Enrique's Journey (19 page)

He leaves, only to be arrested in town—twice, both times for loitering. Where is he from?

“Veracruz,” Enrique says.

“Get in,” the officers yell, pointing to their squad car. They call him a street bum and lock him up with three drunks who are singing. The toilet is running over, the drunks have smeared some of its contents on a wall, and the stench is overpowering. Both times, Enrique wins his release by sweeping and mopping.

One night, as he walks twenty blocks back to the river from washing cars, it rains. El Tiríndaro doesn't usually sleep at the river when it rains. The camp, Enrique fears, will be too dangerous without El Tiríndaro there. He ducks into an abandoned house. It has gaping holes in the roof. He finds some cardboard and places it on a dry spot. He removes his sneakers and puts them and his bucket near his head. He has no socks, blanket, or pillow. He pulls his shirt up around his ears and breathes into it to stay warm. Then he lies down, curls up, and tucks his hands across his chest.

Lightning flashes. Thunder rumbles. Wind wails around the corners of the house. The rain falls steadily. On the highway, trucks hiss their brakes, stopping at the border before entering the United States. Across the river, the Border Patrol shines lights on the water, looking for migrants trying to cross.

With his bare feet touching a cold wall, Enrique sleeps.

MOTHER'S DAY

It is May 14, 2000, a Sunday when many churches in Mexico celebrate Mother's Day.

Finally, Enrique has saved 50 pesos. Eagerly, he buys a phone card. He gives it to one of El Tiríndaro's friends for safekeeping. That way, if the police catch him again, they cannot steal it.

“I just need one more,” he says. “Then I can call her.”

Every time he goes to Parroquia de San José, it makes him think about his mother, especially on this Mother's Day. In addition to the refectory, on the second floor are two small rooms where up to ten women share four beds. They have left their children behind in Central America and Mexico to find work in
el Norte,
and they have found this place to sleep. Many of the single mothers pause at the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border before making their final push into
el Norte.
Each could be his mother eleven years ago.

They try to ignore a Mother's Day party downstairs, where 150 women from Nuevo Laredo laugh, shout, and whistle as their sons dance, pillows stuffed under their shirts to make them look pregnant. Upstairs, the women weep. Like Enrique's mother, these women feel sadness, guilt, and hope. One has a daughter, eight years old, who begged her not to go. The girl asked her mother to send back just one thing for her birthday: a doll that cries. Another cannot shake a nightmare: back home, her little girl is killed, and her little boy runs away in tears. Daily she prays, “Don't let me die on this trip. If I die, they will live on the street.”

Lourdes Izaguirre, Gabi's aunt, arrives at the Rio Grande exhausted, worried, and crying. It has taken Izaguirre three months to get here. She cannot call home; her family has no phone.

She has walked away from Byron, five, and Melissa, ten, as well as her ten-year-old sister and eleven-year-old brother, whom she had been raising for her ailing mother. She is heading north to find work in the United States.

“We try to keep each other from going crazy,” says Águeda Navarro, thirty-four, who left behind her children, fourteen and four, a few weeks earlier.

Another mother, Belinda Cáceres, twenty-nine, prays that her children, ages twelve, nine, and two, will have enough to eat and will not get sick while she is gone.

The mothers share the same fears: Will their children forget them? Will they see their children again?

Back home, Izaguirre says, making Tommy Hilfiger–labeled shirts netted her $30 a week. It was not enough to feed her son and daughter each night, even when her ex-husband helped with the light and water bills.

Byron, her son, went to a birthday party and saw a piñata. He asked why he could not have a party, too. Melissa, her daughter, needed books and school supplies. She asked why she could not have them. Izaguirre told them she would go to the United States and send money for piñatas and books. Melissa offered to quit school and go to work so their mother would not leave.

“I'm going to work so you can study,” Izaguirre told them. “I will never forget you.” Now she fears that something will happen to them and she will be too far away to comfort or help. Worse, she fears that the separation will last too long and her children will give her the same icy reception she has watched other mothers endure. “You lose the love of your child,” she says.

She begins to cry. “I feel bad for doing this. It wasn't worth it. I'd rather starve with my children. But I've come this far. I can't go back.” She mortgaged her property and borrowed money from a neighbor for her journey. Her voice turns firm again. “I can't go back empty-handed.”

“I worry about dying along the way. I know going into another country is wrong. I know God would be against this. But I hope he understands.”

Many of the women in the room became single mothers because they were unwilling to endure the more difficult parts of their relationships with men: drunkenness, beatings, mistresses. Alone, most found supporting their children difficult. Father Ovidio Nery Rodríguez, a priest in Tegucigalpa, explains, “To not prostitute themselves, to feed their children, they leave.”

Though many mothers expect the separations to be short, typically they last six to eight years, says Analuisa Espinoza, a Los Angeles Unified School District social worker who specializes in immigrants. By then, they are strangers. Some mothers, picking up children from smugglers, hug the wrong ones.

Enrique wonders: What does his mother look like now?

“It's okay for a mother to leave,” he tells a friend, “but just for two or four years, not longer.” He recalls her promises to return for Christmas and how she never did. He remembers how he longed to have his mother with him each time his grandmother scolded him. “I've felt alone all my life.” One thing, though: she always told him she loved him. “I don't know what it will be like to see her. She will be happy. Me too. I want to tell her how much I love her. I will tell her I need her.”

Across the Rio Grande on Mother's Day, his mother, Lourdes, thinks about Enrique. She has, indeed, learned that he is gone. But in her phone calls home, she never finds out where he went. She tries to convince herself that he is living with a friend, but she remembers their last telephone conversation: “I'll be there soon,” he said. “Before you know it, on your doorstep.” Day after day, she waits for him to call. Night after night, she cannot sleep more than three hours. She watches TV: migrants drowning in the Rio Grande, dying in the desert, ranchers who shoot them.

Enrique's disappearance stirs up a bad memory: Lourdes's ex-boyfriend and Diana's father, Santos, tried to make his way back to the United States after being deported to Honduras. He never arrived. Lourdes is convinced he was killed in Mexico or drowned in the Rio Grande.

One of Lourdes's roommates has a relative who arrives at their apartment. He lies on the couch, recovering from the traumatic trip through Mexico. His smuggler loaded 150 migrants inside the tank of a truck that normally hauled gasoline. By the time the truck stopped, he tells Lourdes, several men had died of asphyxiation. Their tongues were hanging out.

She imagines the worst and becomes terrified that she might never see Enrique again. She is utterly helpless. She asks God to watch over him, guide him.

On the afternoon of the Mother's Day celebration, three municipal police visit the camp. Enrique does not try to run, but he is jittery. They ignore him. Instead, they take away one of his friends.

Enrique has no money for food, not even for crackers. He takes a hit of glue. It makes him sleepy, takes him to another world, eases his hunger, and helps him forget about his family. He lies on a mattress and talks to the trees. He cries. He talks about his mother. “I want to be near my mom. I want to be near to her,” he says over and over again until the fog in his mind lifts.

A friend catches six tiny catfish. He builds a fire out of trash. It grows dark. He cuts the fish with a lid from an aluminum can.

Enrique hovers nearby. “You know, Hernán, I haven't eaten all day.”

Hernán guts the fish.

Enrique stands silently, waiting.

A SETBACK

It is May 15. Enrique has had a good night washing cars: he made 60 pesos. At midnight, he rushes to buy his second phone card. He puts only 30 pesos on it, gambling that his second call will be short. If his old employer finds Aunt Rosa Amalia and Uncle Carlos and gets his mother's number, it won't take many minutes to call his boss a second time and pick it up.

Enrique saves his other 30 pesos for food.

He and his friends celebrate. Enrique drinks and smokes some marijuana. He wants a tattoo. “A memory of my journey,” he says.

El Tiríndaro offers to do it for free. He takes Enrique to a two-bedroom house near the river, a Los Osos hangout where El Tiríndaro sleeps when it rains. Two drug addicts who live in the house use it to cook crack cocaine. Four wealthier teenagers from Nuevo Laredo are sitting on couches in the living room, smoking crack they have just bought.

El Tiríndaro shoots up to steady his hand.

Enrique wants black ink, but all El Tiríndaro has is green. Enrique pushes out his chest and asks for two names, so close together they are almost one. For three hours, El Tiríndaro digs into Enrique's skin. In gothic script, the words emerge:

EnriqueLourdes.

His mom, he thinks happily, will scold him.

The next day just before noon, he stirs from his dirty mattress. He borrows some toothpaste, squats at the river, dips his toothbrush into the murky water, and cleans his broken teeth. They still ache from the beating he took on top of the train a few weeks ago. So does his head, which throbs constantly. A dark pink welt an inch long scars his left forehead like a cross. He still cannot see well with his left eye, and the lid sags. His arms and legs are mottled with bruises, and he has been wearing the same clothes for days. He brushes gently, methodically, then cups water into his mouth with his hands and gargles. He washes his face, tosses water on his hair. He stores the toothbrush on his portion of the upright mattress coil.

He is hungry. Hours pass. His hunger grows. Finally, he cannot stand it. He retrieves the first phone card from the friend who is holding it, and he sells it for food.

Worse, he is so desperate that he sacrifices it at a discount, for 40 pesos. He saves a few pesos for the next day and uses all of his money to buy crackers, the cheapest thing that will fill his stomach.

Now he has gone from two phone cards to one, worth only 30 pesos. He regrets surrendering to his hunger. If only he can earn 20 pesos more. Then he will go ahead and phone his old boss and hope that his aunt or uncle will call back, so he won't need a second card.

But someone has stolen his bucket. Without it, he is lost: he used it for sitting, chopping food, washing his feet, and earning a living.

When he thinks about giving up, he tries to reassure himself: “I know my day will come. I know I shouldn't get desperate.” After his crackers, he lies on his mattress, stone quiet, and looks at the sky. His friend can see that he is depressed. Since Enrique has been at the river, he has watched thirty other men and boys sleep at the camp, pay a smuggler, then cross the river into the United States.

The friend tries to cheer him up. He urges him not to despair. There is nothing left to do, the friend says, but to risk the cops, go downtown and beg. They will do it together.

They go to Avenida Guerrero. It is filled with tourists who spill across the border to shop, drink, dance, and hire prostitutes. Poor Mexicans flock there to beg. Five-year-olds tap the tourists on the arm and ask them to buy tiny packs of gum. Old women sit on sidewalks and extend their weathered hands, seeking a coin or two. Avenida Guerrero is thick with police. For Enrique, a Central American without papers, it is treacherous ground.

But he is desperate. His friend leans on his arm, drags a foot, and pretends to be lame. They approach every tourist they see. “Want me to show you where the train hit me?” the friend offers. Slowly, he lifts his cuff.

People recoil. “No, no. Here!” They give a peso and scurry away.

Enrique and his friend quickly lose their nerve. They retreat to the river before the police can catch them, with only enough to buy more crackers.

A friend at camp lends him a bucket. He trudges back out to the car wash across from the taco stand. He sits on the bucket. Carefully, he pulls up his T-shirt. There, in an arch just above his belly button, is his tattoo, painfully raw.

EnriqueLourdes.
Now the words mock him. For the first time, he is ready to go back home. But he holds back his tears and lowers his shirt. He refuses to give up.

THE MOMENT

He considers crossing the Rio Grande by himself. But his friends at camp warn him against it.

They tell him the trek is treacherous from the moment you step into the river. A month ago, one of the camp dwellers saw a man's body float past. It was bloated. Sometimes, friends say, migrants are killed when whirlpools suck them under. Other times, whirlpools smash their heads against rocks. Sometimes their legs cramp and they sink. Other times INS helicopters fly too low, whip up waves, and swamp inner tubes, riders and all. They call the helicopters mosquitoes; they come down and bite.

Migrants at the car wash tell him about the trains. Eight to ten leave for
el Norte
every day. Security guards stand on a platform over the freight cars, watch for migrants, and pull them off before they cross the bridge. As soon as the trains reach the U.S. side, the cars are inspected again.

Then, at Milla 12, the first INS checkpoint north of Laredo, the trains stop inside a fence. It is impossible to run. Agents scan the cars with an infrared telescope to pick up body heat. And then come the dogs. The INS uses them at its second checkpoint, some eighty miles north, near Cotulla. The trains carry new Fords and Chryslers. Migrants like to hide in the cars or among them, and the dogs sniff them out.