Crossroads in Southern Mexico

October 27, 2018
Long article---just copied this part

Mauricio Ramos waits beside the road outside Pijijiapan on Thursday with his mother-in-law and his wife, who is holding their baby.




Later that night, at a small encampment assembled along the wall of a local shoe store, Ramos sat with his wife and child reading the Bible. “I guess we’ll go to Oaxaca, and make our decision from there,” he said. It was too dangerous to stray from the caravan, he told me, but he suspected the Mexican government might begin arresting people farther north. “What would be the point, after all this, if we just got deported?” he asked.

Ramos had made it to the U.S. once before, and lived in Louisiana and New York, where he spent a decade working as a roofer. “Eventually, I missed my family too much, and decide to come home,” he said. “Because it hadn’t been so hard to get into the U.S. when I first came, I figured it wouldn’t be that bad trying to make it back.” Five months ago, in need of money for his family, he made the trip alone, but was arrested at the border and, after two months in immigration detention in South Texas, sent back to Honduras. This time he and his family had joined the caravan together, despite his reservations about the trip. “I sometimes wonder if this is worth it,” he said. “There will be immigration checkpoints soon.” A sister, in Mexico City, had agreed to drive to Puebla, one state north of Oaxaca, to pick up Ramos and his family and convey them back to the capital. Maybe they’d eventually just stop there, Ramos said. He didn’t yet know whether they’d be able to reach Puebla,which is a few hundred miles away, but the caravan was moving early the next morning, and he didn’t want to be left behind.

Jonathan Blitzer and the photographer Adriana Zehbrauskas are travelling with the migrant caravan. Read their previous dispatch from Chiapas.

http://blog.besttours.com/2018/10/27...uthern-mexico/