Today is the UN International Migrants Day — to draw attention to the approximately 232 million people forced to pack up and leave for another country because of the political or criminal chaos, poverty, or lack of opportunity back home. Of course, for decades now, such immigrants, especially from Central America and Mexico, have ended up in the Mission in the immigrant “sanctuary city” of San Francisco. Here’s a stunning fact: the World Bank calculates that migrant remittances back to developing countries total more than $400 billion per year. You only need to look at the string of remittance businesses on Mission Street to see individuals are picking up the slack to help out their families where governments and economies fail on a macro one.
But today the locally-based storytelling project MiHistoria.net is putting out the call to hear those micro personal tales — for immigrants of the Latino/Chicano/Indígena/Hispanic persuasion (ahem, Mission District). You just fill out their online form and submit your personal story of migration — easy peasy, facilisimo — even though getting here wasn’t.