Salvadoran Odyssey: Alicia Pursues Her Dream to L.A.

In July, Alicia stole away from her home in El Salvador and embarked on a perilous journey northward across Guatemala and Mexico. All she possessed were her wits, $300 and dreams of a better life in the United States.

It took months, but Alicia finally arrived in Los Angeles, having braved bandits, corrupt police, clandestine smugglers and immigration agents from three countries.

Today, Alicia lives with Salvadoran friends in a tiny apartment in North Hollywood. Armed with the fake identification papers that have become commonplace in the world of illegal immigrants, she works more than 10 hours a day in a garment factory to be able, eventually, to send money to her four small children in La Libertad, a town in western El Salvador.

“At last,” Alicia said in a recent interview, “I can feel more at ease.”

The first half of Alicia’s story was recounted in The Times in September when she reached Mexico City after a dangerous, three-week, 800-mile trek from El Salvador. In another month and a half, she would reach Los Angeles.

Alicia’s odyssey is a story of struggle and survival that could easily belong to any of the thousands of Central Americans who leave their homes each year in a quest for work north of the U.S.-Mexico border. It also illustrates the heightened danger that solitary women--striving to escape poverty, violence or both--increasingly face in making the trip.

Then, as now, Alicia asked that her full name not be published.

Compared to the first half of her journey, the oft-traveled leg from Mexico City to Los Angeles seemed almost easy.

Deserted by her alcoholic husband, Alicia, 29, left her one-room home in La Libertad on July 27, resolved that she could no longer raise her children with the $5 a week she earned washing clothes. It hurt to leave them behind with relatives, she said, but there was no other way. She couldn’t bring herself to say goodby.

During the three weeks that followed, she would pay a “coyote”--a smuggler of people--to sneak her into Mexico from Guatemala, she would wade a river, walk miles along rural back roads and hide in the brush. Often hungry, cold and desolate, she was robbed and threatened by armed bandits and narrowly escaped being raped; other women companions were not so lucky. Police frequently demanded bribes. But an occasional stranger also lent refuge and assistance.

When she reached Mexico City, a Salvadoran friend put her up while she wrestled with the decision of whether to continue. She risked being deported all the way back to El Salvador if caught crossing into the United States.

But Alicia was determined to forge ahead.

First, it would be necessary to create a Mexican identity. That way, she would only be sent back to Tijuana if apprehended while crossing into the United States. With the help of friends, she obtained a false birth certificate that indicated she had been born in San Miguel de Allende, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato.

New Accent

And, like many Central Americans who make the same illegal journey, she began to practice the sing-song accent and the slang used by Mexicans.

“If they (immigration agents) detect a Central American accent,” Alicia said, “it’s all over.”

Alicia also had to wait for money. Most of the $300 she had borrowed in El Salvador, and had sewn into her clothing when she left, had been spent along the way to Mexico City. Her cousin in Los Angeles would send her another $200 for the final part of her trip.

Finally, she was ready. On a morning late in September, she dressed in a beige corduroy skirt and jacket, a piece of clothing discarded by her friend’s employer but still in good condition, and boarded a bus to Tijuana, 1,800 miles away. In her hands she grasped the fake birth certificate.

After pulling out of Mexico City, the bus passed through the city of Guadalajara and headed north toward Hermosillo along the Gulf of California, skirting rocky beaches, endless desert and bountiful farmland. But Alicia paid little heed to the scenery, constantly fearful of being stopped by authorities. She slumped in her seat during much of the 48-hour ride.

Twice, police stopped the bus, ordering all passengers out while they searched the luggage. And twice, Mexican immigration agents stopped the bus at roadside checkpoints, demanding that all passengers present their papers. Several passengers who did not have proper papers were taken from the bus and questioned.

But well-dressed, well-groomed Alicia did not arouse suspicion.

“They looked at me,” she said, “but they did not mistake me for an immigrant.”

Although Alicia offered her birth certificate to one agent for inspection, he merely glanced at it and moved on.

Arriving in Tijuana, Alicia took a taxi to a low-end motel that her cousin, who has lived illegally in Los Angeles for nearly a year, had told her about. She then went to a public pay telephone to call the cousin, but she had trouble dialing the number, not knowing to use the required prefix.

As she fiddled with the phone, she noticed a tall, mysterious man watching her. Fearing he might be a “spy” for immigration authorities, she fled. But the man followed.

For the next several hours, she tried to elude him, ducking into a cafe and a run-down movie house before finally losing him as dusk fell. She never learned who he was or what he wanted.

The experience left Alicia unsettled and eager to move on. Luckily, however, it would turn out to be the only truly tense moment she endured while in Tijuana.

The next day, Alicia was able to make the call to her cousin, who promised to arrange for a coyote in San Diego who had been recommended by another friend. He would cost $400. Less than 24 hours later, the coyote sought Alicia at the motel, identifying himself and using the cousin’s name as a sort of password.

“Let’s go,” she answered him.

The pair took a taxi to an apartment complex near the border, and the coyote left Alicia with a woman in one of the apartments to wait until nightfall.

At 10 p.m., Alicia and the coyote made their first foray into the United States. But they would be caught by U.S. Border Patrol agents after being seen by authorities from a helicopter.

“We passed through a fence and ran and ran,” Alicia remembered. “But they nabbed us.

“Overhead, they saw us from the helicopter. We threw ourselves on the ground, but it was flying very low, and shined a light on us.”

When the chopper landed, Alicia said, three agents got out and placed handcuffs on the coyote. The two were put in a truck and returned to a holding cell where they were required to give their names and nationalities. Alicia, summoning her fake birth certificate, claimed successfully to be Mexican.

What amazed Alicia more than anything was the sheer volume of people doing exactly what she was doing--attempting to cross the border.

“There are so many people, passing through and passing through,” she said. “Like in parades.”

In the 12 months ending in September, 366,000 arrests were made of people crossing the border illegally in the San Diego region, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. An estimated 45% of all illegal entries into the United States are made along an eight-mile stretch of the border near San Diego.

Another Try

Once the holding cell was packed with people, Alicia said, they were taken back to the Mexican side of the border in a bus and deposited there. Far from discouraging, it was an almost festive moment.

“Some of the women called to the immigration agents, ‘See you in a little while,’ ” she said. “One woman blew the agent a kiss and he laughed.”

Alicia and her coyote returned to the fence at the border to wait until Border Patrol agents on motorcycles and on horseback seemed to leave. At about 4 a.m., they tried again, joining another rush of humanity streaming through the fence and over the sandy hills toward San Diego.

Alicia remembers running for 15 minutes solid, then walking another 45 minutes or so until they reached a safehouse outside San Diego. It was nearly 6 a.m. She was given some food and use of a bathroom, then allowed to sleep.

She would have to wait two days at the house, until word arrived that it was safe to continue. At that point, Alicia and six others boarded a carpeted van that traveled from San Diego, through Orange County and into Los Angeles, delivering people “like packages,” she said. The driver showed his illegal passengers how to open the doors from inside in case the van was stopped by police and they would have to flee.

Alicia’s was the last stop. North Hollywood.

Alicia rested the weekend she arrived at her cousin’s North Hollywood apartment, part of an inexpensive complex full of children located off a busy San Fernando Valley thoroughfare, and then set off to find a job. Quickly, she was able to plug into the network of Salvadorans who share work, housing, church and information.

Using those contacts, Alicia visited several seamstress shops over the next five days before being hired to trim threads and iron clothing. She works alongside five to a dozen women.

Wages are low, Alicia says. She is paid 6 cents a piece, not even enough to muster $100 a week. But she is learning to operate the sewing machines and hopes for higher-paying work.

“At least it pays for food,” she said, adding she has still not been able to earn enough to send back to her children.

The easiest part was obtaining phony work papers, Alicia said. Under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, employers are required to demand from workers documents showing they are in the country legally. But, ever since the law went into effect, there has been a boom in counterfeit document production, according to both INS officials and illegal immigrants themselves.

Like thousands of other illegal immigrants, Alicia’s relatives knew exactly where to obtain the papers. Their source would be a woman in a small office in North Hollywood who simply needed a small picture of Alicia. Almost immediately she produced a fake “green card” and a fake Social Security card. Price: $45.

“Since it’s crooked, it’s quick,” Alicia said.

Alicia and her cousins said employers readily accept these fake papers, often with a wink and a smile indicating they know they are not authentic. Under the law, employers can be fined for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants but are not required to verify the validity of immigration papers.

Difficulties have not ended for Alicia. About a week after she arrived, her cousin’s husband went on a drunken rampage, she says, beating both women. They have fled and are living with friends in North Hollywood.

“After all my efforts to get here, this is not what I expected” to have to deal with, she said.

She also is in debt: the $300 she borrowed in El Salvador, the $400 her cousin paid the coyote plus the other $200 the cousin sent her in Mexico City. Alicia reached North Hollywood with about $25 and 100,000 Mexican pesos, worth about $40.

When she first arrived, Alicia felt a sense of relief and anticipation, tempered by a nagging sadness. To welcome Alicia, her cousin had put out snapshots of Alicia’s children. Something familiar, the cousin thought, would make Alicia feel at home. But instead, Alicia burst into tears at seeing the photographs.

“That is the moral pain I carry,” she said emotionally. “It hurts me, but I must wage this fight.”

Alicia said she asks her mother and brother, who are caring for the children in La Libertad, to mention her name to them occasionally so they will not forget their mother. She wants to work in Los Angeles long enough to earn money for her family, perhaps enough money to buy a small house in El Salvador. That could take years. But she is emphatic about one day returning home to her children.

“They are my children,” she said. “I have to be at their side.”

BACKGROUND

Like thousands of Central Americans, Alicia left her home earlier this year and embarked on an illegal and dangerous journey to find work in the United States. Her story was first told in The Times in September, when she had made her way from El Salvador to Mexico City. Since then, she has fulfilled her goal of reaching Los Angeles and is trying to eke out a living by sewing clothes. Increasingly, lone women like Alicia are making the trip, leaving their children behind and braving particular peril.