CHI 10
Fall 2018
Dr. Lorena V. Márquez
Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey (New York: Random House Trade Paperback Edition, 2007)
DIRECTIONS:
Please write a four to five-page paper, double spaced, times new roman font, with one-inch
margins. Please ask your TA which method they prefer for you to turn in your papers. Please be
sure to include a clear argument/thesis in the introduction.
CITATIONS:
Please use proper MLA citations when using a quote or paraphrasing. For example: (Nazario,
33). You must have at least one citation per paragraph.
QUESTION:
It is clear in Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey that she does not believe that separation between
mother and child(ren) is beneficial in the long run; even though she has no children of her own.
She highlights how mothers carry the tremendous guilt and responsibility to work enough to be
able to maintain their own living expenses, plus those of their children left behind. At the same
time, children left behind are left without the love of their mothers.
Do you agree or disagree with Nazario? Had it been Enrique’s father who left would we be so
critical of Lourdes’s choice? What about Enrique’s choice to leave as well? Every year,
thousands of immigrants, both male and female, parents and children, literally risk their lives to
make it to the U.S. They seek employment and once they secure it they work hard, and endure
every which sacrifice to save money so that their families back home can eat. What do you think
are the ultimate consequences of their choices to immigrate? Is undocumented immigration a
necessary evil? Be sure to provide the background to how Enrique is separated from his mother.
CHI 10, Fall 2018
Paper Proposal Rubric
Dr. Lorena V. Márquez
Essay Introduction: The paper proposal should one page,
double spaced, with one-inch margins.
Introduction gives context to the book: In other words, what is
the book’s main theme, characters, and storyline.
2 point
Introduction includes title of book and author’s full name:
Make sure the title is either italicized or underlined.
1 point
The thesis includes an “I argue that…” statement. Be sure to
read the paper prompt carefully before you craft your
argument. An argument does not outline the paper, nor does it
contain information about the book. It simply states your
position or point of view.
2 point
In this case, I am asking you to answer: Is undocumented
immigration a necessary evil? If so, what are the ultimate
consequences?
Total Points
5 points
2
2014 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006, 2007, 2014 by Sonia Nazario
Map copyright © 2006 by David Lindroth
Reading group guide copyright © 2014 by Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an
imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin
Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House LLC.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of
Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in different form in the United States
by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, in
2006, and subsequently in trade paperback by Random House Trade
Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House
LLC, in 2007.
Portions of this work originally appeared, in different form, in the
Pulitzer Prize–winning series in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Enrique’s
Journey,” published in 2002.
Photos 3–18 are by Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Don Bartletti
and appeared in conjunction with the series in the Los Angeles Times
entitled “Enrique’s Journey,” copyright © 2002 by the Los Angeles Times,
and are reprinted here by permission of the Los Angeles Times.
Don Bartletti was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for these photographs in
2003.
Photos 2, 19–23, and 25 are by the author.
Photos 1, 24, and 26–28 are reprinted courtesy of Enrique’s family.
3
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Nazario, Sonia.
Enrique’s journey/Sonia Nazario.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8129-7178-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-58836-602-3
1. Hondurans—United States—Biography. 2. Immigrant children—
United States—Biography. 3. Illegal aliens—United States—Biography.
4. Hondurans—United States—Social conditions—Case studies. 5.
Immigrant children—United States—Social conditions—Case studies. 6.
Illegal aliens—United States—Social conditions—Case studies. 7.
Hondurans—Emigration and immigration—Case studies.
8. United States—Emigration and immigration—Case studies. I. Title.
E184.H66N397 2006
305.23′089′687283073—dc22
2005044347
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
Cover design: Ruby Levesque
Cover photograph: Don Bartletti
v3.0_r4
4
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Prologue
1. The Boy Left Behind
2. Seeking Mercy
3. Facing the Beast
4. Gifts and Faith
5. On the Border
6. A Dark River, Perhaps a New Life
7. The Girl Left Behind
8. A Mother’s Embrace
EPILOGUE: Two Promises
AFTERWORD: Immigrant Nation
Notes
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
5
6
7
8
PROLOGUE
It is Friday
morning, 8 A.M. I hear a key turn in the front-door lock of
my Los Angeles home. María del Carmen Ferrez, who cleans my house
every other week, opens the door. She walks into the kitchen.
Carmen is petite, intelligent, and works at lightning speed. At this
early hour I am usually in a frenzy to get out the door and rush to my
office. But on days when Carmen arrives, she and I shift gears. Carmen
loiters in the kitchen, tidying things. I circle around her, picking up
shoes, newspapers, socks—trying to give her a fighting chance at
cleaning the floors. The ritual allows us to be in the same room and talk.
On this morning in 1997, I lean on one side of the kitchen island.
Carmen leans on the other side. There is a question, she says, that she
has been itching to ask. “Mrs. Sonia, are you ever going to have a
baby?”
I’m not sure, I tell her. Carmen has a young son she sometimes brings
to watch television while she works. Does she want more children? I ask.
Carmen, always laughing and chatty, is suddenly silent. She stares
awkwardly down at the kitchen counter. Then, quietly, she tells me
about four other children I never knew existed. These children—two sons
and two daughters—are far away, Carmen says, in Guatemala. She left
them there when she ventured north as a single mother to work in the
United States.
She has been separated from them for twelve years.
Her youngest daughter, Carmen says, was just a year old when she
left. She has experienced her oldest boy, Minor, grow up by listening to
the deepening timbre of his voice on the telephone. As Carmen unravels
the story, she begins to sob.
Twelve years? I react with disbelief. How can a mother leave her
children and travel more than two thousand miles away, not knowing
when or if she will ever see them again? What drove her to do this?
Carmen dries her tears and explains. Her husband left her for another
9
woman. She worked hard but didn’t earn enough to feed four children.
“They would ask me for food, and I didn’t have it.” Many nights, they
went to bed without dinner. She lulled them to sleep with advice on how
to quell their hunger pangs. “Sleep facedown so your stomach won’t
growl so much,” Carmen said, gently coaxing them to turn over.
She left for the United States out of love. She hoped she could provide
her children an escape from their grinding poverty, a chance to attend
school beyond the sixth grade. Carmen brags about the clothes, money,
and photos she sends her children.
She also acknowledges having made brutal trade-offs. She feels the
distance, the lack of affection, when she talks with her children on the
telephone. Day after day, as she misses milestones in their lives, her
absence leaves deep wounds. When her oldest daughter has her first
menstruation, she is frightened. She doesn’t understand what is
happening to her. Why, the girl asks Carmen, were you not here to
explain?
Carmen hasn’t been able to save enough for a smuggler to bring them
to the United States. Besides, she refuses to subject her children to the
dangerous journey. During her own 1985 trek north, Carmen was
robbed by her smuggler, who left her without food for three days. Her
daughters, she fears, will get raped along the way. Carmen balks at
bringing her children into her poor, drug- and crime-infested Los Angeles
neighborhood.
As she clicks the dishwasher on, Carmen, concerned that I might
disapprove of her choice, tells me that many immigrant women in Los
Angeles from Central America or Mexico are just like her—single
mothers who left children behind in their home countries.
What’s really incomprehensible, she adds, are middle-class or wealthy
working mothers in the United States. These women, she says, could
tighten their belts, stay at home, spend all their time with their children.
Instead, they devote most of their waking hours and energy to careers,
with little left for the children. Why, she asks, with disbelief on her face,
would anyone do that?
The following year, in 1998, unannounced, Carmen’s son Minor sets
off to find his mother. Carmen left him when he was ten years old. He
hitchhikes through Guatemala and Mexico. He begs for food along the
way. He shows up on Carmen’s doorstep.
He has missed his mother intensely. He could not stand another
Christmas or birthday apart. He was tired of what he saw as his mother’s
excuses for why they could not be together. He had to know: Did she
10
leave Guatemala because she never truly loved him? How else could he
explain why she left?
Minor’s friends in Guatemala envied the money and presents Carmen
sent. “You have it all. Good clothes. Good tennis shoes,” they said. Minor
answered, “I’d trade it all for my mother. I never had someone to spoil
me. To say: Do this, don’t do that, have you eaten? You can never get
the love of a mother from someone else.”
Minor tells me about his perilous hitchhiking journey. He was
threatened and robbed. Still, he says, he was lucky. Each year, thousands
of other children going to find their mothers in the United States travel
in a much more dangerous way. The children make the journey on top
of Mexico’s freight trains. They call it El Tren de la Muerte. The Train of
Death.
A COMMON CHOICE
I was struck by the choice mothers face when they leave their children.
How do they make such an impossible decision? Among Latinos, where
family is all-important, where for women motherhood is valued far
above all else, why are droves of mothers leaving their children? What
would I do if I were in their shoes? Would I come to the United States,
where I could earn much more money and send cash back to my
children? This would mean my sons and daughters could eat more than
sugar water for dinner. They could study past the third grade, maybe
even finish high school, go on to university classes. Or I could stay by
my children’s side, relegating another generation to the same misery
and poverty I knew so well.
I was also amazed by the dangerous journey these children make to
try to be with their mothers. What kind of desperation, I wondered,
pushes children as young as seven years old to set out, alone, through
such a hostile landscape with nothing but their wits?
The United States has experienced the largest wave of immigration in
its history. Between 1990 and 2008, nearly 11 million immigrants
arrived illegally. Since 2001, each year, on average, a million additional
immigrants arrive legally or become legal residents. This wave differs in
one respect, at least, from the past. Before, when parents came to the
United States and left children behind, it was typically the fathers, often
Mexican guest workers called braceros, and they left their children with
their mothers. In recent decades, the increase in divorce and family
11
disintegration in Latin America has left many single mothers without the
means to feed and raise their children. The growing ranks of single
mothers paralleled a time when more and more American women began
working outside the home. There is an insatiable need in the United
States for cheap service and domestic workers. The single Latin
American mothers began migrating in large numbers, leaving their
children with grandparents, other relatives, or neighbors.
The first wave was in the 1960s and 1970s. Single mothers from a
smattering of Caribbean countries—the West Indies, Jamaica, the
Dominican Republic—headed to New York City, New England, and
Florida to work as nannies and in nursing homes. Later, Central
American women flocked to places with the greatest demand: the
suburbs of Washington, D.C., Houston, and Los Angeles, where the
number of private domestic workers doubled in the 1980s.
Carmen’s experience is now common. In Los Angeles, a University of
Southern California study showed, 82 percent of live-in nannies and one
in four housecleaners are mothers who still have at least one child in
their home country. A Harvard University study showed that 85 percent
of all immigrant children who eventually end up in the United States
spent at least some time separated from a parent in the course of
migrating to the United States.
In much of the United States, legitimate concerns about immigration
and anti-immigrant measures have had a corrosive side effect:
immigrants have been dehumanized and demonized. Their presence in
the United States is deemed good or bad, depending on the perspective.
Immigrants have been reduced to cost-benefit ratios.
Perhaps by looking at one immigrant—his strengths, his courage, his
flaws—his humanity might help illuminate what too often has been a
black-and-white discussion. Perhaps, I start thinking, I could take
readers on top of these trains and show them what this modern-day
immigrant journey is like, especially for children. “This,” a Los Angeles
woman who helps immigrants told me, “is the adventure story of the
twenty-first century.”
FEAR AND FLEAS
For a good while, I sat on the idea. As a journalist, I love to get inside
the action, watch it unfold, take people inside worlds they might never
otherwise see. I wanted to smell, taste, hear, and feel what this journey
is like. In order to give a vivid, nuanced account, I knew I would have to
12
travel with child migrants through Mexico on top of freight trains.
I thought about starting in Central America and tagging along as one
boy tries to reach his mother in the United States. Carmen’s son Minor
had already explained enough about the trip for me to grasp that this
was just shy of nutty. He’d told me about the gangsters who rule the
train tops, the bandits along the tracks, the Mexican police who patrol
the train stations and rape and rob, about the dangers of losing a leg
getting onto and off of moving trains.
In short, I was afraid.
Then there was the issue of marital harmony: I’d just finished another
project that involved hanging out in dark garages and shacks with
speed, heroin, and crack addicts. My husband had spent months fretting
about my safety. He’d had to ask politely that I strip in our garage each
evening when I came home after hanging out in addicts’ apartments.
Apparently I’d been bringing home a healthy population of fleas. Talk
of strapping myself to the top of a freight train, I figured, was not likely
to be received with open ears. A year later, I hoped the memory of fleas
had faded. I decided to move forward.
Cautiously.
First, I learned everything I could about the journey. What’s the exact
route? The best and worst things that happen at each step of the way?
The places where migrants encounter the greatest cruelty? And the
greatest kindness? Critical turning points in the journey? What are the
favorite areas along the tracks where the gangs rob, where the bandits
kill people? Where do Mexican immigration authorities stop the train?
I talked with dozens of children held by the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service in four jails and shelters in California and in
Texas. Many had ridden the trains. So had students I had spoken with at
a special Los Angeles high school for recent immigrants.
At a detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas, a talk with fifteen-yearold twins José Enrique and José Luis Oliva Rosa forced me to shred my
initial plan. I realized that my first choice—to follow one boy from the
beginning of his journey in Central America to the end with his mother
in the United States—wasn’t doable. The twins had left Honduras to find
their mother in Los Angeles. During the months they spent running for
their lives in Mexico, they were separated from each other four times.
Only sheer luck had allowed them to find each other. I can’t run as fast
as a fifteen-year-old. I also can’t rely on that level of luck. I had to find
a boy who had made it to northern Mexico and follow him to his mother
in the United States. I would have to reconstruct the earlier part of his
13
journey.
Children at the Texas center also brought home the dangers I would
face making such a journey. At the Texas center was Eber Ismael
Sandoval Andino, eleven, a petite boy with dark eyes and machete
marks crisscrossing his legs. The marks were from working in the coffee
farms of Honduras since he was six years old. On his train rides through
Mexico, he told me, he had witnessed five separate incidents where
migrants had been mutilated by the train. He’d seen a man lose half a
foot getting on the train. He’d seen six gangsters draw their knives and
throw a girl off the train to her death. Once, he’d fallen off the train and
landed right next to the churning steel wheels. “I thought I was dead. I
turned stone cold,” he said.
The director of the Texas center told me I’d be an idiot to attempt this
train journey, that I could get myself killed. These kids, he said,
motioning to the children around him, don’t really understand the
dangers they will face. They go into it with their eyes closed. They don’t
know any better. I understood the exact risks. I would be doing it out of
sheer stupidity.
I am not a brave person. I grew up, in part, in Argentina during the
genocidal “dirty war,” when the military “disappeared” up to thirty
thousand people. Often I walked to school with a friend, in case
something should happen to one of us. My mother burned the family’s
books in a pile in the backyard to avoid trouble if the military ever came
to search our Buenos Aires home. We kept the windows closed so
neighbors could not hear any discussion that strayed from the mundane
into anything vaguely political. Among the disappeared and murdered
was a teenage friend, who we heard had been tortured, the bones in his
face shattered. A relative was abducted by the military, tortured, and
released many months later.
I avoid danger, if possible. If I need to do dangerous things to really
understand something, I try to build in as many safety nets as possible.
I redoubled my efforts to reduce my exposure while making the
journey. I lay down one rule: No getting onto and off of moving trains
(a rule I broke only once).
A newspaper colleague plugged into the Mexican government helped
me get a letter from the personal assistant to Mexico’s president. The
letter asked any Mexican authorities and police I encountered to
cooperate with my reporting. The letter helped keep me out of jail three
times. It also helped me convince an armed Mexican migrant rights
group, Grupo Beta, to accompany me on the trains through the most
14
dangerous leg of the journey, the Mexican state of Chiapas. At the time,
the government’s Grupo Beta agents, who are drawn from different
police groups, carried shotguns and AK-47s. They had not patrolled the
train tops for fourteen months. Even with that firepower, they
explained, it was too dangerous; in 1999, their patrols had come under
attack by gangsters four times. They agreed to make an exception.
The letter helped me obtain permission to ride atop the trains of four
companies that operate freight trains up the length of Mexico. That way,
the conductor would know when I was on board. I would tell them to be
on the lookout for my signal. I’d wear a red rain jacket strapped around
my waist and wave it if I was in dire danger. I tried to have a source in
each region I’d be in, including his or her cell phone number, so I could
call for help if I was in trouble.
FINDING ENRIQUE
The average child the Border Patrol catches who comes alone over the
U.S.-Mexico border is a fifteen-year-old boy. I wanted to find a boy who
was coming for his mother and had traveled on the trains.
In May 2000, I scoped out a dozen shelters and churches in Mexico
along the 2,000-mile-long U.S. border that help migrants, including
minors. I visited a few. I told each priest or shelter director what I was
after. I called each place day after day to see if such a child had arrived.
Soon, a nun at one of the churches in Nuevo Laredo, the Parroquia de
San José, said she had a couple of teenagers who had come in for a free
meal: a seventeen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl. Both were
headed north in search of their mothers. She put Enrique on the
telephone. He was a little older than the INS average. But his story was
typical—and just as harrowing as those I had heard from children in the
INS jails.
A few days later, I traveled to Nuevo Laredo and spent two weeks
shadowing Enrique along the Rio Grande. I talked to other children but
decided to stick with Enrique. In Nuevo Laredo, most of the children I
spoke with, including Enrique, had been robbed of their mothers’
telephone numbers along the way. They hadn’t thought to memorize the
numbers. Unlike the others, Enrique recalled one telephone in Honduras
he could call to try to get his mother’s phone number in the United
States. He still had a shot at continuing his journey and, perhaps,
reaching his mother.
15
From Enrique, I gleaned every possible detail about his life and trip
north. I noted every place he had gone, every experience, every person
he recalled who had helped or hindered him along the way.
Then I began to retrace his steps, doing the journey exactly as he had
done it a few weeks before. I wanted to see and experience things as he
had with the hope of describing them more fully. I began in Honduras,
interviewing his family, seeing his haunts. I took buses through Central
America, just as Enrique had done. In Mexico’s southernmost state,
Chiapas, I boarded a freight train. I took the same path along the rails,
traveling up the length of Mexico on top of seven freight trains. I got off
where he did, in San Luis Potosí, then hitchhiked on an eighteen-wheeler
from the same spot in the northern Mexican city of Matehuala, where
Enrique had hitched a ride to the U.S. border. To follow Enrique’s
journey, I traversed thirteen of Mexico’s thirty-one states. I traveled
more than 1,600 miles—half of that on top of trains.
I found people who had helped Enrique and saw towns or crucial
spots he had passed through or spent time in along the way. I showed
people a photograph of Enrique to make sure we were talking about the
same boy. I traveled on trains with other migrant children going to find
their mothers, including a twelve-year-old boy in search of his mother,
who had left for San Diego when he was one year old. From Tegucigalpa
through Mexico, I interviewed dozens of migrants and other experts—
medical workers, priests, nuns, police officers. All this added to the
journey and helped corroborate Enrique’s story. I returned to Enrique
three times to ask if he had seen or heard some of the many things I had
witnessed during my journey. In all, I spent more than six months
traveling in Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. In 2003, to
conduct additional research, I retraced much of the journey again,
beginning in Tegucigalpa.
FOLLOWING A DANGEROUS PATH
For months, as I traveled in Enrique’s footsteps, I lived with the nearconstant danger of being beaten, robbed, or raped. Once, as I rode on
top of a fuel car on a rainy night with lightning, a tree branch hit me
squarely in the face. It sent me sprawling backward. I was able to grab
a guardrail and keep from stumbling off the top of the train. On that
same ride, I later learned, a child had been plucked off the fuel tanker
car behind mine by a branch. His train companions did not know if he
was dead or alive.
16
Even with the presence of the heavily armed Grupo Beta agents on
trains as I rode through Chiapas, gangsters were robbing people at
knifepoint at the end of our train. I constantly worried about gangsters
on the trains. In Tierra Blanca in the Mexican state of Veracruz, during a
brief train stop, I feverishly tried to get the local police to find and
arrest a notoriously vicious gangster named Blackie, after learning he
was aboard the train I was about to reboard. Nearby, a train derailed
right in front of mine. Train engineers have described incidents where
migrants have been crushed as trains derail and cars tip over.
At times, I came close to witnessing the worst the train had to offer.
As I passed through the town of Encinar, Veracruz, I was riding between
two hoppers with four other migrants. A teenage boy emerged from a
railside food store to throw a roll of crackers to migrants on the train. A
teenage migrant standing next to me was hungry. When the boy threw
the roll toward the migrant beside me, it bounced off the train. As the
migrant jumped off the hopper to run back for the crackers, he stumbled
and fell backward. Both feet landed on the tracks. He had a split second
to react. He yanked his feet back just before the wheels rolled over the
track.
Things weren’t much safer by the side of the rails. I walked along the
river that flows by the town of Ixtepec, Oaxaca. It seemed tranquil, a
very safe public spot. Above me was the main bridge that crosses the
river, busy with trains and pedestrians. The next day, I interviewed
Karen, a fifteen-year-old girl who had been raped by two gangsters she
had seen on the trains. Karen told me she had been raped right under
the river’s bridge. I had been alone one day before the rape at the very
spot where Karen had been assaulted.
In Chiapas, I hung out with Grupo Beta agents near the dangerous “El
Manguito” immigration checkpoint. It is thick with bandits who target
migrants. Suddenly we were on a high-speed chase on a two-lane road,
trying to reach three bandits in a red Jeep Cherokee who had robbed a
group of migrants and driven off with one of them, a twenty-two-yearold Honduran woman. I was in the bed of Grupo Beta’s pickup. The
pickup pulled up alongside the Cherokee, trying to force it to stop. A
Grupo Beta agent stood in the pickup bed. He locked and loaded his
shotgun and aimed at the bandits’ vehicle. I was just feet from the
Cherokee. I prayed that the bandits wouldn’t open fire.
Farther north, human rights activist Raymundo Ramos Vásquez gave
me a tour of the most isolated spots along the Rio Grande, places where
migrants cross. We stumbled across a migrant preparing to swim north.
17
He explained that the last time he had been here, municipal police
officers had arrived. They had cuffed his hands behind his back, he said,
and put his face in the river, threatening to drown him if he didn’t
disclose where he had his money. As the migrant described the abuse,
two police officers walked down the dirt path toward us. Their guns
were drawn—and cocked.
When I returned to the United States, I had a recurring nightmare:
someone was racing after me on top of the freight trains, trying to rape
me. It took months of therapy before I could sleep soundly again.
Often in Mexico I was tense. On the trains, I was filthy, unable to go
to the bathroom for long stretches, excruciatingly hot or cold, pelted for
hours by rain or hail.
Although I often felt exhausted and miserable, I knew I was
experiencing only an iota of what migrant children go through. At the
end of a long train ride, I would pull out my credit card, go to a motel,
shower, eat, and sleep. These children typically spend several months
making their way north. During that time, in between train rides, they
sleep in trees or by the tracks, they drink from puddles, they beg for
food. The journey gave me a glimmer of how hard this is for them.
TRAIN-TOP LESSONS
I thought I understood, to a great extent, the immigrant experience. My
father, Mahafud, was born in Argentina after his Christian family fled
religious persecution in Syria. My mother, Clara, born in Poland,
emigrated to Argentina as a young child. Her family was fleeing poverty
and the persecution of Jews. Many of her Polish relatives were gassed
during World War II. My family emigrated to the United States in 1960.
My father, a biochemistry professor working on genetic mapping, had
greater resources and opportunities to conduct research here. He also
wanted to leave behind a country controlled by the military, where
academic expression was limited.
I understood the desire for opportunity, for freedom. I also
understood, due to the death of my father when I was a teenager and
the turbulent times my family experienced afterward, what it is like to
struggle economically. Growing up as the child of Argentine immigrants
in 1960s and 1970s Kansas, I have sometimes felt like an outsider. I
know how difficult it is to straddle two countries, two worlds. On many
levels, I relate to the experiences of immigrants and Latinos in this
18
country. I have written about migrants, on and off, for two decades.
Still, my parents arrived in the United States on a jet airplane, not on
top of a freight train. My family was never separated during the process
of immigrating to the United States. Until my journey with migrant
children, I had no true understanding of what people are willing to do to
get here.
As I followed Enrique’s footsteps, I learned the depths of desperation
women face in countries such as Honduras. Most earn $40 to $120 a
month working in a factory, cleaning houses, or providing child care. A
hut with no bathroom or kitchen rents for nearly $30 a month. In rural
areas of Honduras, some people live under a piece of tarp; they have no
chairs or table and eat sitting on a dirt floor.
Children go to school in threadbare uniforms, often unable to afford
pencil or paper or buy a decent lunch. A Tegucigalpa elementary school
principal told me that many of his students were so malnourished that
they didn’t have the stamina to stand up for long at school rallies or to
sing the national anthem. Many Honduran mothers pull their children
out of school when they are as young as eight. They have them watch
younger siblings while they work, or sell tortillas on a street corner.
Seven-year-olds sell bags of water on public buses or wait at taxi stands
to make change for cabdrivers. Some beg on Bulevar Juan Pablo II.
Domy Elizabeth Cortés, from Mexico City, described being despondent
after her husband left her for another woman. The loss of his income
meant she could feed her children only once a day. For weeks, she
considered throwing herself and her two toddlers into a nearby sewage
canal to drown together. Instead, she left her children with a brother
and headed to Los Angeles. Day after day, mothers like Domy walk
away from their children, some of them just a month old, and leave for
the United States, not knowing if or when they will see them again.
With each step north, I became awed by the gritty determination these
children possess in their struggle to get here. They are willing to endure
misery and dangers for months on end. They come armed with their
faith, a resolve not to return to Central America defeated, and a deep
desire to be at their mothers’ sides. One Honduran teenager I met in
southern Mexico had been deported to Guatemala twenty-seven times.
He said he wouldn’t give up until he reached his mother in the United
States. I began to believe that no number of border guards will deter
children like Enrique, who are willing to endure so much to reach the
United States. It is a powerful stream, one that can only be addressed at
its source.
19
The migrants I spent time with also gave me an invaluable gift. They
reminded me of the value of what I have. They taught me that people
are willing to die in their quest to obtain it.
The single mothers who are coming to this country, and the children
who follow them, are changing the face of immigration to the United
States. Each year, the number of women and children who immigrate to
the United States grows. They become our neighbors, children in our
schools, workers in our homes. As they become a greater part of the
fabric of the United States, their troubles and triumphs will be a part of
this country’s future. For Americans overall, this book should shed some
light on this part of our society.
For Latina mothers coming to the United States, my hope is that they
will understand the full consequences of leaving their children behind
and make better-informed decisions. For in the end, these separations
almost always end badly.
Every woman I interviewed in the United States who had left children
behind had been sure the separation would be brief. Immigrants who
come to the United States are by nature optimists. They have to be in
order to leave everything they love and are familiar with for the
unknown. The reality, however, is that it takes years and years until the
children and mothers are together again. By the time that happens, if it
happens, the children are usually very angry with their mothers. They
feel abandoned. Their mothers are stunned by this judgment. They
believe their children should show gratitude, not anger. After all, the
mothers sacrificed being with their children, worked like dogs, all to
help provide their children with a better life and future.
Latina migrants ultimately pay a steep price for coming to the United
States. They lose their children’s love. Reunited, they end up in
conflicted homes. Too often, the boys seek out gangs to try to find the
love they thought they would find with their mothers. Too often, the
girls get pregnant and form their own families. In many ways, these
separations are devastating Latino families. People are losing what they
value most.
Children who set out on this journey usually don’t make it. They end
up back in Central America, defeated. Enrique was determined to be
with his mother again. Would he make it?
20
Enrique at his kindergarten graduation
ONE
The Boy Left Behind
The boy does not understand.
His mother is not talking to him. She will not even look at him.
Enrique has no hint of what she is going to do.
Lourdes knows. She understands, as only a mother can, the terror she
is about to inflict, the ache Enrique will feel, and finally the emptiness.
What will become of him? Already he will not let anyone else feed or
bathe him. He loves her deeply, as only a son can. With Lourdes, he is
openly affectionate. “Dame pico, mami. Give me a kiss, Mom,” he pleads,
over and over, pursing his lips. With Lourdes, he is a chatterbox. “Mira,
21
mami. Look, Mom,” he says softly, asking her questions about everything
he sees. Without her, he is so shy it is crushing.
Slowly, she walks out onto the porch. Enrique clings to her pant leg.
Beside her, he is tiny. Lourdes loves him so much she cannot bring
herself to say a word. She cannot carry his picture. It would melt her
resolve. She cannot hug him. He is five years old.
They live on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, in Honduras. She can barely
afford food for him and his sister, Belky, who is seven. She’s never been
able to buy them a toy or a birthday cake. Lourdes, twenty-four, scrubs
other people’s laundry in a muddy river. She goes door to door, selling
tortillas, used clothes, and plantains.
She fills a wooden box with gum and crackers and cigarettes, and she
finds a spot where she can squat on a dusty sidewalk next to the
downtown Pizza Hut and sell the items to passersby. The sidewalk is
Enrique’s playground.
They have a bleak future. He and Belky are not likely to finish grade
school. Lourdes cannot afford uniforms or pencils. Her husband is gone.
A good job is out of the question.
Lourdes knows of only one place that offers hope. As a seven-year-old
child, delivering tortillas her mother made to wealthy homes, she
glimpsed this place on other people’s television screens. The flickering
images were a far cry from Lourdes’s childhood home: a two-room shack
made of wooden slats, its flimsy tin roof weighted down with rocks, the
only bathroom a clump of bushes outside. On television, she saw New
York City’s spectacular skyline, Las Vegas’s shimmering lights,
Disneyland’s magic castle.
Lourdes has decided: She will leave. She will go to the United States
and make money and send it home. She will be gone for one year—less,
with luck—or she will bring her children to be with her. It is for them
she is leaving, she tells herself, but still she feels guilty.
She kneels and kisses Belky and hugs her tightly. Then she turns to her
own sister. If she watches over Belky, she will get a set of gold
fingernails from el Norte.
But Lourdes cannot face Enrique. He will remember only one thing
that she says to him: “Don’t forget to go to church this afternoon.”
It is January 29, 1989. His mother steps off the porch.
She walks away.
“¿Dónde está mi mami?” Enrique cries, over and over. “Where is my
mom?”
His mother never returns, and that decides Enrique’s fate. As a
22
teenager—indeed, still a child—he will set out for the United States on
his own to search for her. Virtually unnoticed, he will become one of an
estimated 48,000 children who enter the United States from Central
America and Mexico each year, illegally and without either of their
parents. Roughly two thirds of them will make it past the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Many go north seeking work. Others flee abusive families. Most of the
Central Americans go to reunite with a parent, say counselors at a
detention center in Texas where the INS houses the largest number of the
unaccompanied children it catches. Of those, the counselors say, 75
percent are looking for their mothers. Some children say they need to
find out whether their mothers still love them. A priest at a Texas shelter
says they often bring pictures of themselves in their mothers’ arms.
The journey is hard for the Mexicans but harder still for Enrique and
the others from Central America. They must make an illegal and
dangerous trek up the length of Mexico. Counselors and immigration
lawyers say only half of them get help from smugglers. The rest travel
alone. They are cold, hungry, and helpless. They are hunted like animals
by corrupt police, bandits, and gang members deported from the United
States. A University of Houston study found that most are robbed,
beaten, or raped, usually several times. Some are killed.
They set out with little or no money. Thousands, shelter workers say,
make their way through Mexico clinging to the sides and tops of freight
trains. Since the 1990s, Mexico and the United States have tried to
thwart them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, the
children jump onto and off of the moving train cars. Sometimes they
fall, and the wheels tear them apart.
They navigate by word of mouth or by the arc of the sun. Often, they
don’t know where or when they’ll get their next meal. Some go days
without eating. If a train stops even briefly, they crouch by the tracks,
cup their hands, and steal sips of water from shiny puddles tainted with
diesel fuel. At night, they huddle together on the train cars or next to the
tracks. They sleep in trees, in tall grass, or in beds made of leaves.
Some are very young. Mexican rail workers have encountered sevenyear-olds on their way to find their mothers. A policeman discovered a
nine-year-old boy near the downtown Los Angeles tracks. “I’m looking
for my mother,” he said. The youngster had left Puerto Cortes in
Honduras three months before. He had been guided only by his cunning
and the single thing he knew about her: where she lived. He had asked
everyone, “How do I get to San Francisco?”
23
Typically, the children are teenagers. Some were babies when their
mothers left; they know them only by pictures sent home. Others, a bit
older, struggle to hold on to memories: One has slept in her mother’s
bed; another has smelled her perfume, put on her deodorant, her clothes.
One is old enough to remember his mother’s face, another her laugh, her
favorite shade of lipstick, how her dress felt as she stood at the stove
patting tortillas.
Many, including Enrique, begin to idealize their mothers. They
remember how their mothers fed and bathed them, how they walked
them to kindergarten. In their absence, these mothers become larger
than life. Although in the United States the women struggle to pay rent
and eat, in the imaginations of their children back home they become
deliverance itself, the answer to every problem. Finding them becomes
the quest for the Holy Grail.
CONFUSION
Enrique is bewildered. Who will take care of him now that his mother is
gone? Lourdes, unable to burden her family with both of her children,
has split them up. Belky stayed with Lourdes’s mother and sisters. For
two years, Enrique is entrusted to his father, Luis, from whom his mother
has been separated for three years.
Enrique clings to his daddy, who dotes on him. A bricklayer, his father
takes Enrique to work and lets him help mix mortar. They live with
Enrique’s grandmother. His father shares a bed with him and brings him
apples and clothes. Every month, Enrique misses his mother less, but he
does not forget her. “When is she coming for me?” he asks.
Lourdes and her smuggler cross Mexico on buses. Each afternoon, she
closes her eyes. She imagines herself home at dusk, playing with Enrique
under a eucalyptus tree in her mother’s front yard. Enrique straddles a
broom, pretending it’s a donkey, trotting around the muddy yard. Each
afternoon, she presses her eyes shut and tears fall. Each afternoon, she
reminds herself that if she is weak, if she does not keep moving forward,
her children will pay.
Lourdes crosses into the United States in one of the largest immigrant
waves in the country’s history. She enters at night through a rat-infested
Tijuana sewage tunnel and makes her way to Los Angeles. There, in the
downtown Greyhound bus terminal, the smuggler tells Lourdes to wait
while he runs a quick errand. He’ll be right back. The smuggler has been
24
paid to take her all the way to Miami.
Three days pass. Lourdes musses her filthy hair, trying to blend in
with the homeless and not get singled out by police. She prays to God to
put someone before her, to show her the way. Whom can she reach out
to for help? Starved, she starts walking. East of downtown, Lourdes
spots a small factory. On the loading dock, under a gray tin roof,
women sort red and green tomatoes. She begs for work. As she puts
tomatoes into boxes, she hallucinates that she is slicing open a juicy one
and sprinkling it with salt. The boss pays her $14 for two hours’ work.
Lourdes’s brother has a friend in Los Angeles who helps Lourdes get a
fake Social Security card and a job.
She moves in with a Beverly Hills couple to take care of their threeyear-old daughter. Their spacious home has carpet on the floors and
mahogany panels on the walls. Her employers are kind. They pay her
$125 a week. She gets nights and weekends off. Maybe, Lourdes tells
herself—if she stays long enough—they will help her become legal.
Every morning as the couple leave for work, the little girl cries for her
mother. Lourdes feeds her breakfast and thinks of Enrique and Belky.
She asks herself: “Do my children cry like this? I’m giving this girl food
instead of feeding my own children.” To get the girl to eat, Lourdes
pretends the spoon is an airplane. But each time the spoon lands in the
girl’s mouth, Lourdes is filled with sadness.
In the afternoon, after the girl comes home from prekindergarten
class, they thumb through picture books and play. The girl, so close to
Enrique’s age, is a constant reminder of her son. Many afternoons,
Lourdes cannot contain her grief. She gives the girl a toy and dashes into
the kitchen. There, out of sight, tears flow. After seven months, she
cannot take it. She quits and moves to a friend’s place in Long Beach.
Boxes arrive in Tegucigalpa bearing clothes, shoes, toy cars, a
Robocop doll, a television. Lourdes writes: Do they like the things she is
sending? She tells Enrique to behave, to study hard. She has hopes for
him: graduation from high school, a white-collar job, maybe as an
engineer. She pictures her son working in a crisp shirt and shiny shoes.
She says she loves him.
Enrique asks about his mother. “She’ll be home soon,” his grandmother
assures him. “Don’t worry. She’ll be back.”
But his mother does not come. Her disappearance is incomprehensible.
Enrique’s bewilderment turns to confusion and then to adolescent anger.
When Enrique is seven, his father brings a woman home. To her,
Enrique is an economic burden. One morning, she spills hot cocoa and
25
burns him. His father throws her out. But their separation is brief.
“Mom,” Enrique’s father tells the grandmother, “I can’t think of
anyone but that woman.”
Enrique’s father bathes, dresses, splashes on cologne, and follows her.
Enrique tags along and begs to stay with him. But his father tells him to
go back to his grandmother.
His father begins a new family. Enrique sees him rarely, usually by
chance. In time, Enrique’s love turns to contempt. “He doesn’t love me.
He loves the children he has with his wife,” he tells Belky. “I don’t have
a dad.”
His father notices. “He looks at me as if he wasn’t my son, as if he
wants to strangle me,” he tells Enrique’s grandmother. Most of the
blame, his father decides, belongs to Enrique’s mother. “She is the one
who promised to come back.”
For Belky, their mother’s disappearance is just as distressing. She lives
with Aunt Rosa Amalia, one of her mother’s sisters. On Mother’s Day,
Belky struggles through a celebration at school. That night she cries
quietly, alone in her room. Then she scolds herself. She should thank her
mother for leaving; without the money she sends for books and
uniforms, Belky could not even attend school. She reminds herself of all
the other things her mother ships south: Reebok tennis shoes, black
sandals, the yellow bear and pink puppy stuffed toys on her bed. She
commiserates with a friend whose mother has also left. They console
each other. They know a girl whose mother died of a heart attack. At
least, they say, ours are alive.
But Rosa Amalia thinks the separation has caused deep emotional
problems. To her, it seems that Belky is struggling with an unavoidable
question: How can I be worth anything if my mother left me?
“There are days,” Belky tells Aunt Rosa Amalia, “when I wake up and
feel so alone.” Belky is temperamental. Sometimes she stops talking to
everyone. When her mood turns dark, her grandmother warns the other
children in the house, “¡Pórtense bien porque la marea anda brava! You
better behave, because the seas are choppy!”
Confused by his mother’s absence, Enrique turns to his grandmother.
Alone now, he and his father’s elderly mother share a shack thirty feet
square. María Marcos built it herself of wooden slats. Enrique can see
daylight in the cracks. It has four rooms, three without electricity. There
is no running water. Gutters carry rain off the patched tin roof into two
barrels. A trickle of cloudy white sewage runs past the front gate. On a
well-worn rock nearby, Enrique’s grandmother washes musty used
26
clothing she sells door to door. Next to the rock is the latrine—a concrete
hole. Beside it are buckets for bathing.
The shack is in Carrizal, one of Tegucigalpa’s poorest neighborhoods.
Sometimes Enrique looks across the rolling hills to the neighborhood
where he and his mother lived and where Belky still lives with their
mother’s family. They are six miles apart. They hardly ever visit.
Lourdes sends Enrique $50 a month, occasionally $100, sometimes
nothing. It is enough for food but not for school clothes, fees, notebooks,
or pencils, which are expensive in Honduras. There is never enough for
a birthday present. But Grandmother María hugs him and wishes him a
cheery ¡Feliz cumpleaños! “Your mom can’t send enough,” she says, “so
we both have to work.”
Enrique loves to climb his grandmother’s guayaba tree, but there is no
more time for play now. After school, Enrique sells tamales and plastic
bags of fruit juice from a bucket hung in the crook of his arm.
“¡Tamarindo! ¡Piña!” he shouts.
Sometimes Enrique takes his wares to a service station where dieselbelching buses rumble into Carrizal. Jostling among mango and avocado
vendors, he sells cups of diced fruit.
After he turns ten, he rides buses alone to an outdoor food market. He
stuffs tiny bags with nutmeg, curry powder, and paprika, then seals
them with hot wax. He pauses at big black gates in front of the market
and calls out, “¿Va a querer especias? Who wants spices?” He has no
vendor’s license, so he keeps moving, darting between wooden carts
piled with papayas. Younger children, five and six years old, dot the
curbs, thrusting fistfuls of tomatoes and chiles at shoppers. Others offer
to carry purchases of fruits and vegetables from stall to stall in rustic
wooden wheelbarrows in exchange for tips. “Te ayudo? May I help
you?” they ask. Arms taut, backs stooped, the boys heave forward, their
carts bulging.
In between sales, some of the young market workers sniff glue.
Grandmother María cooks plantains, spaghetti, and fresh eggs. Now
and then, she kills a chicken and prepares it for him. In return, when she
is sick, Enrique rubs medicine on her back. He brings water to her in
bed. Two or three times a week, Enrique lugs buckets filled with
drinking water, one on each shoulder, from the water truck at the
bottom of the hill up to his grandmother’s house.
Every year on Mother’s Day, he makes a heart-shaped card at school
and presses it into her hand. “I love you very much, Grandma,” he
writes.
27
But she is not his mother. Enrique longs to hear Lourdes’s voice. Once
he tries to call her collect from a public telephone in his neighborhood.
He can’t get the call to go through. His only way of talking to her is at
the home of his mother’s cousin María Edelmira Sánchez Mejía, one of
the few family members who has a telephone. His mother seldom calls.
One year she does not call at all.
“I thought you had died, girl!” María Edelmira says, when she finally
does call.
Better to send money, Lourdes replies, than burn it up on the phone.
But there is another reason she hasn’t called: her life in the United States
is nothing like the television images she saw in Honduras.
Lourdes shares an apartment bedroom with three other women. She
sleeps on the floor. A boyfriend from Honduras, Santos, joins her in
Long Beach. Lourdes is hopeful. She’s noticed that her good friend Alma
saves much faster now that she has moved in with a Mexican boyfriend.
The boyfriend pays Alma’s rent and bills. Alma can shop for her two
girls in Honduras at nice stores such as JC Penney and Sears. She’s
saving to build a house in Honduras.
Santos, who once worked with Lourdes’s stepfather as a bricklayer, is
such a speedy worker that in Honduras his nickname was El Veloz. With
Santos here, Lourdes tells herself, she will save enough to bring her
children within two years. If not, she will take her savings and return to
Honduras to build a little house and corner grocery store.
Lourdes unintentionally gets pregnant. She struggles through the
difficult pregnancy, working in a refrigerated fish factory, packing and
weighing salmon and catfish all day. Her water breaks at five one
summer morning. Lourdes’s boyfriend, who likes to get drunk, goes to a
bar to celebrate. He asks a female bar buddy to take Lourdes to the
public hospital. Lourdes’s temperature shoots up to 105 degrees. She
becomes delirious. The bar buddy wipes sweat dripping from Lourdes’s
brow. “Bring my mother. Bring my mother,” Lourdes moans. Lourdes has
trouble breathing. A nurse slips an oxygen mask over her face. She gives
birth to a girl, Diana.
After two days, Lourdes must leave the hospital. She is still sick and
weak. The hospital will hold her baby one more day. Santos has never
shown up at the hospital. He isn’t answering their home telephone. His
drinking buddy has taken Lourdes’s clothes back to her apartment.
Lourdes leaves the hospital wearing a blue paper disposable robe. She
doesn’t even have a pair of underwear. She sits in her apartment kitchen
and sobs, longing for her mother, her sister, anyone familiar.
28
Santos returns the next morning, after a three-day drinking binge. “Ya
vino? Has it arrived?” He passes out before Lourdes can answer. Lourdes
goes, alone, to get Diana from the hospital.
Santos loses his job making airplane parts. Lourdes falls on a pallet
and hurts her shoulder. She complains to her employer about the pain.
Two months after Diana’s birth, she is fired. She gets a job at a pizzeria
and bar. Santos doesn’t want her to work there. One night, Santos is
drunk and jealous that Lourdes has given a male co-worker a ride home.
He punches Lourdes in the chest, knocking her to the ground. The next
morning, there is coagulated blood under the skin on her breast. “I won’t
put up with this,” Lourdes tells herself.
When Diana is one year old, Santos decides to visit Honduras. He
promises to choose wise investments there and multiply the several
thousand dollars the couple has scrimped to save. Instead, Santos spends
the money on a long drinking binge with a fifteen-year-old girl on his
arm. He doesn’t call Lourdes again.
By the time Santos is gone for two months, Lourdes can no longer
make car and apartment payments. She rents a garage—really a
converted single carport. The owners have thrown up some walls, put in
a door, and installed a toilet. There is no kitchen. It costs $300 a month.
Lourdes and Diana, now two years old, share a mattress on the
concrete floor. The roof leaks, the garage floods, and slugs inch up the
mattress and into bed. She can’t buy milk or diapers or take her
daughter to the doctor when she gets sick. Sometimes they live on
emergency welfare.
Unemployed, unable to send money to her children in Honduras,
Lourdes takes the one job available: work as a fichera at a Long Beach
bar called El Mar Azul Bar #1. It has two pool tables, a long bar with
vinyl stools, and a red-and-blue neon façade. Lourdes’s job is to sit at the
bar, chat with patrons, and encourage them to keep buying grossly
overpriced drinks for her. Her first day is filled with shame. She
imagines that her brothers are sitting at the bar, judging her. What if
someone she knows walks into the bar, recognizes her, and word
somehow gets back to Lourdes’s mother in Honduras? Lourdes sits in the
darkest corner of the bar and begins to cry. “What am I doing here?” she
asks herself. “Is this going to be my life?” For nine months, she spends
night after night patiently listening to drunken men talk about their
problems, how they miss their wives and children left behind in Mexico.
A friend helps Lourdes get work cleaning oil refinery offices and
houses by day and ringing up gasoline and cigarette sales at a gas
29
station at night. Lourdes drops her daughter off at school at 7 A.M.,
cleans all day, picks Diana up at 5 P.M., drops her at a babysitter, then
goes back to work until 2 A.M. She fetches Diana and collapses into bed.
She has four hours to sleep.
Some of the people whose houses she cleans are kind. One woman in
Redondo Beach always cooks Lourdes lunch and leaves it on the stove
for her. Another woman offers, “Anything you want to eat, there is the
fridge.” Lourdes tells both, “God bless you.”
Others seem to revel in her humiliation. One woman in posh Palos
Verdes demands that she scrub her living room and kitchen floors on her
knees instead of with a mop. It exacerbates her arthritis. She walks like
an old lady some days. The cleaning liquids cause her skin to slough off
her knees, which sometimes bleed. The woman never offers Lourdes a
glass of water.
There are good months, though, when she can earn $1,000 to $1,200
cleaning offices and homes. She takes extra jobs, one at a candy factory
for $2.25 an hour. Besides the cash for Enrique, every month she sends
$50 each to her mother and Belky.
Those are her happiest moments, when she can wire money. Her
greatest dread is when there is no work and she can’t. That and random
gang shootings. “La muerte nunca te avisa cuando viene,” Lourdes says.
“Death never announces when it is going to come.” A small park near
her apartment is a gang hangout. When Lourdes returns home in the
middle of the night, gangsters come up and ask for money. She always
hands over three dollars, sometimes five. What would happen to her
children if she died?
The money Lourdes sends is no substitute for her presence. Belky, now
nine, is furious about the new baby. Their mother might lose interest in
her and Enrique, and the baby will make it harder to wire money and
save so she can bring them north. “How can she have more children
now?” Belky asks.
For Enrique, each telephone call grows more strained. Because he lives
across town, he is not often lucky enough to be at María Edelmira’s
house when his mother phones. When he is, their talk is clipped and
anxious. Quietly, however, one of these conversations plants the seed of
an idea. Unwittingly, Lourdes sows it herself.
“When are you coming home?” Enrique asks. She avoids an answer.
Instead, she promises to send for him very soon.
It had never occurred to him: If she will not come home, then maybe
he can go to her. Neither he nor his mother realizes it, but this kernel of
30
an idea will take root. From now on, whenever Enrique speaks to her,
he ends by saying, “I want to be with you.”
“Come home,” Lourdes’s own mother begs her on the telephone. “It
may only be beans, but you always have food here.” Pride forbids it.
How can she justify leaving her children if she returns empty-handed?
Four blocks from her mother’s place is a white house with purple trim. It
takes up half a block behind black iron gates. The house belongs to a
woman whose children went to Washington, D.C., and sent her the
money to build it. Lourdes cannot afford such a house for her mother,
much less herself.
But she develops a plan. She will become a resident and bring her
children to the United States legally. Three times, she hires storefront
immigration counselors who promise help. She pays them a total of
$3,850. But the counselors never deliver.
One is a supposed attorney near downtown Los Angeles. Another is a
blind man who says he once worked at the INS. Lourdes’s friends say
he’s helped them get work papers. A woman in Long Beach, whose
house she cleans, agrees to sponsor her residency. The blind man dies of
diabetes. Soon after, Lourdes gets a letter from the INS. Petition denied.
She must try again. A chance to get her papers comes from someone
Lourdes trusts. Dominga is an older woman with whom Lourdes shares
an apartment. Dominga has become Lourdes’s surrogate mother. She
loans Lourdes money when she runs short. She gives her advice on how
to save so she can bring her children north. When Lourdes comes home
late, she leaves her tamales or soup on the table, under the black velvet
picture of the Last Supper.
Dominga is at the Los Angeles INS office. She’s there to try to help a
son arrested in an immigration raid. A woman walks up to her in the
hallway. My name, she tells Dominga, is Gloria Patel. I am a lawyer. I
have friends inside the INS who can help your son become legal. In fact,
I work for someone inside the INS. She hands Dominga her business
card. IMMIGRATION CONSULTANT. LEGAL PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. It has a drawing
of the Statue of Liberty. Residency costs $3,000 per person up front,
$5,000 total. Find five or six interested immigrants, the woman tells
Dominga, and I’ll throw in your son’s residency papers for free.
“I found a woman, a great attorney!” Dominga tells Lourdes. “She can
make us legal in one month.” At most, three months. Dominga convinces
other immigrants in her apartment complex to sign up. Initially, the
recruits are skeptical. Some accompany Dominga to Patel’s office. It is a
suite in a nice building that also houses the Guatemalan Consulate. The
31
waiting room is full. Two men loudly discuss how Patel has been
successful in legalizing their family members. Patel shows Dominga
papers—proof, she says, that her son’s legalization process is already
under way.
They leave the office grateful that Patel has agreed to slash her fee to
$3,500 and require only $1,000 per person as a first installment.
Lourdes gives Patel what she has: $800.
Soon Patel demands final payments from everyone to keep going.
Lourdes balks. Should she be sending this money to her children in
Honduras instead? She talks to Patel on the phone. She claims to be
Salvadoran but sounds Colombian.
Patel is a smooth talker. “How are you going to lose out on this
amazing opportunity? Almost no one has this opportunity! And for this
incredible price.”
“It’s that there are a lot of thieves here. And I don’t earn much.”
“Who said I’m going to rob you?”
Lourdes prays. God, all these years, I have asked you for only one thing:
to be with my children again. She hands over another $700. Others pay the
entire $3,500.
Patel promises to send everyone’s legalization papers in the mail. A
week after mailing in the last payments, several migrants go back to her
office to see how things are going. The office is shuttered. Gloria Patel is
gone. Others in the building say she had rented space for one month.
The papers the migrants were shown were filled-out applications,
nothing more.
Lourdes berates herself for not dating an American who asked her out
long ago. She could have married him, maybe even had her children
here by now…
Lourdes wants to give her son and daughter some hope. “I’ll be back
next Christmas,” she tells Enrique.
Enrique fantasizes about Lourdes’s expected homecoming in
December. In his mind, she arrives at the door with a box of Nike shoes
for him. “Stay,” he pleads. “Live with me. Work here. When I’m older, I
can help you work and make money.”
Christmas arrives, and he waits by the door. She does not come. Every
year, she promises. Each year, he is disappointed. Confusion finally
grows into anger. “I need her. I miss her,” he tells his sister. “I want to
be with my mother. I see so many children with mothers. I want that.”
One day, he asks his grandmother, “How did my mom get to the
United States?” Years later, Enrique will remember his grandmother’s
32
reply—and how another seed was planted: “Maybe,” María says, “she
went on the trains.”
“What are the trains like?”
“They are very, very dangerous,” his grandmother says. “Many people
die on the trains.”
When Enrique is twelve, Lourdes tells him yet again that she will come
home.
“Sí,” he replies. “Va, pues. Sure. Sure.”
Enrique senses a truth: Very few mothers ever return. He tells her that
he doesn’t think she is coming back. To himself, he says, “It’s all one big
lie.”
The calls grow tense. “Come home,” he demands. “Why do you want
to be there?”
“It’s all gone to help raise you.”
Lourdes has nightmares about going back, even to visit, without
residency documents. In the dreams, she hugs her children, then realizes
she has to return to the United States so they can eat well and study. The
plates on the table are empty. But she has no money for a smuggler. She
tries to go back on her own. The path becomes a labyrinth. She runs
through zigzagging corridors. She always ends up back at the starting
point. Each time, she awakens in a sweat.
Another nightmare replays an incident when Belky was two years old.
Lourdes has potty-trained her daughter. But Belky keeps pooping in her
pants. “Puerca! You pig!” Lourdes scolds her daughter. Once, Lourdes
snaps. She kicks Belky in the bottom. The toddler falls and hits her face
on the corner of a door. Her lip splits open. Lourdes can’t reach out and
console her daughter. Each time, she awakens with Belky’s screams
ringing in her ears.
All along, Enrique’s mother has written very little; she is barely
literate and embarrassed by it. Now her letters stop.
Every time Enrique sees Belky, he asks, “When is our mom coming?
When will she send for us?”
Lourdes does consider hiring a smuggler to bring the children but fears
the danger. The coyotes, as they are called, are often alcoholics or drug
addicts. Usually, a chain of smugglers is used to make the trip. Children
are passed from one stranger to another. Sometimes the smugglers
abandon their charges.
Lourdes is continually reminded of the risks. One of her best friends in
Long Beach pays for a smuggler to bring her sister from El Salvador.
During her journey, the sister calls Long Beach to give regular updates
33
on her progress through Mexico. The calls abruptly stop.
Two months later, the family hears from a man who was among the
group headed north. The smugglers put twenty-four migrants into an
overloaded boat in Mexico, he says. It tipped over. All but four drowned.
Some bodies were swept out to sea. Others were buried along the beach,
including the missing sister. He leads the family to a Mexican beach.
There they unearth the sister’s decomposed body. She is still wearing her
high school graduation ring.
Another friend is panic-stricken when her three-year-old son is caught
by Border Patrol agents as a smuggler tries to cross him into the United
States. For a week, Lourdes’s friend doesn’t know what’s become of her
toddler.
Lourdes learns that many smugglers ditch children at the first sign of
trouble. Government-run foster homes in Mexico get migrant children
whom authorities find abandoned in airports and bus stations and on
the streets. Children as young as three, bewildered, desperate, populate
these foster homes.
Víctor Flores, four years old, maybe five, was abandoned on a bus by
a female smuggler. He carries no identification, no telephone number.
He ends up at Casa Pamar, a foster home in Tapachula, Mexico, just
north of the Guatemalan border. It broadcasts their pictures on Central
American television so family members might rescue them.
The boy gives his name to Sara Isela Hernández Herrera, a
coordinator at the home, but says he does not know how old he is or
where he is from. He says his mother has gone to the United States. He
holds Hernández’s hand with all his might and will not leave her side.
He asks for hugs. Within hours, he begins calling her Mama.
When she leaves work every afternoon, he pleads in a tiny voice for
her to stay—or at least to take him with her. She gives him a jar of
strawberry marmalade and strokes his hair. “I have a family,” he says,
sadly. “They are far away.”
Francisco Gaspar, twelve, from Concepción Huixtla in Guatemala, is
terrified. He sits in a hallway at a Mexican immigration holding tank in
Tapachula. With a corner of his Charlie Brown T-shirt, he dabs at tears
running down his chin. He is waiting to be deported. His smuggler left
him behind at Tepic, in the western coastal state of Nayarit. “He didn’t
see that I hadn’t gotten on the train,” Francisco says between sobs. His
short legs had kept him from scrambling aboard. Immigration agents
caught him and bused him to Tapachula.
Francisco left Guatemala after his parents died. He pulls a tiny scrap
34
of paper from a pants pocket with the telephone number of his uncle
Marcos in Florida. “I was going to the United States to harvest chiles,”
he says. “Please help me! Please help me!”
Clutching a handmade cross of plastic beads on a string around his
neck, he leaves his chair and moves frantically from one stranger to
another in the hallway. His tiny chest heaves. His face contorts in
agony. He is crying so hard that he struggles for breath. He asks each of
the other migrants to help him get back to his smuggler in Tepic. He
touches their hands. “Please take me back to Tepic! Please! Please!”
For Lourdes, the disappearance of her ex-boyfriend, Santos, hits
closest to home. When Diana is four years old, her father returns to Long
Beach. Soon after, Santos is snared in an INS raid of day laborers
waiting for work on a street corner and deported. Lourdes hears he has
again left Honduras headed for the United States. He never arrives. Not
even his mother in Honduras knows what has happened to him.
Eventually, Lourdes concludes that he has died in Mexico or drowned in
the Rio Grande.
“Do I want to have them with me so badly,” she asks herself of her
children, “that I’m willing to risk their losing their lives?” Besides, she
does not want Enrique to come to California. There are too many gangs,
drugs, and crimes.
In any event, she has not saved enough. The cheapest coyote,
immigrant advocates say, charges $3,000 per child. Female coyotes want
up to $6,000. A top smuggler will bring a child by commercial flight for
$10,000. She must save enough to bring both children at once. If not, the
one left in Honduras will think she loves him or her less.
Enrique despairs. He will simply have to do it himself. He will go find
her. He will ride the trains. “I want to come,” he tells her.
Don’t even joke about it, she says. It is too dangerous. Be patient.
REBELLION
Now Enrique’s anger boils over. He refuses to make his Mother’s Day
card at school. He begins hitting other kids. At recess, he lifts schoolgirls’
skirts. When a teacher tries to make him behave by smacking him with a
large ruler, Enrique grabs the end of the ruler and refuses to let go,
making the teacher cry.
He stands on top of the teacher’s desk and bellows, “Who is Enrique?”
“You!” the class replies.
35
Three times, he is suspended. Twice he repeats a grade. But Enrique
never abandons his promise to study. Unlike half the children from his
neighborhood, he completes elementary school. There is a small
ceremony. A teacher hugs him and mutters, “Thank God, Enrique’s out of
here.”
He stands proud in a blue gown and mortarboard. But nobody from
his mother’s family comes to the graduation.
Now he is fourteen, a teenager. He spends more time on the streets of
Carrizal, which is controlled by the Poison gang and is quickly becoming
one of Tegucigalpa’s toughest neighborhoods. His grandmother tells him
to come home early. But he plays soccer until midnight. He refuses to
sell spices. It is embarrassing when girls see him peddle fruit cups or
when they hear someone call him “the tamale man.” Sometimes his
grandmother pulls out a belt at night when Enrique is naked in bed and
therefore unable to quickly escape her punishment by running outside.
“Ahora vamos a areglar las cuentas. Now we are going to settle the score,”
she says. She keeps count, inflicting one lash for each time Enrique has
misbehaved.
Enrique has no parent to protect him on the streets of Carrizal. He
makes up for it by cultivating a tougher image. When he walks
alongside his grandmother, he hides his Bible under his shirt so no one
will know they are headed to church.
Soon, he stops going to church at all.
“Don’t hang out with bad boys,” Grandmother María says.
“You can’t pick my friends!” Enrique retorts. She is not his mother, he
tells her, and she has no right to tell him what to do. He stays out all
night.
His grandmother waits up for him, crying. “Why are you doing this to
me?” she asks. “Don’t you love me? I am going to send you away.”
“Send me! No one loves me.”
But she says she does love him. She only wants him to work and to be
honorable, so that he can hold his head up high.
He replies that he will do what he wants.
Enrique has become her youngest child. “Please bury me,” she says.
“Stay with me. If you do, all this is yours.” She prays that she can hold
on to him until his mother sends for him. But her own children say
Enrique has to go: she is seventy, and he will bury her, all right, by
sending her to the grave.
Sadly, she writes to Lourdes: You must find him another home.
To Enrique, it is another rejection. First his mother, then his father,
36
and now his grandmother.
Lourdes arranges for her eldest brother, Marco Antonio Zablah, to
take him in. Marco will help Enrique, just as he helped Lourdes when
she was Enrique’s age. Marco once took in Lourdes to help ease the
burden on their mother, who was struggling to feed so many children.
Her gifts arrive steadily. She sends Enrique an orange polo shirt, a
pair of blue pants, a radio cassette player. She is proud that her money
pays Belky’s tuition at a private high school and eventually a college, to
study accounting. In a country where nearly half live on $1 or less a
day, kids from poor neighborhoods almost never go to college.
Money from Lourdes helps Enrique, too, and he realizes it. If she were
here, he knows where he might well be: scavenging in the trash dump
across town. Lourdes knows it, too; as a girl, she herself worked the
dump. Enrique knows children as young as six or seven whose single
mothers have stayed at home and who have had to root through the
waste in order to eat.
Truck after truck rumbles onto the hilltop. Dozens of adults and
children fight for position. Each truck dumps its load. Feverishly, the
scavengers reach up into the sliding ooze to pluck out bits of plastic,
wood, and tin. The trash squishes beneath their feet, moistened by loads
from hospitals, full of blood and placentas. Occasionally a child, with
hands blackened by garbage, picks up a piece of stale bread and eats it.
As the youngsters sort through the stinking stew, thousands of sleek,
black buzzards soar in a dark, swirling cloud and defecate on the people
below.
Enrique sees other children who must work hard jobs. A block from
where Lourdes grew up, children gather on a large pile of sawdust left
by a lumber mill. Barefoot atop the peach-colored mound, their faces
smeared with dirt, they quickly scoop the sawdust into rusty tin cans and
dump it into big white plastic bags. They lug the bags half a mile up a
hill. There, they sell the sawdust to families, who use it as kindling or to
dry mud around their houses. An eleven-year-old boy has been hauling
sawdust for three years, three trips up the hill each day. The earnings
buy clothes, shoes, and paper for school.
Others in the neighborhood go door-to-door, offering to burn
household trash for change. One afternoon, three children, ages eight to
ten, line up in front of their mother, who loads them down with logs of
wood to deliver. “Give me three!” one boy says. She lays a rag and then
several pieces of wood atop his right shoulder.
In one neighborhood near where Enrique’s mother grew up, fifty-two
37
children arrive at kindergarten each morning. Forty-four arrive
barefoot. An aide reaches into a basket and places a pair of shoes into
each one’s hands. At 4 P.M., before they leave, the children must return
the shoes to the basket. If they take the shoes home, their mothers will
sell them for food.
Black rats and a pig root around in a ravine where the children play.
At dinnertime, the mothers count out three tortillas for each child. If
there are no tortillas, they try to fill their children’s bellies with a glass
of water with a teaspoon of sugar mixed in.
A year after Enrique goes to live with his uncle, Lourdes calls—this
time from North Carolina. “California is too hard,” she says. “There are
too many immigrants.” Employers pay poorly and treat them badly.
Even with two jobs, she couldn’t save. She has followed a female friend
to North Carolina and started over again. It is her only hope of bettering
her lot and seeing her children again. She sold everything in California
—her old Ford, a chest of drawers, a television, the bed she shares with
her daughter. It netted $800 for the move.
Here people are less hostile. She can leave her car, even her house,
unlocked. Work is plentiful. She quickly lands a job as a waitress at a
Mexican restaurant. She finds a room to rent in a trailer home for just
$150 a month—half of what the small garage cost her in Los Angeles.
She starts to save. Maybe if she amasses $4,000, her brother Marco will
help her invest it in Honduras. Maybe she’ll be able to go home. Lourdes
gets a better job on an assembly line for $9.05 an hour—$13.50 when
she works overtime.
Going home would resolve a problem that has weighed heavily on
Lourdes: Diana’s delayed baptism. Lourdes has held off, hoping to
baptize her daughter in Honduras with Honduran godparents. A baptism
would lift Lourdes’s constant concern that Diana’s unexpected death will
send her daughter to purgatory.
Lourdes has met someone, a house painter from Honduras, and they
are moving in together. He, too, has two children in Honduras. He is
kind and gentle, a quiet man with good manners. He gives Lourdes
advice. He helps ease her loneliness. He takes Lourdes and her daughter
to the park on Sundays. For a while, when Lourdes works two restaurant
jobs, he picks her up when her second shift ends at 11 P.M., so they can
share a few moments together. They call each other “honey.” They fall
in love.
Enrique misses Lourdes enormously. But Uncle Marco and his
girlfriend treat him well. Marco is a money changer on the Honduran
38
border. It has been lucrative work, augmented by a group that for years
has been in constant need of his services: U.S.-funded Nicaraguan contras
across the border. Marco’s family, including a son, lives in a fivebedroom house in a middle-class neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. Uncle
Marco gives Enrique a daily allowance, buys him clothes, and sends him
to a private military school in the evenings.
By day, Enrique runs errands for his uncle, washes his five cars,
follows him everywhere. His uncle pays as much attention to him as he
does his own son, if not more. Often, Marco plays billiards with Enrique.
They watch movies together. Enrique sees New York City’s spectacular
skyline, Las Vegas’s shimmering lights, Disneyland’s magic castle.
Negrito, Marco calls Enrique fondly, because of his dark skin. Marco and
Enrique stand the same way, a little bowlegged, with the hips tucked
forward. Although he is in his teens, Enrique is small, just shy of five
feet, even when he straightens up from a slight stoop. He has a big smile
and perfect teeth.
His uncle trusts him, even to make bank deposits. He tells Enrique, “I
want you to work with me forever.” Enrique senses that Uncle Marco
loves him, and he values his advice.
One week, as his uncle’s security guard returns from trading
Honduran lempiras, robbers drag the guard off a bus and kill him. The
guard has a son twenty-three years old, and the slaying impels the
young man to go to the United States. He comes back before crossing the
Rio Grande and tells Enrique about riding on trains, leaping off rolling
freight cars, and dodging la migra, Mexican immigration agents.
Because of the security guard’s murder, Marco swears that he will
never change money again. A few months later, though, he gets a call.
For a large commission, would he exchange $50,000 in lempiras on the
border with El Salvador? Uncle Marco promises that this will be the last
time.
Enrique wants to go with him, but his uncle says he is too young. He
takes Victor, one of his own brothers, instead. Robbers riddle their car
with bullets. Enrique’s uncles careen off the road. The thieves shoot
Uncle Marco three times in the chest and once in the leg. They shoot
Victor in the face. Both die. Now Uncle Marco is gone.
In nine years, Lourdes has saved $700 toward bringing her children to
the United States. Instead, she uses it to help pay for her brothers’
funerals.
Lourdes goes into a tailspin. Marco had visited her once, shortly after
she arrived in Long Beach. She had not seen Victor since leaving
39
Honduras. If the dead can appear to the living, Lourdes beseeches God
through tears, allow Victor to show himself so she can say good-bye.
“Mira, hermanito, I know you are dead. But I want to see you one more
time. Come to me. I promise I won’t be afraid of you,” Lourdes says.
Lourdes angrily swears off Honduras. How could she ever live in such
a lawless place? People there are killed like dogs. There are no
repercussions. The only way she’ll go back now, she tells herself, is by
force, if she is deported. Soon after her brothers’ deaths, the restaurant
where Lourdes works is raided by immigration agents. Every worker is
caught up in the sweep. Lourdes is the only one spared. It is her day off.
Lourdes decides to wait no longer. With financial help from her
boyfriend, she baptizes seven-year-old Diana. The girl’s godparents are a
trustworthy Mexican house painter and his wife. Lourdes dresses Diana
in a white floor-length dress and tiara. A priest sprinkles her daughter
with holy water. Lourdes feels that one worry, at least, has been lifted.
Still, her resolve to stay in the United States brings a new nightmare.
One morning at four, she hears her mother’s voice. It is loud and clear.
Her mother utters her name three times: Lourdes. Lourdes. Lourdes.
“Huh?” Lourdes, half awake, bolts up in bed, screaming. This must be an
omen that her mother has just died. She is inconsolable. Will she ever see
her mother again?
Back in Honduras, within days of the two brothers’ deaths, Uncle
Marco’s girlfriend sells Enrique’s television, stereo, and Nintendo game
—all gifts from Marco. Without telling him why, she says, “I don’t want
you here anymore.” She puts his bed out on the street.
ADDICTION
Enrique, now fifteen, gathers his clothing and goes to his maternal
grandmother. “Can I stay here?” he asks.
This had been his first home, the small stucco house where he and
Lourdes lived until Lourdes stepped off the front porch and left. His
second home was the wooden shack where he and his father lived with
his father’s mother, until his father found a new wife and left. His third
home was the comfortable house where he lived with his uncle Marco.
Now he is back where he began. Seven people live here already: his
grandmother, Águeda Amalia Valladares; two divorced aunts; and four
young cousins. They are poor. Gone are Marco’s contributions, which
helped keep the household financially afloat. Águeda has a new
40
expense: she must raise the young child left by her dead son Victor. The
boy’s mother left him as a baby to go to the United States and hasn’t
shown any interest since. “We need money just for food,” says his
grandmother, who suffers from cataracts. Nonetheless, she takes Enrique
in.
She and the others are consumed by the slayings of the two uncles;
they pay little attention to Enrique. He grows quiet, introverted. He does
not return to school. At first, he shares the front bedroom with an aunt,
Mirian, twenty-six. One day she awakens at 2 A.M. Enrique is sobbing
quietly in his bed, cradling a picture of Uncle Marco in his arms. Enrique
cries off and on for six months. His uncle loved him; without his uncle,
he is lost.
Grandmother Águeda quickly sours on Enrique. She grows angry when
he comes home late, knocking on her door, rousing the household. About
a month later, Aunt Mirian wakes up again in the middle of the night.
This time she smells acetone and hears the rustle of plastic. Through the
dimness, she sees Enrique in his bed, puffing on a bag. He is sniffing
glue.
Enrique is banished to a tiny stone building seven feet behind the
house but a world away. It was once a cook shack, where his
grandmother prepared food on an open fire. Its walls and ceiling are
charred black. It has no electricity. The wooden door pries only partway
open. It is dank inside. The single window has no glass, just bars. A few
feet beyond is his privy—a hole with a wooden shanty over it.
The stone hut becomes his home. Now Enrique can do whatever he
wants. If he is out all night, no one cares. But to him, it feels like
another rejection.
At his uncle’s funeral, he notices a shy girl with cascading curls of
brown hair. She lives next door with her aunt. She has an inviting smile,
a warm manner. At first, María Isabel, seventeen, can’t stand Enrique.
She notices how the teenager, who comes from his uncle Marco’s
wealthier neighborhood, is neatly dressed and immaculately clean, and
wears his hair long. He seems arrogant. “Me cae mal. I don’t like him,”
she tells a friend. Enrique is sure she has assumed that his nice clothes
and his seriousness mean he’s stuck-up. He persists. He whistles softly as
she walks by, hoping to start a conversation. Month after month,
Enrique asks the same question: “Would you be my girlfriend?”
“I’ll think about it.”
The more she rejects him, the more he wants her. He loves her girlish
giggle, how she cries easily. He hates it when she flirts with others.
41
He buys her roses. He gives her a shiny black plaque with a drawing
of a boy and girl looking tenderly at each other. It reads, “The person I
love is the center of my life and of my heart. The person I love IS YOU.”
He gives her lotions, a stuffed teddy bear, chocolates. He walks her
home after school from night classes two blocks away. He takes her to
visit his paternal grandmother across town. Slowly, María Isabel warms
to him.
The third time Enrique asks if she will be his girlfriend, she says yes.
For Enrique, María Isabel isn’t just a way to stem the loneliness he’s
felt since his mother left him. They understand each other, they connect.
María Isabel has been separated from her parents. She, too, has had to
shuffle from home to home.
When she was seven, María Isabel followed her mother, Eva, across
Honduras to a borrowed hut on a Tegucigalpa mountainside. Like
Enrique’s mother, Eva was leaving an unfaithful husband.
The hut was twelve by fifteen feet. It had one small wooden window
and dirt floors. There was no bathroom. They relieved themselves and
showered outdoors or at the neighbor’s. There was no electricity. They
cooked outside using firewood. They hauled buckets of water up from a
relative’s home two blocks down the hill. They ate beans and tortillas.
Eva, asthmatic, struggled to keep the family fed.
Nine people slept in the hut. They crowded onto two beds and a slim
mattress jammed each night into the aisle between the beds. To fit,
everyone slept head to foot. María Isabel shared one of the beds with
three other women.
When she was ten, María Isabel ran to catch a delivery truck.
“Firewood!” she yelled out to a neighbor, Ángela Emérita Nuñez,
offering to get some for her.
After that, each morning María Isabel asked if Ángela had a chore for
her. Ángela liked the sweet, loving girl with coils of hair who always
smiled. She admired the fact that she was a hard worker and a fighter, a
girl who thrived when her own twin died a month after birth. “Mira,”
María Isabel says, “yo por pereza no me muero del hambre. I will never
die out of laziness.” María Isabel fed and bathed Ángela’s daughter,
helped make tortillas and mop the red-and-gray tile floors. María Isabel
often ate at Ángela’s. Eventually, María Isabel spent many nights a
week at Ángela’s roomier house, where she had to share a bed with only
one other person, Ángela’s daughter.
María Isabel graduated from the sixth grade. Her mother proudly hung
María Isabel’s graduation certificate on the wall of the hut. A good
42
student, she hadn’t even asked her mother about going on to junior high.
“How would she speak of that? We had no chance to send a child to
school that long,” says Eva, who never went to school a day and began
selling bread from a basket perched on her head when she was twelve.
At sixteen, a fight forced María Isabel to move again. The spat was
with an older cousin, who thought María Isabel was showing interest in
her boyfriend. Eva scolded her daughter. María Isabel decided to move
across town with her aunt Gloria, who lived next door to Enrique’s
maternal grandmother. María Isabel would help Gloria with a small
food store she ran out of the front room of her house. To Eva, her
daughter’s departure was a relief. The family was eating, but not well.
Eva was thankful that Gloria had lightened her load.
Gloria’s house is modest. The windows have no panes, just wooden
shutters. But to María Isabel, Gloria’s two-bedroom home is wonderful.
She and Gloria’s daughter have a bedroom to themselves. Besides, Gloria
is more easygoing about letting María Isabel go out at night to an
occasional dance or party, or to the annual county fair. Eva wouldn’t
hear of such a thing, fearful the neighbors would gossip about her
daughter’s morals.
A cousin promises to take María Isabel to a talk about birth control.
María Isabel wants to prevent a pregnancy. Enrique desperately wants
to get María Isabel pregnant. If they have a child together, surely María
Isabel won’t abandon him. So many people have abandoned him.
Near where Enrique lives is a neighborhood called El Infiernito, Little
Hell. Some homes there are teepees, stitched together from rags. It is
controlled by a street gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. Some members were
U.S. residents, living in Los Angeles until 1996, when a federal law
began requiring judges to deport them if they committed serious crimes.
Now they are active throughout much of Central America and Mexico.
Here in El Infiernito, they carry chimbas, guns fashioned from plumbing
pipes, and they drink charamila, diluted rubbing alcohol. They ride the
buses, robbing passengers. Sometimes they assault people as they are
leaving church after Mass.
Enrique and a friend, José del Carmen Bustamante, sixteen, venture
into El Infiernito to buy marijuana. It is dangerous. On one occasion,
José, a timid, quiet teenager, is threatened by a man who wraps a chain
around his neck. The boys never linger. They take their joints partway
up a hill to a billiard hall, where they sit outside smoking and listening
to the music that drifts through the open doors.
With them are two other friends. Both have tried to ride freight trains
43
to el Norte. One is known as El Gato, the Cat. He talks about migra
agents shooting over his head and how easy it is to be robbed by
bandits. In Enrique’s marijuana haze, train riding sounds like an
adventure. He and José resolve to try it soon.
Some nights, at ten or so, they climb a steep, winding path to the top
of another hill. Hidden beside a wall scrawled with graffiti, they inhale
glue late into the night. One day María Isabel turns a street corner and
bumps into him. She is overwhelmed. He smells like an open can of
paint.
“What’s that?” she asks, reeling away from the fumes. “Are you on
drugs?”
“No!” Enrique says.
Many sniffers openly carry their glue in baby food jars. They pop the
lids and press their mouths to the small openings. Enrique tries to hide
his habit. He dabs a bit of glue into a plastic bag and stuffs it into a
pocket. Alone, he opens the end over his mouth and inhales, pressing the
bottom of the bag toward his face, pushing the fumes into his lungs.
Belky, Enrique’s sister, notices cloudy yellow fingerprints on María
Isabel’s jeans: glue, a remnant of Enrique’s embrace.
María Isabel sees him change. His mouth is sweaty and sticky. He is
jumpy and nervous. His eyes grow red. Sometimes they are glassy, half
closed. Other times he looks drunk. If she asks a question, the response is
delayed. His temper is quick. On a high, he grows quiet, sleepy, and
distant. When he comes down, he becomes hysterical and insulting.
Drogo, one of his aunts calls him. Drug addict.
Enrique stares silently. “No one understands me,” he tells Belky when
she tries to keep him from going out.
His grandmother points to a neighbor with pale, scaly skin who has
sniffed glue for a decade. The man can no longer stand up. He drags
himself backward on the ground, using his forearms. “Look! That’s how
you’re going to end up,” his grandmother tells Enrique.
Enrique fears that he will become like the hundreds of glue-sniffing
children he sees downtown.
Some sleep by trash bins. A gray-bearded priest brings them sweet
warm milk. He ladles it out of a purple bucket into big bowls. On some
days, two dozen of them line up behind his van. Many look half asleep.
Some can barely stand. The acrid smell of the glue fills the air. They
shuffle forward on blackened feet, sliding the lids off their glue jars to
inhale. Then they pull the steaming bowls up to their filthy lips. If the
priest tries to take away their glue jars, they cry. Older children beat or
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sexually abuse the younger ones. In six years, the priest has seen twentysix die from drugs.
Sometimes Enrique hallucinates that someone is chasing him. He
imagines gnomes and fixates on ants. He sees a cartoonlike Winnie-thePooh soaring in front of him. He walks, but he cannot feel the ground.
Sometimes his legs will not respond. Houses move. Occasionally, the
floor falls.
Once he almost throws himself off the hill where he and his friend
sniff glue. For two particularly bad weeks, he doesn’t recognize family
members. His hands tremble. He coughs black phlegm.
No one tells Enrique’s mother. Why worry her? Lourdes has enough
troubles. She is three months behind in school payments for Belky, and
the school is threatening not to let her take final exams.
AN EDUCATION
Enrique marks his sixteenth birthday. All he wants is his mother. One
Sunday, he and his friend José put train riding to the test. They leave for
el Norte.
At first, no one notices. They take buses across Guatemala to the
Mexican border. “I have a mom in the United States,” Enrique tells a
guard.
“Go home,” the man replies.
They slip past the guard and make their way twelve miles into Mexico
to Tapachula. There they approach a freight train near the depot. But
before they can reach the tracks, police stop them. The officers rob them,
the boys say later, but then let them go—José first, Enrique afterward.
They find each other and another train. Now, for the first time,
Enrique clambers aboard. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station.
From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen.
They know nothing about riding the rails. José is terrified. Enrique,
who is braver, jumps from car to car on the slow-moving train. He slips
and falls—away from the tracks, luckily—and lands on a backpack
padded with a shirt and an extra pair of pants.
He scrambles aboard again. But their odyssey comes to a humiliating
halt. Near Tierra Blanca, a small town in Veracruz, authorities snatch
them from the top of a freight car. The officers take them to a cell filled
with MS gangsters, then deport them. Enrique is bruised and limping,
and he misses María Isabel. They find coconuts to sell for bus fare and
45
go home.
A DECISION
Enrique sinks deeper into drugs. By mid-December, he owes his
marijuana supplier 6,000 lempiras, about $400. He has only 1,000
lempiras. He promises the rest by midweek but cannot keep his word.
The following weekend, he encounters the dealer on the street.
“I’m going to kill you,” the dealer tells Enrique. “You lied to me.”
“Calm down,” Enrique says, trying not to show any fear. “I’ll give you
your money.”
“If you don’t pay up,” the supplier vows, “I’ll kill your sister.”
The dealer mistakenly thinks that Enrique’s cousin Tania Ninoska
Turcios, eighteen, is his sister. Both girls are finishing high school, and
most of the family is away at a Nicaraguan hotel celebrating their
graduation.
Enrique pries open the back door to the house where his uncle Carlos
Orlando Turcios Ramos and aunt Rosa Amalia live. He hesitates. How
can he do this to his own family? Three times, he walks up to the door,
opens it, closes it, and leaves. Each time, he takes another deep hit of
glue. He knows the dealer who threatened him has spent time in jail and
owns a.57-caliber gun.
“It’s the only way out,” he tells himself finally, his mind spinning.
Finally, he enters the house, picks open the lock to a bedroom door,
then jimmies the back of his aunt’s armoire with a knife. He stuffs
twenty-five pieces of her jewelry into a plastic bag and hides it under a
rock near the local lumberyard.
At 10 P.M., the family returns to find the bedroom ransacked.
Neighbors say the dog did not bark.
“It must have been Enrique,” Aunt Rosa Amalia says. She calls the
police. Uncle Carlos and several officers go to find him.
“What’s up?” he asks. He has come down off his high.
“Why did you do this? Why?” Aunt Rosa Amalia yells.
“It wasn’t me.” As soon as he says it, he flushes with shame and guilt.
The police handcuff him. In their patrol car, he trembles and begins to
cry. “I was drugged. I didn’t want to do it.” He tells the officers that a
dealer wanting money had threatened to kill Tania.
He leads police to the bag of jewelry.
“Do you want us to lock him up?” the police ask.
46
Uncle Carlos thinks of Lourdes. They cannot do this to her. Instead, he
orders Tania to stay indoors indefinitely, for her own safety.
But the robbery finally convinces Uncle Carlos that Enrique needs
help. He finds him a $15-a-week job at a tire store. He eats lunch with
him every day—chicken and homemade soup. He tells the family they
must show him their love.
During the next month, January 2000, Enrique tries to quit drugs. He
cuts back, but then he gives in. Every night, he comes home later. María
Isabel begs him not to go up the hill where he sniffs glue. He promises
not to but does anyway. He looks at himself in disgust. He is dressing
like a slob—his life is unraveling.
He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he
has to go find his mother.
Aunt Ana Lucía agrees. Ana Lucía is wound tight. She and Enrique
have clashed for months. Ana Lucía is the only breadwinner in the
household. Even with his job at the tire store, Enrique is an economic
drain. Worse, he is sullying the only thing her family owns: its good
name.
They speak bitter words that both, along with Enrique’s grandmother
Águeda, will recall months later.
“Where are you coming from, you old bum?” Ana Lucía asks as
Enrique walks in the door. “Coming home for food, huh?”
“Be quiet!” he says. “I’m not asking anything of you.”
“You’re a lazy bum! A drug addict! No one wants you here.” All the
neighbors can hear. “This isn’t your house. Go to your mother!”
“I don’t live with you. I live alone.”
“You eat here.”
Over and over, in a low voice, Enrique says, half pleading, “You
better be quiet.” Finally, he snaps. He kicks Ana Lucía twice, squarely in
the buttocks. She ...
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