Preamble

In 2018, the Central American region, Mexico, and the United States witnessed in astonishment an extraordinary phenomenon, albeit not a new one: the emergence of what is known as migrant caravans or migrant exodus. The gathering of large groups of people, the majority initially from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, encouraged by different calls to action, came together to migrate in unity through Mexico with the hope of reaching the southern border of the United States. 

Today we know these caravans did not begin in 2018, but long before, with the caravans of mothers in search of their missing migrant children. We also know that the big 2018 and 2019 caravans that united more than 7000 people originated to a large extent due to migrant criminalization and persecution policies implemented in Mexico during President Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year administration (2012-2018) under the “Southern Border Program.” Caravans serve as a collective strategy for visibility, support, and protection from the increasing danger and violence migrants face during the journey across Mexico. Caravans are also a response to risks, obstacles, and difficulties imposed on the way by authorities and gangs, drug trafficking cartels, and other criminal agents. 

A critically important feature of the first caravans was the presence of large groups of mothers with babies, and also children and adolescents, that represented up to a third of migrant persons, most accompanied by both parents, or individual mothers, fathers or grandmothers. In the caravan, these mothers, fathers, and caregivers could identify and build collective help, care, and develop support strategies. These strategies helped them flee and reach safety, exercising their right to migrate without having to tear their family apart and be separated from their children. Caravans became not only a possibility to migrate without risking their own lives but to do it, safeguarding the human rights of thousands of children and adolescents not to get left behind, to have the opportunity to live with their parents, and have a family.

Besides the contingent of infants, young girls and boys, the caravans had numerous groups of adolescents and youth that migrated unaccompanied by an adult relative or a guardian. For them, the caravan was also a space of safety and protection, of autonomy, of capacity for action—personal and collective—and a way of finding their own identity. 

Until October 13, 2018, for Norman, a young 17-year old Honduran, migrating to the United States had always been a possibility, but not necessarily a pressing choice, because he knew it was fraught with danger. His middle-class adolescent life in a provincial family of Honduras, where he had access to education, leisure time with his friends, and comfort was out of reach for most young people. His life was a counter to the idea of migrating and allowed him to delay the decision to leave. However, one day he had to face intimidation and attempts of recruitment by the mara that controls his neighborhood.

Members of the mara had visited the school many times looking for Norman to force him to sell drugs. He arrived at the public school a few months earlier, but it had been impossible to go unnoticed. His social class, the way he spoke, his social capital, and the knowledge he brought to the classroom gave him away. His peers said, “This güirro (boy) ran out of money and ended up here, in the neighborhood.” The mareros—or members of the maras—, followed him when he left public high school to return to his first private school. One afternoon, they sentenced him nearby. If he wasn’t willing to sell for them, then he would have to join a group of car thieves. They told him that the next day they would come to get him to “mark” (tattoo) him. 

Days before this threat, Norman had heard endless announcements of the forming of a migrant caravan to cross to Mexico and then through the country to reach the US border. You heard them on the radio, at school, neighbors voiced them, and above all, the message was omnipresent on social media, particularly Facebook and WhatsApp friend groups. Everybody in his environment spoke of it. Some peers had even changed their profiles on social media to announce they were leaving in the caravan that would depart in the following days. Others hadn’t yet completed their registration in school and didn’t attend classes that week. He remembers sensing an atmosphere of urgency and euphoria. 

The day he was told he’d be marked to join the mara, Norman entered his home, grabbed a backpack, packed a couple of changes of clothes, a cap, his two cellphones, headphones, a backup battery, and other belongings. He told his father he’d be visiting his mother, who was living in a neighboring city taking care of his grandmother, asked him for money on the pretext of handing it to his mother. At home, they asked him when he would be back, and he answered he wouldn’t take long. Instead of heading to his grandmother’s, Norman went to the San Pedro Sula Great Metropolitan Central Bus Station. “On the way, I saw ladies that entered their homes, turned off everything, locked and went out with their suitcase and holding their children’s hands,” he recounts. When he got to the station, he was impressed by the number of people gathered there. The atmosphere of joy and expectation was tangible. Early that morning, the Central American migrant caravan left San Pedro Sula, heading to the Guatemala-Mexico border.

Two years before, on the Omoa Cortés, Honduras, coastal zone, Edilson left his home to save his life and left to the Guatemala border. That same day members of the mara who wanted to settle some outstanding debts with his brother, then 17 years old, killed his father. Edison was 13. For the better part of two years, he hid with his older brother in Guatemala. Edilson did any kind of job he could find carpenter, blacksmith, loading stuff in a market, baker, and fisherman. Towards the end of 2018, he received news that the migrant caravan was already in Guatemala City and advancing towards Mexico’s border. By then, they had spent a couple of months fearing the maras were close to finding them. They had seen the maras in the neighborhood where they lived and hanging around their workplaces. They didn’t think too hard; joining the caravan was the only way to cross into Mexico without the gang members watching the borders of Central America, identifying them. The next day they got on a bus to reach the caravan, which was nearing the Guatemala-Mexico border. Two weeks after they joined the migrant exodus, his brother, the one who received the original threat and who had returned to Omoa when he turned 19, was attacked by the mara. He was hit by six bullets that almost ended his life. His brother lost a kidney and partial mobility in one of his legs. 

Norman and Edilson didn’t know each other. They were not aware they were both part of the same exodus. They also didn’t know that later they would become friends. Their intense experience involved violent detention and new institutional efforts to protect migrant children and adolescents in Mexico. Norman and Edilson traveled for several weeks with the caravan made up of about 3000 people that entered Mexico through the southern border on October 19, 2018.

Despite traveling in the same caravan and passing by the same places, Norman and Edilson’s experiences were very different. Norman was older from a middle-class background. He has an extroverted personality and is very sure of himself. He also had an impressive network of contacts in Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. Norman also had a skillful communications strategy in social media, managed with his two cellphones. This strategy allowed him to be in permanent contact with his family, feel accompanied, share news on the trip, and post pictures of the places he visited. 

From Norman’s perspective, the journey didn’t have to be a problematic event or filled with suffering; to travel in a group allowed enjoyment, talks, spaces of trust to vent distress, get advice and support. In each city, but especially in Mexico City, Norman and his group of friends found the chance to visit tourist sites with young activists and communicators from alternative media. He posted many and varied selfies and photos on Instagram. He was able to forget he was migrating and fleeing, and he enjoyed the trip as a movement of learning and enjoyment. 

He had constant chats on social media with friends his age. These conversations were also a vital element during the trip to build the mental strength that would allow him to continue and develop a mobility strategy. His friends in Honduras always questioned him on the details of the trip. They also inquired about the difficulty of walking so many kilometers and how to meet food, accommodation, and other needs. Norman happily shared his experience. He encouraged them to join the following caravans and let them know the strategies he was learning. At the same time, his friends living in the United States cheered-him up during the hardest moments, telling him that the troubles found on the way will be worth it once he finds himself on the other side of the border. They told him about their own experience when crossing the wall and gave him advice on what to say when he surrendered to border agents in the United States and applies for asylum. The conversations on what to and what not to say during interviews with immigration officials, and how to sustain only one version of his “story” during the process were frequent, and Norman had an exciting variety of examples. Friends and cousins in both countries followed his journey almost as if it was a reality show, and Norman posted daily updates with the main events of the trip.

Far from being a trivial act, this strategy of presence and communication through media was essential for his psychological preparedness, to receive tips, and learn about different possibilities in case his original plan of reaching the border and seeking asylum at the checkpoint failed. In general, his strategy served to have a clear idea of what was still to come. It was thanks to a cellphone that he was able to notify a group of young activists he had met in Mexico City, immediately after his detention. The members of the group quickly moved to contact colleagues in academia and other groups of young human rights advocates to try to stop his deportation. 

On the other hand, Edilson came from a completely different background in a highly marginalized rural area in Honduras. Considerably younger, shy and inexperienced, with less social capital and support networks, without a cellphone of his own or other means of communication, he depended almost entirely on his older brother to get information, plan and build any future strategy. For this reason, his capture and separation from his older brother in Tijuana was a heavy blow that left him insecure and frightened. He arrived at the facilities of the National Institute for Migration (INM) in Hermosillo after a more than ten-hour trip aboard the “doghouse” (the name given by migrants to the INM vehicles). Barely having had a bite to eat, he wasn’t allowed to go to the toilet and the officers found it pretty easy to make him sign his deportation order. 

For him, the communication with his family and help networks was a more difficult task because, in his home community, a neighborhood of fishermen on the rural outskirts of Omoa, internet access and social media was much more limited. His meeting with Norman in the government shelter made it possible to contact networks of activists and advocates.

When they related their experience as part of the migrant caravan, Norman and Edilson recalled a sensation of protection, anonymity, and support. The possibility of a collective migration was a crucial spark for the decision to set off on their journey. For Norman, who was a few months shy of 18 years and had no experience of mobility, the caravan represented a unique opportunity to reach the border and a better chance to qualify for refugee status as an “unaccompanied minor” in the United States. When the first friends he made during the journey started to change their mind, some of them decided not to continue. The fact that he was traveling in a caravan gave him the courage he needed to make new friends, feel safe and keep going.

Norman recalls with particular joy his stay at the Jesús Martínez “Palillo” Stadium shelter in Mexico City. There they spent the most significant number of days and could deepen friendships with a group of adolescents of different countries and ages to venture into the city and visit various tourist sites. In Edilson’s case, who traveled from Guatemala to Tijuana with his 24-year-old brother, the caravan was also a chance to make friends his age and visit cities he “had never seen.” However, for him, the real sense of safety stemmed from the possibility of traveling accompanied by his 24-year-old brother. For this reason, when INM agents detained him in Tijuana, separating them, the feeling of vulnerability and insecurity was sudden and extreme.

Furthermore, for Edilson, the caravan experience had been idyllic because it became the setting where he first felt himself to be a “migrant.” When the caravan entered the Chiapas border region, in southern Mexico, he witnessed and suffered the rejection of some of the inhabitants the caravan passed:

Norman recuerda con particular júbilo la estancia en el albergue Jesús Martínez “Palillo” de la Ciudad de México, pues allí permanecieron la mayor cantidad de días y le fue posible profundizar los lazos de amistad con un grupo de adolescentes de otras nacionalidades y edades para aventurarse a conocer la ciudad y visitar múltiples sitios turísticos. En el caso de Edilson, que hizo el trayecto desde Guatemala hasta Tijuana acompañado de su hermano de 24 años, la caravana también fue una oportunidad para conocer amigos de su edad y ciudades que “nunca había visto”. No obstante, la verdadera sensación de seguridad para él provenía de poder viajar acompañado de su hermano de 24 años. Por eso, cuando agentes del inm lo detuvieron en Tijuana, separándolos, la sensación de vulnerabilidad e inseguridad fue súbita y extrema. Además, para Edilson la experiencia de la caravana no había sido idílica, porque se convirtió también en el contexto en el que por primera vez se sintió “migrante”; cuando la caravana entró a la región fronteriza de Chiapas, en el sur de México, fue testigo y receptor de reacciones de rechazo de algunos habitantes de los lugares por los que transitaba: 

Norman was detained by immigration authorities in Northwestern Mexico when they intercepted several caravan buses in Sonora. He defended himself and denounced a violent detention process, with abuse of power and physical violence. When the migrants were already under the protection of INM authorities, Norman and Edilson suffered constant pressure and intimidation, even from the Child Protection Officer (CPO), who should have comforted and protected them. Both denounced that the CPO scolded and pressured them to make them sign their deportation and to desist any intention of seeking asylum.

Edilson experienced detention differently from Norman. Edilson was detained on November 25 in Tijuana. That day, a large group of members of the caravan, that had moved to the El Chaparral checkpoint to communicate their claims for international protection, came face to face with Mexican authorities and officers of the Border Patrol, which encircled them and attacked them.

Given the frustration of feeling locked up, without access to information and resources that the young people they had been in contact with could offer, as well as the impossibility of finding another way of avoiding deportation, Norman and Edilson decided to escape from the shelter. They planned a strategy that involved going to the nearest church in case they were separated during the journey. They fled together one night when there was scant surveillance. What followed was an intense experience of defense of their right to migrate by academics and activists. It would not have been possible without the solidarity of many families that gave them sanctuary during the first hours after fleeing, and the many weeks that the defense procedure ended up taking. 

After many weeks of intense lobbying and negotiations with local and national authorities, they avoided deportation, and they gathered enough support so both of them could reach the border and appear before US immigration authorities at the Nogales checkpoint, on the border between Sonora and Arizona. After Edilson spent one month and a half and Norman almost three months in a shelter for unaccompanied migrant minors in Houston, both were sent to their relatives in different cities in the northeastern United States. Edilson now lives with his aunt and uncle and attends a public high school in New Jersey. Norman graduated from high school and is working and studying to enter college in New York. Their respective migration proceedings are pending, and they receive support from civil society organizations involved in the legal representation of migrant children and adolescents. Their bravery and tenacity to hold on to the dream of reaching the United States to start a new life is a sign of great resistance and rebelliousness. Their stories demonstrate an ability to face violence and oppressive regimes that seek to subject them to a life of vulnerability and precariousness, especially when these regimes offer them few or none alternatives, in today’s environment, where the many barriers set impede the right to migrate. Norman and Edilson’s histories show us that hospitality and solidarity are still potent spaces and tools for resistance, hope, and emancipation.