Enrique's Journey (17 page)

Often, as he struggled to get through central and northern Mexico, Enrique came close to getting caught and deported. Time after time, his luck held.

In Matías Romero, Oaxaca,
migra
agents surrounded his train and caught many of the riders. Enrique jumped off and dashed to some bushes. He lay in the thicket, afraid to breathe. After what seemed like an hour, when the train began to roll, he sprinted alongside one of the cars and jumped back on.

When the train reached Medias Aguas, Veracruz, and stopped briefly, Enrique climbed down and sat next to the track, talking to other migrants. But for the locomotive idling and a compressor cycling to feed the brakes, the night was ghostly still.

“Don't you dare run!” two men in green fatigues said as they pinned him in the beams of their flashlights. A small army unit, based next to the train station, was out catching migrants.

Enrique bolted. The soldiers chased him relentlessly. Though exhausted after nearly two days without sleep, Enrique outran both of them. He darted two blocks along the tracks toward the north edge of town to a dirt road called Miguel Hidalgo. Facing the rails was the backyard of a house. It looked empty. The house was built on three-foot concrete pilings, to keep it from flooding. He ran through the yard, fell to his stomach, and crawled under it. He waited. Nothing.

It was midnight. Enrique ached with fatigue. He gathered some boards scattered beneath the house, stood them on their sides so no one could see him, and lay in the dirt. In seconds, he was asleep.

The train coupled and uncoupled cars. It split the night with clanging and crashing. Then, slowly, it pulled out, rumbling the ground as it passed behind Enrique and the house.

Enrique heard nothing. He was safe. Surrounded by dirt, he slept.

Now, as he winds his way into Nuevo Laredo, he has one more piece of good fortune. His bus stops at the Plaza Hidalgo, in the heart of Nuevo Laredo. It is a city park the size of a square block. There, under palm trees, the park is full of people. Some are migrants, who sit on the steps of the big clock tower. Others are smugglers, who circulate, offering, in a whisper, to take people over to the United States for a good price.

Enrique has no money. But he sees a man from Honduras whom he met on the train. The man takes him to an encampment along the Rio Grande. Enrique likes it. He decides to stay until he can cross.

That night, as the sun sets, Enrique stares across the Rio Grande and gazes at the United States. It looms as a mystery.

Somewhere over there lives his mother. She has become a mystery, too. He was so young when she left that he can barely remember what she looks like: curly hair, eyes like chocolate. Her voice is a distant sound on the phone.

Enrique has spent forty-seven days bent on nothing but surviving. Now, as he thinks about her, he is overwhelmed.

FIVE

On the Border

“Y
ou are in American territory,” a Border Patrol agent shouts into a bullhorn. “Turn back.”

Sometimes Enrique strips and wades into the Rio Grande to cool off. But the bullhorn always stops him. He goes back.

“Thank you for returning to your country.”

He is stymied. For days, Enrique has been stuck in Nuevo Laredo, on the southern bank of the Río Bravo, as it is called here. He has been watching, listening, and trying to plan. Somewhere across this milky green ribbon of water is his mother.

Enrique is challenging the unknown to find her. During her most recent telephone call, she said she was in North Carolina. He has no idea if she is still there, where that is, or how to reach it. He no longer has her phone number. He did not think to memorize it.

Many of the youngsters from Central America and Mexico who go north on their own do not memorize telephone numbers or addresses. They wrap them in plastic and tuck them into a shoe or slip them under a waistband. Occasionally kidnappers snatch the children, find the numbers, and call the mothers for ransom.

Stripped of phone numbers and destinations, many of the children become stranded at the river. Defeat drives them to the worst this border world has to offer: drugs, despair, and death.

It is almost May 2000, nearly two months since Enrique left home the last time. He is a hardened veteran of seven attempts to reach
el Norte.
This is his eighth; he has pushed forward 1,800 miles. By now, his mother must have called Honduras again, and the family must have told her that he was gone. His mother must be worrying.

He has to telephone her. Besides, she might have saved enough money to hire a coyote who can take him across the river.

He remembers one number back home—at a tire store where he worked. He will call and ask his old employer to find Aunt Rosa Amalia or Uncle Carlos Orlando Turcios Ramos, who had arranged his job, and ask them for his mother's number. Then he will call back and get it from his boss.

For the two calls, he needs two telephone cards: Fifty pesos apiece. When he phones his mother, he'll call collect. He cannot beg 100 pesos. People in Nuevo Laredo won't give. Mexicans along the border, he notices, are quick to proclaim their right to immigrate to the United States. “Jesus was an immigrant,” he hears them say. But most won't give Central Americans food, money, or jobs.

So he will work by himself. For migrant children, there are few options: shining shoes, selling gum or candy on the sidewalk, or washing cars. He'll wash cars.

A REFUGE

The encampment he has joined is a haven for migrants, coyotes, junkies, and criminals, but it is safer for him than anywhere else in Nuevo Laredo, a city of half a million and swarming with
la migra
and all kinds of police, who might catch him and deport him. Worse than stuck, he would be back at the beginning.

The camp is at the bottom of a narrow, winding path that slopes to the river. A clump of reeds hides it from constant surveillance by the U.S. immigration authorities. They watch with cameras and agents in white sport-utility vehicles who patrol back and forth along a dirt road on top of a steep embankment along the far side.

Enrique shares one of five soiled, soggy mattresses with three other migrants. Still others lie on pieces of cardboard. For their clothing, they use “the closet”—a wire spring standing upright, from a mattress stripped of its ticking. Each resident of the camp has a space on one of the bare coils on which to hang his shirt and pants.

Enrique smells excrement from goats and his fellow campers, whose bathroom is the surrounding grass. The camp is strewn with trash. Red ants cover the ground, and millions of gnats hover over the river. In the daytime, it is scorching hot. Each day, he strips and wades in knee-deep to scrub away sweat and grime. When he is too afraid to venture into Nuevo Laredo to drink from a faucet in a park, he takes water from the river, which carries raw sewage from scores of towns. People tell him of a superstition: Drink from the Río Bravo, and he'll be stuck in Nuevo Laredo forever. He risks it anyway. The water tastes heavy, but it does not make him sick.

The camp is a hard place for Enrique to sleep in. It is noisy all night with the sound of migrants coming and going as they try to cross the river. They swim or ride inner tubes to a tiny, lush island in midstream, then rest and hide until they see a chance to make it the rest of the way. INS bullhorns bark, warning them back. Enrique can hear cars at a U.S. entry checkpoint a few blocks away.

He knows he will have to cross if he ever wants to see his mother again. As he looks across the river, he can see a church steeple, train tracks, and three antennas with blinking red lights. He tries to summon his mother's calm voice.

If only he could call her.

Each evening, without fail, he summons his courage and goes to the Nuevo Laredo city hall with a large plastic paint bucket and two rags. From a spigot on the side of the building, he fills the bucket. Then he goes to parking places across the street from a bustling taco stand. Unlike at other businesses, the workers at the taco stand do not run him off. One of his rags is red. Each time someone arrives to eat dinner, he waves the red rag to guide the customer into a parking space, like a ground crew member ushering a jetliner to a gate.

Usually there is competition. Two or three other migrants set up their buckets along the same sidewalk.

Enrique approaches a woman driving a yellow Chevrolet Impala with chrome-spoke wheels. She is talking on her cell phone. May he wash her car? She ends the call and declines.

A man and his young daughter drive up. “May I clean your car?”

“No, son.”

The woman with the Impala returns with her tacos. Enrique waits until traffic is clear, then waves his red rag and guides her out. Suddenly, she reaches out her car window and presses 3 pesos into his hand.

Enrique approaches dozens of people, but just one or two say yes. By 4
A.M
., when the stand closes, he has eked out 30 pesos, or $3.

A LIFELINE

The air around the taco stand fills with the aroma of barbecue. Enrique watches workers pull strips of meat from a vat, put them on large chopping blocks, and cut them up. Customers sit at long stainless-steel tables and eat. Sometimes, when the stand closes, the servers slip him a couple of tacos.

Otherwise, for his only meal every day, he depends upon the Parroquia de San José, or St. Joseph's Parish, and another church, the Parroquia del Santo Niño, the Parish of the Holy Child. Each gives food cards to migrants. One is good for ten meals and the other for five. Enrique can count on one meal a day for fifteen days. The cards are like gold. Sometimes they are stolen and turn up on a meal-card black market. Migrants who bathe in the river leave their cards on the bank and carry rocks into the water to throw at anyone who tries to take them.

Each day, Enrique goes to one church or the other to eat. It is safe; the police stay away. Like clockwork, Leti Limón, a volunteer, swings open the double yellow doors at San José and shouts, “Who's new?”

“Me! Me!” men and boys cry out from the courtyard. They rush to the door and jostle against it.

“Get in line! Get in line!” Limón is poor herself; she cleans houses across the river in Laredo, Texas, for $20 apiece. But she has helped to feed these migrants for a year and a half, figuring that Jesus would approve. She issues the newcomers beige cards and punches the cards of those who enter. A parish priest counts 6 percent children.

One by one, the migrants stand behind chairs at a long table. At the head is a mural of Jesus, his hands extended toward plates of tacos, tomatoes, and beans. Above him are his words:
COME TO ME, ALL YOU WHO ARE WEARY AND FIND LIFE BURDENSOME.

The lights dim, and two big fans spin to a stop, so everyone can hear grace. In the still air, the room turns hot, nearly suffocating; perspiration trickles down the migrants' faces and soaks their shirts. A volunteer or one of the migrants begins the short prayer. Some who have not eaten in two or three days cannot wait; from behind their chairs, they grab at the tacos with one hand, at bread with the other.

A volunteer asks everyone to remove their hats, to please eat everything on their trays or give it to someone near them.

Chairs screech as everyone pulls them out at once. Spoons of stew touch lips before bottoms hit the seats. There are more migrants than chairs. Some eat standing. Others squat on the floor, plates balanced on their knees. They eat in quiet desperation. In a clatter of forks against plates, beans, stew, tomatoes, rice, and doughnuts disappear.

Afterward, opposite a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, about a dozen of the migrants always gather around a map of Texas. It is covered in plastic, but fingerprints have blackened parts of it anyway. They tell how they will get there, and they discuss the state of the river. Is it high? Low? Then they sneak out an apple or a banana to give to a friend.

At church dinners Enrique meets other children who hope to reach their mothers in the United States. A sixteen-year-old boy, Ermis Galeano, is stuck, too. He and Enrique compare stories. Both are from Honduras.

Both have been robbed. As with Enrique, bandits on top of a train struck Ermis in the face with a board. It tore out his front teeth, leaving two black holes. As with Enrique, the bandits left him in his underwear, sobbing and bloody. They ripped up his scrap of paper with his mother's phone number on it, too, and tossed it to the wind.

Ermis's mother, María, left him for North Carolina when he was ten. She sent money, five letters, and fifteen photos. She called every two weeks. It was not enough. Ermis missed the occasional three-hour bus rides they had taken to Tegucigalpa to buy things, his mom's spaghetti, how they would go to the tortilla store together. He missed his mother's smell. After she left, he would put on her deodorant, stare at her picture, and cry. He slept in her bed, hoping to feel near her. Being raised by his aunt wasn't the same. “My mom told me she loves me. No one else ever told me that,” Ermis says. This is his third attempt to go to her.

A fifteen-year-old girl, Mery Gabriela Posas Izaguirre, or Gabi, as she prefers, tells Enrique her story.

She had reason to leave Honduras. Her mother, who was divorced, had sold the dining room table, the refrigerator, and the pots and pans to send Gabi to school. Finally, her mother had sold some of the beds. Gabi slept on the floor.

Early one morning in July 1999, Gabi says, her mother snuggled next to her and hugged her. She had already spent half the night curled up next to her sons. When Gabi came home from school that afternoon, there was a note: “I'm going for a little while. I'm going to work very hard.” Her mother left Gabi's older brother in charge and asked the children to pray three times a day: before they ate, slept, or went outside.

Gabi and her two brothers ached for her. They began sleeping in her bed to feel near her. Gabi would drift off smelling her mother's scent on the pillow. She dreamed that her mother was at home, scolding her in the morning, telling her to get to school on time. She imagined that they were going to the park. She missed teasing her for playing “old-fogy music”—Beethoven.

“The house felt sad, empty,” Gabi says.

Every time the telephone rang, Gabi raced to answer it. “When are you coming home?” she begged her mother. Then she turned harsh: “Why did you bring us into the world, if you were going to leave us?” Of forty-eight children in her class, thirty-six had a parent in the United States, most often a mother.

At her new home in the northeastern United States, her mother cleaned house and babysat two toddlers. One day, she sent Gabi a Barbie doll. The toddlers had already torn open the box. Gabi seethed. She sat alone, envisioning her mother playing with her new charges.

“How are the beaches?” she asked, snidely.

They argued.

“I'm taking care of other kids instead of you. Can you imagine what that's like?” her mother demanded. “You don't know what I've suffered.”

Gabi didn't believe her. All she wanted was to be with her.

Winter came. Her mother called, crying. She was sick, lonely, and out of a job.

“I knew I had to go,” Gabi said. “I thought: ‘I'm young. I want to help her, so she can come home.'”

By Christmas of 1999, going had become an obsession.

Her mother was terrified that Gabi would make the trip alone and be raped. She asked Gabi's aunt Lourdes, twenty-six, to go with her. A smuggler promised to deliver them for $2,000 up front, but he robbed and abandoned them in Tapachula, just inside the southern border of Mexico. They were deported to Guatemala.

Gabi resolved to try again, this time through the Lacandón jungle in the Mexican state of Chiapas. She and Lourdes spent days washing clothes along the Usumacinta River in exchange for food, asking every smuggler who went by if he would take them through the mountain pass.