Enrique's Journey (14 page)

They stand along the tracks at Fortín de las Flores and throw the crackers and the water and the pastries into the outstretched hands of the migrants.

Ciro González, thirty-five, taught Gladys to do this; he wants her to grow up right.

“Why do you give them food?” she asked him once. Her father said, “Because they have traveled far and haven't eaten.”

Long ago, González's neighbor heard a migrant knock at his door. “Give me anything,
please,
” he said anxiously, through parched lips. He had not eaten in two days. The man gulped down six bean tacos. Then, humbly, he said, “I hope God helps you someday. I was hungry. And you fed me well.” The neighbor started throwing food to migrants as they rolled by on the train. González followed.

At 6
P.M
. on a summer day, Jesús González Román, forty, and his sister, Magdalena González Román, thirty-one, sit outside their railside home in the town of Encinar. Neighbors come out to chat after long hours of work as bricklayers and field hands. Clouds float down between the steep green mountains. The evening cools. A neighbor gently urges his goats along as he guides them home along the tracks.

They hear a diesel horn.

Magdalena and her brother have two minutes. They run inside. Their mother, Esperanza Román González, seventy-eight, adjusts her pink apron and grabs her cane.

Jesús plucks three sweaters from a nylon bag, hand-me-downs from relatives. He ties them into a knot, so they will be easier to throw.

Magdalena puts tortillas into an orange-colored bag, then snatches bread rolls and stuffs them into a blue bag. She ladles lemonade into a plastic bottle, spilling some in her haste.

The horn on the locomotive grows louder, more frequent.

At the stove, she scoops a bowl of stew into a plastic bag. “Ready?” she mutters. “We have bread, tortillas…” She dashes to the front room.

The horn blasts nearby.

Jesús and Magdalena race outside, where their mother is already hobbling past the wooden front gate, her long gray braids swinging.

It is dusk. Headlights glow on the train. It slows for a curve. The ground rumbles. Wheels pound. The engineer sounds the horn five times, warning the twenty-odd people who have come out with food, drink, and clothing to be very careful.

Jesús and Magdalena edge close to the tracks, dig in their heels, and brace each other, so the wind the train produces will not suck them under the wheels.

Jesús spots migrants on a hopper car. “Some are on top!” he yells. He waves the sweaters above his head.

A teenager in a green-and-white shirt edges down the ladder on the hopper. He holds on with his right hand and reaches out with his left.

Now seconds count. Magdalena hands Jesús her blue bag of bread. He thrusts it up, along with the sweaters. A moment later, Magdalena pushes up a bottle of lemonade. The youngster grabs everything.

“¡Gracias!”
he yells above the din.

“
¡Que Dios los lleve!
May God watch over you!” Jesús shouts back, eyes smiling.

Esperanza stands silently, her hands stretched upward. She prays to the Virgin of Guadalupe, asking her to bring all the children on the train safely to their worried mothers in
el Norte.

Some have decided that giving migrants food and prayers is not enough. One town opened its church to migrants. Some residents invite strangers to stay in their homes, sometimes for months at a time. Others protect migrants from the police, often at great risk, since they can be accused of immigrant smuggling.

The priest Salamón Lemus Lemus chuckles as he looks out on the grounds of the María Auxiliadora church. “They have taken over my church,” he says, smiling. Hundreds of migrants mill around in the courtyard. They sleep in every nook and cranny of the church: in three large rooms once used for sacraments, baptisms, and youth study groups; in the garage; in the hallways; on the dirt patio outside; in the former sacristy. Each picks out a bit of cardboard from a huge pile and lays it down anywhere he or she can find a spot to bed down. There are so many—up to 640 some nights—that migrants must move on after three days and make room for others.

For more than two decades, the church members have been led by priests who have fought for the rights of workers and the poor. The church members grew increasingly distressed as they watched groups of migrants huddle and sleep, wet and with the outdoor temperature sometimes dropping below zero, along the nearby tracks. They watched police officers haul migrants by the hair or twist their wrists behind their backs, the
“manita de puerco,”
before throwing them into the back of their pickup trucks. They saw many migrants injured as they tried to escape capture by the police. In two years, thirty-two migrants lost limbs to the train.

The municipal police, dressed in green and white, used dogs. Municipal and state police would beat migrants, sometimes take their money, then throw them into the back of their trucks, says Julio César Trujillo Velásquez, a spokesman for the Diocese of Orizaba.

Church members organized teams that would rush out on a moment's notice to aid a migrant being abused by the police. “They aren't animals. They are human beings,” says a church volunteer, Gloria Sánchez Romero. “You'd never want to be treated that way.”

Police officers run into the church to arrest migrants hiding inside, sometimes with their guns drawn. One day, several
migra
officers came in, arrested four migrants, and put them into their truck.

The priest protested.

“Help us! They're going to hit us!” one migrant said.

“Shut up!” one of the officers said, hitting the migrant with a nightstick several times. The incensed priest, a crowd of a hundred around him, demanded that they let the migrants go. “This is a church. You have violated this place. Release them!” the priest said.

The police let the four go but kept six others they had grabbed outside the church.

Church members held public protests. About 150 gathered outside a local public hospital. They strung up a large banner that read,
HOSPITAL, ENEMY OF MIGRANTS
. They were angry that the hospital had allowed
la migra
to quickly deport a migrant who had lost a leg to the train. The migrant claimed that a police officer had pushed him toward the train, causing the accident. He had been deported quickly, before local officials could take his testimony. On a mile-long walk toward the hospital, they chanted, “We want justice!” and shut down the entrance to the local highway.

Church members decided they had to do more, says church volunteer Luis Hernández Osorio. They began to let a few migrants sleep and eat at the church. Word spread that the church was providing sanctuary. The police crackdowns mounted, and more and more migrants came to the church.

“You must help,” Luis and a group of other churchgoers told the bishop. “They are our brothers. We must open the church's doors.” An opposing group went to the bishop, saying he should keep migrants out of the church. These migrants are a threat to the security of our children and families, they said. They give the church a bad image. They hang underwear to dry on the church walls. They haven't bathed in weeks and smell. They spit and proposition our daughters. They are strangers, delinquents. They are turning the church's beautiful green lawn, where kids play after catechism classes, into a muddy brown lot.

The bishop sided with the migrants. He called the church's gray-haired priest, Lemus Lemus, and told him to help them. He promised to help raise funds to build a migrant shelter. “This is what I consider the mission of the church. It is fundamental,” the bishop says. Half the church's eight hundred members quit in protest.

An informal truce was struck with the police and
la migra.
They no longer come into the church to hunt down migrants. Hundreds of migrants, mostly men, mill about the large courtyard of the yellow church with orange trim. They rest, play dominoes, wash laundry and hang it on lines that crisscross the courtyard. On one side of the courtyard is an open-air kitchen. Three times a day, they form a long line to be handed a meal. Usually it is rice and beans and whatever else has been donated, maybe a big bowl of soup. On the other side: a large outdoor basin where they wash their clothes. At 10
P.M
., they lie down to sleep on the floor like canned sardines, one's feet next to another's head. There are no sheets.

All forty churches and eleven rectories that make up the diocese give food and money for the effort. On Ash Wednesday in February or March and the Day of the Migrant in September, all of the churches take up a collection. They pass around donation envelopes adorned with a drawing of a freight train. Each time, they raise about $3,300. The bishop goes to churches himself to preach about the need to help migrants.

Teams from the church go door-to-door, asking businesses to give. Four in five say yes, says volunteer Gregoria Sánchez Romero. Two bread store owners give extra loaves at the end of each day. A man with a chicken-sales company drops by every two or three weeks with fifty birds. On Saturday, a market in Córdoba hands over all the vegetables it hasn't sold that week. Another donor regularly brings two or three large gunnysacks of sugar. People arrive at the church with smaller bundles of beans, oil, rice, and lentils. Some cook a little extra for dinner—and bring the leftovers. A few bring bags of cement, to help build the migrant shelter.

Perhaps the greatest gift has come from the church's priest. Over his lifetime, he had saved $37,500 to live on during his retirement. He told church members, “These people will keep on coming, more and more. We must build.” Then, when he was sixty-three years old, he quietly donated the entire amount to buy the land to build the migrant shelter.

Others give time. Luis Hernández Osorio, a small man with dark, intense eyes, puts in eight hours a day as an accountant and then another eight at the church. He confronts police problems and finds new donors. Each night, he picks up donated bread. Every eight days, he goes, a huge pot stowed in his car trunk, to a local fish store. The owner fills it with seafood. It feeds the migrants a main dish for two or three days. “Every day, I have to battle a lot of problems here. But I feel at peace,” Hernández says. “I always wanted to do something with my life. I feel satisfied.”

Alfonso Peña Valencia, an architect, volunteers six nights a week to work as a security guard at the church from 7
P.M
. to 1
A.M
. On the seventh night, Saturday, he guards until dawn. His wife, Rosita, administers first aid to migrants. Peña says, “I like it here. I want to help my brother.”

For some, providing short-term shelter at the church is not enough. María del Carmen Ortega García, a barrel-chested woman with a big smile, lets migrants sleep in a room in her house. They remind Ortega of her son. In 1995, her eighteen-year-old, José Geronimo, in the United States illegally, was deported from California. She does not know what happened after he was driven across the border. She never heard from him again. She started small, offering migrants a cup of coffee, then a place to bathe.

One twenty-two-year-old Honduran, Israel Sierra Pavón, begged for money from Ortega along the tracks. She gave him 6 pesos and told him to go to her house, the one with a pig leashed on the patio, for dinner. He has stayed for nine months for free, working and saving money to continue his journey. Ortega has let seventeen migrants stay—some for days, some for months.

Francisca Aguirre Juárez's one-room home is so cramped that the three beds are all shoved together along the back wall. Aguirre, a middle-aged woman who is missing most of her front teeth and is dressed in a sweater full of holes, shares one bed with her daughter. Her son shares the middle bed with a migrant. Two migrants sleep in the third bed. In two years, eighty migrants have shared the room with her family. Most stay a week. Aguirre says she feeds the police occasionally, to keep them on good terms. Still, her landlord has threatened to kick her out for housing so many people.

Aguirre sells
memelitas,
a
masa
snack filled with black beans, from a street corner near the tracks. She barely has enough to feed her own children. Yet all four times the train rolls by between 6
A.M
. and 10
P.M
., she goes out to the tracks.

She signals the train conductor.

“Go slow, please, I'm going to give food!” she yells.

Some oblige, some don't. “
Muchachos! Comida!
Guys! Food!” she says. She gives water, apples, socks, and sandwiches stuffed with beans. Often, she says, she gets up to feed migrants on the 1:30
A.M
. and 3
A.M
. trains, too.

“A lot of people want to hoard money. Not me,” says Aguirre, who started helping after she witnessed a twenty-five-year-old Honduran lose a leg trying to board a train. He screamed in pain for two hours until someone took him to a hospital. “I feel better if I help. They are suffering more than I do,” she says.

Some residents offer protection from the police. When they see a police car coming or that officers are conducting a sweep, they unlatch their front gates and usher migrants in to hide in their gardens and backyards.

Baltasar Bréniz Ávila, who lives two blocks from the tracks in Encinar, had fed a twenty-five-year-old Honduran migrant some tacos. The man was on his porch, getting ready to leave, when a blue-and-white state police car cruised down the dirt road.

Bréniz whisked the migrant inside. The police knocked. “Turn him over! He's a migrant. We're going to arrest him. If you don't turn him over, we'll arrest you, too, for being a smuggler.”

The police had pistols and machine guns. Bréniz knew that people charged with smuggling can spend years in jail. Bréniz, who sells rustic chairs door to door, tried to mask the terror he felt inside. He politely declined and said there was no reason to turn the man over. He told them the visitor was a relative from an outlying farm. The police retreated.