Enrique's Journey (5 page)

Soon Patel demands final payments from everyone to keep going. Lourdes balks. Should she be sending this money to her children in Honduras instead? She talks to Patel on the phone. She claims to be Salvadoran but sounds Colombian.

Patel is a smooth talker. “How are you going to lose out on this amazing opportunity? Almost no one has this opportunity! And for this incredible price.”

“It's that there are a lot of thieves here. And I don't earn much.”

“Who said I'm going to rob you?”

Lourdes prays.
God, all these years, I have asked you for only one thing: to be with my children again.
She hands over another $700. Others pay the entire $3,500.

Patel promises to send everyone's legalization papers in the mail. A week after mailing in the last payments, several migrants go back to her office to see how things are going. The office is shuttered. Gloria Patel is gone. Others in the building say she had rented space for one month. The papers the migrants were shown were filled-out applications, nothing more.

Lourdes berates herself for not dating an American who asked her out long ago. She could have married him, maybe even had her children here by now…

Lourdes wants to give her son and daughter some hope. “I'll be back next Christmas,” she tells Enrique.

Enrique fantasizes about Lourdes's expected homecoming in December. In his mind, she arrives at the door with a box of Nike shoes for him. “Stay,” he pleads. “Live with me. Work here. When I'm older, I can help you work and make money.”

Christmas arrives, and he waits by the door. She does not come. Every year, she promises. Each year, he is disappointed. Confusion finally grows into anger. “I need her. I miss her,” he tells his sister. “I want to be with my mother. I see so many children with mothers. I want that.”

One day, he asks his grandmother, “How did my mom get to the United States?” Years later, Enrique will remember his grandmother's reply—and how another seed was planted: “Maybe,” María says, “she went on the trains.”

“What are the trains like?”

“They are very, very dangerous,” his grandmother says. “Many people die on the trains.”

When Enrique is twelve, Lourdes tells him yet again that she will come home.

“Sí,”
he replies. “
Va, pues.
Sure. Sure.”

Enrique senses a truth: Very few mothers ever return. He tells her that he doesn't think she is coming back. To himself, he says, “It's all one big lie.”

The calls grow tense. “Come home,” he demands. “Why do you want to be there?”

“It's all gone to help raise you.”

Lourdes has nightmares about going back, even to visit, without residency documents. In the dreams, she hugs her children, then realizes she has to return to the United States so they can eat well and study. The plates on the table are empty. But she has no money for a smuggler. She tries to go back on her own. The path becomes a labyrinth. She runs through zigzagging corridors. She always ends up back at the starting point. Each time, she awakens in a sweat.

Another nightmare replays an incident when Belky was two years old. Lourdes has potty-trained her daughter. But Belky keeps pooping in her pants. “
Puerca!
You pig!” Lourdes scolds her daughter. Once, Lourdes snaps. She kicks Belky in the bottom. The toddler falls and hits her face on the corner of a door. Her lip splits open. Lourdes can't reach out and console her daughter. Each time, she awakens with Belky's screams ringing in her ears.

All along, Enrique's mother has written very little; she is barely literate and embarrassed by it. Now her letters stop.

Every time Enrique sees Belky, he asks, “When is our mom coming? When will she send for us?”

Lourdes does consider hiring a smuggler to bring the children but fears the danger. The coyotes, as they are called, are often alcoholics or drug addicts. Usually, a chain of smugglers is used to make the trip. Children are passed from one stranger to another. Sometimes the smugglers abandon their charges.

Lourdes is continually reminded of the risks. One of her best friends in Long Beach pays for a smuggler to bring her sister from El Salvador. During her journey, the sister calls Long Beach to give regular updates on her progress through Mexico. The calls abruptly stop.

Two months later, the family hears from a man who was among the group headed north. The smugglers put twenty-four migrants into an overloaded boat in Mexico, he says. It tipped over. All but four drowned. Some bodies were swept out to sea. Others were buried along the beach, including the missing sister. He leads the family to a Mexican beach. There they unearth the sister's decomposed body. She is still wearing her high school graduation ring.

Another friend is panic-stricken when her three-year-old son is caught by Border Patrol agents as a smuggler tries to cross him into the United States. For a week, Lourdes's friend doesn't know what's become of her toddler.

Lourdes learns that many smugglers ditch children at the first sign of trouble. Government-run foster homes in Mexico get migrant children whom authorities find abandoned in airports and bus stations and on the streets. Children as young as three, bewildered, desperate, populate these foster homes.

Víctor Flores, four years old, maybe five, was abandoned on a bus by a female smuggler. He carries no identification, no telephone number. He ends up at Casa Pamar, a foster home in Tapachula, Mexico, just north of the Guatemalan border. It broadcasts their pictures on Central American television so family members might rescue them.

The boy gives his name to Sara Isela Hernández Herrera, a coordinator at the home, but says he does not know how old he is or where he is from. He says his mother has gone to the United States. He holds Hernández's hand with all his might and will not leave her side. He asks for hugs. Within hours, he begins calling her Mama.

When she leaves work every afternoon, he pleads in a tiny voice for her to stay—or at least to take him with her. She gives him a jar of strawberry marmalade and strokes his hair. “I have a family,” he says, sadly. “They are far away.”

Francisco Gaspar, twelve, from Concepción Huixtla in Guatemala, is terrified. He sits in a hallway at a Mexican immigration holding tank in Tapachula. With a corner of his Charlie Brown T-shirt, he dabs at tears running down his chin. He is waiting to be deported. His smuggler left him behind at Tepic, in the western coastal state of Nayarit. “He didn't see that I hadn't gotten on the train,” Francisco says between sobs. His short legs had kept him from scrambling aboard. Immigration agents caught him and bused him to Tapachula.

Francisco left Guatemala after his parents died. He pulls a tiny scrap of paper from a pants pocket with the telephone number of his uncle Marcos in Florida. “I was going to the United States to harvest chiles,” he says. “Please help me! Please help me!”

Clutching a handmade cross of plastic beads on a string around his neck, he leaves his chair and moves frantically from one stranger to another in the hallway. His tiny chest heaves. His face contorts in agony. He is crying so hard that he struggles for breath. He asks each of the other migrants to help him get back to his smuggler in Tepic. He touches their hands. “Please take me back to Tepic! Please! Please!”

For Lourdes, the disappearance of her ex-boyfriend, Santos, hits closest to home. When Diana is four years old, her father returns to Long Beach. Soon after, Santos is snared in an INS raid of day laborers waiting for work on a street corner and deported. Lourdes hears he has again left Honduras headed for the United States. He never arrives. Not even his mother in Honduras knows what has happened to him. Eventually, Lourdes concludes that he has died in Mexico or drowned in the Rio Grande.

“Do I want to have them with me so badly,” she asks herself of her children, “that I'm willing to risk their losing their lives?” Besides, she does not want Enrique to come to California. There are too many gangs, drugs, and crimes.

In any event, she has not saved enough. The cheapest coyote, immigrant advocates say, charges $3,000 per child. Female coyotes want up to $6,000. A top smuggler will bring a child by commercial flight for $10,000. She must save enough to bring both children at once. If not, the one left in Honduras will think she loves him or her less.

Enrique despairs. He will simply have to do it himself. He will go find her. He will ride the trains. “I want to come,” he tells her.

Don't even joke about it, she says. It is too dangerous. Be patient.

REBELLION

Now Enrique's anger boils over. He refuses to make his Mother's Day card at school. He begins hitting other kids. At recess, he lifts schoolgirls' skirts. When a teacher tries to make him behave by smacking him with a large ruler, Enrique grabs the end of the ruler and refuses to let go, making the teacher cry.

He stands on top of the teacher's desk and bellows, “Who is Enrique?”

“You!” the class replies.

Three times, he is suspended. Twice he repeats a grade. But Enrique never abandons his promise to study. Unlike half the children from his neighborhood, he completes elementary school. There is a small ceremony. A teacher hugs him and mutters, “Thank God, Enrique's out of here.”

He stands proud in a blue gown and mortarboard. But nobody from his mother's family comes to the graduation.

Now he is fourteen, a teenager. He spends more time on the streets of Carrizal, which is controlled by the Poison gang and is quickly becoming one of Tegucigalpa's toughest neighborhoods. His grandmother tells him to come home early. But he plays soccer until midnight. He refuses to sell spices. It is embarrassing when girls see him peddle fruit cups or when they hear someone call him “the tamale man.” Sometimes his grandmother pulls out a belt at night when Enrique is naked in bed and therefore unable to quickly escape her punishment by running outside. “
Ahora vamos a areglar las cuentas.
Now we are going to settle the score,” she says. She keeps count, inflicting one lash for each time Enrique has misbehaved.

Enrique has no parent to protect him on the streets of Carrizal. He makes up for it by cultivating a tougher image. When he walks alongside his grandmother, he hides his Bible under his shirt so no one will know they are headed to church.

Soon, he stops going to church at all.

“Don't hang out with bad boys,” Grandmother María says.

“You can't pick my friends!” Enrique retorts. She is not his mother, he tells her, and she has no right to tell him what to do. He stays out all night.

His grandmother waits up for him, crying. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asks. “Don't you love me? I am going to send you away.”

“Send me! No one loves me.”

But she says she does love him. She only wants him to work and to be honorable, so that he can hold his head up high.

He replies that he will do what he wants.

Enrique has become her youngest child. “Please bury me,” she says. “Stay with me. If you do, all this is yours.” She prays that she can hold on to him until his mother sends for him. But her own children say Enrique has to go: she is seventy, and he will bury her, all right, by sending her to the grave.

Sadly, she writes to Lourdes: You must find him another home.

To Enrique, it is another rejection. First his mother, then his father, and now his grandmother.

Lourdes arranges for her eldest brother, Marco Antonio Zablah, to take him in. Marco will help Enrique, just as he helped Lourdes when she was Enrique's age. Marco once took in Lourdes to help ease the burden on their mother, who was struggling to feed so many children.

Her gifts arrive steadily. She sends Enrique an orange polo shirt, a pair of blue pants, a radio cassette player. She is proud that her money pays Belky's tuition at a private high school and eventually a college, to study accounting. In a country where nearly half live on $1 or less a day, kids from poor neighborhoods almost never go to college.

Money from Lourdes helps Enrique, too, and he realizes it. If she were here, he knows where he might well be: scavenging in the trash dump across town. Lourdes knows it, too; as a girl, she herself worked the dump. Enrique knows children as young as six or seven whose single mothers have stayed at home and who have had to root through the waste in order to eat.

Truck after truck rumbles onto the hilltop. Dozens of adults and children fight for position. Each truck dumps its load. Feverishly, the scavengers reach up into the sliding ooze to pluck out bits of plastic, wood, and tin. The trash squishes beneath their feet, moistened by loads from hospitals, full of blood and placentas. Occasionally a child, with hands blackened by garbage, picks up a piece of stale bread and eats it. As the youngsters sort through the stinking stew, thousands of sleek, black buzzards soar in a dark, swirling cloud and defecate on the people below.

Enrique sees other children who must work hard jobs. A block from where Lourdes grew up, children gather on a large pile of sawdust left by a lumber mill. Barefoot atop the peach-colored mound, their faces smeared with dirt, they quickly scoop the sawdust into rusty tin cans and dump it into big white plastic bags. They lug the bags half a mile up a hill. There, they sell the sawdust to families, who use it as kindling or to dry mud around their houses. An eleven-year-old boy has been hauling sawdust for three years, three trips up the hill each day. The earnings buy clothes, shoes, and paper for school.

Others in the neighborhood go door-to-door, offering to burn household trash for change. One afternoon, three children, ages eight to ten, line up in front of their mother, who loads them down with logs of wood to deliver. “Give me three!” one boy says. She lays a rag and then several pieces of wood atop his right shoulder.

In one neighborhood near where Enrique's mother grew up, fifty-two children arrive at kindergarten each morning. Forty-four arrive barefoot. An aide reaches into a basket and places a pair of shoes into each one's hands. At 4 P.M., before they leave, the children must return the shoes to the basket. If they take the shoes home, their mothers will sell them for food.