Riding ‘the beast’: child migrants reveal full horror of their journeys to America

Author Valeria Luiselli began working as a volunteer interpreter at New York’s federal immigration court in 2015. She has since heard many disturbing accounts of unaccompanied children travelling through her home country, Mexico

“Why did you come to the United States?” That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City, where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.

But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences and barren terms. But the children’s stories are always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end ...

Some compare La Bestia to a demon, others to a kind of vacuum that sucks distracted riders down into its metal entrails

80% of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the US border are raped on the way

Related: The Inequality Project: the Guardian's in-depth look at our unequal world

Continue reading...

from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2xiiwxc