ALDEA XUCUP, PANZÓS, Guatemala — Here, in the small Mayan indigenous village of Xucup, men and boys pack tightly and stand in the back of pickup trucks in the early morning, heading to the fields to check on their crops after a night of harsh rain.
It’s early June — and any strong storm has the potential to derail months of work tending to crops, mostly maize, which soon people will harvest to feed their families. And these days, everyone is on high alert after back-to-back hurricanes last year left their home province of Alta Verapaz among the most devastated in the region.
As the men head for the fields, women and young girls — many dressed in bright colored skirts and tops with hand-embroidered flowers and patterns — hold bowls of maize over their heads, gingerly walking between homes made of wooden sticks, straw, metal sheets and concrete blocks.
In one of the homes, right off the main road, sisters Miriam Noemi Cuc Cac and Irma Cuc Cac are beginning their day. They stand in front of the open fire in their kitchen, good-natured and talkative, making breakfast and chatting in their native Q’eqchi’ language about their plans to make the trek north. Again.
Both sisters tried to reach the U.S. southern border in December 2019, but were apprehended by Mexican law enforcement midway in Mexico and sent back home. Since then, they’ve lost their crops to last year’s hurricanes and are bracing for more widespread crop failure. And, now, more than a year and a half after their first attempt, they’re ready to try again.
“God must know why we didn’t make it,” Miriam, 29, says while Irma, 40, listens as she nods and flattens the dough for the tortillas. “But it’s our dream. We want to better ourselves. And there’s no way to make money here. It’s only getting harder.”
There was a time here in Xucup — and in other neighboring villages — where people rarely, if ever, talked about leaving. Most have lived here for generations. Few left home. But that’s changing.
Now, like the Cuc Cac sisters, thousands of rural Guatemalans — as well as Salvadorans and Hondurans in agrarian areas — increasingly are leaving their communities. These days, migration — including the record number of unaccompanied children — is on the rise in rural areas, as an increasing portion of the country’s land and population faces the fallout from climate change.
And it’s not just climate change acting alone. It’s food insecurity. Malnutrition. Poverty. It all ties together.
Guatemalan migrants have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border more than 153,000 times this year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. Exact numbers are hard to know: The majority of those migrants were kicked out of the country, and, separately, thousands of migrants slip undetected over the border each year.
But as the Biden administration navigates the puzzle that is the U.S. immigration system, there’s another far-reaching challenge it faces: climate change. It’s impossible to know the motives of migrants — and it’s rarely just one reason — but U.S. and Guatemalan officials, regional experts and civil society leaders say climate-fueled displacement is a likely factor for thousands who’ve decided to strike out from home and head to the U.S.
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