Enrique's Journey (13 page)

She's always running short on money. Medicine for one amputee costs $300. Sometimes there is no food for the migrants; she must ration antibiotics and not give patients a full dose; she runs out of gauze and must use boiled rags instead. Each pair of artificial legs costs at least $2,000. When she visits an orthopedic doctor, Jorge Luis Antonio Álvarez, who makes artificial limbs, she slides a few photos across his desk of the migrants she needs fitted, knowing she still owes him $4,500 for jobs he's already done. She pays little by little. Most migrants must leave the shelter before she can afford to buy them limbs. This is what pains her most.

Sometimes, she loses her patience with God. Some migrants, too battered by the beast, die. At times, Olga can't quickly come up with the money to buy the blood or medicine they need to fight for their lives. “What do you want me to do?” she asks God angrily. A thirteen-year-old girl was raped by the tracks and left with a broken neck and shattered hips. She could not move or talk. She buried that girl and thirty-nine others. She tries to buy them each a wooden coffin so they can be lowered into the ground with some dignity. But most slowly recuperate under Olga's care.

Each day, Olga begins at dawn at the city's drab public general hospital. Today, as she enters the emergency room, a social worker in a pink frock rushes up to Olga. The worker looks relieved.

“Señora Olguita, you have new clients,” she says.

“Migrants?” Olga asks.

The social worker nods.

In room 2 she sees Andrea Razgado Pérez, a teenager, who has lost her right foot. Olga tells her she knows she fears her husband will see her as damaged goods and leave her. Olga says, “There's nothing you can't do if you have will.” She describes a migrant who lost both legs but cooked for everyone in the shelter. She set up a chopping block across the armrests of her wheelchair. Andrea listens, sobbing. “Don't cry,” Olga tells her. “This is the beginning of a new life. Nothing has been taken from you. God wants people who are useful. You must keep going forward. You have your hands. You must go forward and trust in God.”

Olga heads to the shelter, which is full of people maimed by the train.

Tránsito Encarnación Martínes Hernández lost both feet. Olga has promised to get the young man prostheses, which cost $1,800. “You are going to walk again,” she said. He has waited months at the shelter. He cannot bear the thought of going back to his small town in Honduras, where he won't be able to walk the hilly dirt paths, grow beans or corn or coffee, or play soccer with friends. He must start over, someplace new. “I ask God that I be able to walk, to learn a job that I can do this way.” He waits, knowing that Olga is his best chance of ever being able to get the legs.

Leti Isabela Mejía Yanes sits on her bed. A single mother, she has an angular face and soft curly brown hair. She has lost both legs. In Honduras, Leti and her three children ate once a day—usually two pieces of bread with a watery cup of coffee. The youngest got only one piece of bread and breast milk. Sometimes, when her children cried with hunger, she scrounged together enough to buy a bit of tortilla dough and mixed it into a big glass of water to fill their bellies.

Her children begged her not to go. Her nine-year-old boy told her he would rather quit school and start working. “I already know how to write my name!” he pleaded. She left Marlon, eleven; Melvin, nine; and Daniel, one and a half, with relatives. When she walked away, Daniel still hadn't learned to talk. Olga, who found Leti at the hospital, brought her two liters of blood and antibiotics. At the shelter, she gave her painkillers and took out her stitches. At first Leti wanted to die. Now she wants to get better and see her children again. She sits in bed, embroidering a pillowcase with a drawing of Cinderella wearing a ballroom gown. She will wait here, sewing, until Olga can buy her legs, too.

Olga bathes people. She cooks. She gives them pills for pain. She cheerleads, watching with joy as they take their first steps with a prosthesis. She is impatient with those who wallow in pity. She coaxes them past the shelter's threshold to go to the ocean, which most have never seen. She places them on the sand, where waves can lap at their stumps.

Each day, she tends to their wounds. Each night, at 7 P.M., she races to church for Mass. She kneels before an altar with a bronze lamb, two winged angels, and a wooden carving of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. She clasps her hands and closes her eyes. She prays. She tells God what she did that day. She thanks God for giving her strength to get through the day's travails. She asks him for ideas on how to make money to pay for medicines and prostheses. She asks for ten more years of life so she can build a permanent shelter for injured migrants. She ends each prayer the same way: “You are the one who makes this work possible.”

Each night, when she hears the train whistle, she asks God to protect the migrants from the trains and the assaults. She prays that the beast not bring so many to her door.

Others who don't make it as far as Enrique are broken by Chiapas in a different way. They have been raped.

A bandit with a cobra tattoo marches Wendy into a cornfield. She is seventeen and the only woman among eleven Central Americans trying to sneak around a Mexican immigration checkpoint at Huehuetán in Chiapas. The man with the cobra tattoo and four other bandits have been lying in wait.

A Central American man tries to bolt. One of the bandits broadsides him three times with the flat blade of a machete. The bandits tell the nine other men, including Wendy's husband, to strip to their underwear, then lie facedown on the ground. A bandit searches their clothing for cash.

Then, say Wendy's husband and the other Central Americans, the man with the cobra tattoo on his arm orders Wendy to remove her pants. She refuses. He throws her to the ground and places the tip of his machete against her stomach.

She begins to cry. He puts the edge of the blade to her throat. She takes off her pants, and he checks them for money. “If you scream,” he says, “we cut you to bits.” Then he rapes her.

The other bandits curse the men on the ground, then curse their mothers and threaten to castrate them. “What the hell are you doing outside your country?” they say. One by one, during an hour and a half, each of the five bandits goes into the cornfield and rapes Wendy.

Her husband fills with rage. The bandits bring her back, crying. She cannot speak. She vomits, then faints. As they flee, her husband and the others carry Wendy to the checkpoint. She says, trembling, “I want to die.” None of the bandits is arrested.

Wendy, from Honduras, is one of a large number of migrant girls who say they are raped as they travel north through Mexico to get to the United States. A 1997 University of Houston study of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detainees in Texas shows that nearly one in six says she was sexually assaulted.

The rapes are part of the general denigration and humiliation of Central Americans in Mexico, where the migrants are seen as inferior because they come from less developed countries, says Olivia Ruiz, a cultural anthropologist at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana. The targets, she says, can be either men or women.

OAXACA

Having avoided the fate of many other migrants, Enrique reaches Ixtepec, a southern crossroads in Oaxaca, the next state north, 285 miles into Mexico. As his train squeals to a stop around noon, migrants jump down and look for houses where they can beg for a drink and a bite to eat.
La bestia
might be behind them, but most are still afraid. In these small towns, strangers stick out. Migrants are easy to spot. They wear dirty clothes and smell bad after days or weeks without bathing. Often, they have no socks. Their shoes are battered. They have been bitten by mosquitoes. They look exhausted.

Most of the migrants want to stay on the grassy slope by the tracks where they catch outgoing trains, where they can hide in huisache or mesquite bushes if there is a
migra
raid. Two of them are too frightened to go into town. They offer Enrique 20 pesos and ask him to buy food. If he will bring it back, they will share it with him.

He takes off his yellow shirt, stained and smelling of diesel smoke. Underneath he wears a white one. He puts it on over the dirty one. Maybe he can pass for someone who lives here. He resolves not to panic if he sees a policeman and to walk as if he knows where he is going.

Blending in is critical. Migrants clip labels off clothes from Central America. Some buy Mexican clothes or ones sporting the name of a Mexican soccer team. Most ditch their backpacks shortly after entering Mexico.

Enrique tries to stay clean by finding bits of cardboard to sleep on. When he gets a bottle of water, he saves a little to wash his arms. If he is near a river or stream, he strips and slips into the water. He begs for clean clothes or scrubs the ones he is wearing and lays them on the riverbank to dry.

He takes the pesos the two migrants have given him and walks down the main street, past a bar, a store, a bank, and a pharmacy. He stops at a barbershop. His hair is curly and far too long. It is an easy tip-off. People here tend to have straighter hair.

He strides purposefully inside.

“¡Órale, jefe!”
he says, using a phrase Oaxacans favor. “Hey, chief!” He mutes his flat Central American accent and speaks softly and singsongy, like a Oaxacan. He asks for a short crop, military style. He pays with the last of his own money, careful not to call it
pisto,
as they do back home. That means alcohol up here.

He is mindful about what else he says.
Migra
agents trip people up by asking if the Mexican flag has five stars (the Honduran flag has, but the Mexican flag has none) or by demanding the name of the mortar used to make salsa (
molcajete,
a uniquely Mexican word) or inquiring how much someone weighs. If he replies in pounds, he is from Central America. In Mexico, people use kilograms.

In Guatemala, soda is called
agua.
Here in Mexico,
agua
is water. A jacket is a
chamarra,
not a
chumpa.
A T-shirt is a
playera,
not a
blusa.

Migra
agents particularly like to test suspected migrants with words that have the same meaning in Mexico and in Central America and sound similar but are not exactly the same. A belt is a
cinto
or a
cincho.
Sideburns are
patillas
or
patitas.

At one point, Enrique glances into a store window and sees his reflection. It is the first time he has looked at his face since he was beaten. He recoils from what he sees. Scars and bruises. Black and blue. One eyelid droops.

It stops him.

“They really screwed me up,” he mutters.

He was five years old when his mother left him. Now he is almost another person. In the window glass, he sees a battered young man, scrawny and disfigured.

It angers him, and it steels his determination to push northward.

FOUR

Gifts and Faith

F
rom the top of his rolling freight car, Enrique sees a figure of Christ.

In the fields of Veracruz, among farmers and their donkeys piled with sugarcane, rises a mountain. It towers over the train he is riding. At the summit stands a statue of Jesus. It is sixty feet tall, dressed in white, with a pink tunic. The statue stretches out both arms. They reach toward Enrique and his fellow wayfarers on top of their rolling freight cars.

Some stare silently. Others whisper a prayer.

It is early April 2000, and they have made it nearly a third of the way up the length of Mexico, a handful of migrants riding on boxcars, tank cars, and hoppers.

Many credit religious faith for their progress. They pray on top of the train cars. At stops, they kneel along the tracks, asking God for help and guidance. They ask him to keep them alive until they reach
el Norte.
They ask him to protect them against bandits, who rob and beat them; police, who shake them down; and
la migra,
the Mexican immigration authorities, who deport them.

In exchange for his help, they make promises: to never drink another drop of alcohol, to make a difficult pilgrimage someday, to serve God forever.

Many carry small Bibles, wrapped in plastic bags to keep them dry when they ford rivers or when it rains. On the pages, in the margins, they scrawl the names and addresses of the people who help them. The police often check the bindings for money to steal, the migrants say, but usually hand the Bibles back.

Some pages are particularly worn. The one that offers the Twenty-third Psalm, for instance: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Or the Ninety-first Psalm: “There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”

Some migrants rely on a special prayer,
La Oración a las Tres Divinas Personas
—a prayer to the Holy Trinity. It asks the saints to help them and to disarm any weapon raised against them. It has seven sentences—short enough to recite in a moment of danger. If they rush the words, God will not mind.

That night, Enrique climbs to the top of a boxcar. In the starlight, he sees a man on his knees, bending over his Bible, praying.

Enrique climbs back down.

He does not turn to God for help. With all the sins he has committed, he thinks he has no right to ask God for anything.

SMALL BUNDLES

What he receives are gifts.

Enrique expects the worst. Riding trains through the state of Chiapas has taught him that any upraised hand might hurl a stone. But here in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, he discovers that people are friendly. They wave hello and shout to signal if hostile police are lying in wait for them in an upcoming town. People living along the tracks are put out when migrants take clothing from laundry lines, a police chief says—but only because they don't ask first. “People in Oaxaca and Veracruz are more likely to help,” says a train engineer. “It's just the way we are,” says Jorge Zarif Zetuna Curioca, a legislator from Ixtepec.

Perhaps not everyone is that way, but there is a widespread generosity of spirit. Many residents say it is rooted in the Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous cultures. Besides, some say, giving is a good way to protest Mexico's policies against illegal immigration.

As one man who lives on the tracks in Veracruz puts it, “It's wrong for our government to send people back to Central America. If we don't want to be stopped from going into the United States, how can we stop Central Americans in our country?”

Not long after seeing the statue of Jesus, Enrique is alone on a hopper. Night has fallen, and as the train passes through a tiny town, it blows its soulful horn. He looks over the side. More than a dozen people, mostly women and children, are rushing out of their houses along the tracks, clutching small bundles.

Some of the migrants grow afraid. Will these people throw rocks? They lie low on top of the train. Enrique sees a woman and a boy run up alongside his hopper.

“
¡Órale, chavo!
Here, boy!” they shout. They toss up a roll of crackers. It is the first gift.

Enrique reaches out. He grabs with one hand but holds tightly to the hopper with the other. The roll of crackers flies several feet away, bounces off the car, and thumps to the ground.

Now women and children on both sides of the tracks are throwing bundles to the migrants on the tops of the cars. They run quickly and aim carefully, mostly in silence, trying hard not to miss.

“¡Allí va uno!
There's one!
”

Enrique looks down. There are the same woman and boy. They are heaving a blue plastic bag. This time the bundle lands squarely in his arms.
“¡Gracias! ¡Adiós!”
he calls into the darkness. He isn't sure the strangers, who pass by in a flash, even heard him.

He opens the bag. Inside are half a dozen rolls of bread.

Enrique is stunned by the generosity. In many places where the train slows in Veracruz—at a curve or to pass through a village—people give. Sometimes twenty or thirty people stream out of their homes along the rails and toward the train. They wave. They smile, they shout, and then they throw food.

The towns of Encinar, Fortín de las Flores, Cuichapa, and Presidio are particularly known for their kindness. A young Honduran migrant, Fernando Antonio Valle Recarte, points at the ground in Veracruz.
“Here,”
he says, “the people are good.
Here,
everyone gives.” As migrant José Rodas Orellana readies to board a train in Veracruz, a man emerges from his house. Without a word, the man puts a large sandwich stuffed with scrambled eggs into Rodas's hands. The man turns back home. Rodas, his voice cracking with emotion, says, “We could never keep going forward without people like this. These people give you things. In Chiapas, they take things away.”

Enrique and other migrants usually try to ride the trains under cover of darkness. Here, migrants hope to cross during daylight, because residents are likely to bring gifts to the tracks.

These are unlikely places for people to be giving food to strangers. A World Bank study in 2000 found that 42.5 percent of Mexico's 100 million people live on $2 or less a day. Here, in rural areas, 30 percent of children five years old and younger eat so little that their growth is stunted, and the people who live in humble houses along the rails are often the poorest.

Families throw sweaters, tortillas, bread, and plastic bottles filled with lemonade. A baker, his hands coated with flour, throws his extra loaves. A seamstress throws bags filled with sandwiches. A teenager throws bananas. A carpenter throws bean burritos. A store owner throws animal crackers, day-old pastries, and half-liter bottles of water. People who have watched migrants fall off the train from exhaustion bring plastic jugs filled with Coca-Cola or coffee.

A young man, Leovardo Santiago Flores, throws oranges in November, when they are plentiful, and watermelons and pineapples in July. A stooped woman, María Luisa Mora Martín, more than a hundred years old, who was reduced to eating the bark of her plantain tree during the Mexican Revolution, forces her knotted hands to fill bags with tortillas, beans, and salsa so her daughter, Soledad Vásquez, seventy, can run down a rocky slope and heave them onto a train.

“If I have one tortilla, I give half away,” one of the food throwers says. “I know God will bring me more.”

Another: “I don't like to feel that I have eaten and they haven't.”

Still others: “When you see these people, it moves you. It moves you. Can you imagine how far they've come?”

“God says, when I saw you naked, I clothed you. When I saw you hungry, I gave you food. That is what God teaches.”

“It feels good to give something that they need so badly.”

“I figure when I die, I can't take anything with me. So why not give?”

“What if someday something bad happens to us? Maybe someone will extend a hand to us.”

Many people in the area who give are from small towns where roughly one in five youngsters has left for the United States. In these places, residents understand that poor people leave their country out of a deep necessity, not because they want to. They have watched and worried as their own children struggled to reach the United States. They know it is harder still for the Central Americans to make it.

The son of retired schoolteacher Raquel Flores Lamora, who lives in the railside town of Santa Rosa, nearly died trying to cross into the United States. For three days he walked, until his feet were so raw and blistered he knew he would have to turn himself in to the INS to save his life. Instead, others in the group carried him the rest of the way.

Each night, Flores gets up from her threadbare sofa and heads to the tracks. There, she hands out food and clothing, often shirts and pants her children in California send for her to give.

Baltasar Bréniz Ávila's two sons walked for days to enter the United States, through searing heat and with little drinking water. They dodged snakes, as well as bandits trying to assault them. Now they work as car washers in Orange County, California. “When I help someone here, I feel like I'm giving food to my children,” Bréniz says. “I bet people help them, too.”

For some, the migrants' gratitude is enough reason to give. Migrants who haven't eaten in days sob when they are handed a bundle of food. Other times, thanks come in a small gesture: a smile, a firm handshake before they move on.

The impetus to help comes from the local bishop, Hipólito Reyes Larios. One of his favorite passages in the Bible is Matthew 25:35. People, it says, should welcome and show compassion and charity toward strangers. “One of the acts of mercy,” the bishop says, “is to give shelter to a migrant.”

In dozens of tiny local parishes throughout the archdiocese, priests preach and practice what Matthew said. At the Iglesia Rectoría de Beato Rafael Guizar y Valencia, a humble yellow brick church with forty pews, priest Ignacio Villanueva Arteaga's message to churchgoers on Sunday is straightforward: being a good Christian means being a good Samaritan. He describes why the Central American migrants felt forced to leave their lands and tells of the dangers and problems they faced along the way.

He tells of another refugee: the baby Jesus, whose family had to flee the land of Israel and go to Egypt after an angel told Joseph they were in danger. He leads a prayer and asks God to help migrants safely arrive at their destinations, find work, and be able to return to their countries someday.

Every couple of weeks, nearby, state and local police officers conduct sweeps to find migrants. Villanueva protects any migrant who runs inside the church. “They are migrants. We are going to feed them here,” the balding priest tells the police, who, so far, haven't raided the church. He hauls some green mattresses piled outside into a small room used for studies and catechisms, where the migrants sleep.

When seven migrants ran from the train one evening and were arrested outside his church, Villanueva ran toward the commotion. “Why do you detain them? They aren't robbing anyone. They just want to go north,” he told the officers. “Let them go.” Soon eight police cars had arrived. More than fifty church members had gathered around their priest. Villanueva convinced the officers to release the migrants. He works hard, the priest says, to keep police officers on his side. Each Easter Sunday parade, he invites them to carry the cross.

The same goes on at a nearby church, the Parroquia San Isidro Labrador in Encinar. Each week the priest asks church members to feed migrants. If you are old or pregnant, or can't go to the tracks for some other reason, bring food to the church, he tells them. We will send someone to the tracks to hand it out for you.

No one recalls when the gift-giving started, probably in the 1980s, when Central Americans, fleeing war and poverty, began riding the rails north in large numbers. Wherever the trains stopped, the migrants went, gaunt and dirty, plagued by parasites they had picked up along the way, to front doors to beg. Occasionally one would fall off a train, weak with hunger.

Eventually people along the tracks, particularly in the state of Veracruz, began to bring food out to the trains, often where they slowed for curves or bad tracks. Those who had no food brought plastic bottles of tap water. Those with no bottles came out to the tracks to offer a prayer. As the procession of migrants has grown, so has the determination to help.

Along the tracks in Veracruz, residents mobilize at the first sign of a train.

Gladys González Hernández waits for the diesel horn. There it is, at last! The girl runs down the narrow aisles of her father's grocery, snatching crackers, water bottles, and pastries off the shelves. She dashes outside. Gladys and her father, Ciro González Ramos, wave to the migrants on board the train. She is six years old.