Enrique's Journey Part 6

STAYING AWAKE.

The Iron Worm squeaks, groans, and clanks-black tankers, rust-colored boxcars, and gray hoppers winding north on a single track that parallels the Pacific coast. Off to the right are hillsides covered with coffee plants. Cornstalks grow up against the rails. The train moves through a sea of plantain trees, lush and tropical.

By early afternoon, it is 105 degrees. Enrique's palms burn when he holds on to the hopper. He risks riding no-hands. Finally, he strips off his s.h.i.+rt and sits on it. The locomotive blows warm diesel smoke. People burn trash by the rails, sending up more heat and a searing stench. Many migrants have had their caps stolen, so they wrap their heads in T-s.h.i.+rts. They gaze enviously at villagers cooling themselves in streams and was.h.i.+ng off after a day of fieldwork and at others who doze in hammocks slung in shady spots near adobe and cinder-block homes. The train cars sway from side to side, up and down, like bobbing ice cubes.

Enrique's head throbs. The sun reflects off the metal. It stings his eyes, and his skin tingles. It drains the little energy he has left. He moves around the car, chasing patches of shade. For a while, he stands on a narrow ledge at the end of a fuel tanker. It is just inches above the wheels. He cannot let himself fall asleep; one good shake of the train, and he would tumble off.

Moreover, the Mara Salvatrucha street gangsters, some deported from Los Angeles, always prowl the train tops looking for sleepers. Many MS gangsters settle in Chiapas after committing crimes in the United States and being expelled to their home countries in Central America. The police in Chiapas are more forgiving of gangs than those in El Salvador or Honduras. "There, the police don't arrest you. They kill you," says Jose Eduardo Aviles, twenty-five, who was deported from Los Angeles to El Salvador and settled in Chiapas along the tracks.

The MS control the tops of freight trains operating north of the Rio Suchiate, where many migrants going to the United States begin their trek through Mexico. They rob migrants riding the trains. Migrants, who are often afraid to press charges, make ideal victims.

About two hundred street gangsters in Chiapas share the rolling criminal enterprise. Father Flor Maria Rigoni, the priest at the Albergue Belen migrant shelter, counts nineteen groups. Each controls a specific part of the train route and certain stations. Periodically, the groups meet to decide who gets what.

"We ask for money to take people to the U.S. on top of our trains," says Jorge Mauricio Mendoza Pineda, twenty-four, describing what he and his Mara Salvatrucha gang do in Chiapas. "They give me their money. If people treat me well, I treat them well. If they don't, I don't.... If someone says, 'Please don't kill me,' I won't listen."

Before the train leaves, the gangsters roam the Tapachula depot, eyeing which migrants are buying food and where they stash their cash afterward. They try to get friendly with the migrants, telling them they have already done the train ride. Maybe they can offer tips? Many of the gangsters wear white plastic rosaries around their necks so the migrants will be less suspicious. They ask, "Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you have any money?"

Ten or twenty board the train, armed with machetes, knives, bats, lead pipes, and pistols. When the train gains speed, they surround a group of migrants. They tell them: hand over your money or die. Drugs embolden them. The gangsters carry marijuana and rocks of crack cocaine in the headbands of their baseball caps. A train engineer, Emilio Canteros Mendez, often sees the armed gangs through his rearview mirror. Fights erupt on top of the boxcars. Migrants who anger the gangsters because they don't have money or resist are regularly tossed off the moving train or left dead on the tops of the cars, to be discovered by train workers at the next stop.

Gangsters' warnings to migrants not to go to the police are ruthlessly enforced. Julio Cesar Cancino Galvez, with Grupo Beta Sur, recalls how a group of about thirty migrants at the Tapachula train station asked him why the authorities weren't clamping down on the gangsters. Cancino told them they needed witnesses. He urged the migrants to step forward and report abuses. One nineteen-year-old Honduran in the crowd spoke up. He described his a.s.sailant in detail.

Hours later, the Red Cross asked Cancino if he could help an injured migrant. It was the same Honduran teenager. His right ribs were broken. His entire chest and face were badly bruised. He spoke slowly, in a whisper, clasping his chest. Two gangsters had overheard his description and kicked him mercilessly. "Next time, we kill you," the gangsters told him. The teenager, afraid for his life, asked to be deported.

Many of the migrants on Enrique's train huddle together, hoping for safety in numbers. They watch for anyone with tattoos, especially gangsters who have skulls inked around their ankles-one skull, police say, for every person they have killed. Some wear black knit hats they can pull down over their faces. Their brutality is legendary. Migrants tell of nine gangsters who hurled a man off their train, then forced two boys to have s.e.x together or be thrown off, too.

Enrique has heard of the most dangerous gangsters: El Indio, who claims the Guatemalan side of the Mexican border; Blackie, a chubby Salvadoran with dark skin and MS tattooed on his forehead, whose territory stretches from the border to Arriaga in northern Chiapas; and El Yaga, Porkie, and Home-boy.

During his first attempts north, a chance meeting saved Enrique from the worst of the gangs. As he set out on his trip, he noticed another teenager, a gangster named El Brujo, at the bus station in Honduras waiting to go to the Mexican border. Enrique doesn't like gangs. But as the two spent hours traveling through Honduras and Guatemala together, they became friends. On their first train ride through Chiapas, El Brujo introduced Enrique to a dozen other MS members, among them Big Daddy, who is skinny and short; El Chino (the Chinaman), who has slanted eyes; and El Payaso (the Clown), who has a big mouth and eyes. On subsequent trips, when he was deported, he always stuck with one of these gang members to protect himself from any attacks.

On his seventh trip, the convenient relations.h.i.+p ends. He is on the train with El Brujo and two other MS gangsters, who are carrying machetes. One of them is upset because a member of the rival 18th Street gang has stolen his s.h.i.+rt during a train stop in Chiapas. The MS gangsters decide to retaliate and throw the gangster off the train. Enrique refuses to partic.i.p.ate, creating a rift. "If you are MS, you have to kill 18th Streeters. And if you are 18th Street, you must kill MS. I wasn't like that," Enrique says.

After the fight with his friends, halfway through Chiapas, the gang members stop riding with Enrique. That night, without their protection, the six men beat him on top of the train. Now, for a second time, he is alone on a train. He must stay alert.

Some migrants, after days without sleep, nap on their feet, using belts or s.h.i.+rts to strap themselves to posts at the ends of the hoppers. Others get off the train and stretch out across the rails, using one as a footrest and the other as a pillow. They believe it is the only way to catch sleep and not miss the next train-they trust that the vibrations from the locomotive will wake them. Some also believe, mistakenly, that snakes cannot slither over the rails, so they sleep there for protection. Exhausted, many sleep so soundly they do not hear the trains bearing down on them: the earsplitting horn, the screaming brakes. They lose limbs and are sometimes decapitated. By the time they see the migrants on the rails, train drivers know they don't have enough distance to stop the train. Many say they simply ask G.o.d for forgiveness and drive on.

Enrique allows himself to doze only on trains farther north, where the gangsters no longer control the tops of the trains. There, he jams his body into the crevice on top of a hopper, next to the trapdoors used to fill the car. Or he waits until the train rounds a curve, giving him a good view of all of the cars. He spots a boxcar with its door open. When the train slows, he jumps off and races to the boxcar, jumping inside for a quick nap.

In Chiapas, most train riders struggle to stay awake. Dagoberto Hernandez Aguilar uses the memory of his first train ride to stay up. Two teenagers on top of a nearby boxcar dozed. The train suddenly lurched forward. The two slid off. He is not sure if they survived. He chants one sentence to himself, over and over, as he rides north: "It could have been me." Migrants take amphetamines, slap their own faces, do squats, talk to one another about how much money they'll make in the United States, tell jokes, pour drops of alcohol into their eyes, and sing. At 4 A.M. the train sounds like a chorus.

Today, Enrique is terrified of another beating. Every time someone new jumps onto his car, he tenses. Fear, he realizes, helps to keep him awake, so he decides to induce it. He climbs to the top of the tank car and takes a running leap. With arms spread, as if he were flying, he jumps to one swaying boxcar, then to another. Some have four- to five-foot gaps. Others are nine feet apart.

The train pa.s.ses into northern Chiapas. Enrique sees men with hoes tending their corn and women inside their kitchens patting tortillas into shape. Cowboys ride past and smile. Fieldworkers wave their machetes and cheer the migrants on: "Que bueno!" Mountains draw closer. Plantain fields soften into cow pastures. Enrique's train slows to a crawl. Monarch b.u.t.terflies flutter alongside, overtaking his car.

As the sun sets and the oppressive heat breaks, he hears crickets and frogs begin their music and join the migrant chorus. The moon rises. Thousands of fireflies flicker around the train. Stars come out to s.h.i.+ne, so many they seem jammed together, brilliant points of light all across the sky.

The train nears San Ramon, close to the northern state line. It is past midnight now, and the judicial police are probably asleep. Train crews say this is where the police stage their biggest shakedowns. One conductor says the officers, fifteen at a time, stop the trains. They grab fleeing migrants by their s.h.i.+rts. The conductor has heard them say, "If you move, I'll kill you. I'll break you in two." Then, "Give us what you've got, or we send you back."

At nearby Arriaga, the chief of the judicial police, or Agencia Federal de Investigacion, denies that his agents stop trains in San Ramon and rob migrants. The chief, Sixto Juarez, suggests that any robbing is done by gangsters or bandits who impersonate judicial officers.

Enrique has been caught here before. He had taken his shoes off to dry blistered feet. Barefoot, he couldn't outrun the police. Today, his feet are still damp from his race around La Arrocera. But he has left his shoes on, ready to bolt.

Enrique greets the dawn without incident. The stars recede. The sky lightens behind the mountains to the east, and mist rises off the fields on both sides of the tracks. Men trot by on burros with tin milk containers strapped to their saddles, starting their morning deliveries.

Enrique figures that one in ten migrants makes it this far. Mario Campos Gutierrez, supervisor of Grupo Beta Sur, estimates that half eventually get here-after repeated attempts. One migrant says, "I've done the most difficult part." Another: "When I get to this point, I begin to sing hallelujah."

Enrique puts Chiapas behind him. He still has far to go, but he has faced the beast eight times now, and he has lived through it. It is an achievement, and he is proud of it.

DEVOURED.

Many migrants who first set out on the train with Enrique have been caught and deported. Others have fared worse; they are left broken by Chiapas. These migrants don't talk of The Pilgrim's Train, or of The Iron Horse. They have another name for the train: El Tren Devorador. The Train That Devours.

At the rate of nearly one every other day, the Red Cross estimates, U.S.-bound Central American migrants who ride freight trains lose arms, legs, hands, or feet. The estimate, offered by Martin Edwin Raba.n.a.les Luttman, chief of training for the Red Cross ambulance corps in Tapachula, is for the Mexican state of Chiapas alone. It does not count those who die instantly when they are cut in half or decapitated.

They fall from the trains for a variety of reasons. Some fall asleep and roll off; others are thrown by the street gangs who control the train tops. Because the migrants try to fool authorities and pa.s.s themselves off as Mexican, they carry no identification. If they die, their bodies are lowered, nameless, into common graves. In Tapachula, they end up down a hole in the cemetery with fetuses and stillborn babies.

At Arriaga, in northern Chiapas, snapshots of the dead are placed in a black book on Police Chief Reyder Cruz Toledo's desk. Some pictures are so new that he hasn't pasted them in yet.

In most photos, the eyes are open.

The chief keeps the book handy, hoping someone will identify the bodies. No one, he says, ever comes to look.

Carlos Roberto Diaz Osorto, seventeen, of Honduras, had almost crossed Chiapas. Carlos lies in bed number 1 of the trauma unit at Hospital Civil in the town of Arriaga in southern Mexico. Four days before he was brought in, Carlos had seen a man get both legs cut off by a freight train. But he had pushed fear out of his mind. He was going to the United States to find work.

At a curve near Arriaga, where the trains brake, Carlos raced alongside, asking himself, "Should I get on or not?" His cousins grabbed on to the sixth car from the end. Carlos panicked. Would he be left behind?

The train came to a bridge. Carlos did not give up. He crossed the span, jumping from one railroad tie to another. His shoelaces were loose. His left shoe flew off. Then his right shoe. He reached for a ladder on a fuel tanker, but the car was moving too fast, and he let go. He grabbed a railing.

The tanker jerked hard. Carlos held on, but he could feel air rus.h.i.+ng beneath the car, sucking his legs in, close to the wheels. His fingers uncurled. He tried to bounce his feet off the wheels and push away. But as he let go, the air pulled him in. The wheels flattened his right foot, then sliced through his left leg above the knee.

"Help me! Help me! It hurts!" he screamed. He began to pant, to sweat, to ask for water, not sure anyone could hear him.

Paramedics from the Mexican Red Cross found him lying by the tracks. He had lost nearly a third of his blood, but the hot rails had cauterized many of his arteries. The medics applied two tourniquets. A doctor cut his bones, then sealed each artery and vein. He stretched skin over the openings and sutured them shut. Sometimes there are no drugs available to stave off infection, but Carlos was lucky. The Red Cross located some penicillin.

Many migrants who lose limbs to the train end up back in Tapachula, a dozen blocks from the depot where they first boarded the train, at the Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd. The shelter director, Olga Sanchez Martinez, tries to heal migrants left deeply wounded by the beast.

Olga is a pet.i.te middle-aged woman with silky black hair that touches her hips and a simple white rosary strung around her neck. She is always in motion, impatient to find solutions to problems. She buys blood and medicine so migrants won't die. She nurses them until they can be taken back home. "No one tells me something can't be done. Everything can be cured. Nothing is impossible," Olga says.

Says the hospital surgeon, Jose Luis Solorzano, "Without her, a lot of patients would have died."

At the hospital, almost all tell Olga they wish the beast would have killed them rather than leave them like this. They seethe. They curse G.o.d. Why didn't he protect them? They curse Olga. Their eyes speak fear. Who will ever marry them like this? How will they ever work, much less till a field again? "Let me die," they say, pus.h.i.+ng Olga away. They tell her not to dress their stumps and wounds. They refuse to eat. Some try to hang themselves.

She perches on a corner of their hospital beds. She strokes their hair. She tells them that G.o.d has spared them for a reason. "If he wanted, he could have killed you. But he didn't. He left your eyes open," she says. When you are in this much pain and despair, she tells them, there is only one place to find strength. "G.o.d has a plan for you," she says. "You will learn to live-in a different way."

Then she tells them a story about herself.

When I was seven, she begins, I had an intestinal disease that went untreated for lack of money to buy medicine. It wrecked havoc on my insides. From then, off and on, I was gravely ill. At eighteen, I temporarily went blind and mute and had boils on my arms. My hair fell out. For thirty-eight days, I lay in a coma-sixty-six pounds of skin and bones. A year later, when I was well enough to work at a tortilla factory, a machine tore two fingertips off my left hand. She holds out her hand to the migrant. Plagued by constant stomach pain, so weak I couldn't get out of bed for months at a time, she tells them, I tried to slit my wrists.

In 1990, a doctor told me I had cancer and months left to live. I had two small children who would be left with my husband, who was once a womanizing alcoholic.

I was never very religious, but that day I went to church. I kneeled. I prayed. "They say there is a G.o.d. Why don't you cure me? Let me see my children grow, if only a little bit?" I made a pact: heal me, and I will help others.

The migrants listen.

She tells them she studied the Bible. It told her to help the weak, the hungry. She began visiting patients at a local public hospital. One year later, she saw a thirteen-year-old Salvadoran boy who had lost both legs trying to board a train. She walked home in tears. How, she asked G.o.d, could he be so cruel? The hospital pushed the penniless migrant out before he was healed. Olga brought the boy to recuperate at her humble home. Three days later, there was another young Salvadoran at the hospital who had lost both arms. "Don't feel alone. I will help you," she told him. She brought him home, too.

She taught herself, watching doctors, how to dress their wounds. Soon she had twenty-four migrants at home, so many she could barely open her front door. She moved the furniture outside so everyone could fit. Olga's husband helped dress and wash boys without arms. Olga begged money for food, medicine, and wheelchairs and to get migrants home. In 1999, she opened a shelter for injured migrants in a tiny former tortilla factory someone lent her.

As she finishes, she leans forward. She tells them she has never had a serious illness since she made her pledge in church that day. "G.o.d," she says, "has never left me alone."

She reaches out with her mangled hand. "G.o.d needs you. He doesn't need you with all your limbs. He needs your heart. You have much to give."

She confesses it has not been easy. Each day, at least one new wounded migrant pa.s.ses through the shelter's lime green doors. They are logged into an intake book with their names and notations on which body parts they are missing or how they were otherwise injured. She has treated more than 1,500 wounded migrants since the shelter opened. It is a never-ending stream. Those who don't fit in the four bedrooms' fifteen beds sleep in a long hallway on the floor.

She works for free, from dawn until late at night, seven days a week, to obtain money for food, units of blood, medicine, prostheses, and a sc.r.a.p of land to build a permanent shelter. She sells tacos, pork rinds, cakes, chopped fruit, and donated bread in front of the hospital. Occasionally, a few churches in Chiapas let her solicit donations. She goes from car to car, begging, with a picture of a mutilated migrant she's trying to help and the prescription she must fill. People often tell her she's crazy to help foreigners who rob and murder and that she should help Mexicans instead.

Each Sunday she rises at 4 A.M. to head up into the mountains to a spot near an outdoor market. There, she sells used clothes people donate. It is still dark when she arrives. She dumps six big bags of used clothes onto the narrow sidewalk. She neatly lines up little bags of beans, sugar, and laundry soap-items a local grocery store donates because the packages are damaged and cannot be sold. When customers pause by the big pile of clothes, Olga madly paws through it, holding up items, hoping something will catch their fancy.

"Clothes for one, two pesos!" she yells.

A ragtag group helps her: the owner of a local hotel, a fertilizer salesman, a woman who sells children's clothing, a hardware store operator. A recovering alcoholic drives her around in his rickety truck. Together, they take injured migrants back to their hometowns in Central America when going by bus isn't feasible. A private doctor donates his time to reconstruct a boy's foot if Olga provides the materials for the operation. Olga and a church friend, Marilu Hernandez Hernandez, beg outside seven churches in five different towns. If a migrant is bleeding to death and there is no money to buy blood, they go to the tracks, even in the middle of the night, and plead for migrants to give theirs for free.

She's always running short on money. Medicine for one amputee costs $300. Sometimes there is no food for the migrants; she must ration antibiotics and not give patients a full dose; she runs out of gauze and must use boiled rags instead. Each pair of artificial legs costs at least $2,000. When she visits an orthopedic doctor, Jorge Luis Antonio alvarez, who makes artificial limbs, she slides a few photos across his desk of the migrants she needs fitted, knowing she still owes him $4,500 for jobs he's already done. She pays little by little. Most migrants must leave the shelter before she can afford to buy them limbs. This is what pains her most.

Sometimes, she loses her patience with G.o.d. Some migrants, too battered by the beast, die. At times, Olga can't quickly come up with the money to buy the blood or medicine they need to fight for their lives. "What do you want me to do?" she asks G.o.d angrily. A thirteen-year-old girl was raped by the tracks and left with a broken neck and shattered hips. She could not move or talk. She buried that girl and thirty-nine others. She tries to buy them each a wooden coffin so they can be lowered into the ground with some dignity. But most slowly recuperate under Olga's care.

Each day, Olga begins at dawn at the city's drab public general hospital. Today, as she enters the emergency room, a social worker in a pink frock rushes up to Olga. The worker looks relieved.

"Senora Olguita, you have new clients," she says.

"Migrants?" Olga asks.

The social worker nods.

In room 2 she sees Andrea Razgado Perez, a teenager, who has lost her right foot. Olga tells her she knows she fears her husband will see her as damaged goods and leave her. Olga says, "There's nothing you can't do if you have will." She describes a migrant who lost both legs but cooked for everyone in the shelter. She set up a chopping block across the armrests of her wheelchair. Andrea listens, sobbing. "Don't cry," Olga tells her. "This is the beginning of a new life. Nothing has been taken from you. G.o.d wants people who are useful. You must keep going forward. You have your hands. You must go forward and trust in G.o.d."

Olga heads to the shelter, which is full of people maimed by the train.

Transito Encarnacion Martines Hernandez lost both feet. Olga has promised to get the young man prostheses, which cost $1,800. "You are going to walk again," she said. He has waited months at the shelter. He cannot bear the thought of going back to his small town in Honduras, where he won't be able to walk the hilly dirt paths, grow beans or corn or coffee, or play soccer with friends. He must start over, someplace new. "I ask G.o.d that I be able to walk, to learn a job that I can do this way." He waits, knowing that Olga is his best chance of ever being able to get the legs.

Leti Isabela Mejia Yanes sits on her bed. A single mother, she has an angular face and soft curly brown hair. She has lost both legs. In Honduras, Leti and her three children ate once a day-usually two pieces of bread with a watery cup of coffee. The youngest got only one piece of bread and breast milk. Sometimes, when her children cried with hunger, she scrounged together enough to buy a bit of tortilla dough and mixed it into a big gla.s.s of water to fill their bellies.

Her children begged her not to go. Her nine-year-old boy told her he would rather quit school and start working. "I already know how to write my name!" he pleaded. She left Marlon, eleven; Melvin, nine; and Daniel, one and a half, with relatives. When she walked away, Daniel still hadn't learned to talk. Olga, who found Leti at the hospital, brought her two liters of blood and antibiotics. At the shelter, she gave her painkillers and took out her st.i.tches. At first Leti wanted to die. Now she wants to get better and see her children again. She sits in bed, embroidering a pillowcase with a drawing of Cinderella wearing a ballroom gown. She will wait here, sewing, until Olga can buy her legs, too.

Olga bathes people. She cooks. She gives them pills for pain. She cheerleads, watching with joy as they take their first steps with a prosthesis. She is impatient with those who wallow in pity. She coaxes them past the shelter's threshold to go to the ocean, which most have never seen. She places them on the sand, where waves can lap at their stumps.

Each day, she tends to their wounds. Each night, at 7 P.M., she races to church for Ma.s.s. She kneels before an altar with a bronze lamb, two winged angels, and a wooden carving of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. She clasps her hands and closes her eyes. She prays. She tells G.o.d what she did that day. She thanks G.o.d for giving her strength to get through the day's travails. She asks him for ideas on how to make money to pay for medicines and prostheses. She asks for ten more years of life so she can build a permanent shelter for injured migrants. She ends each prayer the same way: "You are the one who makes this work possible."

Each night, when she hears the train whistle, she asks G.o.d to protect the migrants from the trains and the a.s.saults. She prays that the beast not bring so many to her door.

Others who don't make it as far as Enrique are broken by Chiapas in a different way. They have been raped.

A bandit with a cobra tattoo marches Wendy into a cornfield. She is seventeen and the only woman among eleven Central Americans trying to sneak around a Mexican immigration checkpoint at Huehuetan in Chiapas. The man with the cobra tattoo and four other bandits have been lying in wait.

A Central American man tries to bolt. One of the bandits broadsides him three times with the flat blade of a machete. The bandits tell the nine other men, including Wendy's husband, to strip to their underwear, then lie facedown on the ground. A bandit searches their clothing for cash.

Then, say Wendy's husband and the other Central Americans, the man with the cobra tattoo on his arm orders Wendy to remove her pants. She refuses. He throws her to the ground and places the tip of his machete against her stomach.

She begins to cry. He puts the edge of the blade to her throat. She takes off her pants, and he checks them for money. "If you scream," he says, "we cut you to bits." Then he rapes her.

The other bandits curse the men on the ground, then curse their mothers and threaten to castrate them. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing outside your country?" they say. One by one, during an hour and a half, each of the five bandits goes into the cornfield and rapes Wendy.

Her husband fills with rage. The bandits bring her back, crying. She cannot speak. She vomits, then faints. As they flee, her husband and the others carry Wendy to the checkpoint. She says, trembling, "I want to die." None of the bandits is arrested.

Wendy, from Honduras, is one of a large number of migrant girls who say they are raped as they travel north through Mexico to get to the United States. A 1997 University of Houston study of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detainees in Texas shows that nearly one in six says she was s.e.xually a.s.saulted.

The rapes are part of the general denigration and humiliation of Central Americans in Mexico, where the migrants are seen as inferior because they come from less developed countries, says Olivia Ruiz, a cultural anthropologist at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana. The targets, she says, can be either men or women.

OAXACA.

Having avoided the fate of many other migrants, Enrique reaches Ixtepec, a southern crossroads in Oaxaca, the next state north, 285 miles into Mexico. As his train squeals to a stop around noon, migrants jump down and look for houses where they can beg for a drink and a bite to eat. La bestia might be behind them, but most are still afraid. In these small towns, strangers stick out. Migrants are easy to spot. They wear dirty clothes and smell bad after days or weeks without bathing. Often, they have no socks. Their shoes are battered. They have been bitten by mosquitoes. They look exhausted.

Most of the migrants want to stay on the gra.s.sy slope by the tracks where they catch outgoing trains, where they can hide in huisache or mesquite bushes if there is a migra raid. Two of them are too frightened to go into town. They offer Enrique 20 pesos and ask him to buy food. If he will bring it back, they will share it with him.

He takes off his yellow s.h.i.+rt, stained and smelling of diesel smoke. Underneath he wears a white one. He puts it on over the dirty one. Maybe he can pa.s.s for someone who lives here. He resolves not to panic if he sees a policeman and to walk as if he knows where he is going.

Blending in is critical. Migrants clip labels off clothes from Central America. Some buy Mexican clothes or ones sporting the name of a Mexican soccer team. Most ditch their backpacks shortly after entering Mexico.

Enrique tries to stay clean by finding bits of cardboard to sleep on. When he gets a bottle of water, he saves a little to wash his arms. If he is near a river or stream, he strips and slips into the water. He begs for clean clothes or scrubs the ones he is wearing and lays them on the riverbank to dry.

He takes the pesos the two migrants have given him and walks down the main street, past a bar, a store, a bank, and a pharmacy. He stops at a barbershop. His hair is curly and far too long. It is an easy tip-off. People here tend to have straighter hair.

He strides purposefully inside.

"orale, jefe!" he says, using a phrase Oaxacans favor. "Hey, chief!" He mutes his flat Central American accent and speaks softly and singsongy, like a Oaxacan. He asks for a short crop, military style. He pays with the last of his own money, careful not to call it pisto, as they do back home. That means alcohol up here.

He is mindful about what else he says. Migra agents trip people up by asking if the Mexican flag has five stars (the Honduran flag has, but the Mexican flag has none) or by demanding the name of the mortar used to make salsa (molcajete, a uniquely Mexican word) or inquiring how much someone weighs. If he replies in pounds, he is from Central America. In Mexico, people use kilograms.

In Guatemala, soda is called agua. Here in Mexico, agua is water. A jacket is a chamarra, not a chumpa. A T-s.h.i.+rt is a playera, not a blusa.

Migra agents particularly like to test suspected migrants with words that have the same meaning in Mexico and in Central America and sound similar but are not exactly the same. A belt is a cinto or a cincho. Sideburns are patillas or pat.i.tas.

At one point, Enrique glances into a store window and sees his reflection. It is the first time he has looked at his face since he was beaten. He recoils from what he sees. Scars and bruises. Black and blue. One eyelid droops.

It stops him.

"They really screwed me up," he mutters.

He was five years old when his mother left him. Now he is almost another person. In the window gla.s.s, he sees a battered young man, scrawny and disfigured.