Guatemalans have been much on my mind lately and much in the news. The account of a May 12 ICE raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, written by FIU professor and Spanish translator Erik Camayd-Freixas, is making its way around the net. Camayd-Freixas was hired as a translator after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bust, and the normally unflappable professor ("I am not the impressionable kind," he says at one point) was shaken by the spectacle of weeping Mayan workers, "mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants," shackled together and facing criminal charges of "aggravated identity theft" and "Social Security fraud." The workers were given a terrible choice of pleas — prison time plus deportation or longer prison time plus deportation — on charges they couldn't fully comprehend before being hauled off to jail. That day, the Town of Postville, Camayd-Freixas says, lost a third of its population, including schoolchildren. "Businesses were empty, amid looming concerns that if the plant closed it would... More >>>