Authors: Oscar Martinez
The men huddle and plan next to the rails as they wait for the engine to hook up with the twenty-eight boxcars to begin the journey. The group’s decision is unanimous: if it’s necessary, they’ll fight.
The majority of the cars stand on one rail line, but there are also some lined up on adjacent tracks. There’s an extended moment of uncertainty: nobody knows which train to board. The hundred or so shadows turn their heads between the two lines, trying to read the train’s signals. The shadows move along the one line to get a better look, and then return. It’s a lot easier if they can figure it out before the cars take off, otherwise they’ll have to board on the run.
Though this will be my eighth trip, I still haven’t gotten used to it: the back and forth of hurling, frantic silhouettes, the metal clanking of The Beast enveloping everything, hardly a moment to think. It’s a sensation between the excitement of the ride and the fear of the uncertainty. All we know is that we don’t want to miss the train, that if we jump on the wrong car we’re going to have to wait and wait and wait. And when the time finally comes, we’ll only think of ourselves, we’ll concentrate on the ladder we’ve picked out, on climbing it safely, hoping that nobody gets in our way.
The train is a long series of uncertainties. Which cars are going to be leaving? Which one will take you to Medias Aguas and which to Arriaga? How soon will it leave? How will you duck any rail workers? To avoid an assault, is it better to ride the middle or the back cars? What sounds signal you to jump on? When do you get off? What happens when you need to sleep? Where is the best place to tie yourself to the roof? How do you know if an ambush is coming?
Between the two lines, the group of thirty make their decision: the leftmost rails. One after another they scamper up the ladders and settle on the top of boxcars, staking their claim. This sixty-foot radius will be their base during the six-hour journey. They’ll cling to any ridge or pole to keep from falling. It’s a space they’re willing to fight for.
These men have already kicked off one dark-skinned teenage Salvadoran. Earlier in the afternoon, the young gangster, recently deported from the States, was smoking marijuana outside the
hostel in Ixtepec and sitting apart from the group. The other men didn’t trust him, didn’t want to risk having a gangster ride with them. “You’re not coming,” one of them said simply, clearly an order, the whole group of thirty watching over his shoulder. And then the young gangster, looking back into that group of faces, backed down.
Eduardo and I pick our spot on the top of a car with a group of Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans.
The few women on board settle themselves on the balconies between the cars. A few lucky migrants even secure the bottom platform, which is safe from the wind and passing branches and wires. The remaining passengers only have metal beams to hang on to. They’ll ride on top, dodging wires and branches, shivering in the constant currents of wind.
The group of thirty is composed of bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, farmers, laborers, and carpenters, all recently turned warriors. The four Guatemalan men closest to us are brothers. They’ve recently been deported from the United States, but are headed back to the country they consider their home. One of them is an ex-soldier who left a job as a bricklayer. We also meet Saúl, who is so skilled at getting on and off the train that, after tying his bag to the roof, he swiftly hops off to snag a cardboard box lying next to the rails. He’ll use the box as padding against the sharp fiberglass of the roof.
Finally the engine lurches forward, pulling the twenty-eight cars behind it. The hard clack begins at the head and shudders down each car all the way to the last: tac, tac, tac, tac … One car after another pulled by the powerful engine, people latching on to whatever they can. Many have been injured in this initial thrust when, ignorant of the rules of The Beast, they’ve rested a foot between two cars. The molars, they call them. As its cars domino and grind together, The Beast, like a hammer crushing a nut, has smashed many feet.
And yet the danger of the initial thrust is outweighed by one invaluable advantage: you can get on before the train starts
moving. There are plenty of other stops—Lechería, Tenosique, Orizaba, San Luis Potosí—where rail workers and guards won’t let anyone board near the station, and you have to jump on the train farther down the line, once it’s already speeding ahead.
On one of my earlier rides, Wilber, a twenty-year-old Honduran who acts as a guide for the undocumented across Mexico, gave me a beginner’s course on how to board a moving train.
“First, you read its speed. You let the handles of the cars hit your hand to see how fast it’s going. You have to feel that. If you’re just watching, the train will trick you. If you think you’re ready, get up next to it, grip onto a handle and run with it for about sixty feet to match its rhythm. When you have its pulse down, you latch on with both hands, then, only using your arms, keeping your legs away from the wheels, lift yourself up. You step on the rung with your inside foot, not your outside foot, so that your body swings away from the train and you don’t get sucked under.”
When I tried for the first time with Wilber, we were in Las Anonas, a small pueblo between Arriaga and Ixtepec. The train was moving at about ten miles an hour. I made the basic mistake that’s maimed so many beginners: I forgot the trick about which foot first and I stepped with my outside foot. I was hanging on by my left hand and the sudden thrust pushed my foot back to the ground. The train dragged me for a few yards until, luckily, a few migrants jumped down to disentangle me.
Wilber thinks that travelers who are mutilated early on in the journey are “lucky.” The train is usually going slowly enough, he says, that, after getting maimed, they get the chance to make a new decision.
“I saw one guy,” Wilber remembers, speaking as calmly as if he were remembering a soccer match, “who got his leg chopped off by a wheel. The guy just couldn’t lift himself up once he was already running. And since the train was going so slowly, he had enough time to see his chopped leg, think about it, and then put his head under the next wheel. You know,” Wilber says, “if he was
heading north because he couldn’t get work down south, what could he possibly find with only one leg?”
Why don’t they let them board before the train starts moving? Why, if they know that the migrants are going to get on anyway, do they make them jump on while it’s already chugging? It’s a question that none of the directors of the seven railroad companies is willing to answer. They simply don’t give interviews, and if you manage to get them on the phone, they hang up as soon as they realize you want to talk about migrants.
The ride begins. The Ixtepec rail lights fade into the distance. We cut through dark plains outside of town, which glimmer in the eerie light of the yellow full moon.
These are the migrants riding third class, those without either a coyote or money for a bus. The men repeat this fact over and over. They will be sleeping alongside these rails for the bulk of the trip across Mexico, hoping that as they rest they won’t miss the next whistle and have to wait as long as three days for another train. They’ll travel in these conditions for over 3,000 miles. This is The Beast, the snake, the machine, the monster. These trains are full of legends and their history is soaked with blood. Some of the more superstitious migrants say that The Beast is the devil’s invention. Others say that the train’s squeaks and creaks are the cries of those who lost their life under its wheels. Steel against steel.
Once, riding on top of the train in the dark of night, I heard someone say: “The Beast is the Rio Grande’s first cousin. They both flow with the same Central American blood.”
The stretch from Ixtepec to Medias Aguas, crossing from Oaxaca into Veracruz, is 125 miles long, which lasts, at the very least, six hours. Six hours in which the train curves away from highways and into the desolate wilderness where it sometimes stops in the middle of the mountains to load cement or attach new cars. Sometimes the halt in the mountains can last up to two days. It’s a waiting and guessing game. This leg of the ride can last anywhere between two and ten hours.
The best place to chat with a migrant is on top of the hurtling train. You’re considered an equal there. You’re in their territory and have, by boarding the train, signed a pact of solidarity. You share cigarettes, water, food, and are ready to defend the train from attack if necessary. The pact ends when you get off the train. And then you have another opportunity to sign again, to get back on the train or not.
Talking is the best way to stay awake, to keep yourself from becoming another one of the legends, another victim mutilated in the darkness, bleeding to death by the side of the tracks.
THE BITE OF THE BEAST
That afternoon while waiting for the train we spoke with Jaime, an unassuming thirty-seven-year-old Honduran peasant. Jaime was not the sort of migrant to dream of American cars, new clothes, and bling, or to fantasize about returning to his village wearing an L.A. Lakers jersey. He left his small Caribbean coastal village in January, dreaming of healthy crops, shoots of corn and rice and beans that would one day surround his modest home.
It was his second try heading north. On his first trip he spent two years in the United States, saving up $17,000, enough to build his family a cement house back in Honduras. Then he returned for good. He had what he wanted: a house and some crops to grow. But then, after seven months, what he spent two years saving for was swept away. “A hurricane, one of those storms that hit that part of Honduras all the time. It destroyed everything.” All he owned—both house and crops—were gone.
And then, just like the first time, Jaime packed some clothes and a few bucks and said goodbye to his wife.
The only way to get back what he had lost, he knew, was to go back north.
But before reaching the goal there is the journey to face, a journey that can take even more from you than what you’re looking to make.
That afternoon in Ixtepec at Father Alejandro Solalinde’s migrant shelter, Jaime sat in a plastic chair and talked to us under the shade of a mango tree. His left leg was stretched out, his other leg ended in a stump. White, almost raw-looking flesh marked the stump.
Jaime had been desperate. He wanted to ride the train hard, make the journey fast. He wanted to see the corn bloom around his house again. But The Beast lashes out if you’re impatient. And Jaime wasn’t only impatient, he was tired. He had hardly slept for days, and had just arrived in Arriaga after an eleven-hour ride. And, with the exhaustion weighing down his eyelids, he hopped a train hauling nothing but boxcars. There wasn’t a single good wagon on the train, only boxes. It was a dangerous combination.
Boxcars are exactly that, rectangular boxes of steel, no balconies between them, no top bars that you can grab onto. And between each box, the train bares its teeth—small bars of iron onto which impatient migrants hang as if they were crucified, while the earth blurs below, just a few inches under the migrants’ hanging feet. That leg of the journey from Arriaga to Medias Aguas lasts six hours. Six hours on the cross, balancing on a thin bar, your own gripping white-knuckled fingers the only protection from slipping into the mouth of The Beast. The train picks up to seventy miles an hour, sometimes even through a curve. And that’s not the same seventy of an automobile. A train is a whole other creature. No rubber tires, no quick stopping, or evasive turns. It’s a solid, menacing, half-mile-long, barely controllable worm that squirms, wriggles, lurches, and shrills.
Jaime, crucified on the front of the car, talked with his cousin and two Nicaraguans. He occasionally stretched his arms to try to keep awake. But then he succumbed. “For just one minute I closed my eyes,” he remembered. Or rather, they closed themselves. After three days of riding the trains before Arriaga, and then an eleven-hour ride under the beating Chiapan sun to Ixtepec, he was bone-tired. And then he walked from Ixtepec, catching what sleep he could in the ditches along the way. Nobody sleeps well
in those mountains. One eye may close, but the other stays half-opened, staring into the night, waiting for danger.
When almost instantly he woke, he felt himself falling, felt the world slowing. He floated, he remembered, more than he fell. It was enough time to realize that he was falling toward the rails. Enough time to pray: “My God. My God, keep me, save me.” And then everything became noise. Noise and speed. He was slammed flat to the earth, flattened like a stretch of tape. The Beast broke the air and formed the wind current which slammed Jaime into the ground, his head inches from the steel wheels.
Riiiin! Riiiin! Riiiin!
That was all he heard, the deafening
Riiiin! Riiiin! Riiiin!
And then, while the shrieking wheels split his eardrums, another wind current lifted him off the sleepers like a feather, floated him for a moment, suspended in the air, and then slammed him again against the rails. It was the very last car that ran over his right leg. The tailwind then spat him off the tracks, onto the hillside, like something regurgitated.
“I felt fine,” Jaime said. “It didn’t hurt.”
Most mutilated migrants say the same thing. At first it doesn’t hurt. Later, though, the pain nearly tears apart the muscles in your face and a sudden and intense heat shudders into your body so fast you think your head’s going to explode.
Jaime didn’t know what had happened at first. He felt something was wrong when he tried to stand. He doubled over, fell. Then he looked down. His leg was mutilated. It ended in crushed bone and ground skin and a barely attached, macerated, bluish hunk of foot. He tried to climb up the mountain using two sticks as crutches, but the long loose threads of his skin kept catching in the thorn bushes. With his pocketknife he tried to finish the job, cutting off his train-chewed leg. He couldn’t manage. He tore off a strip of his blood-soaked pant leg instead, and used it as a tourniquet.
He succeeded, somehow, in walking an hour, still following the tracks, still heading north.