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Women tend to stay in small rooms that are rented, you know, not so much in the shelters that they have the option. Women tend to try to get false documentation that will help them get on buses or ride in cars, or go around checkpoints walking that kind of thing,
but in different routes then men would traditionally take. You know, the women who I've talked to over the years, they absolutely are thinking about how to protect their bodies, but also how to use their bodies to move through extremely difficult situations.
From Fudro Media and PRX it's Latino USA. I'm Mariao Posa. Today she migrates the stories from women making journeys north to the United States. Before we start, there is a mention of sexual violence in this episode. In a new migration reality, the one that we're living through, women and children are requesting asylum in Mexico it higher rates than men.
But even as more and more women are crossing borders on long and dangerous journeys, many hoping ultimately to get to the United States, you rarely hear about their stories and what it's like, specifically to migrate as an undocumented person when you're a woman or you identify as one. For women, their bodies take on a central role when they're in transit, regardless of their age. Some, for example, are forced to disguise their gender for their own protection.
Others end up using it as a form of survival. But in the end, so many are victimized just because of their gender, and because so many of them are mothers, many will end up carrying their children with them. Latino USA editor Marta Martinez and reporter Alejandra Sanchez in SUNSA traveled to chap Us in southern Mexico. Here's their reporting about migrant women in different stages on their way north. Part one Girlhood, the body as a disguise and Marta Martinez is going to take it from here.
It's midday in Palinke Chiappas, and it's very hot. There's a group of some eight boys sitting on the sidewalk, cramped under the shade of a small tree, just yards away from the migrant shelter where they spent the night a few days earlier. Last May, they had left on Luras, their home country, crossing first into Gatemala and then into
southern Mexico. They walked more than one hundred miles through the humid, mountainous jungle to get to the city of Palinke, mostly known for its Mayan ruins, but also especially two migrants, as one of the few cities along Mexico's southern border with shelter facilities. The boys are between fifteen and twenty one years old. They all have the same destination goal. One of them even wears it stamped on his converse sneakers, the red, white and blue pattern of the US flag.
One of the boys has a fresh haircut, the bottom half of the skull shaved, the top half tied in a high bun. It takes a while to realize that he is actually a girl. Her name is Amaya. Amaya recently turned fifteen, but she didn't celebrate with a big party like girls in Latin America usually do when they turn this age. Less than a month after her birthday, she packed her things in a backpack and left her parents home in a rush, joining a couple of friends
and two distant cousins. She left with five thousand lampitas some two hundred dollars, but when we talked, she already had no money left.
Co suky oh no, yeah, different, Amilia.
Her dream is making it to the United States, where she believes she'll be able to work and earn more money than she could ever do in Honduras. In her hometown of Santa Barbara, there are no jobs. There's nothing. Amaya. Sasas is the most unequal country in the Americas. Sixty percent of the population is poor, and for over a decade, the country has held one of the highest murder rates in the world, especially against women, and one in six
girls has experienced sexual violence. Its population is also very young. Almost half of all Hondurans are younger than twenty, but the increasing violence by organized crime, the unsustainable stortion and recruitment by street gangs, high unemployment and inflation are leaving
young Endurance without opportunities in their home country. If all that wasn't enough to push thousands of Hodurance to migrate every year in twenty twenty, the COVID nineteen pandemic and two devastating back to back hurricanes sun Conduras even deeper, driving even more people like Amaya to leave. In the first seven months of twenty twenty, nine hundred and four unaccompanied minors requested asylum in Mexico, almost double the number
for all of twenty twenty. The vast majority were Hondurant children. Amaya had her hair cut for free at the migrant shelter in Balinki the day before we met her her big sister Verlo.
Okay, as you know, I think muchon yeah, Maria Jongwood.
I mean the short hair is an advantage, Amaya says, because she doesn't stand out on the road. She wears a gray hat, only the shaven half of her head exposed. Her black T shirt is actually more revealing. It has a mini mouse bow printed on her chest and the pink brass trap picks out from her t shirt neck. On the migrant road, being a young woman is an added risk, and Amaya knows it.
Calica cont.
Yo.
Amaya knows that men pray on girls like her and that she must stay alert at all times. She feels safe with this group of boys, though she says she trusts they won't abandon her when they walk together. She always walks in the middle on their long tracks across southern Mexico. Migraines try to walk in big groups to avoid getting mugged, kidnapped, or worse. Women and girls are also overwhelmingly exposed to sexual abuse and targeted by traffickers.
It's hard to find reliable data on sexual violence against migrant women because they don't usually talk about it and they're often too scared to file police reports. According to Mexico's National Health Institute, almost half of women migrating through the country have been sexually abused or have exchanged sex for food, shelter, and anything else that would help them along their journey. It's even harder to find data on human and sex trafficking. One of the most obscure criminal
networks in Mexico and in many other countries. One of the few reports available is the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, which shows that in twenty twenty, almost eighty percent of six hundred and seventy three victims identified in Mexico where women and girls. The figure barely scratches the surface. Advocates say when Amaya left Onduda's she had already dropped out of school. She says that it took her half an hour to get there, and she didn't
like her classes very much either. She enjoyed babysitting, though, especially taking care of her niece, who still calls.
Her mom is Mama, I won't dabia.
Amaya says she'd like to have children one day, but not until she's twenty five because it's a lot of hard work.
Leventi sinko yeah, mayor de la momentore.
In Honduras, one in four girls has been pregnant at least once before turning nineteen. The morning after we meet Amaya and her group at fourth in the morning, one of the years, but enough it's still pitch dark upside, but they want to get going before the sun is too harsh. Their goal for the day is getting to Salto Iagua, which is thirty five miles away, because that's where the next migrant shelter is. They sip some black coffee in plastic cups and smoke cigarettes. The group has
shrunk a bit. Some didn't want to wait and decided to leave the evening before. There are now six boys Plasa Maya. Their ultimate goal is to jump on La Vestia or the Beast, the train heading to northern Mexico. Part of the train route in Chiapa's has been discontinued to give way to El Trenmaya, a big federal infrastructure project, so now migrants have to walk an addition of two hundred and twenty miles to the first train station in
quat Sa Quadkos. The group walks following the train tracks, increasingly covered by weeds and stones due to the lack of use. Several of them, including a maya whole thick woodsticks the size of baseball bats to protect themselves in case they're attacked. And that sound in the background, those are the hauling monkeys hiding in the luscious trees. You rarely see women walking on the train tracks by themselves, let alone teenage girls like Amaya, and when they do,
they hide their gender. We meet the group again in Salta the Iyawa the day after their fourteen hour track. There are now only four boys plus a Maya. Two of them decided to continue on their own no breaks, but Amaya isn't feeling well. She needs to rest a bit. She looks exhausted and her feet are very swollen.
Am I.
You know?
Amaya says that for a moment she thought she wouldn't be able to make it. Her friend had to drag her. She got some burned, her head hurt. She tells us that she needs a favor, but she's ashamed to tell us what it is. Has just gotten her period and asks if we could help her get contraceptive pills to make her period stop. A similar hike awaited them the next day and she couldn't walk like this anymore. We tell her that pills won't really stop her period right away,
but what about tempons? Amaya has never used a tempon the shelters. They only have sanitary towels, and Amaya says they're very uncomfortable in this hot weather.
As people grow, especially in adolescents, women are so so vulnerable.
This is Gretchen Kuhner, director of the Institute for Women in Migration based in Mexico.
We've seen all different kinds of violence, you know, starting with extortion, which is just the highest, and then women also have the extra vulnerability of sexual violence.
Many times though women don't realize when they're victims of sexual violence.
Some women are so accustomed to being touched. Other women will say, well, the truck driver gave me a ride from Tabacula to Saltillo, and so of course in exchange for that, I had to sleep with him. But that's not sexual event, that's sexual violence.
A recent change in Mexico's immigration law has directly impacted girls and boys traveling alone. Since January of this year, minors cannot be held in immigration detention centers. Now they must remain under the supervision of Mexico's Child Protective Services known as DIEF. Child rights activists have been pushing for this for over a decade, but its implementation has not resulted in the kind of change advocates expected.
What we have is a situation in which there's especially in Chiapas, you know, whether there's just the largest flows, a lot of confusion about who should be doing what, insufficient resources.
Because child protective services are overwhelmed, they sent many of these children to private shelters for immigrants, which are also overcarded, and we're living conditions might not be up to standards, especially for an accompanied children. During our reporting in Chapas, two shelter coordinators said that they had stopped accepting an accompanied minors from THEEF because they were quote too hard to deal with. Many have suffered violence or sexual abuse.
They can be aggressive or unruly due to that violence and need special attention, the coordinators say, and the shelters don't have enough resources nor trained staff to help them.
Some of them they receive a cursory interview and then they're turned back over to the National Immigration Institute and they returned to their countries of origin. The word I think that everyone understands would be deportation. But I also have the sense that, especially with unaccompanied children, that some of them are being released because if they can't be an immigration detention, there's no capacity to go through the correct system, then they're being released.
Still, Gretchen things, keeping miners out of the tension centers was the right thing to do.
So we have the right framework now, but we don't have the right resources. And there's also, you know, the larger issue, which is that we have to think regionally. A lot of parents and family members of children in our region are in the United States, and if it's in their best interest to be reunited with those family members, we need to accept that as a region, because there's regional responsibility for the reason that we're in the situation in the first place.
Coming up on let you know usay the rise of migrant child trafficking, and then a group of women and the choices they make when their body is the only current they have to pay for the journey north. Stay with us notes, Hey, we're back, and before the break, we met Amaya. She's a teenage girl from Ondudas, migrating on her own and hiding her gender for protection. We continue the journey across southern Mexico now to learn about the experiences of migrant women. Now in the city of Tapachula.
Editor Marta Martinez picks up the story from.
Here at Jesus Elwen Pastor shelter in Tapachula, the city with the highest number of migrants and asylum seekers. We meet another fifteen year old girl from Honduras who is also on her own. We're gonna call her Christina Aga Sanchez. The coordinator of the shelter, says that a coyote had charged the girl two thousand dollars to get to the United States, where she has a brother she's trying to reunite with, but the coyote tried to sell her and
then abandoned her in Whatatemala. The coordinator says, Christina is shy and afraid of talking.
Well, no, I'm familia manna intensiforess.
Her parents abandoned her when she was a child. She says. She grew up with her grandmother. More recently, a criminal gang started harassing her.
For quego lasi interns and nan fear in Ternsi and matan in ternsi the America.
The gang members tried to rape her, Christina says, and they threatened to kill her if she didn't leave the country.
The next day, Alista and Maleta tredia caminando Ilo and in Esol, she.
Packed her things and left. She walked and hitch hiked for three days. During those three days, Christina says she didn't sleep.
With one pass ombresi internsi.
Christina says she didn't sleep because she had heard that men could attack her. Auga says the number of teenagers arriving at the shelter has grown in twenty twenty one, and so has seinage trafficking.
Liscente yesta or momentous.
She's been doing this job for over thirty years, and she says it's never been this dangerous for migrant teenagers and children before. The shelter rarely commits to taking in an accompanied teenagers because they can guarantee their safety.
Persi lot tratas persis the best part. Mafioso traffickers are waiting for them.
They go after them. Alga says, when traffickers see migrants, they see money Science.
Part two Adulthood the body as currency.
The main square in Tapachula is always busy. Many of the people sitting on the benches selling food or cleaning the sidewalk are migrants from Central America and the Caribbean, but also from farther away, including African countries and India. Tapatula is also a big bottleneck for people who cross into Mexico through its southern border, often on their way to the US, which is still more than eleven hundred
miles away. The majority of migrants asking for asylum in Mexico do it in this city, but the number of requests has grown so much in recent years that the process can take up to a year. That's why so many of them get stuck here too. In the first half of twenty twenty one, Mexico received nearly fifty two thousand asylum requests, and more than thirty five thousand of those in Tapatula. The numbers are already twenty five percent
higher than those of all of twenty twenty. The country with most applicants is on Duras with forty four percent, followed by Haiti, Cuba, El Salador and Venezuela. But Chiappas, where Tapatula is located, is also the poorest state in Mexico, so job opportunities are really scars for migrants who are waiting for their humanitarian business or simply making a stop to earn some money after having spent everything they brought, or being extorted by the local police in Guatemala before
they crossed into Mexico. For some migrant women, their body becomes currency. Some choose to look for clients on their own, often not the main square. Many others are forced into it, but it's hard to know exactly how many. Here's Gretchen Kuhner from the Institute for Women in Migration.
Again, we've seen all different kinds of trafficking along the migration route in Mexico. So little is known about the different types of criminal structures that exist that force women into trafficking situations. Who might begin in a situation in which they're leaving their country, maybe they're traveling with a smuggler, and then from the smuggling situation they're trafficked. Then it could be in Tapachula, you know, or other towns along
the southern border of Mexico. We've also had some a couple of cases of women who are kept in safe houses so they're not allowed to leave, so they're in a trafficking situation, but their job is either sex trafficking, you know, for the smugglers themselves, or it could even be you're not allowed to leave and you have to help us cook or clean or other kinds of domestic work that is needed in any kind of a situation, even if it's a criminal encampment.
But for migrant women, there are also situations where the way they use their bodies as a currency is blurrier. Taskuanitas is one of those places. It's early on a Wednesday afternoon and the waiters are setting up for the evening. At this bar in the north of Tapatula. Some four girls in tight pans and lay stops or mini dresses start coming in. They wear heavy makeup despite the unbearable humid heat. They sit around one of the wooden tables and for the most part they look at their phones.
A woman in a breezy white dress and curly hair is behind the counter. Her fingers are full of rings and her nails are long and monicured. Her name is Floor and she's the owner of the bar. She explains how Laskubanitas works.
Jes gulfstan jests any sales is the refresco Navaho yes Eccellina un.
According to Donia Floor, she pays the women who work for her a basic daily salary of two hundred pesos some ten u s dollars for eight hours of work, but they make most of their money off taps clients. Basically, men can buy the women drinks, but only if the women want to. Donia Floor says. The women's drinks are much more expensive than the regular ones, which costs one hundred and eighty five pesos so a little overnight dollars, almost as much as what Donia Floor pays them for
a day of work. The women get to keep one hundred and sixty five pisos or a little over eight dollars from every drink Donia Floor takes the rest. Most of her profits really come from the drink's clients order for themselves. Both Donya Floor and the women told us that only if they choose to in exchange for the drinks men buy for them, they spend some time chatting with them, having a love Sometimes the women also dance with them or they let them touch their bodies. At
any time. The women can leave the table if they feel uncomfortable. Both Donia Floor and the women say the waters at Las Cuanitas are all men, and they also keep an eye on the women who work there. Whether or not women have sex with clients, that's up to them, Donia Floor says, and they cannot leave the bar during their working hours. There are some ten women currently working at Lascuanitas, but despite the name, only two of them are actually from Cuba. Most of them are from Central America.
Yes DNN, the Sentra America Albunasavena, Salida Delante, Lucha Boro Borguea with the ISSIL.
Many of the women have children who depend on them. Donia Flor says that's why they have to do whatever job they can or decide to do.
The Sionastos.
Two girls started working at Laskuanita's just five days earlier. One of them is Kati. She's from Hondudas and she wears a nudleg stop that matches her high heeled shoes. Her nails match her clothes too, an intricate design in gold, orange and brown tones. She has been living in Tapachula for over a year and a half. Her dream, though, is making it to the US. Katy says this is the first time she's doing this kind of work and she doesn't like it.
No.
Katy says she's doing it because she has to take care of her six year old daughter, pay rent, and send money back to Ondua's. Her older child, an eight year old boy, is still there living with her mother. Life in tegui Alpa, the capital of Honduras, became unsustainable for Kati when a gang began forcing her to pay an extortion fee. They asked for one hundred dollars a month, an amount she couldn't make by selling tortillas. Her life was in danger, so she left the country with a friend.
I do this if you're not support abercn coming as a pal.
But shortly after Kati went back Toudas to pick up her daughter. The girl missed her too much and would cry all the time. It was the first time they had ever been apart. Before Laskuannita's Katy was working at a burger joint in Tapatula for eight hundred pisols per week about forty dollars. Sometimes it wasn't enough to feed her daughter, let alone send money back to Onduda's were.
Not Yeah, mom, eating rayo, keeps h heavy, fishing and waiting.
Fishing at the bar. Katy can make more money in one night than what she did at the restaurant in one week, and she says they treat her better too if she has an emergency.
They're flexible, super different. The males quando amenza.
You know, it's not been easy for Kati to get used to this kind of work and to make sure that men respect her depend ah. She hasn't told anyone about her new job, not even her daughter, who thinks Katy works selling tacos.
Yeah, okay, mommy, and.
Well she works. The woman who first offered Kati shelter in Tapachula takes care of her daughter. She's an angel, Katy says, man.
Okay on a personality and forma.
Sitting on the table with the other women. There's also Carrida, one of the only two Cubans around. She's twenty four, restless, and has appierced in the crosses her tongue horizontally. She hasn't told anyone about her new job either. Karidath has only been in Tapatula for a couple of weeks. She applied for some jobs, but they asked for an identification document. She didn't have a friend who had worked at Las Cuanitas told her that they were looking for women in Cuba.
Karidad worked at a day care center, making sixteen dollars a month. She left for Brazil with her cousin, looking for a better job, but her goal was always the United States. If a comp my family, your women. In late March, Karida and her cousin left Brazil and ventured into a dangerous journey that took them through nine or
ten countries. Karidath has lost count The worst part was crossing the Darien Jungle, a wild territory between Colombia and Panama that is considered among the most dangerous migrant roots in the world, not only because of the rough mountains and wildlife, but also because of the presence of criminal gangs.
Karida accidentally lost track of her cousin the day they entered the jungle, and then the group she was walking with got stopped by a band of armed meno I just the men took their backpacks, and then they selected three women from the group. One of them was Karidad. Another one was a thirteen year old from Haiti, yeah by Anse but Yo Karia said she was lucky that she was raped by only one man. The thirteen year old Haitian girl was attacked by several.
In Donceevre in came.
Eventually, Karida reunited with her cousin in the jungle and they walked for four and a half days, borrowing food from others. The Hitian girl never made it out of the jungle. She drowned when the group crossed the river the first time that Karidad mentioned she had been raped in our conversation, she did it casually, as if it were just one more thing that she went through in this extreme journey she was still on. It felt like her mind was in survival mode, like she hadn't really
processed everything she had been through. She seemed to be just as sad about having lost her phone while crossing the jungle as having been raped. She knows her life is what matters most, and she thinks God that she's still here. Sometimes Kadida shares some of her journey with the clients at the bar. It entertains them. She says, dealing with men when they are drunk gets more difficult. Sometimes they get annoying, or they might want to spend
the night with her. No, when that happens, Kadida tries to move the conversation into another direction. She believes there are women who have it harder than her while migrating, mothers who make the journey with their little children. She doesn't have any yet and decide, look, you know, her focus is getting to the United States to work so that she can make sure her grandparents and her mother are taken care of. Only then she'll feel ready to start her own family. She says, motherhood can wait.
Coming up on Latino USA, we head to Denosike in the neighboring state of Dabasco and meet a group of single moms taking the risky choice of migrating with their children. It's a dangerous decision, but is there another option? Stay with us, hey, we're back. Before the break, we met Kati and Kharidad in Tapachula, two migrant women who are
using their bodies to finance their journey north. We're gonna move on now to the busy migrant routes along the Usumacinta River, which forms the natural border between Mexico and Guatemala. Part three, Motherhood The body as a forever bond. Here's Marta Martinez again.
When media attention grew exponentially around migrant caravans crossing into Mexico and towards the United States in late twenty seventeen, Tapatula became the face of Mexico's southern border, a face that became increasingly aggressive. Starting in twenty nineteen, military presence increased in the Tapatula area. Former President Donald Trump brokeered a deal with Mexican President and Jasminuel Lopez Obrador to deter migrants from coming to the United States by stopping
them early, even before they made it into Mexico. But the move didn't stop migrants, it just led them into tougher roots across the mountain and the jungle. Two of the most used routes right now are on opposite sides of the Yusumacinta River, which serves as a natural border between Mexico and Guatemala. Centuries ago, the Yusumacinta River was an important trade route for the Mayan civilization back when
rivers were the main way to travel across the jungle. Today, the Usumacinta River is still busy, but for different reasons. At Frontira Corossal, on the Mexican side of the border, tourists used to take colorful boats to visit the Mayan ruins of Yaksilan, but the pandemic brought tourism to a sudden and unexpected halt. Now those same boats are busy transporting migrants from the Watemalan side of the river to
the Mexican one, and business is booming. We spoke to one of the Lantido's the men who drive those small boats.
Mill As Via.
The Boatman says there are more than one thousand migrants crossing each day, day and night, and many of them cross with the help of coyotos or coyotes. At around eight pm in the evening, when it looked like the river would turn quiet as the sky went dark, a boat arrived on the Mexican docks. A group of some twenty migrants descended. There were several women in the group and at least three little children. A red car awaited them. They seemed to be traveling with a coyote. There was
no police or military presence around me. People pay as much as fourteen thousand dollars per person, sometimes even more since the pandemic to travel with a coyote to the United States without any guarantee that they'll safely make it into the country. Women tend to travel more with coyotes, experts say, or at least in groups. Padalupeare Inas heads the Migrante program at Medicos El Mundo and Ango and Tapachula.
She says that before twenty eighteen, Micritian in Central America was understood as a purely male phenomenon, but then women started taking the road more. For example, there were a lot of women in the caravans that became more popular in twenty eighteen. Wadalupees is a connection there, Oh.
Yeah, No migran sols. Yes, migr compass simprevido collectives and simpre or back on la familia or bas or.
Pero nozle. There have always been women collectives. What a Lupez says, women tend to get together when they migrate. They go with family or with friends, but they don't go alone. Wadalupees is migration as an empowering action, sort of an act of rebellion.
Migradisna format resistant, na forma de kiro no kiro is, tavida is yokorokel mayorato revelda is migras as daglas conditions. Estado to pais is the colorno.
On the other side of the Usumacinta River. There's Lasitendaidos, the biggest migrant shelter in southern Mexico. They serve over thirteen thousand people every year. It's in a relatively small city called Tenoske in the nearby state of Tabasco, not Chiapas. Where we met Amaya and the women of Las Cuanitas. When we visited Las Tendaidos, the shelter was closed due to a coronavirus outbreak. Over one hundred migrants roamed around
in the sprawling grass bigger than a soccer field. They had turned the concrete grandstand into an improvised encampment where they slept under blue plastic tars and blankets or in amas. The night before, a storm soaked them and people were hanging their clothes to dry. There were lots of children running around playing soccer, and wherever there are migrant children, there are a lot of mothers, often single mothers. We sat down on the grass with three single mothers as
the son started to fade away. They had all requested asylum in Mexico and were waiting for the decision. One of them is Mcgdalena. She's twenty one years old and she's from a rural area in eastern Guatemala called Los a matte Isabel. As we speak, she holds her daughter Juliana in her arms.
It's the Jomarina Bouquet Mexico Mario Son and Michumpeao.
Maghosve.
When Magdalena starts talking about her ex husband and how he used to hit her. Her daughter can stand seeing her mother cry, and she begins to cry too. Magdalena's father died when she was eight years old and attend She started working to help her mother and five siblings. Her relationship with her ex husband was violent from early on. Magdalena wanted to leave him, but then she got pregnant at just seventeen years old. He wouldn't let her go anywhere,
not even to church. He was weary of every man and even suspected that she was having an affair with the priests. He isolated her from the world comunitus.
He will be.
Meghamura Natania comunica zukomuma.
If she left the house to buy food, she couldn't take more than five minutes. If she got home later than that, her husband hid her until her skin was all bruised. She couldn't communicate with her mother because he didn't let her have a phone. One time, her mother saw her with her face bruised and told her to report him to the police, but Magdalena was too scared. He had threatened multiple times to cut her head off with a machete if she spoke out.
Majok formosa Policii Juquno Okaya Asaua Santo juke La Carezl.
Eventually, Magdalena was able to escape and she spent some time living with her mother, but he found her and asked her to come back, swearing he would stop hitting her. But it wasn't the first time she had heard that. She decided to leave the country with her daughter, looking for safety and a better future for Juliana.
By Yomebmemuskara Massa da Misakoa Atlante.
Magdalena fled Guatemala with two of her sisters, her daughter, and her nephew with only one extra set of clothes on the road. They were lucky, she says, they found people who gave them food. Now they work for a man who has a farm. They take care of his garden, clean his house, work the fields. With the money they get from their daily work, they're able to buy some
nachos from the food carts by the shelter. Sometimes they don't have enough, but it's still better than having stayed in Guatemala with her ex husband.
Felice Miscino Masseura.
Yosta.
Here in ten Magdalena is happy, She feels safer. She says they're going to stay in Tenosiki for a while. She wants to go to the US in the future if possible, but she wants to do it safely.
The primer Ca caestrellasmiliar.
Dinga Magdalena says she's heard that it's more dangerous farther north, that they take the children away, they rape and kill the mothers and the girls. Magdalena says it's best to be patient, get their documents and then head to the US. Kidnappings and disappearances of migrants in Mexico have been on the rise in recent years, and they've also become more violent. According to the country's National Human Rights Commission, fifty four
migrants are kidnapped every day on average in Mexico. In the case of women, they're often targeted by kidnappers and sexually abused and sometimes trafficked.
Since about twenty sixteen, there's been much more family units, and a lot of the family units are headed by women who are heads of households and they're on their own with their small you know, their young children.
This is Gretchen Kunner again from the Institute for Women in Migration.
I mean, can you imagine traveling on your own without funds in a place that you don't know. That's scary with your little children. I mean, I think it leaves a psychological wound on every single person as well as the children.
These single mothers often carry several children from different fathers. They're the only ones forever in charge of the care and well being of their kids.
Even if you leave your children behind with the family member, you know, that's still something that's stigmatiz So women are expected to be the caretakers of their children, and that's why they're moving together because that's the expectation, and it's their societal responsibility to do so, and there's no extra support from their government to have any other options except to do that.
For these mothers, taking their children with them when they migrate entails risks, but so does leaving their kids in their home country, And either way, they feel deeply guilty about the decisions they make.
Women are really stigmatized. It's just amazing. You know, how could you take your children without any money? Well, how could you not take your children if you're in a dangerous situation and you need to leave. So I think that as a society, we're stigmatizing women and children and we're not asking the right questions or we're not providing the right resources.
At the migrant shelter, we also meet Irma. It's not the first time Irma sits on the lawn of lasitent Taidos. It's her second time living on Duras, but this time she's on her own with her two children. Denosike doesn't bring back good memories. The first time she emigrated, she did it with Arnold, her husband and father of her youngest child. They applied for asylum, and while they waited for a decision, Arnold started working at a local supermarket.
One day after his shift, Arnold Irma and her thirteen year old ran into some young drunk men on the street. They got into a fight and one of the men had a knife.
Yeah, Ike eltchaop was.
They killed? Arnold Irma tried to start from scratch once again in her home country of Africa.
Savas.
She looked for jobs at several factories, but the pay was never enough. She felt her only option was to leave again. She had to do it for her children and for herself too. She didn't want to get stuck thinking about her late Husbando.
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Irma and her children took the same route they had taken the previous time. Everything reminded them of Arnold, but this time it was harder. Irma felt defenseless.
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They were lucky that migration authorities didn't detain them. They circled mountains in the middle of the night to avoid checkpoints. They slept on the floor until they made it to Tenessiki again. Her oldest son is not doing well psychologically. He blames himself for not having done more to say Arnold. But at the shelter there are psychologists Irma sees, and she's trying to get him help.
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None of the single mothers we spoke to in Tenosek knew how long it would take to hear back from COMAR, the Mexican Refugee Commission, about their cases, But something else was clearer to them. As soon as they got their papers, they would continue their journey North. Most of the women we spoke to during our reporting believe that migrating when you're a woman is harder than when you're a man.
Some said it's carrier because they feel unprotected. Others agreed that they face more risks like sexual violence or trafficking. Many said their children were their biggest worry, but also their biggest incentive to live in search for a better future for their families. Women are migrating in new ways in groups, jumping on buses instead of trains, avoiding shelters and massive places that we still know or hear little about.
In August, Cariat, the Cuban migrant who was working at Las cuan Nita's bar, after traveling through nine or ten countries, finally made it to the United States, where she plans to start all over again. Many more women are on their way. That's it for today.
This episode was produced by Marta Martinez and Alexandra Sanchez in SUNSA. It was edited by Andrea Lobez Gruzado and mixed by Julia Caruso. This reporting was supported by the Reproductive Health Rights and Justice in the America's Initiative from the International Women's Media Foundation. The Latino USA. Team also includes Victoria Strada, Rinaldo leanoz Junior, Dori mar Marquez, Mike Sargent, Nor Saudi and Nancy Truchuillo. Benileei Ramirez is our co
executive producer. Our director of Engineering is Stephanie Lebou. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Zane RINOs. I'm your host and executive producer Maria jo Hoosa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on all of your social media. I'll see you there and remember none Bay Yes Chiao.
Latino USA is made possible in part by the chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The Anni E. Casey Foundation creates a brighter future for the nation's children by strengthening families, building greater economic opportunity, and transforming communities, and the Heising Simons Foundation unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities. More at hsfoundation dot org.
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