The Only Road

The freight trains that run north are a major mode of transportation for migrants. They are also extremely dangerous. Jaime is repeatedly regaled with horror stories about people who have lost their lives or limbs to the trains. They are the stuff of folklore, of myth. Every migrant has a story about being stopped or robbed or thrown off or otherwise endangered by the trains, and yet they are by far the best option for people trying to get north.

Because the trains can deliver people to safety and hope or smash them to pieces beneath their wheels, the trains are respected and feared. They are referred to as la bestia, the Beast. When the police discover a dead body along the tracks one day, a man blasted out of his own shoes and into a million pieces, they say the train has eaten him.

Because these are freight trains, they also represent industry, and the way migrants are fed into them reflects how low-paid, sometimes illegal migrant labor is the unseen fuel that feeds the economies of many nations. The trains can mean salvation, survival, suffering, or death, but whatever happens they roll on, inexorably, inevitably.

La migra is the term used to describe officers in Mexico and the United States who are charged with trying to prevent illegal immigration. Like the trains, these police are mythologized into boogey men hiding around every corner, waiting to pounce. The police are often portrayed as inhuman, callous, unfeeling, but as Jaime notices when one of them lets the young mother and her two small children escape, some of them do have hearts.

La migra also represent the moral quandary at the heart of the novel: What would a person sacrifice for a chance at a better life? One of the train riders gives up his fellow migrants so the police will let him go, and his acts are reviled, but still he ensures Xavi’s survival along the way. Xavi is ashamed, but not too ashamed to keep quiet when the man informed on the others. Jaime watches in horror as a woman from El Salvador is beaten and dragged off a bus but does nothing. He fears the police too much to intercede, even though he is certain what is happening to this woman is wrong. Diaz does not directly address the question of what kind of people would sign up for a job where they chase and punish those trying to escape poverty, violence, and other dangers in search of a better life, but that question is another theme of immigrant literature: how those whose job it is to turn away people in need can retain their humanity.

Jaime wonders what he would be willing to give up to keep his chance at freedom but does not have to explicitly make that choice, though others do. Rafa is pressed into serving as a mule for some drug dealers and likely ends up in the hands of the immigration police, but he goes semi-willingly to his fate, ostensibly to protect the others but also in part because he has no future to look forward to. The police function as a metaphorical wall against which these migrants will crash over and over until they give up, are killed, or—miraculously—make it over.