SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Kids are gonna be kids wherever they are.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: I remember there was this one kid who was putting plastic bottles on the train tracks just to see what happened to them.
DETROW: This is Eyder Peralta, NPR's Mexico City correspondent. It was December, and he was in a trainyard in northwest Mexico.
PERALTA: So at some point, I gave him a little coin so he could put it on the train track and see what happened to it. And indeed, I had never done this before.
DETROW: I did this when I was a kid. Yeah.
PERALTA: Yeah, and it flattens it, right?
DETROW: Yeah.
PERALTA: It's like one of those machines.
DETROW: This was a moment of downtime between many periods of acute motion. Hundreds of migrants were waiting for freight trains, hoping to jump aboard and ride north toward the U.S. border.
PERALTA: They have, like, their whole lives with them. You know, they have just bags full of coats and blankets, and they have jugs of water.
DETROW: When a train would finally approach...
PERALTA: They're so heavy that, like, the earth beneath it sort of heaves as they move across, right? It almost feels like the gravity of the train pulls you toward it.
DETROW: The trains moved so fast that jumping on directly would be impossible for most of the migrants.
PERALTA: So they have this term that they say, (non-English language spoken), which translates to, we're going to puncture the train. And so the young people - they will put on gloves, like, a ski mask to protect their face and their eyes.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
PERALTA: And then as the train comes, they just sprint, like, right beside it, and they somehow jump on, and then they just start turning knobs and pulling levers. And what they're hoping will happen is that it disrupts the train's air brakes. And so that would usually cause an emergency stop.
DETROW: The migrants Eyder and his photographer were following finally found the train they wanted, and they got it to stop. They climbed up to the top of the train, and Eyder and his colleague joined them. They all spent a frigid night riding north at 50 miles an hour.
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DETROW: In Mexico, this train is called La Bestia, the beast. For decades, migrants have been riding on top of it in a treacherous and often deadly leg of the journey to the U.S. border. Today for our weekly Reporter's Notebook segment, we'll go on board La Bestia with Eyder. His reporting started with a basic question. Why would migrants take this risk?
PERALTA: There was this Venezuelan woman who I met, and she had slung her little girl just on her shoulder.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
PERALTA: And I asked her, like, you know, why do this, and why do this right now? And she sort of, like, looked at me surprised, I think, at the question, and she said, you know, you guys think that the American dream is dead.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
PERALTA: "But, for us"...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
PERALTA: ..."The American dream is still very much alive." And I think what - the explanation for that that I got over talking to dozens of migrants is that the American dream is not this grand idea. It's a really simple idea. For her, it was that her two kids could get an education.
I also met this mother and son from Venezuela as well, Brian and Yalitza (ph), who was his mom. And his mom was in her 50s, and he was 23, right? And Yalitza's husband died, and she says she told Brian, you know, this is our chance. I've got nothing to lose. We can do this, and you can find a better life now. And so they left.
And so she told me, why I'm doing this is because I think that Brian, my son, could become an entrepreneur. He can have a better life. And then talking to her son, he told me something much simpler - right? - which was that he had a little kid in Venezuela.
BRIAN: (Non-English language spoken).
PERALTA: And he hadn't been able to buy him a birthday present.
BRIAN: (Non-English language spoken).
PERALTA: What this trip could mean - what this American dream could mean - is that one day, his kid could have a birthday present.
DETROW: Even when the policy of the U.S. government right now is we don't want you...
PERALTA: Yeah.
DETROW: ...We don't want to give you any of these resources, we want to arrest you or deport you from the country or both.
PERALTA: Yeah. But they - you know, I think another thing about these migrants - right? - is that they've been told that throughout. A lot of these migrants - they've been at this for years. You know, a lot of these Venezuelan migrants - you know, they first started in Colombia. And then, you know, they crossed the jungle in Panama, and then, you know, they went up to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, right?
And so we were catching these migrants at the tail end of a journey. I think that's a lot of why they're saying, we don't care what the American president says. We've been going through hell. And whatever he says is nothing compared to what we've already been through.
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DETROW: Let me turn the why question to you because, obviously, the immigration story is a major part of your beat. But you can and you have told that story a lot of different ways. Why, to you, was this story worth climbing on top of a two-story freight train and riding it as it traveled 50 miles an hour?
PERALTA: You know, it - this story was born out of a conversation I had with my wife. You know, we live in Mexico City, and Mexico City is a stop along the way for migrants, so you see a lot of migrant families. And my wife had a question, right? She was saying, I don't know that I have the capacity emotionally to put my family through a trip like this. And what she was saying is, I have a hard time understanding migrants who do. I was like, you know, that's probably a question that many of our listeners have.
I had met this Mexican photographer, Pedro Ansa (ph). I had met him in Haiti when we were doing some coverage in Haiti. And he rides this train a lot. He's working on a long term project on this train. And he had told me, you know, you should ride the train. It gives you a very different understanding of the migrant experience.
DETROW: Was he right? Did - on the other side of that, did you feel like you understood this in a different way?
PERALTA: I did. I have to say, I didn't realize how hard this was. You know, I was coming off of an assignment in Lebanon. I was there as Israel started bombing. It was missiles, and you could feel the force of them, right? So, like, I was like, well, you know, what's getting on a train, right?
DETROW: (Laughter) It's all relative.
PERALTA: I was - but I was wrong.
DETROW: Yeah.
PERALTA: Scott, like the - we spent - a 12-hour part of that train ride was at night. And it was in the high 30s, and that train is moving at 50 miles an hour. So, like, just the wind, right?
DETROW: And is there any cover whatsoever up there? I assume no.
PERALTA: No cover - and, like, one of the - there's this - there are these people who help the migrants. And this lady - like, she saw me and the photographer I was with. And she said, you guys are crazy, like, you don't know what you're getting into. And she gave us this very thin blanket. And I was like, I'm not going to take this. Give it to one of the migrants, right? Like, I - you know, I'm just here as a reporter. I'm not doing this. And she's like, you're going to want this. And so, like, I took it sort of with a little shame. And in the middle of the night, I was just holding onto that blanket.
It is freezing out here. Everyone just woke up. The train has picked up speed again. It's like...
It was difficult. And you're just, you know, there's so many people on that train that you can't really move, but there's also, like, not really body warmth that you're getting, like, from other people. Nobody's talking. It's so loud. The wind - right? You're just - like, you look up, and all you see is, like, there was, like, a full moon, right? And, like, you really can't see anything on either side.
DETROW: What were you, like, thinking about on, like, hour six or seven or eight, sitting on top...
PERALTA: The sun.
DETROW: ...Of this train? The sun?
PERALTA: The sun - literally, all I could think about is, what am I doing? Like, why did we do this? And when is that sun going to come up?
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DETROW: That's a good segue, Eyder, that you, I think, probably more than anybody on staff right now at NPR, have a particular knack of finding yourself in tricky situations in the middle of a story and often maximizing that and using that situation to tell a better story and to understand the topic that you're covering even more and help listeners understand that.
You've been detained in south Sudan. I remember hearing live on the radio when you were reporting on something 'cause people were throwing rocks at the tin roof of the building you were in...
PERALTA: It was in Kenya.
DETROW: ...In Kenya as you did a live radio hit (ph). How do you generally think about the pros and cons and at what point it's not worth it to keep going for you personally?
PERALTA: I think - my editor always tells me, like, Eyder you know, the chaos will be there tomorrow, right? Whatever chaos that is, right? Haiti will be there tomorrow. She's like, take - let's take a breath 'cause my instinct - right? - as a journalist is, let's go.
I grew up in Miami. And the first house we stayed at - it was like a corner house and, like, a big intersection, right? And so there was always car crashes. And, like, no one could keep me from going to see the car crash, right? It was, like, the thing I did. So, like, I always want to run toward things. But I - there's always a conversation between me and my editors about risk versus benefit.
It's interesting because on this train, I had a different opinion than my photographer friend. You know, we had gotten on a couple of trains, and they were moving in the wrong direction. Everybody got off. And I was not comfortable on top of that train. You know, you're two stories up. I'm afraid of, like, ferris wheels, so, like, I don't like heights. And...
DETROW: I'm with you on that. I can do roller coasters, but ferris wheels...
PERALTA: I can...
DETROW: The slow height of it...
PERALTA: Same.
DETROW: No.
PERALTA: And then, like, sometimes, you know, you have to walk on top of those things, and you have to jump from cart to cart. And that...
DETROW: I clenched up hearing that part...
PERALTA: Yeah.
DETROW: ...Of the story, as you described it.
PERALTA: That made me really uncomfortable. I rarely am physically scared, right?
DETROW: Yeah.
PERALTA: I was physically scared. And I sat down at some point with Pedro Ansa, the photographer who was with me on this trip, and I said, I'm not doing this. And I'm like, we don't - we won't even use it for the story, I said, because actually, in the end, we used about one paragraph of that awful 12 hours overnight of freezing cold. And so in my mind, I was making that calculation, right? And he stopped me, and he said, you will never understand what they go through unless you get on the train with them.
DETROW: Eyder, I want to end this conversation the way you ended this story, because the fact is, for a lot of these people, maybe even a majority of these people, all of this long, long journey - which, like you said, the very end of is riding across the desert freezing cold on the top of a train - it's all for naught because you end the story by talking about a family who - they make it across the border, they turn themselves in and seek for asylum, and they're immediately kicked out of the United States. And yet, as you write in the story, they, the next day, start heading north again.
PERALTA: Yeah. You know, just as President Trump took office, I was in Ciudad Juarez, at the border. And I actually met some of the same migrants that had been on the train with me.
DETROW: Same people?
PERALTA: The same people - and they were waiting in line 'cause they had gotten a CBP One (ph) appointment, which is this app that the Biden administration used to have. And that's kind of like - that is the glimmer of hope. That was the glimmer of hope for so many migrants, right? And on that day, Trump takes the oath of office. And that app goes offline just minutes after he does.
And the heartbreak on that international bridge - it's hard to describe, honestly. You're just watching somebody's world crumble in a few minutes. And to know, I guess, to have felt what it's like for a little tiny period - right? - of how hard that journey is - to watch it crumble on that day, I mean, you know, that's - I think it's difficult.
DETROW: That's Eyder Peralta, Mexico City correspondent for NPR. Eyder, thanks for walking us through one of your stories and helping us understand how you think about all of this.
PERALTA: Thank you, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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