Learning to sew is what spared Guatemalan Francisca Lares the perilous migrant journey to the United States, crippling smuggler debt and likely deportation. Instead, she found the better life she was seeking right on her doorstep.
The 30-year-old single mother is a beneficiary of a scholarship program of the government and the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) for young Guatemalans to learn a trade and make a living in their own country.
More than half the Central American country’s 18 million residents live in poverty, according to official figures. The ratio is even higher in Indigenous villages such as Estanzuela in Joyabaj municipality, where Lares lives.
It is a significant push factor, and some 3.2 million Guatemalans are believed to live in the United States — hundreds of thousands of them illegally.
Lares had herself considered pursing the “American dream” at a time she was earning $75 a month producing handmade fabrics and barely getting by.
Then she heard about a sewing course offered at the “Quedate” (Stay) training center.
After completing the course she bought a sewing machine, and now makes traditional Mayan tunics known as huipiles that she sells from a small shop at her home.
Lares also markets her wares on social media, and has already sent a few blouses all the way to the United States.
She does not want to speak about how much she earns, but told AFP she can now easily cover her needs and those of her daughters aged five and nine.
It was the training, she said, “that made me stay here and say: I can get ahead.”
‘They are being caught’
The project, which launched in 2021 at a municipal center in Joyabaj and has received donations from Japan, also trains young Guatemalans in hairdressing, baking, computer repair and other skills to help them find jobs or open their own businesses.
Courses last from two weeks, like the one Lares took, to nine months.
For many in a country where 70 percent of people work in the informal sector and almost one in six are illiterate, the only alternative is putting their lives in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers.
“They are being caught,” Lares told AFP of her countrymen and women being expelled from the United States in a deportation wave under President Donald Trump.
“They are returning and one starts to think: what if I had left (Guatemala), what if I was just starting to pay off my debt and had to leave (the United States) — how would I have paid my debt?” she said.
Smugglers, also known as “coyotes,” charge desperate clients as much as $20,000 to get them to the United States from Joyabaj.
“Some die” on the journey, pointed out Lares, speaking to AFP at the training center she credits with offering her a new lease on life.
“There is suffering there (in the United States) too… Let’s spare our families the suffering.”
Many among Lares’s classmates are deportees.
‘Better to stay’
Fellow graduate Marleny Tino, 25, also considered emigrating. In the end, only her husband went.
He now lives in Florida “afraid” of being deported, she told AFP.
“It is better to stay here than risk your life going there and then being deported as soon as you arrive,” said the mother of two, who also makes huipiles and runs a small business from her home.
Remittances sent home by migrants amounted to some $21 billion last year, almost a fifth of GDP.
Last year, the United States deported 61,680 Guatemalans, according to the government of the Central American country.
Pedro Miranda, the director of the training center, said the goal was to equip more than 600 young people with new skills in 2025.
So far, 814 youngsters have learnt a trade at the center and two similar ones in Huehuetenango and Solola.
