|
 It
started as an off-the-cuff question I had for
Carmen, who came to clean my house twice a month.
Did she plan to have more children? Carmen, always
chatty, suddenly went silent. She started sobbing.
She told me about four children she had left behind
in Guatemala. Her husband had left her, and Carmen
simply couldn’t feed them more than once or twice a
day. They would ask for food. Many nights, she
didn’t have it. “Sleep face down, so your stomach
won’t growl so much,” she would say, gently coaxing
them to turn over.
She left them in Guatemala with their grandmother
and came to work in El Norte. She hadn’t seen them
in 12 years. Her youngest daughter was only a year
old—still breastfeeding—when she left.
Carmen’s answer stunned me and sent me on an
incredible journey of my own. How could a mother
leave her children and travel 2,000 miles away, not
knowing when or if she would see them again? After
nearly two years of research in the U.S. and in
Latin America, I found some answers—and many more
Carmens.
Regardless of the law, regardless of the danger and
pain, millions of women, often single mothers, come
to the United States from Mexico and Central America
to send dollars to the children they leave behind.
After years apart, their children, desperate to be
with their mothers, often make their own harrowing
journey through Mexico to find them. Each year, a
small army of children—more than 48,000—head north
alone, without either parent, from Central America
and Mexico into the United States. Most are coming
to reunite with a parent.
Enrique’s mother left him when he was five years old,
to work in the U.S. At first, he was bewildered by
her absence. He constantly asked for her, begging,
“When is she coming for me?” He was devastated
without her. After 11 years apart, Enrique set off
to find her, to see if she still loved him. He left
with little more than a tiny scrap of paper with her
phone number in North Carolina scrawled on it. He
didn’t really know where North Carolina was. But he
headed north.
Penniless, he traveled through Mexico the only way
he could—clinging for dear life to the tops and
sides of freight trains. There are thousands of
other children who ride through Mexico to find their
mothers this way each year—some of them as young as
7 years old.
It is an incredible adventure. But it is also
harrowing and dangerous beyond belief. Most children
like Enrique don’t make it through Mexico. Some are
killed along the way—torn apart by the train wheels.
These children are hunted down like animals all
along the way by bandits, gangsters, and corrupt
cops.
In Mexico’s southermost state, Chiapas, gangsters
control the tops of the trains. It is their turf.
Usually, there are 10 or 20 on a train. They are
hopped up on crack cocaine and carry machetes,
knifes, wooden bats—even guns. A pack of gangsters
goes from car to car. On each car, they surround the
migrants aboard. “Your money or your life,” they say.
They steal the few coins the migrants carry. Often,
they beat them. Sometimes, they toss someone off the
train, feeding them to the churning wheels. One
night, Enrique was nearly beaten to death on top of
a train by six men.
 It
was just the beginning of many challenges Enrique
would face.
The migrants call it El Tren de la Muerte, The Train
of Death.
There is great cruelty—and amazing acts of kindness—on
the train. I know because I saw and experienced the
journey myself. I met Enrique when he had made it as
far as Northern Mexico. I wanted to understand what
he had been through, the dangers he faced. So I went
to Honduras and retraced his footsteps step by step,
exactly as he had a few weeks before. I rode on top
of seven freight trains up the length of two-thirds
of Mexico. I took many precautions, such as carrying
a letter from the personal assistant to Mexico’s
president.
I was tense, filthy, in near constant fear of being
robbed, beaten or raped. At times I felt as if I was
at my breaking point—and yet at end of each ride, I
went to a motel, ate a meal.
Enrique endured months in danger and misery,
sleeping in tall clumps of grass by the tracks, in
sewage culverts, in dirt crawl spaces under houses,
begging or foraging for food. He went two days
without water. His throat felt like it was swelling
shut. Other children I saw would filter ditch sewage
through their t-shirts to get some liquid. Some
described going up to 5 days without food.
I couldn’t fathom what Enrique and other children I
met on the trains go through to reach their mothers
in the United States.
Yet to Enrique, these obstacles were nothing
compared to his yearning to be with his mother. He
remembered how his mother’s telephones calls ended
with “I love you. I miss you.” Without her, he had
felt alone all his life. He would not give up until
he reached her. His is a true, suspenseful,
inspiring story of families torn apart, and their
desire to be together again.
By Sonia Nazario |
