I’m leaving, Arnovis said to his daughter.
He leaned down to her. Be good, he said, pulling her into his chest. I love you.
What else was there to say? Meybelín could tell, he told me, that he wasn’t just leaving for the day or a few weeks. He could see it in her eyes. She knew. I love you, he said again, and then he backed away. Arnovis swung his leg over the motorcycle, and he could hear her crying behind him. Papi, she called out. Papi! Papi! Don’t leave, she cried.
The family had paid fifteen dollars to one of Arnovis’s uncles to help him escape by motorcycle. They’d also borrowed a helmet with a tinted face screen so he would be less recognizable, and—still entre chien et loup on that early morning in November 2017—he and his uncle zipped their way toward San Marcos Lempa, the elbow town on this side of the river. Riding over speed humps and potholes, avoiding sauntering cattle on their way to pasture, Arnovis’s helmet occasionally clunked awkwardly, intimately, into his uncle’s. Arnovis wanted to watch, to take in the landscape, to snatch one last view of the still bay, the twisted ceiba tree, the matutinal, flat gray profile of the volcano, but instead he just stared at the back of his uncle’s head.
I was thinking, he said to me a year later, púchica (a common regional phrase, meaning something like “shoot,” that Arnovis uses a lot), if I leave, maybe I’ll be able to see Meybelín again, but if I stay, and they kill me, I’ll definitely never see her again.
You will leave everything loved most dearly, Dante wrote in the fourteenth century. This is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first.
Arnovis’s mom, Sonia—a stout woman and blunt talker who runs the house, kitchen, and garden through quick labor and sharp commands, and who has one of the heartiest, most body-shaking laughs I’ve ever witnessed—left the same morning, but by lancha, and the two met a couple hours later in the city of Usulután.
Sonia bought her son a black knockoff Puma backpack for his clothes—two pairs of socks, two underwear, and one extra T-shirt. He didn’t want to carry too much and stick out as a migrant. He also had an old Siemens phone, without internet connection, and $250 sewn into the collar of his shirt, another $50 in his pocket. Together, mother and son went to a Western Union to receive one last infusion of pocket money that his brother’s friend had wired from Kansas. And then, before Arnovis boarded a bus heading to the San Marcos terminal in San Salvador—$1.50 fare—he bought a bottle of water and said goodbye to his mother.
Afterward, Sonia made the most of her trip to the mainland, as she later told me, to buy a few things: some coffee, sugar, other essentials you can’t buy in Corral. Then—laughing at the memory—she sat down on a concrete bench and cried.
From the San Marcos terminal, Arnovis hailed a taxi and went to the central station in San Salvador where he boarded a PuertoBus heading toward and then across the border to Guatemala City. These were the first steps of a journey that tens of thousands of Salvadorans take every year, during which they fall prey to robbery, beatings, drowning, kidnapping, dehydration, starvation, murder, rape, arrest, prolonged detention, solitary confinement, psychological torture, extortion, forced labor, humiliation, and feelings of insecurity, abandonment, loss, aimlessness, hopelessness, constant danger, joy, pride, solidarity, confusion, and fear—according to what I’ve been told. On trouble’s wing, Aeschylus wrote, you will find no two plumes alike.
For the next two months, before reaching the US border, Arnovis’s story would follow his own singular horrors and hardships. At first, as he explained it, he didn’t even know how to get where he was going—he only knew that it would be hard, and it was. He arrived in Guatemala City at ten that same night, took a taxi to a nearby hotel and, before he got out, asked the driver where to catch a bus for Mexico. La Línea Dorada, The Gold Line, the cabbie told him. First bus leaves at 4 a.m.
He paid eighty quetzales for a hotel and skipped dinner. I asked if he was hungry that night. Well, he said, sure I was. Why didn’t you eat? No sé.
The next morning he got to the bus station early, purchased his ticket, and walked outside. There was a young woman selling coffee out of a large soup pot, along with sweet bread from a basket covered by a checkered green cloth. He bought a light breakfast. When I passed through the same station in Guatemala City, on my own early-morning bus ride about a year after Arnovis’s, I tried the coffee and bread and thought of him, thought of taking a bus to a place that I don’t know, not knowing how to get where I was going but seeing with my feet, as a migrant once explained it to me. What was it like to leave a place and no longer have a home, no roof or bed to return to?
Caminante, wanderer—Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote—there is no road, you make the road by walking.
The pre-sweetened coffee that the woman served with a soup ladle, together with the vanilla muffin, cost Arnovis less than a dollar. The muffin crumb soaked up the hot liquid. As the bus downshifted and motored along the path between the volcanoes, heading north just as the sky was beginning to lighten, three young men a couple rows in front of Arnovis started talking about crossing the border. They recognized him as a migrant and, with some knowing locking of eyes, invited him to follow. A number of migrants have mentioned to me how they recognize fellow migrants, even in crowds, as they head north. A certain haircut, a mended backpack, the worn shoes, the darting eyes. A few hours later, as the bus approached the Mexican border, one of the young men went up to the driver and asked if he could let them off a little bit before the station.
Arnovis got off the bus before the station, too. He followed the three men down the streets of Tecún Umán, a border city filled with bordellos, bars, fruit stands, cell phone stores, internet cafes, and money changers standing on corners flashing stacks of pesos and quetzales, with the green heat of the surrounding jungle pressing in on the rapid streets and occasional cloudbursts offering short-lived relief. Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner in literature, wrote of the eponymous Mayan king, Tecún Umán, he of the green towers, he of the tall green towers green, green green of the tall green towers …
Along the Suchiate River, men and boys on clusters of rafts loaded and unloaded people, market goods, and animals. It’s one of the iconic images of northward Central American migration: barefoot young men with long, gondolier-like poles pushing migrants and baskets and chickens across the river on rafts made up of boards lashed to the black inner tubes of giant tractor-trailer tires. Looming sometimes directly above the rafts is the bridge and the official border crossing. Arnovis paid his ferryman and asked how to find a ride north. The ferryman, really a ferryboy, told him where to catch a van that would skirt the immigration checkpoints. I asked Arnovis how he knew there would be checkpoints, and he told me he just knew, that there’s a common knowledge of the migrant trail, basic things that everybody knows. Some of them, he would learn, were wrong.
The ferryboy told him to duck through the market, cross two aisles, pop out at the third aisle, head toward the road, and then there would be a white van parked on the near side of the lot, waiting for him. He thanked the kid, but was nervous, concerned it was a trap. That was another generally known truth about the migrant trails—that in Mexico migrants get kidnapped, held for ransom fees, and, if you can’t pay, you wake up the next morning in a clandestine grave with flies in your mouth.
It wasn’t a trap. Arnovis boarded the van with about ten other passengers, some of them migrants, and they rode along the coast to Puerto Madero, then inland to Huixtla, up to Escuintla, the sunset’s pink bruise over the low jungle, north to Pijijiapan, just past Tonalá and almost to Arriaga, where he planned to catch the train, the Beast. There, with night dropping its grays and blacks and the thrum of the crepuscular jungle just starting its racket, they hit a checkpoint. Maybe the driver didn’t know about the checkpoint. Maybe he didn’t care. A female officer opened the side door of the van and shined a red laser into Arnovis’s eyes, ordering him to get out. He thought she was a federal police officer and only wanted a bribe, but, it turned out, she was an immigration officer. He was the only one they pulled out of the van.
They were nice, he told me. They never even handcuffed me. They gave me some food. They asked why I was in Mexico. I told them.
He spent a night in a small room outside Escuintla. It didn’t seem like a prison: there were locks on the doors, but they were just regular doors. It looked like a house. The next morning they sent him south to Tapachula where he was deposited into the notoriously crowded, unsanitary, barely controlled open-air detention center known as Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI, or Migration Station Century XXI. One migrant had been detained there for so long he had established a small store inside—like a little pulpería, Arnovis said. The man sold fellow detainees Maruchan Ramen, cigarettes, soda, and drugs.
I’ve been told stories of Siglo XXI. Some of them, I assume, are wildly exaggerated, but the fervor with which the exaggerations are issued, it seems, must hit at some kernel of hard truth: that Siglo XXI is an awful place to be. I remember the director of a humanitarian program in Honduras who talked to me, off the record, about when he himself was fleeing north about ten years earlier, was caught in Mexico, and sent to Siglo XXI. He explained how wretched his experience was: there were people doing drugs, drinking, threatening each other and getting in fights, he told me, and the guards gave us almost no food. I was painfully hungry for ten days, eating nothing but bean slop and thin tortillas, and there were no bathrooms.
I stopped him. What do you mean there were no bathrooms?
There were no bathrooms.
You mean the bathrooms were so filthy you didn’t want to use them?
No, there were no bathrooms. No toilets.
And you were there ten days?
There weren’t enough Hondurans to fill up a bus, so we had to wait.
And in those ten days, when you had to go to the bathroom, where did you go?
In the corner, on the walls, on the floor. It was disgusting.
I didn’t press any more. The director was driving me, along with a few recently deported migrants, along a broken road in a rural part of Honduras. He was a respectable man, a boss and community leader with a stable job, a home, a family, and he was hotly exaggerating. Or, was he trying to convey something that can’t be understood unless you live it or caricature it? No home, no ground to push off from, no roof to shelter under, no toilet to flush your waste. What but unflushable, unburiable feces could more poignantly express the feeling of homelessness, statelessness?
Siglo XXI does have bathrooms. I wasn’t granted access to see for myself—there seems to be a blanket policy of denying entrance to journalists—but I’ve asked other migrants, including Arnovis, and he told me that yes, there are bathrooms, though he said that there were no stalls, and he had to defecate in front of dozens of other people.
Before they locked Arnovis into the main barrack, where people slept at night on thin mattresses on the floor and hugged the walls during the day, one of the officials told him who the narcos were, who to look out for. Some of the people inside were, you know, Arnovis said, really tough. And, that first night, they were just smoking pot right out in the open.
Mexico has been both a transit country for migrants traveling north, as well as a destination country for years. But it wasn’t until 2014 that it initiated a drastic change in immigration policy in response to the sharp increase in families and unaccompanied minors heading to the United States. (While many were unaccompanied, some had been “designated” as unaccompanied only after the Border Patrol separated them from extended family members or trusted friends—the word separated has gone through the same kind of transitive verbalization as disappeared.) That year, Mexico ramped up its own violent crackdown on undocumented migrants, installing more checkpoints on roads, hiring more immigration officials, and even planning segments of a wall between Mexico and Guatemala. The United States pressured Mexico to carry out the crackdown, as well as paid for some of it. As a result of the heightened enforcement, many migrants were pushed into increasingly remote crossing zones, where they fell prey to robbery and kidnapping—or were handed over to, robbed, or murdered by the police or immigration officials themselves; 2015 marked the first year that Mexico actually deported more undocumented Central Americans than the United States. In the fall of 2018, as Trump made outlandish claims about migrant caravans, sent troops to the border, and threatened to cut aid to Honduras and Guatemala (which he finally did in the spring of 2019), Mexican officials turned a convention center in Tapachula, Mexico, into an extension of Siglo XXI and locked up over 1,700 migrants in the pop-up prison. Many of them, according to reports, were tricked into walking into the Siglo XXI annex by officials who told them they could apply for asylum inside; they were not informed that once they entered, they couldn’t leave again—a Calypso’s welcome. A photo was leaked showing hundreds of red and blue camping tents set up inside an enormous open-air room into which the migrants were crammed. The new refugee camp didn’t have water for bathing for the first few days, and some migrants were forced to share tents with strangers. The Trump administration, at the same time, earmarked $20 million in foreign assistance funds to pay bus and plane fares so Mexico could deport more Central Americans. In 2019, conditions got so bad and overcrowded in the original Siglo XXI that the guards lost control and there were multiple mass escapes, with around 600 people breaking out in one instance.
Back in 2017, after five nights in Siglo XXI, Arnovis became one of the nearly 100,000 Central Americans that year who were loaded onto a bus and shipped south. They were sent back to the places they had just fled. The world, for some of them, had become uninhabitable.