Enrique's Journey (20 page)

One of the dogs is a Malinois, imported from Belgium for her keen ability to smell human sweat and saliva, even from outside closed cars with their windows rolled up. Her name is Franca. She takes commands in German.

Immigrants smear themselves with garlic to throw her off. She begins upwind of the train and runs alongside its length, straining at the leash until she gets a hit. She jumps up and down when she suspects that they are there, and she rarely misses. Agents open and inspect the double-decker boxcars. “Ten-four! We have bodies up here!” they announce. Agents praise the dog and let her play with a rubber toy.

Enrique decides that walking across Texas is out. Without a guide, his campmates say, it is easy to get lost and wander in circles in the sameness of the brush lands. The trek to San Antonio takes seven or eight days, in desert heat of up to 120 degrees, with diamondback rattlers, lacerating cactus needles, water slimy with cattle spit, saucer-sized tarantulas, and wild hogs with tusks. Some migrants, dehydrated and delirious, kill themselves. Their leathery corpses sway from belts around their necks on whatever is sturdy and tall. Water jugs lie empty at their feet.

A Central American youth rides a freight train through Mexico toward the United States. Each year, thousands of children cling to the tops and sides of trains as they journey north in search of their parents. Some say they need to find out whether their mothers still love them.

         

The view through a fence at the home where Enrique lived with his paternal grandmother. Across the valley were his sister and the phone on which they occasionally talked to their mother. Enrique ended the strained calls by saying, “I want to be with you.”

         

María Marcos looks at photos of her grandson Enrique. As he began to rebel, she asked him: “Don't you love me? I am going to send you away.” “Send me!” he said. “No one loves me.”

         

Buzzards and children are competitors for trash at the dump in Tegucigalpa. The same fate might have awaited Enrique without the money that arrived from the United States. Still, he began to grow angry and rebellious. “I see so many children with mothers,” he told his sister. “I want that.”

         

Central American migrants headed for the United States ride in railroad cars through southern Mexico.

         

Migrants flatten themselves to avoid being hit by tree branches as their freight train rolls through Chiapas in southern Mexico. Enrique learned several lessons about the state known to immigrants as “the beast.” Among them: Trust no one in authority, and never ride alone.

         

One migrant watches as another leaps from freight car to freight car during a train's brief stop in Mapastepec.

         

Thirteen-year-old David Velásquez, left, and seventeen-year-old Roberto Gaytán wait to be jailed after being caught in Tapachula, Mexico. The Guatemalans were headed for Los Angeles and North Carolina.

         

Migrants arrested in a dawn sweep at the Tapachula rail yard are behind bars before their probable deportation. Central Americans are sent back to the Guatemalan border on
el bus de lágrimas
, the bus of tears. Making as many as eight runs a day, the buses deport more than 100,000 passengers a year.

         

Oscar Omar Valle of Honduras reboards a train after a stop in Cordoba, Mexico, where he sought food. Like Enrique, he is unprepared for the cold ahead. A migrant knows that if he doesn't run fast enough while grabbing onto a moving train, he can be jerked forward, lose his grip, and be pulled under the wheels.