Fall 2006 Issue
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Immigration to El Norte: Eight Stories of Hope and Peril
Don Bartletti
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BOUND TO EL NORTE
TEOTIHUACAN, STATE OF MEXICO, MEXICO | SEPTEMBER 11, 2000
Each year in the vast migration to the United States thousands of migrants, like this Honduran boy, stowaway through Mexico on the tops and sides of freight trains. Some are children in search of their mothers who went before them. At the end of more than 1,500 miles aboard the freights, El Norte comes only to the brave and the lucky. Photo and caption by Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times.
I'd been on this train from Veracruz to Mexico City all night, with it grinding relentlessly through freezing mountain passes and tunnels thick with locomotive diesel smoke. At dawn, most of the riders were huddled down near the wheels in sheltered cavities out of the wind. Climbing a ladder up the side of a car, I emerged topside and was astonished to see the train disappearing into a thick fog bank. Several cars ahead, I spotted the tiny figure of a boy sitting alone. I sprinted closer across three or four hopper cars and made two horizontal and three vertical frames of the boy who never moved or noticed me. The camera clicks were lost in the buffeting winds. I was overwhelmed by his solitude and hesitated to speak to him. Asking his name seemed more a rude intrusion than a journalistic necessity. Then the fog enveloped us. The image and his anonymity are a metaphor: a one-point perspective on an unclear horizon for each migrant who won't look back.