Enrique's Journey (33 page)

T
he reporting for this book spanned five years. During that time, I spent a total of six months, in 2000 and in 2003, in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and North Carolina. The initial travel was done for a newspaper series for the
Los Angeles Times.
Subsequent travel and interviews would expand the series into this book.

I found Enrique in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in May 2000. I spent two weeks with him there and rejoined him at the end of his journey in North Carolina. Then, based on extensive interviews with him in Mexico and during three visits to North Carolina, I retraced each step he had taken, beginning at his home in Honduras.

Between May and September 2000, I spent three months working my way north through Mexico just as Enrique had, riding the tops of seven freight trains and interviewing people Enrique had encountered, along with dozens of other children and adults making the same journey. I walked around immigration checkpoints and hitchhiked with truckers, exactly as Enrique had. To retrace Enrique's steps, I traversed thirteen of Mexico's thirty-one states.

Though I witnessed a part of Enrique's journey, much of his travel and life come from the recollections of Enrique and his mother. Enrique recalled his travel experiences largely within weeks of when they occurred. The recalled scenes and conversations were corroborated, whenever possible, by one or more individuals present.

I conducted hundreds of interviews in the United States, Honduras, Mexico, and Guatemala with immigrants, immigrant rights advocates, shelter workers, academics, medical workers, government officials, police officers, and priests and nuns who minister to migrants. At four INS detention centers in California and Texas and in two shelters for child migrants in Tijuana and Mexicali, Mexico, I interviewed youngsters who had made their way north on top of freight trains. I conducted interviews from Los Angeles and also consulted academic studies and books about immigration.

In 2003, I retraced Enrique's journey for a second time. I spent time in Honduras with Enrique's family; his girlfriend, María Isabel; and their daughter, Jasmín. I witnessed some of the scenes depicted of María Isabel's life with her daughter. I again traveled through Honduras and Guatemala and retraced the rail route, starting in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico. To obtain additional details on the journey and people who help migrants along the rails, I spent time in five regions of Mexico.

I spent two weeks with Olga Sánchez Martínez, a shelter worker in Tapachula, Mexico, and a week with Father Leonardo López Guajardo at the Parroquia de San José in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I made a fourth trip to North Carolina to interview Enrique, Lourdes, and others in their family. In 2004, during a visit by Lourdes to Long Beach, California, I accompanied her to places where she once lived and worked. Between 2000 and 2005, I conducted regular interviews with Enrique and Lourdes by telephone.

The decision to use only the first names of Enrique and Lourdes is a continuation of a decision made by the
Los Angeles Times
that I supported. The newspaper has a strong preference for naming the subjects of its articles in full. It did so with two members of Enrique's family and a friend. But the
Times
decided to identify Enrique and his mother, father, and two sisters by publishing only their first names and to withhold the maternal or paternal name, or both, of six relatives as well as some details of Enrique's employment. A database review by
Times
researcher Nona Yates showed that publishing their full names would make Enrique readily identifiable to authorities. In 1998, the Raleigh, North Carolina,
News and Observer
profiled an illegal immigrant whom it fully identified by name and workplace. Authorities arrested the subject of the profile, four co-workers, and a customer for being undocumented immigrants. The
Times
's decision was intended to allow Enrique and his family to live their lives as they would have had they not provided information for this story. For the same reason, I have decided in this book to identify Enrique's girlfriend by her first name and to withhold the maternal or paternal name, or both, of her relatives.

The following is an accounting of where information in this book comes from. It is an extensive but by no means complete list of who helped make Enrique's story possible. Throughout the book, people's ages and titles are for the time when Enrique made his journey.

PROLOGUE

Information about the number of legal and illegal immigrants comes from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics and demographer Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center. Passell estimated that between 2000 and 2004, 700,000 illegal immigrants arrived each year. Information about the initial wave of immigrants who were single mothers and came to the United States is from Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, and Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Hondagneu-Sotelo also provided the estimated growth in U.S. domestic worker jobs in the 1980s.

The University of Southern California study that discusses how many live-in nannies have left children behind is “I'm Here but I'm There: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” published in 1997. The Harvard University study that details the percentage of immigrant children separated from a parent during the process of immigration is “Children of Immigration,” published in 2001.

1. THE BOY LEFT BEHIND

Much of the account of Enrique's and Lourdes's lives in Honduras, Lourdes's departure from Honduras, their lives apart, and Enrique's departure to find his mother are drawn from Enrique, Lourdes, and family members. These include Enrique's sister Belky; his aunts Mirian, Rosa Amalia, and Ana Lucía; his uncle Carlos Orlando Turcios Ramos; his maternal grandmother, Águeda Amalia Valladares, and paternal grandmother, María Marcos; his mother's cousin María Edelmira Sánchez Mejía; his father, Luis, and stepmother, Suyapa Álvarez; his girlfriend, María Isabel, and her aunt Gloria; Enrique's cousins Tania Ninoska Turcios and Karla Roxana Turcios; as well as Enrique's friend and fellow drug user José del Carmen Bustamante.

The estimate that a total of at least 48,000 children enter the United States from Central America and Mexico each year, illegally and without either parent, comes from 2001. It was reached by adding the following numbers: The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said it had detained 2,401 Central American children. The INS had no figure for Mexican children, but Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the INS had detained 12,019 of them. Scholars, including Robert Bach, former INS executive associate commissioner for policy, planning, and programs, estimated that about 33,600 children are not caught. For 2000, the total was 59,000.

The reasons children travel to the United States and information that many come in search of their mothers come from Roy de la Cerda, Jr., the lead counselor at International Educational Services Inc., an INS-contracted detention shelter for unaccompanied minors in Los Fresnos, Texas. His information was corroborated by Aldo Pumariega, principal at the Bellagio Road Newcomer School; Bradley Pilon, a psychologist who counsels immigrant students in the Los Angeles Unified School District; and Rafael Martínez, director of Casa YMCA, a migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, Mexico.

The estimate that half of Central American child migrants ride trains without smugglers is from Haydee Sanchez, executive director of Youth Empowerment Services, a nonprofit Los Angeles group that helps immigrants; Olga Cantarero, a coordinator for the nonprofit Casa de Proyecto Libertad in Harlingen, Texas, which provides legal help to INS child detainees; and Roy de la Cerda.

Details about travel through Mexico come from migrant children in Mexico and the United States and from children in INS detention facilities in Texas and California. Included are my observations as I traveled with children on Mexican freight trains. The University of Houston study about violence to children is titled “Potentially Traumatic Events Among Unaccompanied Migrant Children from Central America,” published in 1997.

Accounts of encounters with children as young as seven on the rails come from Pedro Mendoza García, a railroad security guard at a depot near Nuevo Laredo.

The remarks of a nine-year-old boy searching for his mother who was in San Francisco are from Haydee Sanchez in Los Angeles.

The typical age of children on this journey comes from INS data and migrant shelter workers in Mexico.

The description of how children recall their mothers is from interviews with several of them, including Ermis Galeano, sixteen, and Mery Gabriela Posas Izaguirre, fifteen, questioned in Mexico on their way to find their mothers in the United States.

Lourdes elaborated on her description of being abandoned in 1989 at a downtown Los Angeles bus station by her smuggler by returning to the station with me in 2004. During the 2004 trip, further details of Lourdes's life in Long Beach were obtained as Lourdes took me to places where she had once lived and worked, including a Long Beach bar. Several of Lourdes's Long Beach friends were also interviewed and corroborated how they and Lourdes had been scammed by a woman claiming she could help them become legal residents.

For the account of Enrique's life with his paternal grandmother, I visited the home of the grandmother and the home of Enrique's father, as well as the market where Enrique sold spices.

Santos's return to Honduras comes from Lourdes and her family members in Honduras, who said they had witnessed his behavior. Santos himself couldn't be located.

The smugglers' fees for bringing Central American children to the United States come from immigrant women and Robert Foss, legal director of the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles.

The description of the Tegucigalpa dump and its scavengers is from my observations and interviews with children at the dump. I also witnessed children hauling sawdust and firewood. I spent time at the school in El Infiernito where children arrive without shoes.

Lourdes's life in North Carolina comes from Lourdes, her boyfriend, her daughter Diana, and their friends and relatives.

The description of María Isabel's childhood, her move to her aunt Gloria's house, and her devotion to Enrique is from Gloria, María Isabel, her sister Rosario, her brother Miguel, her mother, Eva, and from time I spent at Gloria's and Eva's homes in Tegucigalpa.

The account of life in El Infiernito is from my visit to the neighborhood accompanied by the teacher Jenery Adialinda Castillo. I accompanied the Tegucigalpa priest Eduardo Martín on his evening rounds to feed glue-sniffing homeless children.

Enrique's attempt to reach his mother in 1999 was corroborated by José del Carmen Bustamante, his companion on the journey.

2. SEEKING MERCY

Enrique's experiences in and around Las Anonas were written from interviews with Sirenio Gómez Fuentes; Mayor Carlos Carrasco; Carrasco's mother, Lesbia Sibaja; residents Beatriz Carrasco Gómez, Gloria Luis, and other villagers; San Pedro Tapanatepec mayor Adan Díaz Ruiz; and the mayor's driver, Ricardo Díaz Aguilar. I visited the Fuentes home, the Las Anonas church, and the mango tree where Enrique collapsed.

Manuel de Jesús Molina, who in 2000 served as assistant to the mayor of Ixtepec, a nearby town, said that Enrique's experience of being robbed by the judicial police was common in the area. The denial that judicial police rob people comes from Sixto Juárez, chief of the Agencia Federal de Investigación in Arriaga, Mexico.

The estimate of how much a wounded migrant costs the nearest hospital comes from personnel at the Hospital Civil in Arriaga, Mexico.

The account of how Mexican immigration officers shake down Central American migrants comes from retired immigration agent C. Faustino Chacón Cruz Cabrera.

The descriptions of Enrique's first six attempts are from interviews with Enrique and from my observations of other migrants along the same route. I visited the spot near Medias Aguas where Enrique had been stung by bees. I went to the Tapachula cemetery and the mausoleum where Enrique had slept. The cemetery caretaker, Miguel Ángel Pérez Hernández, and Mario Campos Gutiérrez, a supervisory agent with the government migrant rights group Grupo Beta, provided information about recent violence in the graveyard. The annual number of deportees from Mexico is from the National Migration Institute of Mexico.

The description of the violence and gangs in the Guatemalan border town of Tecún Umán comes from Father Ademar Barilli and Marvin Godínez at the Casa del Migrante shelter in Tecún Umán and from Flaudio Pérez Villagres, head of the tricycle taxi union in the town.

The beating on the train is from interviews with Enrique and residents of Las Anonas and San Pedro Tapanatepec. Robberies in which migrants are stripped and hurled from trains are commonplace, according to Grupo Beta, whose officers occasionally patrol the trains; Father Flor María Rigoni, a Catholic priest at the Albergue Belén migrant shelter in Tapachula, Chiapas; Baltasar Soriano Peraza, a caseworker at the shelter; and other migrants who have been robbed on the trains by street gangsters. Railroad personnel and Mayor Carrasco estimated how fast the trains travel in the area.