SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, Mexico.- While waiting for their documents to transit to the northern border of Mexico or while waiting for the appointment for the CBP One application to enter the United States, Cubans and others migrants They teach classes for children who are in the same undocumented condition on the southern border of the Aztec country.
As reported by the Southern DiaryAs part of a Social Emergency Program of the Ministry of Welfare, Cuban, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan and Haitian migrant teachers provide free classes to some 400 children of different nationalities.
In its first generation, they have already trained more than 100 preschool and primary school students, who receive officially valid documents recognized by the Chiapas Education Secretariat.
At “La escuelita”, as it is known, the teacher is Cuban Yuneysi Fernández Pineda, whose case was reported in the Mexican newspaper.
As she explained to the press, she has been teaching primary school since June 13 and is involved in different subjects, although in Cuba she was a literature teacher.
Having been a high school and pre-university teacher, she was linked to the program to train children while they complete some regularization procedure, like her.
“The only thing you have to have is patience and understand the migrant children, because they have their own difficulties, but we have managed to understand each other. The only thing you need is to be prepared to work in the classes,” she said.
Classes run from 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for teachers, while children enter an hour later and leave an hour early.
“I thank the Mexican government for giving me the opportunity to work in something I really like, because in my country I also taught, but at a different academic level. But there we go, little by little,” he said.
He also said he plans to stay in Mexico if he manages to obtain his documents.
On their way to the border with the United States, Cubans, who most of the time cannot access transit permits or humanitarian visas to move legally through Mexico, are forced to remain in the southern states while they wait for documentation to move legally.
A total of 10,464 undocumented Cuban migrants were intercepted by Mexican authorities from January to March 2024.
The arrests come in the context of increasing operations, in which Mexican authorities detected a total of 359,697 “people in an irregular immigration situation.”
Cubans are the ninth country in terms of the number of migrants intercepted, on a list that is headed by Venezuela, with 89,718, almost one in four of the total, for 24.94%.
Venezuelans are followed in number by Honduras (37,323), Ecuador (36,956), Guatemala (36,934), Colombia (21,534), Nicaragua (18,711), El Salvador (17,720) and Haiti (16,791).
