American Dreaming
Why a man from El Salvador crossed the border — and why he sometimes wishes he hadn’t
When I was living in Miami last winter, I received a message on Facebook from an acquaintance in El Salvador. I had met him years ago when I visited the country. On Facebook, we chatted about my poor Spanish and the snowstorm in the Northeast. He told me his cousin lived in Miami and that I should say hello.
Several days later, he sent me another message:
“I am just thinking to travel illegally to the U.S. in two weeks.”
I wasn’t shocked. In a place like Ohio, where I’m from, illegal Mexican border crossings are something you read about. In Miami, it’s far more common to know people who have done this. No one knows exactly how many successfully sneak in, for obvious reasons, but one estimate from the Government Accountability Office suggested the number was 459,000 in 2004. That’s more than the population of the city of Miami. A decade later, by the looks of various other data, the influx has probably waned slightly.
My friend, whom I’ll call Juan, was planning to ride a bus more than 930 miles from El Salvador to Mexico City. At some point, he would rendezvous with coyotes and other migrants from Central America and Mexico. At the Mexico-U.S. border, in the city of Reynosa, they would scope out a place to wade across the Rio Grande into McAllen, Texas. If Border Patrol agents caught them, they would be thrown in jail for weeks and sent home. But if they crossed unseen, they would walk north for two days to another town. There, a van would pick them up and drive them to Houston. From Houston, more vans would shuttle the migrants to their final destinations. Juan’s would take him to Miami.
I knew many immigrants die trying to cross, but I didn’t ask Juan why he decided to risk it. It seemed obvious at the time. In his town, begging in San Salvador is considered a decent job. His brother made a good living selling pupusas — nixtamalized cornmeal filled with beans or cheese — from a cart. This requires startup capital. In rural El Salvador, a back-breaking agricultural job is much more common, though these jobs pay little and promise less.
Juan was 27 and, if tuition money hadn’t dried up, could have earned a college degree. He taught English to Catholic schoolchildren for $2 per hour; in the U.S. he could make seven or eight times that amount doing any number of odd jobs. Later, he insisted to me that whatever he earned in America would be solely for the purpose of returning to El Salvador to finish his English degree and find a job there. He believed he could help lift his country out of poverty if only he could lift himself out of poverty first.
For this kind of journey, coyotes are indispensable; they arrange transportation, lodging, food, and bribes. But coyotes require harsh fees. Juan needed $2,000, and he asked if I could loan him half. I consulted my girlfriend, a nonprofit immigration lawyer at the time, who advised against it. I consulted federal statutes, which forbid rendering help to anyone crossing illegally. A conviction for doing so could mean thousands in fines and 10 years in prison. I declined to loan Juan money.
But I was curious about his plans, and we continued to trade messages. We even talked on Skype, where I met his mother, a slight, sweet woman who looks to be in her 60s. She was cooking something in a bare kitchen. Even today, she asks Juan to tell me, “God bless your friend.”
I learned that Juan had attempted to cross twice before, and both times he was arrested and jailed. Altogether, he spent months locked up waiting to be deported.
Despite this, I sensed an opportunity. Though helping Juan was against the law, I figured it would not be illegal for a journalist to accompany the group for a portion of the journey. I imagined there would be terrible risks, but if half-a-million people could do it every year, perhaps I could, too. On Facebook, I asked Juan, “Do you think I could come with you as a journalist?”
“Eh, no, it’s difficult and dangerous,” he said. “But I am going to keep you posted the day I leave from my country.”
“You can’t be persuaded to let me come?” I persisted. “I guess what I’m asking is would my presence make it more difficult and dangerous for you?”
“The thing is this kind of coyote works with some dangerous drug dealers like Los Zetas,” Juan said.
Los Zetas are a Mexican drug cartel known for hanging decapitated victims from trees and bridges. Journalists are among their favorite targets. I didn’t press the issue. “Oh, God,” I said. “Please be careful.”
Several weeks later, I heard from Juan. He was in Miami.
I met him at his cousin’s house, and he told me everything: Mexican frijoles are not as good as Salvadoran ones. The bus ride to Mexico City felt like eternity. The group included some 20 people, mostly from Guatemala, and a pregnant woman. The Rio Grande was frigid at night, the distant shore dark and uncertain. In Texas, Border Patrol agents did not see them, but their next imprisonment was worse than any federal roundup. They spent days in a strange house at gunpoint — likely one of the “stash houses” proliferating throughout southern Texas, where undocumented crossers await smugglers to ferry them onward. Juan spent these days in prayer, believing silence and obedience would save him. At last, coyotes paid what Juan called their ransom: $500 a head, which they must repay. Finally free, they walked through the desert toward Corpus Christi, a period of desperation marked by cold nights on the move, hot days hunkered down, and ever-present thirst. The pregnant woman, weak and dazed, could not go on. They left her in the desert to return to a nearby town. If she made it, her child may now be a U.S. citizen. Juan doesn’t know.
As he told me this story, I realized that if I, a white Midwesterner with poor Spanish skills, had tried to tag along, there was a good chance I would have been killed or held for a much greater ransom. Hundreds of migrants die each year. Their bones, clutching meager belongings, are discovered in the desert. I was stupid to ask.
One of the first things I did when Juan arrived was to drive him around the city. He had seldom been to San Salvador, let alone a major American metropolis. I picked him up from his cousin’s house in Allapattah, a neighborhood reputed for crime and blight.
My first inclination was to show him where I lived, but as I headed toward Brickell, Miami’s financial district, I decided to go somewhere else. Even though I was sharing a 450-square-foot studio apartment with my girlfriend and splitting the modest rent payments, it was a 23-story skyscraper with an 11th-floor pool deck nonetheless, and Juan was still wearing the same clothes in which he waded across the Rio Grande.
Instead, I showed him the causeways and Miami Beach, where Collins Avenue coursed with bikinis and Lambourghinis. Hoping to distract him, I asked about his plans. He told me he couldn’t wait to earn enough money to go back to El Salvador.
Over the next several days, he sent me text messages asking whether I could find him a job, loan him some money to buy clothes or give him a ride to the Western Union. Anticipating more of these kinds of requests, I made him an offer: If he taught me Spanish twice a week, I’d give him $10 an hour. Most nights after work, I took him to a diner called Nuevo San Salvador, where we ordered pupusas with American ingredients that were never quite as good.
Weeks passed, and Juan’s eagerness slumped into despair. He was desperate for a job, but his social network was tiny. And the social network, for someone underground without papers, is all there is. He spent days alone in that Allapattah house, feeling homesick, feeling he’d made a grave error coming here.
One morning before I went to work, I dropped Juan off on an industrial strip somewhere west of the airport. Juan had finally connected through Craigslist with someone looking to hire a laborer, and he was scheduled for an interview. It was drizzling, and I left him there with his cousin and her two children, who would help him take the bus back home later.
The next day I asked him how it went. Not good, he said. The address was wrong, or Google maps sent me to the wrong place. Whatever the mixup, Juan spent the time instead pacing the rows of industrial bay doors offering help. His only success was with a Venezuelan manager who put him to work lifting boxes for an hour. At the end of it, he handed Juan $40 and said, “You need it more than I do.”
Months have passed, and although Juan seems happier now, he still struggles to find steady work. He owes money to a lot of people, including the coyotes who brought him here, and monthly rent in Miami is an annual salary for some people back home.
He wants to go north to other states where he has heard farm wages are consistent and easy to find. But there’s no promise there, either, just as the promise of the American good life that filters to El Salvador through Facebook and Skype turned out to be a projection of hope, not reality. Because the truth is, for people like Juan, it’s hard here, too.
