Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  Midway through class Alejandro made a snide remark under his breath.

  “Knock it off, Alejandro,” Sarah said from the front of the classroom.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Alejandro responded in Spanish.

  Sarah turned away, prepared to let the comment slide. But then another student spoke up.

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” the student responded to Alejandro in Spanish. “You shut the fuck up.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Alejandro said, now more heated.

  “She’s the coolest teacher we have. Seriously, don’t talk to her like that.”

  Both boys stood up from their chairs. Alejandro threw a punch. He was knocked down by a retaliatory blow. There was blood on the floor. Sarah yelled for Sullivan security guards, who ran from the front desk to her room within seconds.

  A few days later, Sarah met with Alejandro’s father. She told Sergio his son was both acting out and clashing with others. Sergio explained that ever since Alejandro had arrived in the United States he’d been angry about everything. He was angry about leaving his mother and his friends. He was angry at his father, who had become a relative stranger in their years apart from one another. Sarah implored Sergio to spend more time with his son.

  The fight was a turning point for Alejandro and Sarah. When Alejandro learned that Sarah hadn’t told his father about the fight, he thanked her. After that, he started spending his lunch periods in Sarah’s classroom. By spring, Alejandro ate every day with Sarah. The classroom that broke his patience was now his safe space. He not only ate lunch there, he came to maintain order at other times of the day, too. He helped keep the room neat and Sarah’s work manageable. She joked to him that he was her Secret Service detail. If students came to her with questions when Sarah was engaged, Alejandro would intercept them. “Ms. Q. is busy right now,” he’d say, “ask me.”

  Alejandro shared details about his new relationship. He chronicled his growing love for salsa and tamales and complained about teachers he’d come to dislike. He never, however, talked about his past. That changed when Sarah assigned Jorge Ramos’s book Dying to Cross. Like many of her teaching units, Sarah hoped the book, which tells the stories of nineteen people who died inside a trailer truck that was meant to carry them from Latin America to Houston, Texas, would connect with students’ own migration stories. The class spent one full month discussing the book and its themes. She had students present on different characters and stories. When the class reached the section in the book that detailed how migrants crossed over the Rio Grande to reach the U.S. border, Alejandro spoke up.

  “I did that,” he told Sarah and the class.

  “You crossed a river?” Sarah asked, puzzled.

  “I crossed that river.”

  Sarah pulled up a map on the overhead projector. She pointed to it.

  “This same river? The Rio Grande? What was that like?”

  “Really fucking scary.”

  These days, the ELL office remains one of the only places Alejandro finds community. He tried other groups, but nothing stuck. When he first started at Sullivan, he played on the soccer team. Alejandro was a strong player and leader; he was elected team captain his second year on the squad. While everything else was new in America, the rules, pace, and play of the game remained the same as in Guatemala. When the team took to the field, they weren’t thinking about the people they’d left behind. Alejandro didn’t focus on his precarious future. The world shrunk to the size of the field. He found comfort in that. But soccer also brought out his anger and competitive nature. A bad referee call would leave him fuming. And once triggered, Alejandro found it difficult to reel himself back in. So, after his sophomore year, he quit. He also tried going to church with his girlfriend and her family. They went every Sunday and always shared a family meal afterward. But Alejandro was turned off by how women dressed up for church. He thought the short skirts and low-cut tops looked like outfits meant for a dance club. He decided he’d prefer to pray at home. From then on, whenever anyone asked him what his church was, he told them, “My house.”

  Last month, as Alejandro prepared to make his second plea for asylum, he asked Sarah to write him a letter of support. In the days leading up to his November 9 court date, he spent almost every period in the library. He’d hole up in a corner and consult a stapled stack of papers. The document, a script of sorts, consisted of the forty questions of the intake questionnaire given to unaccompanied migrant children once they are brought into custody, as well as his answers. The questions, which are modeled after those on the I-589 form, the U.S. application for asylum, are meant to turn difficult, complex lives into well-shaped narratives. For Alejandro, the specifics of his escape from Guatemala were hard to recall. They have faded as he’s built a life in Chicago. But his lawyers told him he had to do his best to memorize his answers. They told him that the judge would try to catch any discrepancies. When Alejandro felt overwhelmed, he’d turn to Sarah who would always carve out time to talk.

  _______

  Less than forty-eight hours before he was due in court on November 9, Alejandro received a phone call. It was his father, Sergio. He explained that the lawyers had called and told him that Alejandro’s court date was being pushed back. The court was behind on its cases and it didn’t have time to hear Alejandro’s. He’d have to wait to receive a new date. When he did, the email read June 11, two days before he was due to graduate from Sullivan.

  ALEJANDRO

  •

  Growing up in Guatemala City, Alejandro knew the landscape as a patchwork of gang territories. Though MS-13 was first established in Los Angeles by El Salvadorian refugees fleeing the civil war, it began to take hold of Central America in the 1990s when the U.S. government deported hundreds of members back to their home countries. By the time Alejandro was a boy, MS-13 had more than fifty thousand members among its ranks. They extorted money from business owners. They recruited young drug runners through threats of violence. Killers were celebrated as heroes, and dead gang members treated as martyrs. Remaining invisible was a fight for survival in city taken prisoner by violence.

  For Alejandro, gunshots were part of the mix of neighborhood sounds. When kids went missing, he figured they had been killed. Some, however, were abducted and initiated into the gang and taught how to handle guns. MS-13 members were known to raid homes and canvas the neighborhood in black SUVs and trucks with tinted windows and no license plates. In a city plagued by violence, joining a gang could feel more like an inevitability than a choice. As much as possible, Alejandro stayed in his family home. Each venture out brought the threat of violence or an encounter with its aftermath. Many of these incidents still haunt him.

  One afternoon, as Alejandro walked home from school, he watched as gang members in an SUV with tinted windows pulled up to a group of young men gathered at the corner and sprayed them with bullets. Alejandro saw body after body fall to the ground. He counted ten dead in the seconds before he sprinted away. Another time, he witnessed his neighbor, a widow who bravely pledged to testify in court against the MS-13 members who’d killed her son, get gunned down from a passing car as she mowed her front lawn.

  Alejandro’s stepfather, Edmundo, warned the boy against the gang life. Edmundo had been a member of the Eighteenth Street Gang, a longtime revival of MS-13, before he bought himself out. Years later, he was still haunted by his past. Edmundo drank—a lot. And when he did, Alejandro grew worried. Edmundo had a habit of stripping off his shirt and revealing the mosaic of Eighteenth Street insignias inked across his chest. It was a dangerous and deliberate move, one that Alejandro feared would lead to Edmundo’s death. Eventually it did.

  Alejandro was sleeping deeply when his younger brother came running into the room.

  “My dad, my dad,” his younger brother cried looking down at Alejandro, who still lay in bed. “Look what happened to my dad.”

  Alejandro pulled a shirt over his head and ran to the front of the house, where he found
his mother. She was speaking with the police.

  “Go back to your room,” Luana instructed him. “Your dad … Your dad …”

  Alejandro looked past his mother and saw his stepfather, shirtless, lying face down in the middle of the street. He had been shot twelve times in the chest.

  In the years that followed, Alejandro watched as many of his friends enlisted in MS-13. He’d first notice them wearing nicer shoes and a blue and white rosary, a symbol of the gang. As new recruits, they were tasked with selling drugs and staking claim on corners in the city’s escalating turf wars. But Alejandro, thinking of Edmundo, refused to join. His closest friend Jose, who was seven years his senior, resisted, too, which did not go unnoticed.

  The first time members of MS-13 approached Jose, he and his friends were preparing for a water balloon fight. It was a hot, sticky afternoon. As the boys filled their balloons from a hose, a group of young men approached Jose. They handed the boy a letter.

  “Read it out loud,” one of the young men demanded. Jose, ever sure-footed and calm, looked over the letter quietly. When he finished he looked up.

  “We’re not going to do this,” Jose responded. “We’re not going to join.”

  “Then you’re going to die,” one of the young men said.

  “We’re good people,” Jose continued. “We don’t have issues with anyone. Let us be.”

  After that, Alejandro began to notice MS-13 members everywhere. They moved with a feral swagger. They drank beer in the alleys. They tucked knives into their shoes. They came and went as they pleased, untouchable. One afternoon, a group of young men approached Alejandro at school. They asked if he wanted to be friends. But friendship, Alejandro knew, came with a high price. After he refused one too many times, the same boys came looking for him with knives in hand. One managed to stab Alejandro in the arm and chest before Alejandro broke free and sprinted home. He still has scars where the metal broke his skin. But despite growing alarms, Alejandro felt secure with Jose around. Jose would, he thought, keep him safe.

  The air was dusty in January 2013, the middle of the dry season in Guatemala City. Alejandro and Jose had just bought drinks from their preferred neighborhood convenience store. Alejandro usually bought bread—the woman who owned the store was the best baker in the neighborhood—but he refrained that day because he needed to save the money to buy water for showers and washing dishes at home. The boys took their sodas to the sidewalk curb. They sat at the edge and stretched their legs. Jose, who didn’t have his phone, wanted to play a FIFA game. He told Alejandro to run home and borrow his mother’s phone so the two could play. Alejandro obliged. The roundtrip took Alejandro, who prided himself on his speed, only a few minutes. On his way back, as he turned the corner and Jose came into view, Alejandro saw a black car pull up in front of his friend. He then heard several sharp cracks ring out. When the car pulled away, Jose’s body lay flat on the sidewalk. A small pool of blood began to spread beneath his head. Jose was dead.

  After Jose died, the only options that remained for Alejandro in Guatemala City were bad. Jose’s brother framed it in simple terms: “If you stay with me, we’re not gonna let no bitch kill us. We gonna be ready. They try to kill us, we kill them.”

  Alejandro had never picked up a gun and he didn’t intend to. So when Alejandro’s uncle rode up outside Luana’s house on a motorcycle less than a month after Jose was killed, Alejandro was already dressed in his Air Jordan sweatshirt and new sneakers. He was ready to leave. Luana handed Alejandro’s uncle $4,000 in cash, the price of hiring a coyote to bring her son across Mexico and into the United States. She gave Alejandro a small card with an image of Jesus Christ and told him to pray every night. Alejandro’s uncle hurried him along. They had to reach the Mexican border by the following day. Pulling himself up and over the motorcycle seat, Alejandro settled in behind his uncle and left Guatemala City for good.

  The year Alejandro left Guatemala was the same year sixty-eight thousand unaccompanied minors fled to the U.S. border, many of whom sought to escape similar horror and pain in their home countries. By the time Alejandro started north, the number of undocumented children—mostly teens—apprehended at the border had doubled since the year prior.

  Alejandro and his uncle road his motorcycle to the Mexico-Guatemala border where they crossed the Suchiate River into the state of Chiapas. From there, they met another four migrants hoping to reach the United States and a coyote, whose job it was to deliver the group to their destination. Alejandro spent eighteen days traveling the thousand miles from the southern tip of Mexico to the Rio Grande at the northern edge of the country. Sometimes the group would walk for ten hours before taking breaks. They slept in shifts, with at least one person always keeping guard. Alejandro would eat once each day, street food such as tacos, tamales. The last two days were spent crossing the Chihuahuan Desert, a graveyard of migrant corpses. While Alejandro basked in the freedom of the desert expanse—he liked to sprint from the front of the group to the back—the terrain proved challenging for his uncle. He began to lag behind the group. When the coyote warned Alejandro that the group might have to leave his uncle behind, Alejandro refused.

  “We came together, we stay together,” Alejandro told the coyote. “If he stops, I stop, too. I’m not going to leave him in the desert.”

  When the coyote brought the group to a cabin at the edge of the Rio Grande, he told Alejandro and the others to wait for smugglers who would bring them across the river and into Texas. Alejandro waited in the cabin for three days. The river was one of the busiest and most dangerous crossings along the Mexico and U.S. border. The riverbed is uneven and the currents unpredictable. Taking one wrong step in the river could mean getting swept away. Some try to cross on inflatable pools. Others wade into the water wearing life jackets over their clothes. When the smugglers arrived, they told Alejandro he would hold on to a car tire and float to the Texas border.

  The current was fast the day Alejandro crossed. And while the water looked shallow in some areas, other parts dipped without warning to a depth of eight feet. Debris floated at the surface, and the banks were littered with inflatable tubes and Styrofoam noodles. The coyote put him on a tire with a young girl, someone Alejandro had never met, and the two clung to each other as the tire splashed in the current’s wake.

  Once on U.S. soil, Alejandro was apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and separated from his uncle. He was taken to a border station, a chaotic place filled with hundreds of young people who had recently crossed the border and were seeking asylum. The facility was one of dozens across the Southwest, where immigrant youth were kept while they waited to be given a court hearing and to be released to either family members or other individuals they knew. Alejandro spent six weeks inside the facility. The food was bad and the rooms dirty, but he was allowed to shower and play video games. That was enough to distract the thirteen-year-old.

  Alejandro was flown to Chicago where he was released to the custody of his father, Sergio, who he hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. He had almost no memory of Sergio. When Alejandro spoke to his father before leaving Guatemala, Sergio promised he would buy his son whatever he wanted. But new shoes couldn’t solve what felt like an insurmountable problem. Sergio felt like a total stranger to Alejandro. The only image Alejandro had of him was from pictures at his grandmother’s house. But when he walked out into the airport corridor, Alejandro recognized Sergio right away. He knew his eyes. Sergio was holding a hand-drawn sign that read “Welcome” and his cheeks were wet with tears.

  The first night in his father’s apartment was one of Alejandro’s loneliest. He and Sergio spent much of that night in silence. They watched Disney’s Cars. Alejandro, who knew almost no English then, required Spanish subtitles.

  One evening, when Alejandro particularly missed his home, he made one of his mother’s recipes, which included white onion and garlic. He hoped it would connect the two men to their lost home. Sergio didn’t like to talk about his
previous life in Guatemala. But when Sergio took a bite, he spit out the food.

  “Why did you do that?” Alejandro asked, distraught by his father’s reaction.

  “I don’t eat onions,” Sergio responded. “But you didn’t know.”

  The episode left Alejandro feeling excruciatingly alone. He had spent so much of his childhood longing for his father. He had fantasized about what it would mean to see him again. But now that Alejandro lay on his futon bed in an unfamiliar apartment in a country where he didn’t speak the language nor had any promise of permanence, he longed for Guatemala. And no matter how much time passed, that was an ache that he never could quite shake.

  6

  JANUARY

  Sarah Quintenz

  By the time school starts back up after winter break, the holiday cheer that animated the halls has given way to bitter, if not morose, winter doldrums. The school floors, now a bright white thanks to a $120,000 renovation over the break, are wet from melted snow and ice drips from students’ boots. Winter sports—basketball, volleyball, wrestling—will begin in just a few weeks, their seasons marked by a pep rally where students fill the auditorium with blue and yellow balloons and streamers. The day is a bright spot among the dregs of winter. Hoping to join the wrestling team and take the stage at the rally, a group of Rohingya boys have started a weight-lifting club. They visit the second-floor weight room every day after school and observe how their classmates work their thighs, chests, and biceps, each muscle group demanding a different set of machines. The boys study every motion as they watch their seasoned classmates, but by February, several will have dropped out, preferring to spend time playing FIFA or billiards on their phones.