Escaping gang persecution, 45 Guatemalan refugees resettle in Erie, more likely to arrive

Nineteen-month-old Sofia Valey-Perez races back and forth from one end of the living room to another, plucking a different teddy bear off a stand each time to show the guest who's entered her Parade Street apartment.

The small child, carefree and giggling one minute, is fast asleep in her mother's arms the next. She's at peace. And that's how her parents want to keep it.

On Feb. 1, Sofia, her 6-year-old sister, Sasha, and their parents, Tania Perez Bolos, 32, and Brayan Valey, 27, were among 20 members of an extended family who arrived as refugees in Erie after fleeing their homes in Guatemala City, Guatemala, to escape gang persecution.

"All I can say is that we feared for our lives," Tania Perez Bolos said, speaking through Spanish-language interpreter Irene Zlotnicki with the Erie field office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, which helped resettle the family. "Some (family members) had been killed."

Guatemalans began fleeing their country in the 1980s to escape violence, impunity, corruption, political turmoil and natural disasters. Despite its long history of welcoming refugees from war-torn nations and other countries facing humanitarian crises, Erie has rarely been a resettlement site for Guatemalans, said Dylanna Grasinger, the Erie-based director of field offices for the USCRI.

But in the past year, 45 people from Guatemala have been resettled in Erie. In fact, they join two other new populations of refugees who previously were not widely resettled in Erie.

A new group of refugees

However, unlike Afghans and Ukrainians now calling Erie home, the 45 Guatemalans now residing here had to go through the traditional resettlement process, which tends to take longer.

Brayan Valey's mother and her four sisters led the efforts to flee their country. Those efforts began with International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency that also goes by the acronyms IOM and OIM.

"Going back to 1980s, they've been fleeing poverty, corruption, war — all the standard things you see with most other countries," Grasinger said. "For Erie, it's just a new group (of refugees) for us."

It's common for refugees to be resettled in areas of the United States where they have family members who have previously been resettled and where there are existing populations of refugees from their native land.

But no matter where they resettled, there are innumerable challenges to restarting life in a new country, from meeting basic needs like food, shelter, transportation and work to learning a new language and assimilating to a new way of life.

"It was very difficult to leave home, to leave what you knew, your neighborhood, your childhood, to leave your friends, to leave some of your family," Perez Bolos said. "It was painful. It's difficult, but it was for the best for the safety of the family."

'So much opportunity'

Perez Bolos works two jobs, one as a full-time cafeteria employee at Erie High School through the food-service company Metz and another as a housekeeper at the USCRI's Erie field office on East 26th Street. She's taking basic English language classes and is close to obtaining her driver's license.

Brayan Valey, her husband, previously worked as a phone repair technician in Guatemala. Now he's working a second-shift job at PHB Inc.'s molding division in Fairview. He's working with large, robotic machinery and is on his feet for long hours, but is picking up a lot of overtime. Several other family members are also working at PHB.

Sasha, who is in first grade in the Erie School District, struggles with the language barrier, too, and misses friends back home, but she gets excited to go to school every day, her mother said.

Another change, of course, is the weather. The family, accustomed to warm weather year-round, saw snow for the first time living in Erie.

"It was really hard. It was the first time that we've been in snow, and now that it's starting to get cold again, we just think, well, we're not going to go outside anymore," Perez Bolos said, laughing.

"This place is beautiful. There are so many opportunities here, and we have been surprised by how many people have helped us, have guided us. And even though sometimes we get homesick, the process has been incredible and we've achieved so much in such a short period of time because there's so much opportunity here."

Erie is now home for Perez Bolos and her young family.

"To return to my country would be, it would not be possible," she said. "It would be very difficult to go back."

Grasinger said the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants' Erie field office anticipates resettling more Guatemalan refugees in its new fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.

Matthew Rink can be reached at mrink@timesnews.com.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: 45 refugees flee Guatemala's gang violence, resettle in Erie PA