All the women I talked to told the same story

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By SONIA NAZARIO
O
ne day, I was having a conversation in my kitchen
with Carmen, who came to clean my house twice
a month.
I asked her: did she want to have more
children? I thought she just had one young son.
Carmen was normally chatty, happy. But when I asked
her about having more children, she fell stone silent. Then,
she started sobbing.
She told me she had left four children behind in
Guatemala. She said she was a single mother—her husband
had left her for another woman. Most days, she could only
feed her children once, maybe twice. At night, they cried
with hunger.
She showed me how she would gently roll them over
in bed, and tell them: “Sleep face down, so your stomach
doesn’t growl so much.”
She has left her four children with their grandmother
in Guatemala and come north to work in Los Angeles, and
hasn’t seen them in 12 years.
“
All the women I talked to told the
same story: they left their children
with one promise: I’ll be back in a
year or two—at most.
Enrique’s kindergarten graduation photo,
taken shortly after his mother left him.
©photo courtesy of sonia nazario
SONIA NAZARIO is the author of the national bestseller Enrique’s Journey:
The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With His Mother, which
has been published in eight languages.
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I stood in my kitchen, stunned, asking myself
what kind of desperation does it take for a mother to leave her children, go 2,000 miles away, without knowing when or if she would see them again?
I soon learned three things: worldwide, migrants are no
longer predominantly men. Today, of the more than 214
million migrants circling the globe, more women migrate
than men. Many of these women, like my housecleaner,
were leaving children behind. In doing so, they were creating a new class of children—so-called “mobility orphans”.
Save the Children estimates there are tens of millions
of these mobility orphans worldwide—a million left behind
each year in Sri Lanka alone. And, as would later become
the case with my housecleaner, children left behind and in
desperation after years of not seeing their mothers often set
off on their own to find them, in what for many becomes a
modern-day odyssey.
Latin America was the first developing region in 1990
to have as many women migrate as men. In parts of the past
decade, three quarters of migrants leaving the Philippines
and Indonesia were women.
The United Nations has long focused on the benefits of
migration, both for sending and receiving countries. I stood
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9/10/13 5:10 PM
“
In Latin America, growing
family disintegration
spurred many single
mothers to migrate. In what
became the largest wave of
migration in United States
history since 1990, 51 per
cent of those coming were
women and children.
in my kitchen that morning with my housecleaner wondering: what were the benefits? What were the costs?
Those questions launched me on an amazing journey—
to Honduras, and on top of freight trains for three months
travelling up the migrant routes through Mexico. Women
migrants, I learned, came to take care of other people’s children as nannies, but weren’t there to see their own children
take their first steps, or hear their first words.
In Latin America, growing family disintegration
spurred many single mothers to migrate. In what became
the largest wave of migration in United States history since
1990, 51 per cent of those coming were women and children.
Women told me when their children cried at night, they
filled a big glass with water, stirred in a teaspoon of sugar or
a dollop of tortilla dough, to fill their stomachs with something. To them, leaving was the ultimate act of love; their
sacrifice meant their children might eat and perhaps even
study past the third grade.
All the women I talked to told the same story: they
left their children with one promise: I’ll be back in a year
or two—at most. Life in the United States was much harder
than advertised. Often, separations stretched into five or ten
years—or more. Their children got desperate to be with them
again. They told themselves: if my mom can’t come back to
me or send for me, I’m going to find her!
Today, there is a small army of children, about 100,000
per year, heading north to the United States unlawfully and
alone—without either parent—from Mexico and Central
America. The number of unaccompanied children doubled
in the past year and is expected to jump again this year.
Children aren’t just coming to be with their mothers;
they are fleeing increasing violence fuelled by transnational
gangs vying for turf to move drugs north. These battles have
given Honduras and El Salvador the highest homicide rates
in the world. In El Salvador, 9-year-old boys describe being
recruited by gangs as they walk home from elementary
school. The warning: join, or we will kill your parents, rape
your sister.
I wrote about the millions of mobility orphans through
the true story of one boy, Enrique, whose mother leaves him
in Honduras when he is five years old to work in the United
States. Enrique begs his paternal grandmother, who he is left
with, “Cuando vuelve mi mami? When is my mother coming back?” Desperate to be with her, 11 years later he sets
off on his own to go find her. All he has is a scrap of paper
with her telephone number, and a burning question: Does
she still love me?
Virtually penniless, he travels the only way he can,
clinging to the tops of freight trains up the length of Mexico.
Thousands of children make this journey every year in
search of their mothers. The youngest I heard about was
a 7-year-old boy. I travelled with a 12-year-old boy going
in search of his mother. He was traversing four countries,
alone, navigating by little more than the arc of the sun.
From the moment Enrique crossed into Mexico, he was
hunted down like an animal by bandits alongside the tracks,
gangsters who control the train tops, and corrupt cops.
Today, the most feared narco-trafficking cartel in Mexico,
the Zetas, controls the train routes; they are kidnapping
22,000 migrants a year for ransom. Their favorite target:
children, using the slip of paper they carry with their mother’s telephone number to make demands in exchange for
the child’s life. Many children, who must get on and off the
trains away from the stations and while they are moving,
lose arms and legs to the train, called el tren de la muerte,
the train of death.
Enrique is nearly beaten to death by six thugs on top of
a freight train. He escapes one of the men who is strangling
him by flinging himself off the fast-moving train.
To write Enrique’s story, to show what this journey is like
for so many children, I spent two weeks with him in Mexico
near the United States border, and then went to Enrique’s
house in Honduras. From there, I did the journey, step by
step, exactly as Enrique had just weeks before. I travelled for
months, 1,600 miles, half of that on the top of seven freight
trains. I had many close calls and difficult experiences. A big
tree branch almost swept me off a train top. It got the teen
behind me, who flew off and down to the churning wheels
below. When I returned home to Los Angeles, I had nightmares of gangsters running after me on top of trains.
Despite what I had been through, I understood I had
experienced just a fraction of the danger children go through
on this journey. The journey also helped me understand
what drives these women and mobility orphans out of their
homelands. In Honduras, help wanted ads told women that
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if they were 28 years or older to not bother applying. The
children of mothers who stayed in Honduras in Enrique’s
neighbourhood often ended up working as scavengers in
this horrific dump. The journey helped me see a kind of
determination I could never have imagined—determination
no wall will stop. Enrique tries eight times to get through
Mexico—braving 122 days and 12,000 miles.
I saw migrants inflicted with horrible cruelty, and also
amazing acts of kindness. In South-Central Mexico, when
people in tiny towns along the tracks heard the whistle of
the train, I watched them rush out of their homes with bundles of food in their arms. They would wave, smile and shout
out to migrants perched on top of the trains. They threw
bread, tortillas, whatever fruit was in season—bananas,
pineapples, or oranges. If they didn’t have even that, they
lined up next to the tracks, and sent out a prayer to the
migrants atop the train.
These were the poorest Mexicans, who could barely
feed their own children. They gave, they said, because it was
Argentina to the United States—and as someone who has
written about the issue for nearly three decades. From my
perspective in the United States, I see it as an issue with
many shades of gray, with winners and losers.
The influx of migrants since 1990, the largest in United
States history, has indisputably helped; migrants have done
jobs Americans clearly don’t want to do and helped spur
the nation’s $13 trillion economy. Migrants, per one study,
have cut by 5 per cent the cost of all goods and services
everyone in the United States buys.
But there have been clear consequences. Take the 1 in
14 Americans, mostly African-American and Latino, who
don’t have a high school degree and are among the most
disadvantaged in our society. They have seen their wages
depressed because of competition from migrants.
Migrant women and children have also been hurt.
Certainly, mothers who migrate are able to send money
©photo courtesy of sonia nazario
The author atop a “train of death” in Mexico.
the right thing to do, the Christian thing to do, what Jesus
would do standing in their shoes.
Migration, the movement of people, is one of the biggest social and economic issues of our time. I come at this
issue with migration in my blood—my grandparents fled
Syria and Poland for Argentina; my parents migrated from
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home and, as a result, their children are able to eat well
and study. But after years apart, most of these children
resent and even walk up to the line of hating their mothers for leaving them. They feel abandoned. They tell their
mothers that even a dog doesn’t leave its litter. Many mothers lose what’s most precious to them—the love of their
sonia nazario  enrique’s journey
9/10/13 5:10 PM
“
There is still little to no
discussion of immigration as
an international development
issue, even though presidential
commissions have advocated
this as the only long-term
solution to unlawful migration
since the 1970s. Instead, the
focus has been on open trade,
the elusive promise of the North
Atlantic Free Trade Agreement,
to lift all boats through
development. And, countries
have furiously built walls.
children. Resentful children disproportionately join gangs
or get pregnant with an older man, searching for the love
they dreamed of having when they finally reunite with
their mothers.
Studies show mobility orphans have higher levels of
depression, lower academic levels, and greater physical
and emotional problems. Drug abuse is more common.
Enrique turned to glue sniffing in Honduras to fill the
void of his mother’s absence, an addiction he has found
hard to overcome.
In October 2013, as the United Nations holds a second High-level Dialogue on International Migration and
Development, it will once again focus on how to improve
the lives of all migrants, especially mobility orphans.
The migrants I met in Central America and along the
train tracks in Mexico stressed that if they could stay at
home with all they love—their family, culture, language,
and especially their children—they wouldn’t leave. Women
said they felt forced to leave, and told me that if they could
feed their children, clothe them and send them to school,
they would have stayed.
This exodus, they said, must be tackled at its source, in
terms of helping to create more jobs in developing countries. For the United States, that means working on the
lack of opportunity for women in just four countries that
send three-quarters of the women who come to the United
States without permission. We must bring everything to
this task: more microloans to help women start businesses, trade policies that give preference to goods from these
countries and help promoting education for girls. We must
promote more democratic governments that redistribute
wealth, the opposite of what the United States has historically done in the region. We must take billions spent on
useless things like walls and put that money into targeted
economic development.
Readers of Enrique’s Journey, perhaps the most widely
read book about immigrants in the United States today,
have taken this approach to heart. The story of one boy has
caused them to organize to build schools, water systems,
and homes for single mothers in Central America. One
California high school raised $9,000 to provide a microloan to help coffee-growing women in Olopa, Guatemala
expand their business, so that more mothers could stay at
home with their children.
Today, the United States Congress is debating the same
old approach to regulating migration: amped up border
enforcement, guest worker programmes, and pathways to
citizenship—all approaches that have done little to help
people stay at home. These approaches sealed in migrants
who would prefer to circulate back home, brought people
as temporary workers who never left, and caused the number of unlawful migrants to grow anew. Too often, we get
the migration policy that the strongest prison, agricultural,
high tech and business lobbies push for.
There is still little to no discussion of immigration as an international development issue, even though
presidential commissions have advocated this as the only
long-term solution to unlawful migration since the 1970s.
Instead, the focus has been on open trade, the elusive
promise of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, to
lift all boats through development. And, countries have
furiously built walls.
What if, instead, each developed country took on the
task of job creation for women in the handful of countries
that send them immigrants? Imagine if the United Nations
worked to coordinate a small percentage of the $406 billion
in yearly remittances that flow from migrants in developed
to developing countries to produce projects that create jobs.
Migrants shouldn’t have to rely on food throwers—the
kindness of strangers—for help. The United Nations, governments in developed countries, and non-governmental
organizations must become their champion in changing
the direction of what must be done. unc
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