a blend of pride and horror, most say, “I came on La Bestia,” which literally means “the beast,” and refers to the freight trains that cross Mexico, on top of which as many as half a million Central American migrants ride annually. There are no passenger services along the routes, so migrants have to ride atop the railcars or in the recesses between them.
Thousands have died or been gravely injured aboard La Bestia, either because of the frequent derailments of the old freight trains or because people fall off during the night. The most minor oversight can be fatal. Some compare La Bestia to a demon, others to a kind of vacuum that sucks distracted riders down into its metal entrails. And when the train itself is not the threat, it’s the smugglers, thieves, policemen, or soldiers who frequently threaten, blackmail, or attack the people on board. There is a saying about La Bestia: Go in alive, come out a mummy.
But, despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don’t think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along with it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half-stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.
La Bestia’s routes start either in the town of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, or in Tenosique, in the state of Tabasco—both towns near the Mexico-Guatemala border. They slowly make their way up to the U.S.-Mexico border, following either the eastern Gulf route to Reynosa, the border town near the southeasternmost tip of Texas, or the western routes that lead either to Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua, or to Nogales, in Sonora, which share borders with Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
The journey atop La Bestia’s freight trains ends at the U.S.-Mexico border. And there begins another journey: one that is not as dangerous, objectively speaking, but is equally terrifying in the children’s eyes. Once off La Bestia, and having reached the border, the coyotes’ job is usually done and the children are on their own. They try to turn themselves in to the migra, or Border Patrol, as soon as possible. They know their best bet is to be formally detained by Border Patrol officers: crossing the desert beyond the border alone is too dangerous, if not impossible. They also know that if they are not caught at this point, or if they do not surrender themselves to the law, it is unlikely that they will arrive at their final destination—the home of a relative in some city, usually far from the border. If the legal proceedings don’t begin now, their fate will be to remain undocumented, like many of their parents or adult relatives already in the United States. Life as an undocumented migrant is perhaps not worse than the life they are fleeing, but it is certainly not the life that anyone wants. So, the children who cross the border, into the desert, try to stick to the busier roads and walk openly along highways, until someone—hopefully an officer and not a vigilante—sees them.
I remember a teenager who, during an interview in court, told me of his increasing desperation when, after hours of walking the arid plains of New Mexico, the Border Patrol still hadn’t appeared. It was not until his second day of walking in the desert under the burning sun that a vehicle finally appeared on the far horizon. He stood in the middle of the road, waving his arms. And when the vehicle pulled over beside him, to his immense relief, two tall officers stepped out and detained him.
My mom always told me I was born under a lucky star, he said when he finished his story.
As soon as a child is in the custody of Border Patrol officials, he or she is placed in a detention center, commonly known as the hielera, or the “icebox.” The icebox derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody. The name also points out the fact that the detention centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat doesn’t go bad too quickly—naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs. The children are treated more like carriers of diseases than children. In July 2015, for example, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) filed a complaint after learning that in a detention center in Dilley, Texas, 250 children were mistakenly given adult-strength hepatitis A vaccinations. The children became gravely ill and had to be hospitalized.
By law, the maximum time a person can remain in the icebox is seventy-two hours, but children are often kept for longer, subject not only to the inhumane conditions and frigid temperatures but also to verbal and physical mistreatment. They sometimes have nowhere to lie down to sleep, are not allowed to use the bathrooms as frequently as they need to, and are underfed.
They only give out frozen sandwiches twice a day there, another teenager I once screened told me.
That’s all you ate? I asked.
No, not me.
What do you mean, not you?
I didn’t eat those things.
Why not?
Because they give belly-sadness.
As we drive from southwestern New Mexico toward Arizona, it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the uncomfortable irony of it: we are traveling in the direction opposite to the children whose stories we are now following so closely. As we get closer to the border and begin taking back roads, we do not see a single migrant—child or adult. We see other things, though, that indicate their ghostly presence, past or future. Along the narrow dirt road in New Mexico that goes from a ghost town called Shakespeare to another town called Animas we see a trail of flags that volunteer groups tie to trees or fences, indicating that there are tanks filled with water there for people to drink as they cross the desert. Occasionally, we are overtaken by big pickup trucks, and it’s hard not to imagine the men behind their steering wheels: big men with beards or shaved heads or abundant tattoos; vigilant, patriotic men who carry pistols and rifles by constitutional right and feel entitled to use them if they see a group of aliens walking in the desert. As we approach Animas, we also begin to see fleeting herds of Border Patrol cars like ominous white stallions racing toward the horizon.
We decide not to tell anyone in diners and gas stations that we are Mexican, just in case. But we are stopped a few times by Border Patrol officials and have to show our passports and display big smiles when we explain we are just writers and just on vacation. We have to confirm that yes, we are only writers, even if yes, we are also Mexican. Why are we there and what are we writing—they always want to know.
We are writing a Western, sir.
That’s what we tell them, that we are writing a Western. We also tell them we came to Arizona for the open skies and the silence and the emptiness—this second part, more true than the part about writing the Western, which is untrue. Handing back our passports, one official says sardonically:
So you come all the way down here for the inspiration.
We know better than to contradict anyone who carries a badge and a gun, so we just say:
Yes, sir.
Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.
We roll the windows up and keep driving. To distract ourselves from the aftertaste of the Border Patrol encounter, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle. One song that often pops up is “Straight to Hell” by the Clash. We didn’t suspect that that song would become a kind of leitmotif of our trip. Who would have known that a song partly about the post-Vietnam War “Amerasian” children and their exclusion from the American Dream would become,