Photo by Will Crooks/Greenville Journal
As a child, when Sarai Bautista imagined the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico, she envisioned sparse, flat stretches of sand — but when she walked it at age 11 with her mother and two younger siblings, she felt every rocky slope they stumbled over.
The entire trip from her home state of Puebla, Mexico, to South Carolina likely took less than a week, but to Bautista it felt more like a month.
Ariel Gilreath 