Enrique's Journey Part 8

Alfonso Pena Valencia, an architect, volunteers six nights a week to work as a security guard at the church from 7 P.M. to 1 A.M. On the seventh night, Sat.u.r.day, he guards until dawn. His wife, Rosita, administers first aid to migrants. Pena says, "I like it here. I want to help my brother."

For some, providing short-term shelter at the church is not enough. Maria del Carmen Ortega Garcia, a barrel-chested woman with a big smile, lets migrants sleep in a room in her house. They remind Ortega of her son. In 1995, her eighteen-year-old, Jose Geronimo, in the United States illegally, was deported from California. She does not know what happened after he was driven across the border. She never heard from him again. She started small, offering migrants a cup of coffee, then a place to bathe.

One twenty-two-year-old Honduran, Israel Sierra Pavon, begged for money from Ortega along the tracks. She gave him 6 pesos and told him to go to her house, the one with a pig leashed on the patio, for dinner. He has stayed for nine months for free, working and saving money to continue his journey. Ortega has let seventeen migrants stay-some for days, some for months.

Francisca Aguirre Juarez's one-room home is so cramped that the three beds are all shoved together along the back wall. Aguirre, a middle-aged woman who is missing most of her front teeth and is dressed in a sweater full of holes, shares one bed with her daughter. Her son shares the middle bed with a migrant. Two migrants sleep in the third bed. In two years, eighty migrants have shared the room with her family. Most stay a week. Aguirre says she feeds the police occasionally, to keep them on good terms. Still, her landlord has threatened to kick her out for housing so many people.

Aguirre sells memelitas, a masa snack filled with black beans, from a street corner near the tracks. She barely has enough to feed her own children. Yet all four times the train rolls by between 6 A.M. and 10 P.M., she goes out to the tracks.

She signals the train conductor.

"Go slow, please, I'm going to give food!" she yells.

Some oblige, some don't. "Muchachos! Comida! Guys! Food!" she says. She gives water, apples, socks, and sandwiches stuffed with beans. Often, she says, she gets up to feed migrants on the 1:30 A.M. and 3 A.M. trains, too.

"A lot of people want to h.o.a.rd money. Not me," says Aguirre, who started helping after she witnessed a twenty-five-year-old Honduran lose a leg trying to board a train. He screamed in pain for two hours until someone took him to a hospital. "I feel better if I help. They are suffering more than I do," she says.

Some residents offer protection from the police. When they see a police car coming or that officers are conducting a sweep, they unlatch their front gates and usher migrants in to hide in their gardens and backyards.

Baltasar Breniz avila, who lives two blocks from the tracks in Encinar, had fed a twenty-five-year-old Honduran migrant some tacos. The man was on his porch, getting ready to leave, when a blue-and-white state police car cruised down the dirt road.

Breniz whisked the migrant inside. The police knocked. "Turn him over! He's a migrant. We're going to arrest him. If you don't turn him over, we'll arrest you, too, for being a smuggler."

The police had pistols and machine guns. Breniz knew that people charged with smuggling can spend years in jail. Breniz, who sells rustic chairs door to door, tried to mask the terror he felt inside. He politely declined and said there was no reason to turn the man over. He told them the visitor was a relative from an outlying farm. The police retreated.

He let the migrant stay for an hour, until he was sure the coast was clear.

At Maria Auxiliadora, many church members, including its priest, have been intimidated by police officers for helping migrants. "If I see you doing this again, I'm taking you in," the officers warn. "It is a crime to help Central Americans."

Although humanitarian help is not against the law, this is not an idle threat, says Hernandez, the church volunteer. Five church members have been arrested. None were charged, but that may have been due to their willingness to pay a bribe to buy their freedom, says Hernandez. An entire family-a mother, father, and two sons-were taken in for giving three migrants a place to sleep. The police officers extorted 20,000 pesos from the family to set them free. Similarly, a church member, a taxi driver, gave five migrants a ride up the road. The state police freed him after he paid 30,000 pesos under the table, fearful that they might charge him with human trafficking.

Sometimes whole communities stand up to the police. Residents of El Campesino El Mirador, a railside hamlet nestled at the foot of a mountain, tell this story: El Campesino El Mirador was policed by officers from nearby Nogales. One afternoon in late May 2000, a northbound freight train pulled onto a siding to let a southbound train pa.s.s. At that moment, police officers emerged from a bar by the tracks. Townspeople say the officers looked drunk. The police saw about fifty migrants on top of the stopped train and headed toward the freight cars to arrest them. Migrants jumped off and ran toward the mountain.

The police gave chase. Townspeople say the officers began to shoot. One bullet hit a Honduran girl, seventeen or eighteen years old, in the arm. She was eight months pregnant and said it was because she had been raped by a policeman in Chiapas.

The girl clawed her way up the mountain. After about one hundred yards, she reached a small concrete platform. On the platform stood a white cross. Panting and bleeding, she stopped, unable to go farther.

Three police officers caught up to her, grabbed her hair, kicked her, and beat her with their nightsticks.

"Leave me alone!" she cried. "You've already shot me. I'll lose this child."

Maria Enriqueta Reyes Marquez, thirty-eight, of El Campesino El Mirador, climbed up to the cross. She says she could see that a bullet had splintered a bone in the girl's arm. "It's as if they were hitting a dog," she recalls, her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears. "They treat dogs better than that. They don't punish criminals, but they beat up these poor folks. Why? Why?"

Reyes says she demanded: "Stop hitting her." She and about fifty other people encircled the girl and the cross. They turned on the officers. "Cowards!" "Why are you hitting her?"

Two of the officers ran down the hillside, away from the angry mob. Someone kicked the third in the b.u.t.tocks until he ran as well.

Afterward, the townspeople found a local man dead in a ditch near the railroad tracks. They a.s.sumed that he had been killed when the officers began shooting. Now the people's rage boiled over.

The next day, five hundred residents of El Campesino El Mirador and two nearby towns marched to the city hall in Nogales, where all of the officers were from. They surrounded it. Some held rocks and sticks. They demanded the release of any migrants apprehended the day before-fifteen in all, some of whom were beaten.

Reyes, who had walked two and a half hours to Nogales, says she shouted at the mayor, "We are human. We should treat people in a humane way. It's okay to send people back. But they shouldn't shoot them, beat them this way."

The people of El Campesino El Mirador told the mayor of Nogales to keep his police out of their town.

Samuel Ramirez del Carmen, director of the Red Cross in nearby Mendoza, Veracruz, confirms that his paramedics were sent to treat a pregnant migrant who had been shot by Nogales police officers and that protests did run the police out of town.

Local news reporter Julian Ramos Hernandez says that eight police officers were ultimately fired over the incident. "The police were firing at the migrants," Ramos says. "People were indignant."

For a month, Reyes says, other migrants from the train stayed on the mountain, afraid to come down. Three times each day, people trudged up to the palm-studded ridge of the hill to bring them food and water. The police, she says, have not been back.

NEW CARGO.

Enrique is hungry, but he fears that the half-dozen rolls from the food throwers might be all there is to his good fortune, so he stashes them for later. In little more than an hour, the train nears a town: Cordoba.

The cargo is beginning to change. It is valuable and more easily damaged-Volkswagens, Fords, and Chryslers. Security guards check the freight cars, catch every rider they can, and hand them over to the authorities. More important, says Cuauhtemoc Gonzalez Flores, an official of the Transportacion Ferroviaria Mexicana railroad, is the fact that if a migrant falls and is injured or killed, it costs $8 a minute to stop the train, often for hours, until investigators arrive.

A sewage stream appears by the tracks. Cordoba is getting close. The migrants finish their water, because it is hard to run fast holding bottles. They tie sweaters or extra shirts around their waists. Enrique grabs his bag of bread. About 10 P.M., he smells a familiar cue: a coffee-roasting factory next to the red-brick station. As the train slows, he leaps and flees.

He eludes the station's security guards and eases to a walk. He sits on a sidewalk one block north of the station. Two police officers approach.

His odds are better if he does not bolt. He tucks his bread into a crevice. He swallows his fright and tries to look unconcerned.

The officers, in navy blue uniforms, walk straight up to him.

He does not move, even flinch. Cops can sense fear. They can tell if someone is illegal. You have to be calm, he says to himself. You can't look afraid or hide. You have to look right at them.

The police do not bear gifts. They pull out pistols. "If you run, I'll shoot you," one says, aiming at Enrique's chest. They take him and two younger boys, sitting nearby, to a cavernous railroad shed, where seven other officers are holding twenty migrants. It is a full-scale sweep.

They line up the migrants against a wall. "Take everything out of your pockets."

Only a bribe, Enrique knows, will keep him from being deported back to Central America. He has 30 pesos, about $3, that he earned lifting rocks and sweeping near the tracks in Tierra Blanca. He had briefly gotten off the train in Tierra Blanca, in part so he could earn enough to try to buy his freedom if he was caught by the police. Some officers will let you go for 20 pesos. Others demand 50-or more-and then turn you over to la migra to be deported anyway. Now he prays the coins he has will be enough.

One officer pats him down and says to empty his pockets.

Enrique drops his belt, a Raiders cap, and the 30 pesos. He glances at his fellow migrants. Each is standing behind a little pile of belongings.

"Salganse! Vayanse, ya! Get out! Leave!"

He will not be deported. But he pauses. He screws up his courage. "Can I get my things back, my money?"

"What money?" the officer replies. "Forget about it, unless you want to have your trip stop here."

Enrique turns his back and walks away.

Even in Veracruz, where strangers can be so kind, the authorities cannot be trusted. The chief of state police in nearby Fortin de las Flores will not comment on the incident.

Exhausted, Enrique retrieves his bag of bread, climbs onto a flatbed truck, and sleeps. At dawn, he hears a train. He trots alongside a freight car and clambers aboard, holding his bread.

THE MOUNTAINS.

The tracks, smoother now, begin to climb. It grows cooler. The train pa.s.ses sixty-foot-tall stalks of bamboo. It crosses a long bridge over a deep canyon. It rolls through putrid white smoke from a Kimberly-Clark factory that turns sugarcane pulp into Kleenex and toilet paper.

As he pushes north, Mexico changes. In Oaxaca, he rolled through cattle country. It was so hot, the tracks behind him looked like a squiggly line, warped by heat. It was so humid that green moss b.a.l.l.s grew on the electrical wires by the tracks. Enrique pa.s.sed a river that was a block wide. He was drenched in sweat. When the train slowed, the smell of perspiration washed over him.

In Veracruz, he rode through rows of silvery pineapple plants and lush fields of tall, thin sugarcane stalks that brushed up against the train. He saw sugar mill smokestacks and homes where people put day-old tortillas on their tin roofs to dry. All around him were swamps and mosquitoes. He had to watch closely for bees. He had heard that many are Africanized bees, and when smoke from the locomotive angers them, they swarm and attack migrants on top of the cars.

As he pushes north, the trains keep changing, too. Tracks are fastened to concrete ties, welded, and better maintained. The freight trains are longer and seem to glide more smoothly, roll more rapidly, and derail less frequently. Because there are more trains and because so many migrants have been hurt or detained back in Chiapas, fewer riders are on board. On some trains, Enrique sees only a dozen others.

In Orizaba, the train changes crews. Enrique asks a man standing near the tracks, "Can you give me one peso to buy some food?" The man inquires about his scars. They are from the beating he got on top of the train, a little more than a week ago now. He gives Enrique 15 pesos, about $1.50.

Enrique runs to buy soda and cheese to go with his bread. He looks north. Beyond a range of verdant mountains he sees the snow-covered Pico de Orizaba, the highest summit in Mexico. Now it will turn icy cold, especially at night, much different from the steamy lowlands. Enrique begs two sweaters. Before the train pulls out, he runs from car to car, looking into the hollows at the ends of the hoppers, where riders occasionally discard clothing. In one, he finds a blanket.

As the train starts, Enrique shares his cheese, soda, and rolls with two other boys, also headed for the United States. One is thirteen. The other is seventeen. Silently, Enrique thanks the food throwers again for the bread.

He relishes the camaraderie: how riders take care of one another, pa.s.s along what they know, divide what they have. Migrants will often designate one person to look out for trouble while the others rest. They give one another advice. In spots along the route where the train slows and migrants sprint from the shadows to board, reaching for the ladders, migrants riding atop the cars shout out if the train is going too fast.

"Don't do it! You'll get nailed!" they yell.

When Enrique lands an extra shirt or a tip about where to avoid the police, he shares. Other migrants have been generous with him. They have told him Mexican words they have learned. One offered a bit of soap when Enrique slipped into a shallow green river to bathe.

Enrique realizes that the friendships will be fleeting. Very few who set out together, including brothers, end up together. Often, migrants abandon an injured member of their group rather than risk being caught by the authorities. As he waits in Veracruz for a train to leave, a thirty-one-year-old Salvadoran recalls how he recently watched a man get his right leg cut off as he was trying to elude la migra at a train stop. The Salvadoran stripped off his shirt and used it to wrap a tourniquet around the leg. Then he ran away, fearful la migra would arrest him.

"Don't leave me!" the injured man cried out. The authorities said the man died later that day.

Often, between train rides, Enrique prefers to sleep alone in a tall clump of gra.s.s, away from other migrants, knowing it will make him less of a target. Still, camaraderie often means survival. "I could get to the north faster alone," he figures, "but I might not make it."

The mountains close in. Enrique invites the two boys to share his blanket. Together they will be warmer. The three jam themselves between a grate and an opening on top of a hopper. Enrique stuffs rags under his head for a pillow. The car sways, and its wheels click-clack quietly. They sleep.

The train enters a tunnel, the first of thirty-two in the c.u.mbres de Acultzingo, the Peaks of Acultzingo. Each tunnel is named for a state in Mexico. Migrants tick off the states they have pa.s.sed-and the many they still have to go. Outside is bright sun. Inside is darkness so black that riders cannot see their hands. They shout, "Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!" and listen for the echo. Sometimes the tail of the train hasn't left one tunnel before the locomotive dives into another. The freight cars creak as they turn the curves. Enrique and his friends sleep on. Back in the daylight, the train hugs a hillside. Below, a valley is filled with fields of corn, radishes, and lettuce, each a different hue of green.

El Mexicano is the longest tunnel. For eight minutes, the train vanishes inside. Black diesel smoke rises, hugging the tops of the cars.

It burns the lungs and stings the eyes. Some of the migrants bolt down the ladders, trying to escape the noxious haze. Enrique's eyes are closed, but his face and arms turn gray. His nose runs black soot. Engineers fear El Mexicano. If a locomotive overheats, they must stop. Riders spring for the arched exits, gasping for clean air.

Back outside, ice forms on the train cars. Migrants huddle between the cars or with strangers, seeking protection from the biting wind. Riders ache and shiver. Many don't have a blanket or a sweater. Some wear T-shirts. Their lips crack, and their eyes grow dull. They hug themselves. Three cram into the hole at the end of a hopper. To fit, they must sit on one another, hands across the chest, heads down. They pull their shirts over their mouths to warm themselves with their breath. When the train slows, they jog alongside to ward off the cold.

Some risk moving forward to the last of the train's three locomotives to press against the engine. Some stand in the warm plumes of diesel smoke. Others jump inside hoppers full of sand or grain, but only if they can find cars that are full enough that they will be able to crawl out. As night falls, some of the older migrants drink whiskey. Too much, and they tumble off. Others gather old clothing and trash and build fires on the ledges over the wheels of the hoppers. They hold their hands close to the fire, then press their palms to their frigid faces.

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 Teotihuacan.

Then he sees switches and semaph.o.r.es. Housing developments. A billboard for Paradise Spa. A sewage ditch. Taxis. The train slows for the station at Lecheria. 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 Ma.s.s 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 Lecheria, one resident, Olivia Rodriguez 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. Rodriguez 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, Rodriguez 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, Rodriguez 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," Rodriguez 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 Lecheria, a gritty industrial neighborhood on the northwestern outskirts of Mexico City. Enrique is surrounded by smokestacks. There is a sc.r.a.p 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 gra.s.s.

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 Lecheria to leave any cars with combustible contents. On their way north, they stop to pick the cars back up. Fifteen trains leave Lecheria every twenty-four hours, says Jose Patricio Sanchez Arellano, who handles human resources for Lecheria and other stations for Ferrocarril y Terminal del Valle de Mexico.

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, Transportacion 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 Lecheria, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 Potosi, 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 gla.s.s 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.