Chiapas is the home Maria Elena Dominguez is forced to leave and the uncertain destination she later weighs against a new life in the north. In her story, it is both a specific place of family loss—a small village where soldiers kill her father and take her mother and brother—and a home she cannot be sure still holds anyone who can receive her.

Home and Family

Maria Elena is fifteen when her past is recounted. Four years earlier, soldiers had killed her father, a leftist sympathizer, in their tiny village in Chiapas. At his funeral, the same soldiers returned. Her mother and older brother fought their captors as they were taken away together in one armored vehicle; the frightened Maria Elena was put into another. The village is thus the setting for the rupture that leaves her separated from her closest family.

A Possible Return

After leaving El Asilo Seguro, Maria Elena travels north with a ticket to Nogales. At the bus station, she briefly considers exchanging it for one that would take her back to Chiapas. The choice is not simply between two places: she knows her father is dead and fears that her mother and brother are probably dead as well. After four years away, she cannot know who might remain to take her in or care for her. She boards the northbound bus instead.

Distance and Displacement

Chiapas remains a point of reference even as Maria Elena’s route carries her through other places. After her father’s death, she is taken to a Franciscan-run orphanage outside Matías Romero in Oaxaca. Because she does not consider herself an orphan, she runs away twice, hoping to make it home, but is caught and returned. After a third attempt, she is sent to a juvenile detention center in Colima, then transferred to El Asilo Seguro outside Hermosillo. Her eventual departure from that facility does not resolve the question of home; it leaves her choosing a future without knowing whether return is possible.

Narrative Significance

Chiapas is more than a point of origin in Maria Elena’s account. The possibility of returning gives her flight from El Asilo Seguro an alternative that she must consider, while the deaths and disappearances in her family make that alternative uncertain. The contrast between the home she remembers and the unfamiliar life ahead explains why boarding the bus for Nogales can feel both like freedom and like a step into the unknown.