The Beast (Óscar Martínez)

A few years ago when I was doing some volunteer tutoring, one of my students was a young man from Guatemala (I'll call him S., though that wasn't his initial) who already spoke and understood English fairly well, even though he was a bit embarrassed not to be able to speak the language better than he did. I don't know whether he was in the country legally (it was none of my business), but he was fortunate in having found a fairly regular full-time job that was a solid step above unskilled casual labor. I have no doubt that he was good at what he did, and it sounded like he got along well with his employer and co-workers, most of whom knew no Spanish. I worked with him for the better part of a year and in the course of the lessons we talked about a lot of things — whatever served as a way of practicing his conversational English — including his job, his life back home, what he did on the weekends, and so on.

Most of the Central American students I worked with had a good sense of humor and were fun to be around, and S. was certainly bright and likeable, but he was a little more serious than most of the others. He didn't seem depressed, like the occasional student who really seemed to be suffering serious culture shock — in fact I think he was fitting in pretty well — but it was clear that he'd been through a lot and was haunted by his experiences. He volunteered one time, without going into details, that Americans had no idea of what people like him had gone through in getting to this country, and I could tell by the look in his eyes that whatever he had personally gone through had to have been pretty bad.

Óscar Martínez is a young journalist from El Salvador who has investigated what may be the grimmest aspect of the ongoing migration crisis: not the crossing of the border itself but the nightmarish journey of Central American migrants through Mexico, an ordeal that annually subjects thousands to rape, murder, and organized kidnappings for ransom as well as to lethal falls from the northbound freight trains known as "the Beast." Unable to travel openly because of their undocumented status, these migrants are preyed upon by violent criminal syndicates who have either bought off local authorities or intimidated them into submission. At every step of the way they are fleeced or threatened; some resist and are killed, others make it through to the border only to be turned around by US authorities. Increased enforcement at the US-Mexico border has only exacerbated the situation, as newly built sections of border wall have funneled migrants into the most dangerous crossing routes, where many are extorted or forced to serve as mules for drug smugglers. Given the odds against them, the motivation that drives them must be powerful indeed. Some come for economic reasons, but as Martínez makes clear, many come simply to save their skins, having been directly threatened by local gangs or having lost family members to violence in what are currently some of the most dangerous societies on Earth: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The Beast (the Spanish title is Los migrantes que no importan — "the migrants who don't matter") originated as a serious of articles for the online publication El Faro. Originally published in book form in Spain in 2010, it appeared in Mexico in 2012 and has now been issued in English by Verso Books. It predates, but clearly foreshadows, the recent upsurge in migration from Central America that is being driven by ongoing violence in the region. As a work of primary first-hand journalism, it makes no attempt to propose comprehensive solutions for the migration crisis, but in providing a powerful sense of the human dimension of that crisis its value is immeasurable.

For an update, see the same author's "Why the Children Fleeing Central America Will Not Stop Coming" in the Nation, August 18/25, 2014.

Birth

"The circumstances of my birth weren't extraordinary at all but they were a bit colorful, because it was a birth that took place in Brussels that might have taken place in Helsinki or Guatemala; it all hung on the assignment they had given my father at the time. The fact that he had just gotten married and that he arrived in Belgium virtually on his honeymoon led to my being born in Brussels at the same moment that the Kaiser and his troops launched upon the conquest of Belgium, which they carried out in the days of my birth. So the story that my mother tells me is absolutely true: my birth was an extremely warlike one, the outcome of which was one of the most pacifistic men on the planet."

— Julio Cortázar, from a television interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano for A fondo, 1977.

The exact nature of Cortázar's father's employment in Brussels in 1914 seems to be uncertain; family accounts that made him out to be some kind of minor diplomat or trade official attached to the Argentine embassy are said to be unconfirmed. The family spent the war years in Europe, and when the young Julio Florencio Cortázar eventually arrived in Argentina, he carried with him, according to some sources (but this point is also in dispute), a detectable French accent that would remain with him through the rest of his life. His father — Julio José Cortázar — eventually deserted the family, and it was young Julio's mother and maternal grandmother who would dominate his childhood, but the accident of his parents' sojourn in Europe made him, along with such contemporaries as Alejo Carpentier (born in Switzerland) and Elena Poniatowska (born in France), part of a generation of Latin American intellectuals who moved easily between continents but remained firmly rooted as citizens of the twentieth century and its disruptions.

Walking Around

Every morning for the past few weeks I've been taking advantage of near-perfect weather and my early-rising habits to go for a long walk before I start the day, and to get better acquainted with the town I've known all my life and have lived in for twenty-five years, something that, no matter how many times one drives through the streets, really has to be done on foot. I get up when the cat wakes me up — generally around six — read the newspapers, eat a couple of eggs, and set out, joining the early-morning joggers and the Central American immigrants already on their way to work at an hour when most of the town is just beginning to stir in their beds. I walk for forty-five minutes or so, sometimes an hour, and whatever route I take I eventually always wind up downtown, where the little stream that runs right through the center of town widens into a slow-moving pool where on some mornings a great blue heron watches for small fish or frogs and turtles climb up on the mud banks, ever alert to retreat into the water at the first sign of commotion.

I walk through the vast silent necropolis on the edge of town, following its circuitous drives and watching crows harass a hawk. In some sections the headstones are mostly those of Italian immigrants of a generation or two go, some with surprisingly evocative names: Manna, Eraclito, Astrologo. In the backstreets live new immigrants, some with carefully tended front gardens lush with sunflowers and vegetables just coming into maturity. Two neighbors greet, in English, discussing one of these little plots. "Y maíz," he says, and regards the developing ear; "soon," he says, in English again. These plantings are too small to be of any economic importance, even to one family's budget; their value is symbolic, a reminder of the milpas back home, a little connection to a distant world and another life.

By eight o'clock or so the town is waking up, the whoosh of traffic beside me is steadier now, and I turn for home. It's time to get to work.

The Dark End of the Street

There are countless covers of this Dan Penn / Chips Moman tune, some of them very good ones, but to me this live performance by Richard and Linda Thompson is on a different plane from all the rest. The directness and intensity of the vocals, the stark one-guitar arrangement, and the quicker tempo set it apart from the smoother, bluesier versions, and when you listen to it in the context of some of the songs that Richard Thompson was writing during roughly the same period when it was recorded, songs like "Wall of Death," "Walking on a Wire," "When I Get to the Border," or "Just the Motion," it suddenly ceases to be a song about an illicit love affair and is transformed into something much more haunting: a song about the way life relentlessly exposes the vanity of our passions and dreams but can't quite extinguish the defiant longing for something transcendent, call it spirit, call it love, call it God, call it what you will (as if anybody could explain what it is or where it comes from). The real fire is in the bridge, which in this rendition is so stirring it is sung twice:

They're going to find us
They're going to find us
They're going to find us someday
We'll steal away
To the dark end of the street

There's something here akin to the Borges story "The Secret Miracle," in which a writer is arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to die, but in the single instant before the order is given to the firing squad — an instant that, in his mind and perhaps (who is to say?) in reality as well, lasts for an entire year — is able to complete his unfinished masterpiece in his mind, though it will be known to no one but himself. It's not external circumstances that matter; it's the secrets, the dark interior that no one can see, that provide a final promise of redemption:

If you take a walk downtown
And you take the time to look around
If you should see me and I walk on by
Oh, darling, please don't cry
Tonight we'll meet
At the dark end of the street

Call it a love song if you will (and a love song it is), but there's something else here few love songs can aspire to: at once an acknowledgment of death and a furious rebellion against it.

We'll steal away
To the dark end of the street
You and me
To the dark end of the street

War

Our species: an interesting idea, but poorly executed.

Given the inescapable fact of our propensity for cruelty, how is anything else not trivia? It's not just our well-established willingness to ignore the suffering of others; our darkest secret is that given the slightest breakdown in the façade of social customs that keep us more or less on peaceful terms with each other we quickly degenerate into torturers and killers. And once the habit of cruelty begins nothing is harder to break, all the more so when we have, as inevitably we do, our own sufferings that cry for vengeance. No flag is unstained. Blood for oil, blood for land, blood for blood, blood, blood, blood.

Our tragedy is that our technological ingenuity has far outstripped our ability to manage the tools at our disposal in a manner that benefits our own species. How could it be otherwise? How could seven billion individuals with conflicting histories, destinies, and needs ever hope to find common purpose? Where is the will? If we can't find a way of destroying ourselves and much of the natural world around us, we will try harder.

Our overfull boat steams ahead
in the darkness with the pilot fled
and the captain mad
and though we huddle cold and numb
day may not come.