Enrique's Journey (16 page)

At dawn, the tracks straighten and level out. At one and a half miles above sea level, the train accelerates to 35 miles per hour. Enrique awakens. He sees cultivated cactus on both sides. Directly in front rise two huge pyramids—the pre-Aztec metropolis of Teotihuacán.

Then he sees switches and semaphores. Housing developments. A billboard for Paradise Spa. A sewage ditch. Taxis. The train slows for the station at Lechería. Enrique gets ready to run.

He is in Mexico City.

SUSPICION

The Veracruz hospitality has vanished. One Mexico City woman wrinkles her nose when she talks about migrants. She is hesitant to slide the dead bolt on the metal door of her tall stucco fence. “I'm afraid of them. They talk funny. They're dirty.”

Enrique starts knocking on doors. He begs for food. In Mexico City, crime is rampant. In some churches, groups of bandits have entered during Mass and robbed all the parishioners at once. Churches hire armed guards to ensure peaceful services. In Mexico City, people are edgy and often hostile. “We don't have anything,” they say at house after house, usually through locked doors.

In Lechería, one resident, Olivia Rodríguez Morales, the wife of a retired railroad mechanic, lives just one block south of the station in a rust-colored boxcar she's converted into a home. Rodríguez is a soft-spoken woman with silver-rimmed spectacles and a gold cross on a chain around her neck. Yet when she is asked about migrants, she stops knitting a blue shawl and stiffens; her demeanor turns cold.

One afternoon, Rodríguez recalls, six migrants along the tracks asked a young man from the neighborhood for some money. He said no. That night, as he was walking home, the same migrants grabbed him near the station. They tied his hands with barbed wire. They took his money, his watch, and his clothes. They beat him over the head with a machete. They left him naked.

It rained that night. Slowly, the young man dragged himself to his door. He was in critical condition and spent three months in the hospital. Although he never spoke of it, Rodríguez and other neighbors heard that he had been raped by the migrants. In the close-knit railroad employee community, most had known the man since he was a boy.

Before, she had felt pity for migrants. She had offered them food and help. Now, when migrants ask her, several times a day, for help—a taco, a coffee, a shirt, or a pair of socks—she always turns them down flat. “We don't trust them,” she says. “After that, people closed their doors.”

Each dawn, when residents head out for their jobs, they worry. Are the migrants hiding in clumps of yellow flowers between the tracks innocents traveling north or dangerous men who are running from the law in their own countries? “You don't know who they are. Some come out of necessity. Some may be fleeing some problem,” Rodríguez says.

Her neighbor Oscar Aereola Peregrino, agrees. “
Por uno pagan todos.
One sins, and everyone pays,” he says.

Enrique goes house to house, hoping for mercy. Finally, at one house, another gift: a woman offers him tortillas, beans, and lemonade.

Now he must hide from the state police, who guard the depot at Lechería, a gritty industrial neighborhood on the northwestern outskirts of Mexico City. Enrique is surrounded by smokestacks. There is a scrap metal recycling plant, a sprawling Goodyear tire factory, and a plastics factory. The railroad tracks are littered with broken dolls, old tires, dead dogs, and worn shoes. He must avoid
la migra,
which sometimes shows up at the station in unmarked cars. Most migrants at the station hide between or inside boxcars or in the grass.

Enrique crawls into a three-foot-wide concrete culvert, one of several in a field north of the station. The field is filled with cows and sheep and bursting with yellow and purple flowers. Before, when he made it this far, he spent the night curled up in the culvert with other migrants. The police never saw him. Barring bad luck, he tells himself, he might make it to the border.

Enrique is thirteen miles from the heart of Mexico's rail system. Still, the station here, separated into two staging areas and six tracks, bustles with activity. Trains heading into Mexico City stop first in Lechería to leave any cars with combustible contents. On their way north, they stop to pick the cars back up. Fifteen trains leave Lechería every twenty-four hours, says José Patricio Sánchez Arellano, who handles human resources for Lechería and other stations for Ferrocarril y Terminal del Valle de México.

Outside the culvert where Enrique hides, trains clang and crash as they add and subtract cars, forming trains that are nearly a mile long.

Enrique must pick wisely. Not all of the trains go all the way to the border. Many migrants look for trains operated by Ferrosur, one of three train companies that operate out of the station. Ferrosur has fewer security guards. Another company, Transportación Ferroviaria Mexicana, sometimes puts guards on its trains to prevent anyone from using wire cutters to open sealed boxcars and steal merchandise.

At 10:30
P.M
., a northbound train arrives. This is the train Enrique prefers. It travels all the way to the Texas border, mostly at night, when the dark will make it harder for him to be detected. From Mexico City onward, the rail system is more modern, and trains run so fast that few migrants ride on top.

Enrique notices a few train cars that are unusual. In Lechería, train companies sometimes load a large closed container the size of a boxcar into a slightly larger, open container—a box inside a half box. Some migrants slide into a small spot between the two containers. But if the train suddenly brakes and the inside container shifts, it can press them against the other container and kill them.

Enrique and his two friends pick a boxcar. He braces the door open with a rock. If they are caught inside, it will be hard to escape, but they count on the scarcity of
migra
checkpoints in northern Mexico. Four of five times along this part of the route, one rail official estimates, authorities don't stop the train. The boys load cardboard to lie on and stay clean.

Enrique notices a blanket on a nearby hopper. He climbs a ladder to get it and hears a loud buzz from overhead. Live wires carry electricity above the trains for 143 miles north. Once used for locomotives that no longer operate, the wires still carry 25,000 volts to prevent vandalism. Signs warn:
DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE
. But many of the migrants cannot read.

They do not even need to touch the lines to be killed. The electricity arcs up to twenty inches. Only thirty-six inches separates the wires from the tallest freight cars, the auto carriers. In railroad offices in Mexico City, in a large control room, computers plot train routes with blue and green lines, and at least once every six months the screens flicker, then black out. That means a migrant has crawled on top of a car, been hit by electricity, and short-circuited the system. When the computers reboot, the screens flash red where it happened.

Enrique climbs the hopper car. Carefully, he snatches a corner of the blanket and yanks it down. Then he scrambles back to his boxcar and settles into a bed that he and his friends have fashioned out of straw they found inside.

The boys share a bottle of water and one of juice. The modern locomotives glide past the outer reaches of Mexico City. The landscape turns more and more desolate—sand and scrub brush, jackrabbits and snakes. They cross boulders, dry riverbeds, and canyons with sheer rock walls. They plow through a heavy fog, and Enrique sleeps soundly—too soundly.

He does not sense when police stop their train in the middle of the central Mexican desert. Officers dressed in black find the boys curled under their blanket in the straw. Enrique is afraid. The last time he was stopped here, he jumped down, grabbed two fistfuls of rocks, and barely eluded capture. Now, there is no place to run. These officers take them to their
jefe,
who is cooking a pot of stew over a campfire. He pats them down to check for drugs. Then, instead of arresting them, he gives all three tortillas and water—and toothpaste to clean up.

Enrique is astonished. The
jefe
lets them reboard the boxcar and tells them to get off the train before San Luis Potosí, where sixty-four railroad security officers guard the station. When the train gets to within four blocks of the station, the guards drive alongside, arresting migrants as they jump off and turning them over to
la migra.
At midmorning, Enrique sees two flashing red antennas. The boys jump off the train half a mile south of town.

His friends pay for a taxi to the north side. Enrique goes in search of food. “We don't have any,” people say. Finally, one person gives him an orange. Another gives him three tacos. He shares them with his friends.

Until now, Enrique has opted to keep moving. In the South, in a pinch, he could pick mangoes that grow along the tracks. Once, in Chiapas, he survived on mangoes for three days. But here the countryside is too desolate and dry to live off the land, and begging is too chancy. There are no agricultural fields in sight, just factories that make glass and furniture. He needs to work if he is going to survive. Besides, he does not want to reach the border penniless. He has heard that U.S. ranchers shoot migrants who come to beg.

He trudges up a hill to the small home of a brick maker. Politely, Enrique asks for food. The brick maker offers yet another kindness: if Enrique will work, he will get both food and a place to sleep. Happily, Enrique accepts.

Some migrants say Mexicans exploit illegals by stiffing them after a day's work. Or they pay only a fraction of the going wage, which is 50 pesos, or about $5, a day. But the brick maker does better than that: 80 pesos. And he gives Enrique shoes and clothing.

For a day and a half, Enrique works at the brickyard, one of three hundred that straddle the tracks on the northern edge of San Luis Potosí. Workers pour clay, water, and dried cow manure into large pits. They roll up their pants and stomp on the sloppy concoction, as if pressing grapes to make wine. When the slop becomes a firm brown paste, they slap it into wooden molds. Then they empty the molds on flat ground and let the bricks dry.

The bricks are stacked into pyramids inside ovens as big as rooms. Under the ovens, the fires are stoked with sawdust. Each batch of bricks bakes for fifteen hours, sending clouds of black smoke into the sky.

Enrique's job is to shovel the clay. At the end of the day, covered in clay and manure dust, he bathes in a cattle trough. At night, he sleeps in a shed on a dirt floor he shares with one of his friends from the train.

“I have to get to the border,” Enrique tells him.

Should he take another train? In all of his attempts, he has survived more than thirty train rides. This time, freight cars have brought him 990 miles from Tapachula near Guatemala. Is he pushing his luck?

His employer says he should ride a Volkswagen van called a
combi
through a checkpoint about forty minutes north of town. The authorities won't stop a
combi,
the brick maker says. Then he should take a bus to Matehuala, and he might be able to get a ride on a truck all the way to Nuevo Laredo on the Rio Grande.

THE TRUCKER

Enrique collects his pay, 120 pesos. He spends a few on a toothbrush.

He hails a
combi.
It breezes through the checkpoint. He pays 83 pesos to board a bus to Matehuala. The desert is dotted with tall, crooked Joshua trees. A few people on the side of the road hawk snakeskins. Three hours later, a pink archway welcomes him to Matehuala.

Outside the bus station, he sees a kind-looking man. “Can you help me?” Enrique asks.

The man gives him a place to sleep. The next morning, Enrique walks to a truck stop. Matehuala is on a principal route for truckers headed to the United States. A convoy of trucks rolls by. Some truckers stop to eat or to gas up.

“I don't have any money,” he tells every driver he sees. “Can you give me a ride however far north you are going?”

One after another, they turn him down. Many, having made the lonely haul from Mexico City, would welcome company for the remaining 380 miles to the border. Still, at least nine in ten truckers here, one trucker at the stop says, refuse migrants. If they said yes, police might accuse them of smuggling. Drivers say it is enough to worry about officers planting drugs on their trucks and demanding bribes. Moreover, some of the truckers fear that migrants might assault them.

Finally, at 10
A.M
., one driver takes the risk. Enrique pulls himself up into the cab of an eighteen-wheeler hauling beer.

“Where are you from?” the driver asks.

Honduras.

“Where are you going?” The driver has seen boys like Enrique before. “Do you have a mom or dad in the United States?”

Enrique tells him about his mother.

A sign at Los Pocitos says,
CHECKPOINT IN
100
METERS
. The truck idles in line. Then it inches forward. Judicial police officers ask the driver what he is carrying. They want his papers. They peer at Enrique.

The driver is ready: my assistant. But the officers do not ask.

A few feet farther on, soldiers stop each vehicle to search for drugs and guns. Two fresh-faced recruits wave them through.

Oblivious to the chatter on the trucker's two-way radio, Enrique falls asleep. The scenery changes again. Joshua trees give way to low-lying scrub brush. The driver clears two more checkpoints. As he nears the Rio Grande, he stops to eat. He buys Enrique a plate of eggs and refried beans and a soda, another gift. Riding a truck, Enrique figures, is a dream.

Sixteen miles before the border, he sees a sign:
REDUCE YOUR SPEED. NUEVO LAREDO CUSTOMS.

Don't worry, the driver says,
la migra
check only the buses.

A sign says,
BIENVENIDOS A NUEVO LAREDO.
Welcome to Nuevo Laredo.

The driver drops him off outside the city, near its airport, just past the Motel California. With the 30 pesos he has left, he takes a bus that winds into the city.