Enrique's Journey Part 10

Her mother was terrified that Gabi would make the trip alone and be raped. She asked Gabi's aunt Lourdes, twenty-six, to go with her. A smuggler promised to deliver them for $2,000 up front, but he robbed and abandoned them in Tapachula, just inside the southern border of Mexico. They were deported to Guatemala.

Gabi resolved to try again, this time through the Lacandon jungle in the Mexican state of Chiapas. She and Lourdes spent days washing clothes along the Usumacinta River in exchange for food, asking every smuggler who went by if he would take them through the mountain pa.s.s.

"If you can't pay with cash," one said, "you know how women pay."

Angrily, Gabi refused.

Finally, four smugglers let them tag along with eighty migrants who Gabi learned had paid between $5,000 and $8,000 apiece. They put her up front to help cut a path in the dense vegetation. She rebuffed constant demands for s.e.x. She tried to look as ugly as possible. She hardly slept, never smiled or combed her hair. Her legs turned black with ticks. She felt as though bugs were eating her alive, but she dared not lift her skirt to remove them. She kept repeating to herself, "I have to get to my mother."

She and Lourdes switched to hitchhiking. But a migra agent caught them trying to walk around a checkpoint. The agent was a woman, Gabi says, who ordered her to strip and checked her clothing for hidden cash, then scolded her for having so little money that there was no way for her to release them.

"Please let us go," Gabriela begged. "I'm going to help my mother."

"Vayanse. Go!" the agent said.

Finally, Gabi and Lourdes made it to Nuevo Laredo. She tells Enrique she feels stuck here, too. Sometimes, she says, she wants to kill herself.

Another Honduran teenager at church dinners is Kelvin Maradiaga. He, too, lost the phone number and address of his mother, Adalinda, in New York during his journey. Running from Mexican officials in southern Mexico, he fell into a puddle. His mother's phone number, jotted down with a felt-tip pen, blurred into oblivion.

A man at a taco stand gave him a job washing dishes. He was able to buy a phone card to call Honduras to try to get his mother's phone number again. But the only phone in his small southern Honduran town, which belongs to an agricultural cooperative, had been disconnected.

After months of travel, Kelvin fears he has only one choice: to go back to Honduras, get his mother's phone number, and attempt the journey all over again. "She would tell me about her problems. I would tell her about mine. I need to see her. I want to see her," says Kelvin.

Outside the church after dinner, many migrants engage in a crude kind of street therapy: Who has endured the worst riding the trains? They measure trips not in days but in shoes lost, beatings taken, belongings robbed. They show off scars. "I walked four days." "I walked twenty-eight days!" They air feet covered in large blisters, toenails that have turned up from walking.

A young man sits on a green metal bench outside the church. He has been stuck here for weeks, and he trumps everyone. He slides up a leg of his black jeans and takes off a black, high-topped sneaker, then a prosthesis. His right calf tapers into a pink stump.

A SMUGGLER.

For permission to stay in the relative safety of the river encampment, the leader, El Tirindaro, who is addicted to heroin, usually wants drugs or beer. But he has not asked Enrique for anything. El Tirindaro is a subspecies of coyote known as a patero, because he smuggles people into the United States by pushing them across the river on inner tubes while paddling like a pato, or duck. Others in the business keep clients in rented houses or hotel rooms. El Tirindaro is small-time; he uses the camp. Enrique is a likely client.

In addition to smuggling, El Tirindaro finances his heroin habit by tattooing people and selling clothing that migrants have left on the riverbank. In a pinch, he reverts to his previous profession, petty theft. One day, Enrique b.u.mps into El Tirindaro on the street. He has his arms around a live turkey he has stolen out of someone's yard.

The smuggler has a short fuse when he needs a fix. He shoots up constantly. Enrique stares as El Tirindaro lies on a mattress, mixes Mexican black tar heroin with water in a spoon, warms it over a cigarette lighter, draws it into a syringe, and stabs the needle straight into a vein.

When the drugs take hold, El Tirindaro hallucinates. He hears imaginary voices, crowds of people descending on the camp. Sometimes he is so slowed by heroin that he can barely get up or move. He can earn $2,000 to $3,000 in a single large smuggling operation but blow it in a day on heroin, which he likes to mix with cocaine. He shares his drugs with friends in a local mob called Los Osos, named after a billiard cantina where they drink.

Besides migrants, the camp has ten perpetual residents. Seven are addicts. They call heroin la cura, the cure.

A few at the campsite are Mexican criminals who have been deported by the United States. One is called El Lagrima, the Tear. He is tattooed with TJ, a symbol of the Mexican mafia; a teardrop, signifying a dead gang friend; and a spider-web, tucked next to his right eye.

Also among the permanent campers are several migrants who are stuck. One, a fellow Honduran, has lived on the river for seven months. He has tried to enter the United States three times. Every time, he has been caught. He has descended into depression and a life of glue sniffing. Each time he tried to cross, he says, he went alone. Enrique listens. They call Enrique El Hongo, the Mushroom, because he is quiet, soaking everything in.

Enrique clings to the camp, where he is protected. Staying with El Tirindaro means the Los Osos bandits, who rob people under a nearby bridge and along the river, won't target him.

Los Osos, once a group of neighborhood children who played along the river, became a band of forty men who move drugs and people across the Rio Grande. They began as pateros. Then they armed themselves with revolvers and knives. Anyone who wanted to cross this stretch of river had to pay Los Osos. Other pateros were threatened with death when they tried to cross clients in the area. Half of all migrants found "drowned," autopsies reveal, died before ever entering the water, says Nuevo Laredo human rights activist Raymundo Ramos Vasquez.

Other smugglers undercut Los Osos's business in the 1990s by using different spots to cross migrants along the river. Los Osos turned to smuggling bales of marijuana. Turf gunfights broke out on the river with other local gangs-the Hommies, the Parque Morelos, Los Perros, the Chiquillos Boys, and Cuatro Vientos.

El Tirindaro stuck with the less dangerous job of patero. Each week, he gives police officers who patrol the river a 10 percent cut of his earnings as a smuggler. The police show leniency toward anyone at the camp.

When the police arrive at the river, they ask Enrique for identification papers. They check his pockets for drugs. They help themselves to whatever change is there. Still, Enrique is spared the more severe shakedowns other migrants face. Leonicio Alejandro Hernandez, thirty-three, says that four munic.i.p.al officers approached him on the banks of the Rio Grande and said, "We charge a thousand pesos [$100] to cross this river."

Hernandez balked, and the officers lowered their price. "If you don't give us five hundred pesos, ten days in jail!" he says one yelled.

He says another warned, "Throw yourself into the river, and I'll kill you."

Hernandez says he paid them and swam away.

Octavio Lozano Gamez, the munic.i.p.al police chief in Nuevo Laredo, acknowledges that of his 720 employees, "a small minority of police officers in the city have this problem of robbing people." Lozano doubts, however, that even his corrupt officers would pick poor migrants to rob. "Any smart police would seek out someone with more money, gold chains, wrist.w.a.tches."

Because he is so young, everyone at the camp looks after Enrique. When he goes at night to wash cars, someone walks him through the brush to the road. When he leaves during the day, someone always yells, "Be careful." They warn him against heroin. They offer tips on which parts of the city are thick with police, places he should not go. But leaving the camp scares him, and they give him marijuana to calm him down.

Car washing goes poorly. One night, he earns almost nothing.

At 9:15 P.M., Enrique receives 2 pesos for helping a woman in a small station wagon back up. Five minutes later, a woman in a blue dress arrives in a white Pontiac Bonneville.

"May I wash your windows?" She nods and walks toward the taco stand. Enrique wipes the front of the car, then the side windows, moving his hand, with its fingers splayed across the back of a rag, in quick, ever-growing circles. He walks around the car, wiping and wiping, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. He cleans inside, even the floorboards. The moon is out, but it is 90 degrees. Sweat trickles down his face. He must finish before the woman's tacos are ready. In minutes, he is done.

She returns, fumbles for her car keys, gets in, then puts two coins-3 pesos-in his hand. "Gracias," he says.

A man tips him for guiding him backward out of a parking spot. "I hope this helps you, boy."

Enrique thanks everyone.

By 10 P.M. he has acc.u.mulated only 10 pesos, about $1. He sits over the open top of his water-filled bucket to cool off. Between then and 4 A.M., he scrambles after every car that pulls in. In eight hours, he makes 20 pesos.

The fifteen days on his meal cards pa.s.s quickly. Now he needs part of his money to eat. Every peso he spends on food cannot go toward the phone cards. He begins to eat as little as possible: crackers and soda.

Sometimes Enrique does not eat at all. He feels weak. Occasionally, local fishermen give him a fish they have caught. Friends at the camp share their meals. They offer scrambled eggs or a bowl of chicken soup. One teaches him to fish with a line coiled on a shampoo bottle. The line, fitted with a hook, has three spark plugs at the end to sink it. Enrique swings the spark plugs around his head, then casts toward the middle of the Rio Grande. The line whirs as it spools off the bottle. He hauls in three catfish.

Even El Tirindaro is generous; the sooner Enrique can buy a phone card and call his mother, the sooner Enrique will need his services. When one of Enrique's meal cards is stolen, El Tirindaro gives him the unexpired card of a migrant who has crossed the river successfully.

He knows that Enrique cannot swim, so he paddles him back and forth on the water in an inner tube to quiet his fears. When the river level drops, it exposes the lower branches of willows lining the banks. They are festooned with clothing that the migrants discard as they begin to wade out. Plastic bags, shorts, and underwear hang from the boughs like tattered Christmas ornaments. El Tirindaro takes Enrique on the inner tube along the bank as he collects the clothing. They wash the clothes in the river, then sell them near the taco stand and hawk any inner tubes they find for 15 pesos apiece at a tire store. El Tirindaro lets Enrique keep a T-shirt they find.

Enrique learns that El Tirindaro is part of a smuggling network. He has partners in three safe houses on the U.S. side of the river, people who will hide migrants if Border Patrol agents are in pursuit. A middle-aged man and a young woman, both Latinos, meet him and his clients after they cross the river. Then they all drive north together, and El Tirindaro walks his clients around Border Patrol checkpoints, giving wide berth to the agents. After the last checkpoint, El Tirindaro returns to Nuevo Laredo, and the couple and others in the network deliver the clients to their destinations. The price is $1,200.

El Hongo listens as his campmates talk about dos and don'ts: Find an inner tube. Take along a gallon of water. Learn where to get into the river, where not. They talk about the poverty they came from; they would rather die than go back. Enrique tells them about Maria Isabel, his girlfriend, and that she might be expecting.

Enrique talks about his mother. He says he is extremely depressed. "I want to be with her," he says, "to know her."

"If you talk, it's better," a friend says.

But it gets worse. He fears being attacked by bandits outside his circle of friends. He hears of atrocities: knives, a rifle to the chest, beatings with tree limbs, demands for shoes and money.

Migrants huddle around the San Jose church like cattle pressed up against a barn seeking protection from a cold winter chill. They share experiences. Gonzalo Rodriguez Toledo, twenty-three, from Nicaragua, was approached by two middle-aged men on the river by Enrique's camp. They put a knife to his chest and robbed him. Oscar Vega Ortiz, twenty-six, saw a man on a mule appear as he and four other migrants got ready to cross the river. The man pointed a rifle at his chest. "Your money or your life," he told Vega.

Manuel Gallegos prepares to have his last meal at the church before returning home to Mexico City. That morning, he took most of his clothes and shoes off to cross the river. Bandits spotted him. Gallegos ran, but the bandits, cursing, caught up to him and beat him with a small tree trunk. Gallegos's breathing is labored. He hikes up his shirt. His back is red and raw. Several ribs are broken. He will not try to cross again.

One gang, Enrique knows, wants to harm him. Salvadorans with MS tattooed on their foreheads, the sign of the Mara Salvatrucha, hang out like dogs at the San Jose church, sniffing out robbery prospects. Unlike migrants, they wear new black Nikes. "I'll pa.s.s you across the river. Give me two hundred pesos," they say to the unwary; then they take their clients to the riverbank and a.s.sault them. After robbing them, they tell the migrants to keep mum about what has happened or they will hunt them down and rape them.

The glue sniffer at camp tangles with them, and Enrique steps in. One Salvadoran covered in tattoos threatens to thrash Enrique. He is spared only by the intervention of a migrant MS from his old neighborhood back home.

But his luck with the authorities runs out. One afternoon migra agents come to the camp. They ask Enrique where he is from.

"I'm from Oaxaca," Enrique says in the accent he learned as he pa.s.sed through.

The agents pause. "What are you doing here?"

"Fishing," Enrique says, trying to stay calm.

"You can't fish here. You have to leave. Get out of here."

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 b.u.m 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 Tirindaro doesn't usually sleep at the river when it rains. The camp, Enrique fears, will be too dangerous without El Tirindaro 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 Tirindaro'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 Jose, 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 agueda Navarro, thirty-four, who left behind her children, fourteen and four, a few weeks earlier.

Another mother, Belinda Caceres, 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 Hilfigerlabeled 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 pinata. 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 pinatas 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 G.o.d 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 Rodriguez, a priest in Tegucigalpa, explains, "To not prost.i.tute themselves, to feed their children, they leave."

Though many mothers expect the separations to be short, typically they last six to eight years, says a.n.a.luisa 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 G.o.d to watch over him, guide him.

On the afternoon of the Mother's Day celebration, three munic.i.p.al 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, Hernan, I haven't eaten all day."

Hernan 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 Tirindaro offers to do it for free. He takes Enrique to a two-bedroom house near the river, a Los Osos hangout where El Tirindaro 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 Tirindaro shoots up to steady his hand.

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

His mom, he thinks happily, will scold him.