Alex

Back home in the village we used to eat black nightshade. It’s a wild plant, with little black berries. You make a broth with it, kind of like a soup. We ate beans, rice, and corn. We hardly ever ate meat. Mamá raised chickens, but for their eggs, she wouldn’t often kill one of her chickens. I like the food a lot here. I like hamburgers. Pizza. You hardly ever get those things there. In Gualán they exist, but we never used to buy them. I’d never tried pizza until I got here.

Gualán is actually quite big, it’s got something like 20,000 inhabitants. There are lots of gangs in Gualán. They say that when they threaten you, you have to join, because if you don’t they’ll kill you. They want to get you in to sell drugs or to kill someone. If you won’t do it they threaten to kill your family or kill you. They did kill some people. They killed my grandfather, one of my uncles, two or three other people. They killed them in Gualán, my dad told me. I don’t know why they killed them, because I was still little when it happened.

I had a cousin who’d been living for many years in the States, in Louisiana, working in construction. Sometimes, when I spoke to him on the phone, he’d tell me to come, said he’d help me find a job. And I had my aunt who lived in Los Angeles, but at first I didn’t plan on going to live with her. I wanted to go to my cousin’s. Later, when I was arrested, I had to go and live in Los Angeles with her. My aunt came here years ago and she says it was different before, not so dangerous. When I told her everything that had happened to me she looked shocked, because she thinks I’m too young to have gone through all that.

Cristhian

Sometimes, from the bus window, I would see signs for the cities we were passing through. Some of the names of cities were easy to remember because they were in Spanish and others I couldn’t pronounce properly because they were in English. It’s hard to understand English at first, but you get the hang of it after a while, you get used to it. I know we crossed the whole of Texas and some of New Mexico to get to Colorado.

At the start of the journey, back at the crossing between Honduras and Guatemala, we had to go around. I didn’t have a passport or anything like that. We just paid a hundred quetzals to the guy on the border and then we sneaked around the back and that was it. We crossed the whole of Guatemala by bus, all the way to Tecún Umán, on the border with Chiapas. My friend, the lady’s son, went looking for a coyote, a kind of paid guide. He found one who was cheap and said I’d be safe. We had to give him all the money we had left.

When we crossed Mexico I don’t really know where we went through. The main thing’s getting through, not looking at the places you’re passing. And because you’re scared of not getting there, what you try and do is leave everything behind. Keep going, keep going for miles and miles. Now the odometer works backward: the more miles you travel, the closer you get to the United States, the less afraid you feel.

I know we went from Chiapas to Veracruz and we stayed there for about four days, in some fleapit hotel. We slept five to a room. We were waiting to go someplace else, I don’t remember where. I think I went through Mexico City, too, but I’m not sure. In the city I can’t remember we stayed hidden in the roof of a house. The roof was made of cement and we slept up there, out in the open. Then we took a bus to Reynosa.

In Reynosa, Mexican immigration stopped us and got a lot of money out of the coyote. They threatened to throw us in jail and took five hundred pesos off each of us. We spent the night in a warehouse where there were about 30 people waiting to cross the border. The Mexicans always went first. Even if they’d got there later. I was waiting a week to leave and I was scared because I’d heard that the ones who’d gone before had been given a stash of drugs to take with them.

Eventually they told us a group of us were going to leave. They picked 10 of us and we went to the border and crossed over the river in a tire, a truck tire. Then we snuck along for like three hours through the trees toward McAllen. It was about midnight, and then we heard:

“Hide!”

And we all hid, without a sound. Suddenly there were lights and we were surrounded. Headlights, quad bike lights, motorbike lights. There were horses, too.

And everyone started to run, running everywhere. There were a lot of us, there were meant to be 10, but other people had joined us at the river, there was a long line behind us. The coyote had taken off already.

When immigration catches you, they ask you right away:

“Do you want to go back to your country?”

And of course no one’s going to say yes. In any case they put some people onto a bus and deported them.