English 12

Lourdes does consider hiring a smuggler to bring the children but fears the 

danger. The coyotes, as they are called, are often alcoholics or drug addicts. 

Usually, a chain of smugglers is used to make the trip. Children are passed from 

one stranger to another. Sometimes the smugglers abandon their charges. 

Lourdes is continually reminded of the risks. One of her best friends in Long 

Beach pays for a smuggler to bring her sister from El Salvador. During her 

journey, the sister calls Long Beach to give regular updates on her progress 

through Mexico. The calls abruptly stop. 

Two months later, the family hears from a man who was among the group 

headed north. The smugglers put twenty-four migrants into an overloaded boat 

in Mexico, he says. It tipped over. All but four drowned. Some bodies were 

swept out to sea. Others were buried along the beach, including the missing 

sister. He leads the family to a Mexican beach. There they unearth the sister’s 

decomposed body. She is still wearing her high school graduation ring. 

Another friend is panic-stricken when her three-year-old son is caught by 

Border Patrol agents as a smuggler tries to cross him into the United States. For 

a week, Lourdes’s friend doesn’t know what’s become of her toddler. 

Lourdes learns that many smugglers ditch children at the first sign of trouble. 

Government-run foster homes in Mexico get migrant children whom authorities 

find abandoned in airports and bus stations and on the streets. Children as young 

as three, bewildered, desperate, populate these foster homes. 

Victor Flores, four years old, maybe five, was abandoned on a bus by a female 

smuggler. He carries no identification, no telephone number. He ends up at Casa 

Pamar, a foster home in Tapachula, Mexico, just north of the Guatemalan border. 

It broadcasts their pictures on Central American television so family members 

might rescue them. 

The boy gives his name to Sara Isela Hernandez Herrera, a coordinator at the 

home, but says he does not know how old he is or where he is from. He says his 

mother has gone to the United States. He holds Hernandez’s hand with all his 

might and will not leave her side. He asks for hugs. Within hours, he begins 

calling her Mama. 

When she leaves work every afternoon, he pleads in a tiny voice for her to 

stay—or at least to take him with her. She gives him a jar of strawberry 

marmalade and strokes his hair. “I have a family,” he says, sadly. “They are far 

away.” 

Francisco Gaspar, twelve, from Concepcion Huixtla in Guatemala, is terrified. 

He sits in a hallway at a Mexican immigration holding tank in Tapachula. With a 

corner of his Charlie Brown T-shirt, he dabs at tears running down his chin. He 

is waiting to be deported. His smuggler left him behind at Tepic, in the western 

coastal state of Nayarit. “He didn’t see that I hadn’t gotten on the train,” 

Francisco says between sobs. His short legs had kept him from scrambling 

aboard. Immigration agents caught him and bused him to Tapachula. 

Francisco left Guatemala after his parents died. He pulls a tiny scrap of paper 

from a pants pocket with the telephone number of his uncle Marcos in Florida. “I 

was going to the United States to harvest chiles,” he says. “Please help me! 

Please help me!” 

Clutching a handmade cross of plastic beads on a string around his neck, he 

leaves his chair and moves frantically from one stranger to another in the 

hallway. His tiny chest heaves. His face contorts in agony. He is crying so hard 

that he struggles for breath. He asks each of the other migrants to help him get 

back to his smuggler in Tepic. He touches their hands. “Please take me back to 

Tepic! Please! Please!” 

For Lourdes, the disappearance of her ex-boyfriend, Santos, hits closest to 

home. When Diana is four years old, her father returns to Long Beach. Soon 

after, Santos is snared in an INS raid of day laborers waiting for work on a street 

corner and deported. Lourdes hears he has again left Honduras headed for the 

United States. He never arrives. Not even his mother in Honduras knows what 

has happened to him. Eventually, Lourdes concludes that he has died in Mexico 

or drowned in the Rio Grande. 

“Do I want to have them with me so badly,” she asks herself of her children, 

“that I’m willing to risk their losing their lives?” Besides, she does not want 

Enrique to come to California. There are too many gangs, drugs, and crimes. 

In any event, she has not saved enough. The cheapest coyote, immigrant 

advocates say, charges $3,000 per child. Female coyotes want up to $6,000. A 

top smuggler will bring a child by commercial flight for $10,000. She must save 

enough to bring both children at once. If not, the one left in Honduras will think 

she loves him or her less. 

Enrique despairs. He will simply have to do it himself. He will go find her. He 

will ride the trains. “I want to come,” he tells her. 

Don’t even joke about it, she says. It is too dangerous. Be patient.