By the founder of #notme
This movement was not born in a library. It was born on the road, among people to whom the road is forbidden.
In every country of Latin America where I lived and traveled, I kept meeting the same dream in different mouths. People told me about the United States or Canada the way you talk about a garden just over a wall, close enough to smell. They wanted to work for a few years, to study, to see a brother in Miami or a cousin in Toronto, and they could not, because for their passport the wall has no gate. Their dream dies in an embassy queue, after fees that swallow a month of wages, in front of a clerk who needs thirty seconds to say no. I sat at the same tables with them and drank the same coffee, while I carried a document in my pocket that opens almost every border on earth. They were not less than me in anything that matters, and more often than not they were funnier, smarter and braver. The only difference between us was where our mothers happened to give birth.
The bitterest part is that the garden itself is an illusion. The United States is simply another pasture with its own fences and its own ear tags, and many who finally get there find that they traded one farm for another. Yet the dream tells the truth even where its destination does not. What those people are reaching for is not a country. It is the right to decide where their one life happens.
In San José, Costa Rica, I met a woman who was walking to the United States with her two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of eight. They had left Venezuela without documents, because for people like them there is no queue to stand in, and they had crossed the Darién jungle on foot, the stretch of rainforest without roads where so many migrants die. On one climb they had almost gone over the edge, the boy’s phone had broken in the fall, and their shoes were worn through to nothing. I bought them new clothes and shoes, gave them money for a hotel, and took the boy to the cinema.
Then he took me out in return, to a Venezuelan restaurant, because he wanted to show me, proudly, host to guest, what the food of his country tastes like. Everything the system uses to define a human being had been taken from him, his documents, his address, even his shoes. And everything that actually makes a human being had traveled with him, his pride in where he comes from, his kitchen and his joy in sharing what he loves with someone new. On paper he was nobody. At that table he was the young host of a community he carried inside him, one that no jungle could drown and no border could take away. Community, sharing, being human together. That is everything #notme stands for, and that boy, who had nothing, already had all of it.
On the beach of Sámara I once met a Palestinian traveler who told me, calmly, the way you talk about the weather, that he gets pulled aside for extra questions at nearly every border he crosses, every single time. He had done nothing. He was born somewhere, and that somewhere was enough.
The scandal is not one slow office or one unfair rule. The scandal is the system itself. We have organized the earth as a web of permissions, permission to enter, to stay, to work and to exist on this piece of ground instead of that one, and nobody can tell you where that permission really comes from. Nobody ever granted it, yet it rules everyone. Under it, some people live their wildest dreams while others spend their one life in lines that never move, or carry their children through a jungle because no line will ever take them. Nobody weighs your talent or asks about your character. A stamp decides, issued at birth, for a birth nobody chose.
I grew up measuring success the way the West measures it, by the size of the car, the pool behind the house and a fence high enough that the neighbors disappear. I left that life. I sold the house, the car and the pension plan, and went to live among people who had done the same. What I found was not chaos. I found communities that came together around a shared purpose and let go when the purpose was fulfilled. I cooked in kitchens where people from countries at war with each other shared one table, and I found order that nobody had imposed and everybody kept. Only then did I see what the fence had taken from me. Not knowing the people you live beside is poverty, whatever the car cost.
So let there be no mistake about what #notme is. It is not for a party, a class, a nation or a technology. It is for the human being, every human being, and for a more humane way of living together where each person can fully bloom. Everything I build with this movement has to pass one test, which is whether it helps someone flourish who never got to choose where they were born.