Enrique's Journey (30 page)

“Are you coming back?”

“Yes.”

Jasmín believes her, and this time she does come back.

Sometimes when Jasmín asks if her mother is coming back, María Isabel is silent. She does not answer.

She doesn't like lying to Jasmín. But María Isabel is sure her daughter is too young, at three and a half, to understand the truth. She can't handle a scene, demands by Jasmín to take her with her. She doesn't want to see her daughter cry. This is easier, better, María Isabel tells herself.

Wednesday. The smuggler calls at 1
P.M
. María Isabel must be across town, at Tegucigalpa's main bus station, at 3:30
P.M
. The smuggler says he will be wearing a red shirt and blue jeans. What will María Isabel have on? A black blouse and blue jeans, Enrique's family tells him.

María Isabel heads back to Belky's hut with Jasmín. She holds her in her arms and gives her a last bottle of milk.

María Isabel heads over to Enrique's grandmother's. “I'm leaving now. Good-bye,” she says.

“God bless you,” the grandmother says. The family will pray for her during her journey north, she tells her.

Next door, at Gloria's, María Isabel hugs her mother and sister. Enrique's aunt Rosa Amalia takes Jasmín back to Belky's hut, hoping to prevent a scene. Jasmín will have none of it. She's overheard some of the good-byes, that Rosa Amalia is driving María Isabel to the bus terminal.

“I'm coming! I'm coming to drop off my mother,” she tells Rosa Amalia, who relents.

Jasmín runs to the car and gets in. María Isabel takes the backpack, which contains a change of clothes and one picture of her daughter. Belky and her boyfriend climb in, too.

At the bus terminal, Rosa Amalia won't let Jasmín get out of the car. Only passengers are allowed beyond the waiting room. María Isabel is relieved. She tells herself that it is all right, that Jasmín doesn't really understand what is happening.

María Isabel does not say good-bye to her daughter. She does not hug her. She gets out of the car and walks briskly into the bus terminal. She does not look back. She never tells her she is going to the United States.

Rosa Amalia lifts Jasmín onto the hood of her car. As the bus pulls out of the terminal, she tells the girl to say good-bye. Jasmín waves with both hands and calls out,
“Adiós, mami. Adiós, mami. Adiós, mami. Adiós, mami.”

A
n estimated 1.7 million children live illegally in the United States, most from Mexico and Central America. Like Enrique, almost all have spent time away from a parent before following him or her to the United States. One in four children in the nation's schools is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant—a group whose numbers, between 1990 and 2000, grew seven times faster than that of children with both parents born in the United States.

Children leaving Central America to find their mothers in the United States now face a tougher, more treacherous journey than ever before. Anti-gang crackdowns in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have pushed many gangsters north into Chiapas, where they prey on migrants aboard the trains. Gangsters who once used border cities in Guatemala as their homes have moved their bases into Chiapas. Freight trains pull in to the station in Tonalá, in northern Chiapas, with dead migrants atop the boxcars. In 2004, fed up with rampant violence, more than 5,000 Tapachula residents marched in the streets demanding that Mexico establish a death penalty for gangsters.

Since Enrique's journey, the number of police agencies targeting migrants in Chiapas has grown from five to eight. To elude the additional officers, migrants take ever greater risks to get on and off moving trains. The result: the number of migrants arriving at Tapachula's general hospital with train injuries has more than doubled.

The train is no longer stopped by
la migra
at La Arrocera, the checkpoint where migrants had to outrun bandits lying in wait. In 2003, when La Arrocera became too dangerous even for
migra
agents, the train stop was moved to Los Toros, Chiapas. There, reinforced by three other police agencies and the army, sixty to eighty officers swarm the train, using ladders to reach atop the cars, catching four of five migrants. Just south of the checkpoint, in Tres Hermanos, a new crop of bandits has emerged. Migrants who try to avoid the authorities by walking the tracks are robbed, injured, and even killed by local thugs.

To the north, in Nuevo Laredo, along the Rio Grande where Enrique camped, a battle for control of the border rages among rival Mexican drug cartels. The body of El Tiríndaro, the smuggler who crossed Enrique into Texas, was found in February 2002 near the road to the Nuevo Laredo airport. He had been blindfolded, tortured, and shot in the head, execution style. El Tiríndaro, identified as Diego Cruz Ponce, was one of fifty-seven murders in Nuevo Laredo that year, and the violence has escalated since then. In 2005, the new police chief, who vowed to bring law and order to the city, was gunned down hours after taking office.

Across the length of Mexico, people who help migrants are troubled to see more pregnant women and parents with young children aboard freight trains. Some parents are carrying babies in their arms.

Despite the increased danger, more migrants are making the attempt. Between 2001 and 2004, the number of Central American migrants detained and deported each year by Mexico nearly doubled, to more than two hundred thousand. Most come from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and are trying to reach the United States. In Tapachula alone, up to seventeen buses full of detained migrants are sent south each day. Some of the buses are designated just for children who have been traveling alone through Chiapas. During the same period, the number of Central American children detained by the U.S. Border Patrol while entering the country illegally and without either parent nearly doubled.

Throughout Latin America, even in traditional societies such as Mexico, where most legal and illegal migrants to the United States come from, divorce and separation are increasingly common. That promises to produce more single mothers who feel forced to make the same choice Lourdes made long ago: leave their children and head north.

The growing influx of women and children will fuel questions already raging about immigration: Is it good for the migrants themselves, for the countries they come from, and for the United States and its citizens?

For immigrants, the material benefits of coming to the United States are clear. The money Lourdes sent Enrique allowed him to eat and dress better and attend school longer. Once he arrived in the United States, Enrique drove his own truck and could make a decent living if he worked hard. Enrique loves how clean the streets are compared to those in Honduras, how most people respect and obey the laws. His aunt Mirian notes that the United States is less class-driven than Honduras. Here, people don't look down on her if she dresses humbly. Lourdes enjoys taking showers with indoor plumbing, as well as the relative safety of her neighborhood, where she can wear a gold necklace without worry. She has the freedom to get in her car and go anywhere she wants.

Enrique acknowledges drawbacks. He must live in the shadows, knowing he can be deported at any time. He faces racism. When he goes into a restaurant and can't order well in English, he gets dirty stares. “They look at you as if you are a flea,” he says. Salespeople in stores often attend to Anglo customers first. Even Mexicans look down on Central Americans, whom many view as inferior. Enrique's aunt Mirian says her restaurant employers pay her less than they pay her Anglo colleagues—and assign immigrants the hardest tasks.

Life in America, Enrique and others say, is too hurried. In Honduras, people work half a day Saturday and rest Sunday. Here, Enrique paints seven days a week in an endless struggle to pay bills. “Here,” he says, “life is a race.”

For most immigrants who come to the United States, the biggest downside is the toll parent-child separations exact on families. The family conflicts are most visible in the nation's schools, where teachers and administrators from New York to Los Angeles struggle daily to mend the damage caused by the years apart for parents and children.

NEWCOMER TRAUMAS

Life inside Los Angeles's Newcomer School, a transitional school for newly arrived immigrant students, shows both how common and devastating these separations are for the immigrants themselves.

Each day, the school's soft-spoken counselor, Gabriel Murillo, finds the small wooden box outside his office full of “request to see the counselor” slips. More than half of the 430 high school students will ask to see him by year's end. The reason?
Problemas familiares,
they write: family problems. Most have recently reunited with a parent, usually a mother. On average, they have not seen the parent in a decade.

Hour after hour, parent-child meetings play out with a scary similarity, Murillo says. Idealized notions each had of the other quickly shatter. Some children felt resentful before coming north; others have deeply buried anger that emerges after months with their mothers.

Inside Murillo's office, children usually fire the first salvo: “I know you don't love me. That's why you left me there.” Some mothers, to avoid traumatic farewells, told their children they were going out to the market or to see their children's teachers, and instead left for the United States. The children say their mothers lied to them from the start. They prayed their mothers would get caught by the U.S. Border Patrol and sent back. They demand that their mothers admit their mistakes and apologize for leaving them.

Mothers endured pain leaving their children and struggled to work hard and send back money, and they demand respect for their sacrifice. They are certain the separations were worth what was gained.

But their children say they would have preferred being together, even if it meant going hungry. “I didn't want money. I wanted you there.” They tell their mothers they would never leave their own children. They tell them they are worse than animals. Even an animal doesn't desert her litter.

Murillo fights what is usually a losing battle. “It's a huge emotional scar. For some, the damage continues for the rest of their lives. It is irreparable,” he says. Some eventually improve their relationships with their mothers, but it takes years.

Mothers expect to finally have the perfect family when their children arrive. Instead, they face rejection and constant fights. Eventually, they realize the choice they made may have cost them the love of their children. Children who thought they would find love and an end to loneliness discover that they feel more distant than ever from their mothers, even though they are now with them.

Some children are resentful because they were abused or neglected by their caretakers or bullied by others back home. One in twenty girls at the school admits to being molested by a male relative. They blame their mothers for not being there to protect them.

Others are angry because they had to leave behind a grandmother who became the person who loved and nurtured them most—a real mother. They worry that their departure means the loss of the grandparents' only source of income. They know they may never see their grandparents again.

Actions by both mothers and children make matters worse. Children act out, doing everything possible to push their mothers away. It is their way of testing whether their mothers really love them, whether they can trust them, whether their mothers will abandon them again.

Mothers, beset by guilt, don't discipline their children or set rules. To pay off their debts to the smugglers, they often work overtime, and after so much time apart, children feel their mothers are ignoring them again. Some mothers continue to work as live-in nannies or housekeepers after their children arrive. They place their children in an apartment with relatives or friends, calling at night, visiting on weekends.

The conflicts Murillo sees are most acute when the child was the last to be brought north because the mother couldn't afford to bring everyone at once. Such children come to believe that the mother favored the children she brought north first.

The clashes are also severe when the mother has a new husband or has given birth to additional children in the United States. Some mothers, fearful of how children left behind would react, have hidden these new families from them. Newly arrived children try to create conflicts between their mothers and the new husbands, hoping to drum them out. Children born in the United States, jealous that their mothers are showering the newcomers with attention, tell lies about the new children, hoping to get them in trouble and shipped back.

Some mothers, Murillo says, do many things right. They leave children with relatives who constantly emphasize that the parents left to help their children. They keep in constant contact during the separation. They are open and honest about their lives in the United States. They never promise anything, especially a visit or reunion, until they are positive they can deliver. Even in these cases, Murillo says, the reunions are rocky. He has dealt with students who tried to stab their mothers, who asked to have guardianship transferred to someone else, who turned suicidal.

One mother says: “I think it's like the Bible says. People will move around. But not find peace.”

Many reunified children, not finding the love they had hoped for with their mothers, search for love elsewhere, Murillo says. Some boys find a family in the local gangs and end up selling drugs. A girl might find unconditional love by getting pregnant, having a baby, and moving in with the father. Gangs and pregnancy are much more common among reunited children than among those born here, says Zenaida Gabriel, a case manager at Sunrise Community Counseling Center, where some Newcomer students go for help.

Newcomer School psychologist Laura Lopez estimates that only 70 of 430 students will complete high school. Indeed, immigration expert Jeffrey Passell says nearly half of all Central American children who arrive in the United States after the age of ten don't graduate from high school.

A Harvard University study found that immigrant children in U.S. schools who spent time separated from parents are often depressed, act up, have trouble trusting anyone, and don't respond to the authority of parents they weren't raised with. Los Angeles Unified School District psychologist Bradley Pilon believes only one in ten immigrant students ultimately accepts his or her parent and puts the rancor he or she feels toward the parent in perspective.

Murillo's conclusion: “The parents say: I had to do it. But that's not enough for these children. All of them feel the resentment.” Special education teacher Marga Rodriguez adds, “This isn't worth it. In the end, you lose your kids.” But she admits she doesn't know what it's like not to have anything to feed your hungry children.

Oscar Escalada Hernández, director of the Casa YMCA shelter for immigrant children in Tijuana, Mexico, agrees. “In the end, it is a mess,” he says. “The effect of immigration has been family disintegration. People are leaving behind the most important value: family unity.”

The survivors, like Enrique, try to block out problems with their mothers and focus on what is good for them and their futures. They work to ensure that the love they feel for their mothers overcomes the rancor they also feel inside.