Eleazar was barely forty when he left Muna, Yucatán, with his mind set on crossing into the United States.
He never quite managed it. He was deported somewhere along the border, and that was where the thread was severed: twenty-five years without a call, an address, or knowing whether he was still alive. In Tijuana, they knew him as ‘Don Caballito,’ a taco vendor in Zona Norte who slept wherever he could. In Muna, they remembered him as ‘Profe Chalo,’ the one who left and never came back.
A video recorded in a landfill in the Libertad neighborhood changed everything. His relatives in the San Andrés neighborhood recognized him on the screen and mobilized the Operación Rescate Rodríguez collective and the Tijuana city government. Today, Eleazar is 66, his body marked by two decades on the streets, and a family that never stopped looking for him.
