Meet Your Neighbors: Trains Now Scare Me Edition

Here's another edition of Meet Your Neighbors for all you cool kids living out in Los Angeles.

It is my great privilege to introduce you to a find young man named Junior. That's his nickname, so I'm pretty comfortable sharing it with you all.

I have been privileged to encounter some pretty exceptional people working down here, but Junior might get my vote for the most incredible person that I have met in the last six months. Why? Oh let me count the ways. For a start, Junior is from Honduras. If you've read the article from my last post, you'll have some idea why I am so impressed with migrants from anywhere south of Mexico. Junior is also traveling alone, quite a feat for anyone, but more so for someone not from Mexico. Not only is he traveling alone, unlike most migrants he has no one waiting for him in Los Angeles (family, friends, etc.), just the desire to look for work and send money back to his mother and siblings. This means that he has no support system at all. No one to send him money if/when he runs out or gets robbed (when I met him he had $19 and change. I gave him everything in my wallet, which was sadly only ten more). Junior also managed to first avoid, and later fool, both Mexican and U.S. immigration officials into thinking that he was not in fact from Honduras. Not an easy task. Finally, Junior rode the train all the way from Guatemala to Phoenix (where he was caught and deported). Again, an incredibly difficult, scary, and dangerous thing to do, especially alone.

All that, and he's really just an incredibly nice kid.

To be fair, in the immigration "game"* that takes place here on the border, there is no doubt that Central Americans are the underdogs. Everyone is gunning for them. Mexican migration wants to deport them. American migration wants to find them and ship them home as well. They take special pride in weeding them out and being able to differentiate them from Mexicans. Central Americans are also more likely to be assaulted, left for dead in the desert, cheated out of their money, and beaten up. The migration machine is mostly run by Mexicans, who I am sad to say often abuse one another. This is multiplied exponentially for someone coming from outside of Mexico.

It was tough watching Junior walk out the door. I like the kid, I wish he was sticking around. I also know that he was/is getting back on a train to cross into the U.S. I really don't want to read about him in the paper after he loses a leg, or possibly his life. And I know the meat grinder that is Los Angeles, and the exploitation that awaits him there.

*I say game not becuase I think that immigration as it now exists if fun, but because so many of the people that I know down here think of it that way. If a migrant gets caught by Border Patrol, they get returned to their country of origin, and get to try again. It makes the whole thing feel like a massive game of capture the flag. The problem is, if you lose you can die. And people lose a lot.