Immigrants and “The Hero’s Journey”
By: John Thomas
Tags: Government, Immigration, Culture, Religion, Politics

With “the hero’s journey” so prevalent in literature, films, and all cultural myths, one might wonder if there is a place, not in the realm of stories, but in the real world, where we can see examples of men and women living out their own version of Campbell’s monomyth. No doubt several examples spring to mind. For one, our entire college system is structured on a leaving our normal lives, only to return years later, changed and having found the “life-giving elixir “— a career, and maybe a spouse.

Within the Christians tradition, the ideas of calling, mentorship, and resurrection — though not entirely identical to the concepts outlines by Campbell — provide a framework for the trajectory of life similar in scope to “the hero’s journey.”

But perhaps the best example of “the hero’s journey” in the real world is found in the lives of immigrants and refugees — men and women who “feel there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society.” At least the societies from which they hail.

Consider the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) — one of the most dangerous places on earth, infested with drugs, gangs, and violence. The heroes of this region survey their bleak future and decide to strike north — an adventure that will change them, and their families, forever. To be sure it is not an easy path. Like any hero they need to discern who are their allies and who are their enemies.

The journey is dangerous — especially for women. According to the Migration Policy Institute, “between 60 percent and 80 percent of female migrants traveling through Mexico are raped along the way.”

And when they arrive — if they arrive — when they cross the threshold into their new country, they face a litany of hostilities. Antagonistic government officials, suspicious neighbors, employers who may seek to take advantage of their situation through unsafe and unreasonable working conditions and low pay.

But it is in this new land that they find what they were seeking — “the life-giving elixir “— safety and freedom. And it is not just a freedom for themselves they are seeking. If that were the case, immigrants and refugees would better be classified as selfish than heroic. Instead the freedom they seek is for their children. And the wages they can earn dwelling in that safety and freedom become a lifeline for those they have left behind.

Suketu Mehta, in his book This Land is Our Land, describes the heroic sacrifices migrants make this way,

“They are ordinary people just like those who haven’t had to move. But the ordeals they’ve had to face on their journey, and the sacrifices they make for family — both for their children in the new country and the parents and siblings they support in the old — have made them into ordinary, everyday heroes.”

And while some will never return to their homeland — a departure from the hero’s journey — their remittences (immigrants send $600 billion in remittences every year) go instead and stabilize their families back home.

However, many will return. Indeed as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández notes in his forthcoming book, Migrating to Prison, historically “[f]or Mexicans, circular migration was a way of life.” In the words of Campbell, “a coming and a returning.”

And as Mehta highlights, that is how it still is today, for the millions of Nigerians and Bangladeshis who live and work in the Emirates “[t]en or eleven months working every day, then a month or two back in Lagos or Dhaka, laden (like a hero) with presents for your wife and children and parents.”