it when you take their picture.

“There are no cameras in Honduras?” I asked. I figured the best way to defuse the situation was to keep talking to this guy until he calmed down. Besides, the shelter was on the edge of town, and unless a cab came by, there wasn’t anywhere for me to go.

Next, this man, let’s call him Tommy, walked toward a group of migrants sitting on some rocks and said to them, sweeping his arm across the crowd, “You don’t want your picture taken, do you?”

No response.

I tried to ask Tommy why he didn’t want his picture taken, but he seemed unable to explain himself. If he wasn’t drunk, he was barely literate. Then he asked me for money. I refused.

“You just told all these people not to let me take their picture,” I said to him. “You made my job harder. I’m not giving you money.”

He then asked me to follow him around to the side of the shelter, to see some people doing laundry. Again, I refused. By this point, the dozen or so migrants there were paying close attention. I wanted to hold my ground against him. But I also could tell that nothing would come from sticking around. There would be no interviews or photographs as long as Tommy was there.

A few minutes earlier, I had noticed a taxi with a couple people inside drive by. I figured the cab would have to come back soon, and that it would be empty. It did, and it was. I flagged the cab down and got in, Tommy following me into the street and closing the door behind me.