Cerezas por papeles / Cherries for Documents

A photo-essay by Helen Ceballos

Translated from Spanish by Rojo Robles

Empathy appears when we glimpse kindness among those of us who migrate clandestinely, and we become siblings. Those of us who manage to arrive know the gaseous state to which one aspires to avoid being seen or perceived in transit, to avoid sounds. Networks are woven, a discourse about walking and the awareness that everyone cares for themselves. There is no strength to carry the weight of others. The repercussion of how they see us is critical, and if they don’t see or read us, the better. Always better.

We access the memory with diffuse details tinged with fright—long-term memories. We are bodies in a light atmosphere. Invisible and mirrored, we were others to be able to exist.

When one arrives alive, it becomes clear that the prize was not to arrive.

Periodo. 2020 | Concepto y acción Helen Ceballos | Fotografía: Ali Petru Gerena

I was five years old, traveling with my mother in a yola from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. I slept the whole trip. “Out of sight, out of mind, out of heart,” my mom would say as she gave me another spoonful of grape syrup to induce me to sleep. I woke up, and the sun was going down. I saw a restless woman asking for help to urinate. A man offered his support. She pulled down her panties, gave him her arms, put her feet on the edge, took her ass out, and urinated. They all look. The person who grabbed her arms saw the urine stream mixed with blood. Without looking into her eyes, he released her. She fell into the sea, screamed, asked for help, said that her daughter was waiting, she asked that we don’t leave her. Two people struggled over the gallon of water and the sheet left by the woman swallowing the sea. Nobody talked. Slaps in the water, the yola continued, and we stopped hearing the agony. The guy who released her said: “blood attracts sharks. It was her or us.”

Era esto la vida. 2020 | Concepto y fotografía: Helen Ceballos

Birth certificate of a Puerto Rican girl with American citizenship for rent

• For girls between 5 and 7 years old only.

• Valid to study at any public or private school in the United States.

• The minor must use the name provided as the primary name.

• Must speak Spanish as a first language and learn the Puerto Rican accent.

• Compulsory telephone interview with the parents and the girl before delivering the documents.

• After receiving the payment, a copy of the original birth certificate and a laminated photo ID with the provided name are delivered.

• If any unauthorized minor uses the document, we will notify the authorities and charge you with identity theft. Without exceptions.

• $5K FINAL PRICE. Single cash payment in advance. There is no return nor guarantee.

Torniquete. 2020. | Concepto y acción: Helen Ceballos| Fotografía: Marina Barsy Janer

In the early 1990s, my aunt Cathy managed to enter the United States using her twin sister’s passport. More than 30 years have passed since that feat mocked the immigration authorities, but my aunt has still been unable to legalize her documents. It seems implausible without knowing how to read or write, without money to seek legal support, and having to send almost all her earnings to the Dominican Republic to support her children. My aunt’s process of legalization seems more and more distant every day. When she arrived, she made a living as a waitress and sex worker in a bar south of Miami. There he met Alberto, a naturalized Cuban who, besides promising her castles in the sky, offered her marriage to facilitate the papers.

In the meantime, my cousin Manauri became seriously ill. My aunt moved cielo y tierra to get money to cover medical expenses. However, Manauri’s weakness was so great that even though he battled, he died a month and a half later. My aunt was unable to travel to say goodbye to her son.

She lives without papers, off the radar, in a cloister induced by the fear of deportation. She is married to the guy who sold her a dream she can’t fulfill. Her children are grown. They have other children who don’t know her or wait for her. She’s already sixty, repeats questions, and has started forgetting the basics. She bets on aging quickly. She made a tourniquet out of her pain.

El premio no fue llegar. 2020 | Concepto y acción: Helen Ceballos | Fotografía: Ali Petru Gerena

It was night when we began to see the lights of the Aguadilla coast.  “Get ready for business, mija, get up!” she told me while wetting my face.

I woke up screaming. The saltwater began to burn my eyes. She said we would have to get off there and get to the lights. It wasn’t that far. We had to splash around like a puppy, and the waves would carry us to the shore. She put me on the only life jacket there was. It was too big for me. She told me to go ahead and that I should not try to return for anything in the world if she didn’t come soon.

“I haven’t been able to sleep well these days. If I didn’t get out quickly, I fell asleep. Listen to me, when you get to the shore, you hide in the bushes, and if I haven’t come out in the morning, you go out to the road, stop a car and ask for help,” she told me. She put me in the water, and I felt my feet did not touch the bottom. She got off, holding on to the yola. I started splashing. I felt that my vest wanted to come off. I was suffocating. I stopped hearing her. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t dare. I moved my arms and legs as much as possible but didn’t move forward. The waves took me back.

I swam, I swam, I swam, and nothing. I swam. I swam.

I arrived at the shore with my heart in my mouth. The beach was dark. It was windy. I hid as she told me. I searched for a little hole through the leaves to see the shore. I looked at my hands, and my fingers were wrinkled like when I took a long bath. I had not seen how big was the dark sheet of salt water that came and went in front of me. The waves seemed like people of foam getting up and lying down bravely on the sea. Mami was not coming out of the water.

I saw two men running from a side of the coast that I had not noticed. I hugged my legs and put my head between my knees so they could not see me. I felt them pass. I didn’t see the yola. I never saw it again, as if it hadn’t existed.

Great anguish began to weigh on my chest. I ran to the shore and screamed. I called Mami with all the strength I held as a five-year-old. I had a dry mouth, irritated eyes, and throat. It was cold.

I saw a body crawling towards the shore, her hair loose. It was her. I ran as fast as possible and pulled her onto the dry sand. She could not speak yet, but she smiled at me.

“Mami, I called you. Did you fall asleep?”

Sin pedir permiso. 2020 | Concepto y fotografía: Helen Ceballos| Acción: Kamila Sánchez Viñas

When I turned fourteen, I left home. I did it following my mother’s command, “If you’re going to be fucking with your little boyfriend, you will have to get married. Men only look for ‘that,’ and when you give it to them, they throw you away. Nobody wants a rotten apple.” Time passed. We transformed. I did not get married, but I went with my jevo to another country, and I immediately understood what adulthood was about when I saw myself alone and free so far from the nest. Three years later, Luis, my stepfather, abandoned the house and left my mother pregnant. I returned to the island to accompany her during her pregnancy. When I got to Puerto Rico, my mom got back together with him. Kamila was born on October 22. I left school eager to get to the hospital. I asked Luis to take me, and he refused, telling me that the doctors would let us know when Mami would go into labor. Around eight at night, he was already drunk, drugged, and “celebrating” the unannounced birth of my sister. The thought of being alone with him made me anxious. As the hours passed, I lost hope of reaching the hospital. We lived in a small apartment in Corozal, which became a no man’s land after five in the afternoon. I entered the room where he was to ask him to please take me to Mami for the last time. When he saw me, he hugged me “out of joy.” He began to grope me in the embrace, looking to rub his sex with my body. He cornered me. I felt hate. I immediately left the room and locked myself in my own. Without communication or anything to defend myself, I put up a barricade with what I could block the door. I did not sleep all night. Through the room window, I saw a piece of the sky. I thought of Mami alone in that hospital room, recovering her strength after giving birth. I imagined my sister’s face. I promised myself to take care of her as much as I could, including from her father. I felt compassion for all of the women in my family. Today Kamila is the same age as I was when she was born. She is a Caribbean oxymoron that arrived with the ability to survive. She grew up in the middle of the Republic of the Bronx. She trades each tile, enjoying, coming, and going through her teens. I sometimes appreciate the malice in her eyes, like the wild weed that grows between cement and concrete. I prefer her cunning, ill-thought-out. She already understood codes. She grew up without asking permission.

En tránsito. 2020| Concepto y fotografía Helen Ceballos |Acción: Ali Petru Gerena & André Pó Rodil Rivera

We were a group of theater students. We were returning home after a trip to Brazil. My friend Karim and I were in the immigration line at the Miami airport.

“Do you travel together?”

“Yes, in unison.”

The agent takes my passport “María?”

“Yes,” I answer. His gaze scans my face.

Karim asks: “Hey Helen, why do they call you Helen if your real name is María Cristina?”

Then the agent looks up, waiting for my answer. I read in my friend’s eyes that she didn’t understand what had unleashed his question. I began to tremble from the inside out, a fright that came with cold. “Helen is my nickname,” I told her.

Karim didn’t realize they were about to stop me. The agent handed her his passport and said come with me. As I walked after him, it was crystal clear that at least I would miss the connecting flight, that I didn’t have the money to buy another ticket, and that, in other words, er diablo was taking me.  I experienced two and a half hours of interrogations, abuses, searches, and threats. In the middle of that shit, I remembered Karim’s face when she asked her question. Without realizing it, more than asking, she uncovered the inequality gap that divides her existence from mine, that groove of disadvantages we had not noticed during the previous days, the one that even I forget from time to time. A blue passport that gives you the green light worldwide is not a minor fact. She has not experienced anything similar to a clandestine entry. She does not have to know or understand in what position that question had put me. In that interrogation room, I was the Dominican who spent seventeen days in Brazil. What did I go to? What if it was a mule? Or a sex worker? They lowered my panties to see if I had something hidden. Dominican? On an exchange trip? They opened my suitcase and took everything out. They released a dog that came over me while they instructed me not to move.

The person questioning me tapped my University of Puerto Rico student ID on the table.

“What did you tell me your student number was again?” 

“801 04 1441,” I answered.

He returned my card while he asked me if I understood that if he wanted to, he would deport me to my country forever. “Do you understand?” he asked.

Ponerle cara. 2020 | Concepto: Helen Ceballos| Acción: Afra Mibalé / Kamila Sánchez Viñas / Helen Ceballos Viñas / Candy Viñas| Fotografía: Ali Petru Gerena

In my house, we speak truths like this:

“La yerba que está pa ́ti, no se la comen los burros." My mom didn’t know her mom. She died when she was just three years old. She does not have memories with her mother, nor are there photos that would help her put a face to her. We know that she died of chronic pneumonia at the age of 27. “A veces pa’ salvarse uno, tiene que joderse el otro.” 

She says they tell her that on the day of her mother’s funeral, when she was a baby, they brought her closer to the coffin, and she pounced on the body, directly to the breasts, to breastfeed. “El que no llora no mama.”  Whenever she talks about my grandmother Nidia, she tells the same story, as if by repeating it, she squeezes it until she gets all the juice out of that distant memory. “En tiempos de reyerta, cualquier boquete es una puerta.”

Despite that forced landing, mami is a happy woman, a warrior. She was raised with a bottle by her grandmother Herminia.

I didn’t get to meet any of my grandmothers. It would have been a gift to have their pampering and advice. “Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo.”  Mami repeats the sayings of my great-grandmother Herminia all the time. She says them indiscriminately. I heard her phrases so much that even though I didn’t know her, I gave her a voice. Mami says that ​​“somos como dos gotas de agua: sin vergüenzas, achinadas y voluntariosas.”  “Hija de madre, nieta de abuela, salen toítas con la misma espuela.” 

With her holy hand in the kitchen, her irreverence, and her humor, Mami continues to teach us everything she has done to survive. “Frenando con la pepita,” “sin darle mucha mente” to that which cannot change. She is prioritizing the essential, the everyday. “Lo demás es un poquito de lo otro.” 

Sin títulos. 2020 | Concepto y acción: Helen Ceballos | Fotografía: Ali Petru Gerena

I’ve been working since I can remember. The first time I tried to earn a few coins, I was four years old and was selling cherries from my house in Cachón de la Rubia in Santo Domingo Este. I picked a couple and sat in the street before the door, yelling Veeeeeeendo cereeezas, veeeeeendo cherriiiees. A man approached smiling, took three, and left without paying. I decided that day that I would never sell my cherries to anyone who did not understand their value and that I would sing to an audience one day. When I was 8, my stepfather Jorge employed me to stamp hundreds of numbers from the Puerto Rico Lottery for one dollar a week. That was my first production job, a repetitive motion that I took on with joy, thinking about my dollar and sharing it with my mom when I saw her again. Eight years later, I worked in a laundry next to a church, where I ended up leading the youth group. I did theater. I worked in a colmado where I learned to make bread. I sold pots guaranteed for life and gave theater classes in various communities. I worked at JCPenney and excelled at folding shirts and persuading people to fill out the store’s credit card applications. I was the secretary of the dean. I managed the social media accounts of the Humanities Department. I sold essays and monographs to medical and computer science students. In Argentina, I was a maintenance employee in a beauty salon, sweeping hair from all parts of the body. I worked in a call center selling insurance, where they asked me to conjugate verbs with the local dialect. “Si hablás como hablás nadie te va a entender, tenés que camuflarte.”

I camouflaged myself. I sold Groupons, coached actors in a movie, and was a lighting technician and ticket clerk in an art gallery. I hosted children’s parties, was a teacher and waitress, and worked in a circus. I was a hotel manager on an island with three cats. I was a waitress again. I delivered food. I produced festivals, coordinated agendas, and sold grass in Mar del Plata. I ran a community social program and a cultural center. I cleaned rubble. I was a professor, assistant, and production manager. I’ve cleaned assisted living houses, chaired the Dominican Women’s Center board, delivered supplies, and designed art events.

I was a community leader, a teacher again, and a cultural manager. I coordinated health fairs, community events, and sex parties. I babysat for Buenos Aires, Wall Street, and Loíza Street children.

“I thought you were a performer,” they told me once. 

“I performed in all of them.”

Helen Ceballos

She was born in Santo Domingo Este, Dominican Republic, in 1986. She is a multidisciplinary performer, self-taught photographer, and video artist. She identifies as a queer woman, Afro-descendant, worker in the art and cultural-community gestora. “I have lived in 11 cities, 7 countries, and 35 houses, which means that I have almost as many moves in my body than years in the world, and it is precisely these relocations that mark one of the most prominent thematic lines in my work: migration." In 2013, she started the project Mezcolanza, through which she has developed research laboratories, residencies, and alternative art events such as the Taller de Performance en Puerto Rico, Festival Mezcolanza, and Plataforma Eje.

Listen to the Latinx Visions Podcast’s Episode “Entrevista con Helen Ceballos,” here.