One Woman Migrant's Journey From Honduras to the U.S

Women's E-news reporter Amy Lieberman recently profiled a teenage girl on an epic journey from Honduras to the United States, where she hopes to meet family in South Dakota and stay to live and work.

The 19-year-old girl, who is identified only by the pseudonym "Joyce," said her mother gave her money for smugglers' fees in order for her to cross into the U.S and meet her siblings in South Dakota. Her journey is one of hundreds of thousands, and illuminates in a troubling, personal way the experiences that await female migrants attempting to cross Mexico and enter the U.S.

Joyce is interviewed in a shelter composed nearly entirely of men. She tells Lieberman that earlier in her journey (the interview takes place at an interval in the crossing, in the southern Mexican city of Tultitla) she met a man on the train who told her to go with him or he'd kill her. She refused and got help from several El Salvadorian men, but the man warned he'd be back later in the journey to fulfill his warning.

The El Salvadorians helped Joyce find secure spots atop the train and have thus far protected her from the constant threat of rape. Six out of ten migrant women are raped in the journey through Mexico; the threat is so severe, many take pills or injections to prevent pregnancy before leaving Central America. They also face the threat of being abducted by kidnappers and forced into virtual slavery on Mexican farms or prostitution for gangs.

But perhaps the most tragic part of Joyce's story is just how stuck she is. Her siblings in the U.S discourage her from turning herself into Mexican immigration when she just wants to give up (and with a murder threat hanging over her head from a suspicious man, one can see why), and her mother has placed tremendous pressure on her by paying exorbitant smuggling fees and sending all of her hopes northward. What are Joyce's options? She can go home, fail not only on an economic and personal mission, but on one that extends outwards to her family and community as well, and expect to be met with regret, resentment and poverty. She faces so many different layers of pressure and threat: economic, personal, familial, gender-based.

Joyce's situation is a reminder that women migrants suffer not only the physical pressures of the road, the actual journey northward, but also the psychological pressures of being displaced from family and community. The circumstances that force her to migrate — the devastation in Honduras largely as a result of U.S political, economic, and military policies — narrow her life down into the choice between a treacherous and life-threatening migration and stifling poverty and inertia at home. Her story should serve as a reminder that before so many other women's rights are violated in migration — by rape en route to the U.S., by U.S immigration officers and racist laws, by abhorrent police practices — a fundamental right is violated: the right to stay home.

Photo credit: Alison McKeller