Enrique's Journey Part 7

It angers him, and it steels his determination to push northward.

FOUR.

Gifts and Faith.

From the top of his rolling freight car, Enrique sees a figure of Christ.

In the fields of Veracruz, among farmers and their donkeys piled with sugarcane, rises a mountain. It towers over the train he is riding. At the summit stands a statue of Jesus. It is sixty feet tall, dressed in white, with a pink tunic. The statue stretches out both arms. They reach toward Enrique and his fellow wayfarers on top of their rolling freight cars.

Some stare silently. Others whisper a prayer.

It is early April 2000, and they have made it nearly a third of the way up the length of Mexico, a handful of migrants riding on boxcars, tank cars, and hoppers.

Many credit religious faith for their progress. They pray on top of the train cars. At stops, they kneel along the tracks, asking G.o.d for help and guidance. They ask him to keep them alive until they reach el Norte. They ask him to protect them against bandits, who rob and beat them; police, who shake them down; and la migra, the Mexican immigration authorities, who deport them.

In exchange for his help, they make promises: to never drink another drop of alcohol, to make a difficult pilgrimage someday, to serve G.o.d forever.

Many carry small Bibles, wrapped in plastic bags to keep them dry when they ford rivers or when it rains. On the pages, in the margins, they scrawl the names and addresses of the people who help them. The police often check the bindings for money to steal, the migrants say, but usually hand the Bibles back.

Some pages are particularly worn. The one that offers the Twenty-third Psalm, for instance: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."

Or the Ninety-first Psalm: "There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways."

Some migrants rely on a special prayer, La Oracion a las Tres Divinas Personas-a prayer to the Holy Trinity. It asks the saints to help them and to disarm any weapon raised against them. It has seven sentences-short enough to recite in a moment of danger. If they rush the words, G.o.d will not mind.

That night, Enrique climbs to the top of a boxcar. In the starlight, he sees a man on his knees, bending over his Bible, praying.

Enrique climbs back down.

He does not turn to G.o.d for help. With all the sins he has committed, he thinks he has no right to ask G.o.d for anything.

SMALL BUNDLES.

What he receives are gifts.

Enrique expects the worst. Riding trains through the state of Chiapas has taught him that any upraised hand might hurl a stone. But here in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, he discovers that people are friendly. They wave h.e.l.lo and shout to signal if hostile police are lying in wait for them in an upcoming town. People living along the tracks are put out when migrants take clothing from laundry lines, a police chief says-but only because they don't ask first. "People in Oaxaca and Veracruz are more likely to help," says a train engineer. "It's just the way we are," says Jorge Zarif Zetuna Curioca, a legislator from Ixtepec.

Perhaps not everyone is that way, but there is a widespread generosity of spirit. Many residents say it is rooted in the Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous cultures. Besides, some say, giving is a good way to protest Mexico's policies against illegal immigration.

As one man who lives on the tracks in Veracruz puts it, "It's wrong for our government to send people back to Central America. If we don't want to be stopped from going into the United States, how can we stop Central Americans in our country?"

Not long after seeing the statue of Jesus, Enrique is alone on a hopper. Night has fallen, and as the train pa.s.ses through a tiny town, it blows its soulful horn. He looks over the side. More than a dozen people, mostly women and children, are rushing out of their houses along the tracks, clutching small bundles.

Some of the migrants grow afraid. Will these people throw rocks? They lie low on top of the train. Enrique sees a woman and a boy run up alongside his hopper.

"orale, chavo! Here, boy!" they shout. They toss up a roll of crackers. It is the first gift.

Enrique reaches out. He grabs with one hand but holds tightly to the hopper with the other. The roll of crackers flies several feet away, bounces off the car, and thumps to the ground.

Now women and children on both sides of the tracks are throwing bundles to the migrants on the tops of the cars. They run quickly and aim carefully, mostly in silence, trying hard not to miss.

"Alli va uno! There's one!"

Enrique looks down. There are the same woman and boy. They are heaving a blue plastic bag. This time the bundle lands squarely in his arms. "Gracias! Adios!" he calls into the darkness. He isn't sure the strangers, who pa.s.s by in a flash, even heard him.

He opens the bag. Inside are half a dozen rolls of bread.

Enrique is stunned by the generosity. In many places where the train slows in Veracruz-at a curve or to pa.s.s through a village-people give. Sometimes twenty or thirty people stream out of their homes along the rails and toward the train. They wave. They smile, they shout, and then they throw food.

The towns of Encinar, Fortin de las Flores, Cuichapa, and Presidio are particularly known for their kindness. A young Honduran migrant, Fernando Antonio Valle Recarte, points at the ground in Veracruz. "Here," he says, "the people are good. Here, everyone gives." As migrant Jose Rodas Orellana readies to board a train in Veracruz, a man emerges from his house. Without a word, the man puts a large sandwich stuffed with scrambled eggs into Rodas's hands. The man turns back home. Rodas, his voice cracking with emotion, says, "We could never keep going forward without people like this. These people give you things. In Chiapas, they take things away."

Enrique and other migrants usually try to ride the trains under cover of darkness. Here, migrants hope to cross during daylight, because residents are likely to bring gifts to the tracks.

These are unlikely places for people to be giving food to strangers. A World Bank study in 2000 found that 42.5 percent of Mexico's 100 million people live on $2 or less a day. Here, in rural areas, 30 percent of children five years old and younger eat so little that their growth is stunted, and the people who live in humble houses along the rails are often the poorest.

Families throw sweaters, tortillas, bread, and plastic bottles filled with lemonade. A baker, his hands coated with flour, throws his extra loaves. A seamstress throws bags filled with sandwiches. A teenager throws bananas. A carpenter throws bean burritos. A store owner throws animal crackers, day-old pastries, and half-liter bottles of water. People who have watched migrants fall off the train from exhaustion bring plastic jugs filled with Coca-Cola or coffee.

A young man, Leovardo Santiago Flores, throws oranges in November, when they are plentiful, and watermelons and pineapples in July. A stooped woman, Maria Luisa Mora Martin, more than a hundred years old, who was reduced to eating the bark of her plantain tree during the Mexican Revolution, forces her knotted hands to fill bags with tortillas, beans, and salsa so her daughter, Soledad Vasquez, seventy, can run down a rocky slope and heave them onto a train.

"If I have one tortilla, I give half away," one of the food throwers says. "I know G.o.d will bring me more."

Another: "I don't like to feel that I have eaten and they haven't."

Still others: "When you see these people, it moves you. It moves you. Can you imagine how far they've come?"

"G.o.d says, when I saw you naked, I clothed you. When I saw you hungry, I gave you food. That is what G.o.d teaches."

"It feels good to give something that they need so badly."

"I figure when I die, I can't take anything with me. So why not give?"

"What if someday something bad happens to us? Maybe someone will extend a hand to us."

Many people in the area who give are from small towns where roughly one in five youngsters has left for the United States. In these places, residents understand that poor people leave their country out of a deep necessity, not because they want to. They have watched and worried as their own children struggled to reach the United States. They know it is harder still for the Central Americans to make it.

The son of retired schoolteacher Raquel Flores Lamora, who lives in the railside town of Santa Rosa, nearly died trying to cross into the United States. For three days he walked, until his feet were so raw and blistered he knew he would have to turn himself in to the INS to save his life. Instead, others in the group carried him the rest of the way.

Each night, Flores gets up from her threadbare sofa and heads to the tracks. There, she hands out food and clothing, often shirts and pants her children in California send for her to give.

Baltasar Breniz avila's two sons walked for days to enter the United States, through searing heat and with little drinking water. They dodged snakes, as well as bandits trying to a.s.sault them. Now they work as car washers in Orange County, California. "When I help someone here, I feel like I'm giving food to my children," Breniz says. "I bet people help them, too."

For some, the migrants' grat.i.tude is enough reason to give. Migrants who haven't eaten in days sob when they are handed a bundle of food. Other times, thanks come in a small gesture: a smile, a firm handshake before they move on.

The impetus to help comes from the local bishop, Hipolito Reyes Larios. One of his favorite pa.s.sages in the Bible is Matthew 25:35. People, it says, should welcome and show compa.s.sion and charity toward strangers. "One of the acts of mercy," the bishop says, "is to give shelter to a migrant."

In dozens of tiny local parishes throughout the archdiocese, priests preach and practice what Matthew said. At the Iglesia Rectoria de Beato Rafael Guizar y Valencia, a humble yellow brick church with forty pews, priest Ignacio Villanueva Arteaga's message to churchgoers on Sunday is straightforward: being a good Christian means being a good Samaritan. He describes why the Central American migrants felt forced to leave their lands and tells of the dangers and problems they faced along the way.

He tells of another refugee: the baby Jesus, whose family had to flee the land of Israel and go to Egypt after an angel told Joseph they were in danger. He leads a prayer and asks G.o.d to help migrants safely arrive at their destinations, find work, and be able to return to their countries someday.

Every couple of weeks, nearby, state and local police officers conduct sweeps to find migrants. Villanueva protects any migrant who runs inside the church. "They are migrants. We are going to feed them here," the balding priest tells the police, who, so far, haven't raided the church. He hauls some green mattresses piled outside into a small room used for studies and catechisms, where the migrants sleep.

When seven migrants ran from the train one evening and were arrested outside his church, Villanueva ran toward the commotion. "Why do you detain them? They aren't robbing anyone. They just want to go north," he told the officers. "Let them go." Soon eight police cars had arrived. More than fifty church members had gathered around their priest. Villanueva convinced the officers to release the migrants. He works hard, the priest says, to keep police officers on his side. Each Easter Sunday parade, he invites them to carry the cross.

The same goes on at a nearby church, the Parroquia San Isidro Labrador in Encinar. Each week the priest asks church members to feed migrants. If you are old or pregnant, or can't go to the tracks for some other reason, bring food to the church, he tells them. We will send someone to the tracks to hand it out for you.

No one recalls when the gift-giving started, probably in the 1980s, when Central Americans, fleeing war and poverty, began riding the rails north in large numbers. Wherever the trains stopped, the migrants went, gaunt and dirty, plagued by parasites they had picked up along the way, to front doors to beg. Occasionally one would fall off a train, weak with hunger.

Eventually people along the tracks, particularly in the state of Veracruz, began to bring food out to the trains, often where they slowed for curves or bad tracks. Those who had no food brought plastic bottles of tap water. Those with no bottles came out to the tracks to offer a prayer. As the procession of migrants has grown, so has the determination to help.

Along the tracks in Veracruz, residents mobilize at the first sign of a train.

Gladys Gonzalez Hernandez waits for the diesel horn. There it is, at last! The girl runs down the narrow aisles of her father's grocery, s.n.a.t.c.hing crackers, water bottles, and pastries off the shelves. She dashes outside. Gladys and her father, Ciro Gonzalez Ramos, wave to the migrants on board the train. She is six years old.

They stand along the tracks at Fortin de las Flores and throw the crackers and the water and the pastries into the outstretched hands of the migrants.

Ciro Gonzalez, thirty-five, taught Gladys to do this; he wants her to grow up right.

"Why do you give them food?" she asked him once. Her father said, "Because they have traveled far and haven't eaten."

Long ago, Gonzalez's neighbor heard a migrant knock at his door. "Give me anything, please," he said anxiously, through parched lips. He had not eaten in two days. The man gulped down six bean tacos. Then, humbly, he said, "I hope G.o.d helps you someday. I was hungry. And you fed me well." The neighbor started throwing food to migrants as they rolled by on the train. Gonzalez followed.

At 6 P.M. on a summer day, Jesus Gonzalez Roman, forty, and his sister, Magdalena Gonzalez Roman, thirty-one, sit outside their railside home in the town of Encinar. Neighbors come out to chat after long hours of work as bricklayers and field hands. Clouds float down between the steep green mountains. The evening cools. A neighbor gently urges his goats along as he guides them home along the tracks.

They hear a diesel horn.

Magdalena and her brother have two minutes. They run inside. Their mother, Esperanza Roman Gonzalez, seventy-eight, adjusts her pink ap.r.o.n and grabs her cane.

Jesus plucks three sweaters from a nylon bag, hand-me-downs from relatives. He ties them into a knot, so they will be easier to throw.

Magdalena puts tortillas into an orange-colored bag, then s.n.a.t.c.hes bread rolls and stuffs them into a blue bag. She ladles lemonade into a plastic bottle, spilling some in her haste.

The horn on the locomotive grows louder, more frequent.

At the stove, she scoops a bowl of stew into a plastic bag. "Ready?" she mutters. "We have bread, tortillas..." She dashes to the front room.

The horn blasts nearby.

Jesus and Magdalena race outside, where their mother is already hobbling past the wooden front gate, her long gray braids swinging.

It is dusk. Headlights glow on the train. It slows for a curve. The ground rumbles. Wheels pound. The engineer sounds the horn five times, warning the twenty-odd people who have come out with food, drink, and clothing to be very careful.

Jesus and Magdalena edge close to the tracks, dig in their heels, and brace each other, so the wind the train produces will not suck them under the wheels.

Jesus spots migrants on a hopper car. "Some are on top!" he yells. He waves the sweaters above his head.

A teenager in a green-and-white shirt edges down the ladder on the hopper. He holds on with his right hand and reaches out with his left.

Now seconds count. Magdalena hands Jesus her blue bag of bread. He thrusts it up, along with the sweaters. A moment later, Magdalena pushes up a bottle of lemonade. The youngster grabs everything.

"Gracias!" he yells above the din.

"Que Dios los lleve! May G.o.d watch over you!" Jesus shouts back, eyes smiling.

Esperanza stands silently, her hands stretched upward. She prays to the Virgin of Guadalupe, asking her to bring all the children on the train safely to their worried mothers in el Norte.

Some have decided that giving migrants food and prayers is not enough. One town opened its church to migrants. Some residents invite strangers to stay in their homes, sometimes for months at a time. Others protect migrants from the police, often at great risk, since they can be accused of immigrant smuggling.

The priest Salamon Lemus Lemus chuckles as he looks out on the grounds of the Maria Auxiliadora church. "They have taken over my church," he says, smiling. Hundreds of migrants mill around in the courtyard. They sleep in every nook and cranny of the church: in three large rooms once used for sacraments, baptisms, and youth study groups; in the garage; in the hallways; on the dirt patio outside; in the former sacristy. Each picks out a bit of cardboard from a huge pile and lays it down anywhere he or she can find a spot to bed down. There are so many-up to 640 some nights-that migrants must move on after three days and make room for others.

For more than two decades, the church members have been led by priests who have fought for the rights of workers and the poor. The church members grew increasingly distressed as they watched groups of migrants huddle and sleep, wet and with the outdoor temperature sometimes dropping below zero, along the nearby tracks. They watched police officers haul migrants by the hair or twist their wrists behind their backs, the "manita de puerco," before throwing them into the back of their pickup trucks. They saw many migrants injured as they tried to escape capture by the police. In two years, thirty-two migrants lost limbs to the train.

The munic.i.p.al police, dressed in green and white, used dogs. Munic.i.p.al and state police would beat migrants, sometimes take their money, then throw them into the back of their trucks, says Julio Cesar Trujillo Velasquez, a spokesman for the Diocese of Orizaba.

Church members organized teams that would rush out on a moment's notice to aid a migrant being abused by the police. "They aren't animals. They are human beings," says a church volunteer, Gloria Sanchez Romero. "You'd never want to be treated that way."

Police officers run into the church to arrest migrants hiding inside, sometimes with their guns drawn. One day, several migra officers came in, arrested four migrants, and put them into their truck.

The priest protested.

"Help us! They're going to hit us!" one migrant said.

"Shut up!" one of the officers said, hitting the migrant with a nightstick several times. The incensed priest, a crowd of a hundred around him, demanded that they let the migrants go. "This is a church. You have violated this place. Release them!" the priest said.

The police let the four go but kept six others they had grabbed outside the church.

Church members held public protests. About 150 gathered outside a local public hospital. They strung up a large banner that read, HOSPITAL, ENEMY OF MIGRANTS. They were angry that the hospital had allowed la migra to quickly deport a migrant who had lost a leg to the train. The migrant claimed that a police officer had pushed him toward the train, causing the accident. He had been deported quickly, before local officials could take his testimony. On a mile-long walk toward the hospital, they chanted, "We want justice!" and shut down the entrance to the local highway.

Church members decided they had to do more, says church volunteer Luis Hernandez Osorio. They began to let a few migrants sleep and eat at the church. Word spread that the church was providing sanctuary. The police crackdowns mounted, and more and more migrants came to the church.

"You must help," Luis and a group of other churchgoers told the bishop. "They are our brothers. We must open the church's doors." An opposing group went to the bishop, saying he should keep migrants out of the church. These migrants are a threat to the security of our children and families, they said. They give the church a bad image. They hang underwear to dry on the church walls. They haven't bathed in weeks and smell. They spit and proposition our daughters. They are strangers, delinquents. They are turning the church's beautiful green lawn, where kids play after catechism cla.s.ses, into a muddy brown lot.

The bishop sided with the migrants. He called the church's gray-haired priest, Lemus Lemus, and told him to help them. He promised to help raise funds to build a migrant shelter. "This is what I consider the mission of the church. It is fundamental," the bishop says. Half the church's eight hundred members quit in protest.

An informal truce was struck with the police and la migra. They no longer come into the church to hunt down migrants. Hundreds of migrants, mostly men, mill about the large courtyard of the yellow church with orange trim. They rest, play dominoes, wash laundry and hang it on lines that crisscross the courtyard. On one side of the courtyard is an open-air kitchen. Three times a day, they form a long line to be handed a meal. Usually it is rice and beans and whatever else has been donated, maybe a big bowl of soup. On the other side: a large outdoor basin where they wash their clothes. At 10 P.M., they lie down to sleep on the floor like canned sardines, one's feet next to another's head. There are no sheets.

All forty churches and eleven rectories that make up the diocese give food and money for the effort. On Ash Wednesday in February or March and the Day of the Migrant in September, all of the churches take up a collection. They pa.s.s around donation envelopes adorned with a drawing of a freight train. Each time, they raise about $3,300. The bishop goes to churches himself to preach about the need to help migrants.

Teams from the church go door-to-door, asking businesses to give. Four in five say yes, says volunteer Gregoria Sanchez Romero. Two bread store owners give extra loaves at the end of each day. A man with a chicken-sales company drops by every two or three weeks with fifty birds. On Sat.u.r.day, a market in Cordoba hands over all the vegetables it hasn't sold that week. Another donor regularly brings two or three large gunnysacks of sugar. People arrive at the church with smaller bundles of beans, oil, rice, and lentils. Some cook a little extra for dinner-and bring the leftovers. A few bring bags of cement, to help build the migrant shelter.

Perhaps the greatest gift has come from the church's priest. Over his lifetime, he had saved $37,500 to live on during his retirement. He told church members, "These people will keep on coming, more and more. We must build." Then, when he was sixty-three years old, he quietly donated the entire amount to buy the land to build the migrant shelter.

Others give time. Luis Hernandez Osorio, a small man with dark, intense eyes, puts in eight hours a day as an accountant and then another eight at the church. He confronts police problems and finds new donors. Each night, he picks up donated bread. Every eight days, he goes, a huge pot stowed in his car trunk, to a local fish store. The owner fills it with seafood. It feeds the migrants a main dish for two or three days. "Every day, I have to battle a lot of problems here. But I feel at peace," Hernandez says. "I always wanted to do something with my life. I feel satisfied."