Enrique's Journey Read Free Page A

about gangsters on the trains. In Tierra Blanca in the Mexican state of Veracruz, during a brief train stop, I feverishly tried to get the local police to find and arrest a notoriously vicious gangster named Blackie, after learning he was aboard the train I was about to reboard. Nearby, a train derailed right in front of mine. Train engineers have described incidents where migrants have been crushed as trains derail and cars tip over.
    At times, I came close to witnessing the worst the train had to offer. As I passed through the town of Encinar, Veracruz, I was riding between two hoppers with four other migrants. A teenage boy emerged from a railside food store to throw a roll of crackers to migrants on the train. A teenage migrant standing next to me was hungry. When the boy threw the roll toward the migrant beside me, it bounced off the train. As the migrant jumped off the hopper to run back for the crackers, he stumbled and fell backward. Both feet landed on the tracks. He had a split second to react. He yanked his feet back just before the wheels rolled over the track.
    Things weren’t much safer by the side of the rails. I walked along the river that flows by the town of Ixtepec, Oaxaca. It seemed tranquil, a very safe public spot. Above me was the main bridge that crosses the river, busy with trains and pedestrians. The next day, I interviewed Karen, a fifteen-year-old girl who had been raped by two gangsters she had seen on the trains. Karen told me she had been raped right under the river’s bridge. I had been alone one day before the rape at the very spot where Karen had been assaulted.
    In Chiapas, I hung out with Grupo Beta agents near the dangerous “El Manguito” immigration checkpoint. It is thick with bandits who target migrants. Suddenly we were on a high-speed chase on a two-lane road, trying to reach three bandits in a red Jeep Cherokee who had robbed a group of migrants and driven off with one of them, a twenty-two-year-old Honduran woman. I was in the bed of Grupo Beta’s pickup. The pickup pulled up alongside the Cherokee, trying to force it to stop. A Grupo Beta agent stood in the pickup bed. He locked and loaded his shotgun and aimed at the bandits’ vehicle. I was just feet from the Cherokee. I prayed that the bandits wouldn’t open fire.
    Farther north, human rights activist Raymundo Ramos Vásquez gave me a tour of the most isolated spots along the Rio Grande, places where migrants cross. We stumbled across a migrant preparing to swim north. He explained that the last time he had been here, municipal police officers had arrived. They had cuffed his hands behind his back, he said, and put his face in the river, threatening to drown him if he didn’t disclose where he had his money. As the migrant described the abuse, two police officers walked down the dirt path toward us. Their guns were drawn—and cocked.
    When I returned to the United States, I had a recurring nightmare: someone was racing after me on top of the freight trains, trying to rape me. It took months of therapy before I could sleep soundly again.
    Often in Mexico I was tense. On the trains, I was filthy, unable to go to the bathroom for long stretches, excruciatingly hot or cold, pelted for hours by rain or hail.
    Although I often felt exhausted and miserable, I knew I was experiencing only an iota of what migrant children go through. At the end of a long train ride, I would pull out my credit card, go to a motel, shower, eat, and sleep. These children typically spend several months making their way north. During that time, in between train rides, they sleep in trees or by the tracks, they drink from puddles, they beg for food. The journey gave me a glimmer of how hard this is for them.
    TRAIN-TOP LESSONS
    I thought I understood, to a great extent, the immigrant experience. My father, Mahafud, was born in Argentina after his Christian family fled religious persecution in Syria. My mother, Clara, born