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THE PALM BEACH POST

SUNDAY, NOV. 12, 2006

train jumping A DESPERATE JOURNEY

TENOSIQUE, MEXICO

A Central American woman gets help leaping aboard a cargo train heading north. Nobody knows exactly how many train jumpers attempt the journey, but on any given day in this small town in southern Mexico, hundreds of migrants line the tracks.

this is the face of the migration

t is almost a celebratory affair, the leaving of a train. The train jumpers shout. Wave. Give the thumbs up. Rise to their feet and peer over the edge. In the town squares that dot the tracks, children swing as their parents, dressed up for Saturday night, watch the drama unfold with the nonchalance of theatergoers who have seen the show one too many times. Still, everybody looks up when the whistle blows, just in case and there, atop the train, is the face of the migration. Wedged between cargo cars, perched on tanker tops, stuck in stuffy boxcars, with money sewn into shirt cuffs and pants hems, they hop on, often in daylight, high noon even, because arresting impoverished migrants has not, historically, been a top priority in Mexico. Women and children are most vulnerable, to the elements and man, and most difficult to spot. If they can, they wait for the trains to stop in the dusty yards, then slip on at night. You can find them hiding in the dark hollows of the hopper cars, the children wide-eyed, their mothers fingering the family Bible. Where are they headed? The usual spots: California, Texas, Florida and New York. But also to Iowa and North Carolina and Tennessee places nobody used to think of going. Back home, they are bean farmers whose fields turned fallow, fishermen whose waters no longer yield. Sharecroppers who can no longer eke out a living pulling maize from the hills. Urban dwellers tired of feeling useless in cities with no jobs. Honduran. Salvadoran. Guatemalan. Twenty years old. Fifty years. Ten. Babies lashed to their mothers backs with bits of bright cloth and twine. Some have relatives in the States, and already they can tell you the names of all the streets in their destination cities; which bakeries are open before the labor van leaves; which churches say a Spanish Mass. They have maps in their pockets and only

1,500 to miles to go. In Arriaga, the church shelter logbook tells the story. Bleary-eyed staffers stay up all night, recording the details of the migration names, ages, destinations and hometowns, as well as a long list of the difficulties migrants suffer along the way: robberies, rapes, electrocutions and extortion. Last year, 3,000 people stayed a night or two at the shelter, and this year, the staff expects twice that. We dont even have time to put in all the names, the town priest says. A story has circulated about a 3-year-old girl who fell from the tracks and broke her arm. But where? The father has gone looking for people with little success, says shelter worker Elias Clemente. Other times, people die, and the bodies just stay where they fell. Nobody comes. Outside, the pink light fades, and Jose Luis Gonzalez, a Jesuit priest visiting from Guatemala, takes off his Florida baseball cap. This migration, he says, is such a grave situation. In my parish, in a community of 100 families,

we have only three men left. Three! All the others have all gone north. And now, the women and children are going, too. It is not hard to find absurd examples of the migration. Take the middle-aged woman going north to buy her sick mother medicine. Her feet are bloody, her toes have turned black, and she is wearing her very best outfit, a cheap, brown skirt. How will she jump in that? I have no choice, she says. My coyote stole my jeans. She cuts a memorable figure, but not as memorable, perhaps, as the one-legged man headed north to buy an artificial leg to replace the one he lost when he came the first time. Is this crazy? Yes. The silent border, they call this southern frontier, a lovely misnomer. Because when a man falls, the whole town hears the screams. The journey continues >

TENOSIQUE, MEXICO

Oscar Ortiz, 20, botched his jump in Tabasco state and was rescued by Grupo Beta, the humanitarian branch of Mexican immigration. Doctors treated Ortiz, from Honduras, at Tenosique General Hospital, where doctors write up their reports on typewriters.