Tijuana, Mexico - Ximena Rojas drives through the streets of Tijuana, Mexico at the wheel of an old station wagon that can become a mobile ambulance if necessary.
She often gets lost, but she always arrives where she needs to be.
Rojas has just turned 35 years old. She wears her long hair tied in a braid and she speaks with a soft tone.
She is native of Veracruz, a port city located along the Gulf of Mexico, but she studied nursing and obstetrics at the National University of Mexico City (UNAM) and began assisting home births in 2010.
In 2013, she moved to Baja California, a Mexican state on the US border, to study sex education and she decided to stay.
“The border attracts me,” she tells Al Jazeera. “It is a complex area, but also very vital,” she says.
Rojas is a “partera”, a midwife, and her role is to accompany mothers during their pregnancy and to stand by their side when they give birth.
Midwifery was only officially recognised as a profession in Mexico in 2011, but Rojas says midwives are still not typically allowed to accompany their patients in the delivery room. In public hospitals, women are often not allowed to have anyone, not even a family member, present with them while they give birth.
But Rojas, who is determined to help those most in need, has assisted in more than 350 births.
She primarily helps Mexican women who decide to give birth in their homes to avoid public hospitals in Tijuana, and the obstetric violence, she says, pregnant women often face.
But she also has found that Haitian women who wait along the border with the hopes of getting to the US are in much need of care.
