A Guatemalan migrant describes his own harrowing journey to the US: ‘Anything could happen'
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Loading... - Belle Rolland
- 19 Jul 2022
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When Carlos, a young Guatemalan immigrant, heard that dozens of migrants were found dead in the back of an abandoned 18-wheeler in San Antonio, the story felt all too familiar.
Last Thursday, after waiting for police presence at the scene in Southwest San Antonio to clear, he traveled from Houston to place candles at the growing memorial and said a prayer.
“They’re our migrant brothers [and sisters],” said Carlos in Spanish. The San Antonio Report is withholding his srname because he is undocumented. “They had a dream like we did when we came.”
Carlos, 26, knows firsthand the risks of embarking on such a journey in search of a better life. In May 2019, he made his way to the United States from his home in Guatemala in a dangerous trek with dozens of other migrants, not unlike those whose lives ended shut inside the truck on June 27, a day where temperatures approached triple digits.
“They were coming [to the U.S.] and lost the battle,” said Carlos of the migrants, 19 of whom were Guatemalan. “They battled poverty, searched for alternatives.”
Winning the battle, Carlos said, is reaching the U.S. for a shot at the American Dream.
Twenty-two days separated his life in Guatemala from the American dream he desired. After paying a smuggler and saying goodbye to his family, Carlos rode hours a day crammed into various vehicles — mostly vans and pickup trucks, he said, before trekking for eight days on foot through the Sonoran Desert in Mexico and into Arizona. Carlos said he prayed constantly that he would survive.
Today, Carlos said he is living that American dream, working a job in Houston that pays him cash under the table, living in an apartment with friends and fellow migrants who made the same journey. He sends money home to his family every month and sees an upwardly mobile future for himself.
When he arrived here in 2019, Carlos joined 3.8 million Central American migrants living in the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute. He is one of a growing number of young Guatemalans abandoning rural areas of his country each year to make the journey north. According to the World Bank, that number has grown from 9,000 people migrating annually in the early 2000s from Guatemala to three times that in 2018, driven by what the bank called “an acute shortage of quality jobs.” Read More...
