The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

The Rio Grande is the border between the United States and Mexico at the southern edge of the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. The “border wall”—a 12-foot-high metal fence—stops at the refuge’s perimeter. Markham notes, “Mexico and Texas look just the same” (69). People cross wherever they can, and the river is a frequent spot. The United States and Mexico border is a series of tangible and intangible walls: fencing, official entry points, rivers, inhospitable terrain, or border patrol agents. Much of the desert is inhospitable and deadly. Markham explains, “Each year the remains of hundreds of migrants are found along the southwestern border—in 2012, more than 120 were found in Brooks County” (71). Many remains are unidentifiable and buried by the county in mass graves.

The twins’ raft drifts to the Texas shore, where a coyote commands they disembark. Ernesto gets out first, into knee-deep water, and once ashore he helps Raúl up the bank. After the second raft is ashore, the coyotes yell for the migrants to run. Now in the United States, they run for about an hour until they reach good cover. At about six o’clock in the morning, the migrants pile into a truck that transports them “to a safe house in one of the colonias, the small, poverty-stricken unincorporated zones, outside McAllen, Texas” (74).