Caught in Current of Reverse Migration, Teen's Identity Lies on Both Sides of Border Marc Martin - The Los Angeles Times
go to original December 27, 2012

Thousands of U.S.-born children now live throughout Mexico as a result of deportation of a family member. Disoriented, they struggle in a society that views them with a mix of envy and pity. (Los Angeles Times)

CUATRO MILPAS, MEXICO — In this hardscrabble farming village, an American teenager like Luis Martinez was bound to stand out.

Raised on Little Caesar pizzas and Big Gulps, Luis, 13, was portly. The village kids, subsisting on bowls of chicken broth, were all bones and elbows.

Luis wore Air Jordan high-tops. The kids wore sandals made of rubber tires.

He shot at birds with his BB gun and pedaled around on a Mongoose bike. They scurried up mango trees and chased iguanas.

He seemed like many visitors from America, with new clothes and good health, and the quiet confidence of someone who knew he wouldn’t have to endure this place very long.

Then one day Luis and his step-grandfather, Juan Leyva, started standing up sheets of scrap metal on a treeless patch of dirt. They covered the jagged edges with cardboard, straightened the frame and slid corrugated metal sheets atop the walls, fastening it all together with electrical wire.

The teenager they had treated like a rich American cousin was going to live with his family in a shack, next to a chicken coop.

Read Richard Marosi’s story, “Without a Country: Caught in the Current of Reverse Migration”

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