Single Mothers Flee Poverty on the Roof of the Train Called 'The Beast' Jerry Kammer - Center for Immigration Studies
go to original July 11, 2014

Unsecured Border: Central American Parents Describe the Push and Pull (Center for Immigration Studies)

The young mother smiled shyly as she responded to the Univision reporter's question about where she was headed.

"To the United States," she said. And why was she going there. "Necessity," she answered.

She was a 22-year-old Guatemalan woman sitting on the metal roof of a train rumbling through southern Mexico. She held her four-month-old child in her arms. Hundreds of others, mostly Central Americans, were sitting or lying atop the train as it rolled northward from the Mexican border state of Chiapas. It was the first leg of the long journey to the U.S. border.

Univision reporter Pedro Ultreras, who had climbed onto the train with a videographer, was struck by the number of women — single mothers, apparently — who had decided to make the same perilous journey. They looked tired, hungry, battered by the sun.

Apart from the dangers of scrambling up a ladder of a moving train, they would be subjected to the unpredictable forces of weather and the whims of the brutal gangs and corrupt police that infest the route. Because of that devil's brew of dangers, trains that take the migrants north are known collectively as la Bestia, the Beast.

Read the rest at Center for Immigration Studies

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