Deported nine times, Esther Morales takes things into her own hands

“On this side, there are also dreams,” she says constantly to the people she helps out – migrants and deported persons. She was more than once in the same situation, but now she owns a successful tamal restaurant called La Antiguita in the heart of Tijuana’s downtown. Thanks to the business’s prosperity, Esther Morales has had the chance to get involved in local migrant activism, by giving warm food (tamales and champurrado) to migrants on the streets or in shelters.

Between 1989 and 2010 she was deported nine times; after her last deportation, she decided to stay in Mexico because she didn't have enough strength left to try crossing again. At the time, she was around 50 years old; one year later she started her own business.

“I started cooking in the shelter I first went to after my deportation – Madre Asunta Institute. I had spent 20 years working in the U.S. as a cook. I recognized the need. Sometimes we even had no tortillas; there weren’t too many NGOs helping migrants at the time as there are today.”

After the shelter she found work and housing by taking care of an older woman, a job where she made some savings to start up La Antiguita. She invested two thousand pesos (about 100 U.S. dollars) on her first batch of tamales. At the beginning Morales was just selling 10 or 12 tamales daily, but now, she can sell up to 100, especially in the winter.

While working on her business, Morales was coming back to the Madre Asunta shelter to give meals and prepare Christmas dinners. Her name became a synonym for charity among the migrant community. Her work got the attention of the NGO Al Otro Lado, especially from Soraya Vazquez, who offered her to sponsor Morales' project.

”My project is called Comida Calientita. Thanks to the financial support of Soraya and Al Otro Lado, La Antiguita has given around 10,000 warm meals in more than 12 shelters or in the streets of the city since we began in March of 2020. In spite of the pandemic and the risk of getting infected and my 61 years we keep doing it because of our love for the people.”

Luckily she hasn’t gotten the virus but she was heavily injured last year. Somebody cut her neck with a knife, and she had to stop providing food to migrants for a couple of months. Her story made national news in Mexico.

“I had a problem with a nephew who was deported. He was constantly asking me for money until I said no, and he attacked me with a knife. I was pretty delicate; it came within one centimeter of my trachea. I stopped for three months and then came back to work; for me, there’s no better therapy than that.”