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The Far Away Brothers

Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

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Selected for common reading at: 

Brescia University 
California State University, Northridge
Indiana University Kelley School of Business
University of Iowa Center for Human Rights


NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE | SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE | SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California—fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong.

Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores—until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience.
Author’s Note
 
In the winter of 2013, I received an assignment from the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) to travel to South Texas and write about the recent uptick in immigration by unaccompanied minors and what happened to them once they’d made it into the United States. These were children, mostly from Central America, who had crossed the border without papers or parents. I spent that spring reporting the story, digging into the massive infrastructure of apprehending, detaining, caring for, and litigating the cases of these thousands of young migrants who, that year, more than tripled their historical annual average. The article, “First the Fence, Then the System,” came out that June.
 
Since 2006, I’d been working with refugees and immigrants in Oakland, California, at various nonprofit agencies and then the Oakland school district. In 2011 I started working at Oakland International High School, a school for newly arrived English-language learners, where I coordinated programs for students and families, such as parent classes, after-school programs, and health and mental health services. Our school had enrolled a few unaccompanied minors over the years, but I understood little about their circumstances and even less about their experiences navigating the immigration system.
 
In the VQR story, I had focused on the children who were caught, but I soon found myself chasing another story: what happened to the children who weren’t caught? My story on the growing number of unaccompanied minors working in the California agricultural system, “The Lost Boys of California,” was published in VICE in March 2014.
 
Just as I was filing the first draft, Mr. David, a co-worker at Oakland International, came into my office to tell me that “we really need to do something about all the kids with upcoming court dates.”
 
What?
 
He explained that a number of our new ninth and tenth graders had been ordered to appear in immigration court in the coming months. The students, who were undocumented and had been apprehended by the authorities after crossing the U.S. border, were almost universally unaccompanied minors, or “unaccompanied alien children.” They had all been ordered deported and would have to fight in court for the right to stay. They were terrified of court; none of the students David had spoken to had a lawyer. Of the twenty-five or so students he advised, seven were unaccompanied minors.
 
While I had been away reporting on the issue outside Oakland, this population had been surging at my school, the place where I spent four days a week, right under my nose. By spring of 2014, more than sixty unaccompanied minors had enrolled at Oakland International High School, out of a student body of just under four hundred. By the following fall, the number surpassed ninety. In 2017, unaccompanied minors make up over a quarter of Oakland International’s student population.
 
After my conversation with David, I spent many an afternoon shepherding kids to pro bono legal agencies and court dates and setting up intake appointments and “know your rights” information sessions at the school. The students needed counseling and tutoring and doctors’ appointments; some of them needed help finding homeless shelters and access to food and clothing. Supporting unaccompanied minors quickly became one of my primary responsibilities.
 
In February 2014, I met the Flores twins. (To protect the anonymity of the “Flores” family, I have changed their names and those of many others who appear in this book, as well as the name of their hometown.)
 
They told me why they had come, but I had so many more questions. What were these children really risking—and enduring—to come here, and what was the likelihood they would gain the right to stay? Would they really be better off if they did? Were the stories I was hearing overblown, and could I take their reasons for coming to the United States at face value? Answering these questions became a personal imperative, one that would help me better understand my students, my country, and the endless churn of southern migration into the United States.
 
To learn more about the Flores family’s story, and that of the hundreds of thousands of migrants like them, I traveled to El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, and Texas, reporting from various fulcrums of violence in El Salvador as well as at stations along the migrant trail north. Parts of this book I witnessed myself, and other parts have been reconstructed through extensive reporting and interviews, all in service of investigating the changing dynamics of migration.
 
Since reporting that first article for VQR, I have heard countless stories from young people traveling alone to reach the United States. Every story is different, but there are also striking similarities, often having to do with mounting violence in the children’s home countries. These girls and boys are crossing into the United States in search of the fabled “better life” that has attracted migrants, authorized and unauthorized, since before the Mayflower landed. But in the Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—a “better life,” for many, means a life where they are not afraid of being killed.
 
I began reporting this book during the Obama administration, a time rife with anxiety for undocumented migrants. It was completed after the election of Donald Trump, marking an era of unprecedented fear among immigrants and refugees past and present. In a time when immigration is in the daily headlines yet is too often reduced to a matter of binary politics—keep them out or let them in, wall or no wall—this book seeks to offer a complex understanding of why immigrants leave their country, what struggles they endure to get here, and the challenges they face setting roots in a foreign land.
 
The story of the Flores twins isn’t the most harrowing, or the most unjust, or the most extraordinary I’ve come across as an educator and a journalist—far from it. But something in their story illustrates, roundly and heartbreakingly, the wounds of war, the spirit of a new generation of immigrants, and the impact of migration on the United States as well as on the tiny, time-battered country of El Salvador.
 
The United States is still young and is ever reiterating itself as demanded by its people, both those who have lived here for a long time and those who have just arrived. Immigrants have always shaped our country’s future. Young Central Americans are coming here in unprecedented numbers, and how they are or are not received and supported will determine, in part, the next chapter in the American story.
 
“For a child to choose to make that journey,” an advocate told me during my first trip to South Texas, “there’s a reason.”
 
Since 2012, hundreds of thousands of minors, paperless and parentless, have crossed into the United States. “Why are they coming, and why so many?” I wrote in my first piece on unaccompanied minors. It was an earnest question. Every answer raised another question, and the result is this book. It is about who these young men and women are, where they come from, the choices they’ve made, and what their stories reveal about who we are as a country, and what we will, or might, become.
 
 
Chapter 1
 
“You boys from eighteen?” one of the young men said, pointing his gun toward the retaining wall marked by a small graffito tag: barrio 18.
 
It was 2008. The Flores twins, twelve, were playing poker on the town soccer field with their older brother and six friends when the pickup pulled up. Ten or so guys stood in the truck bed brandishing guns and machetes, sporting hip-hop clothes and tattoos. They were MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, the twins knew—members of the gang that was then slinking into the small town of La Colonia. The Flores boys and their friends were high on adrenaline from having won a big soccer match that morning, a feeling that mixed nicely with the bravado of early adolescence. But the sight of the armed men scared them silent.
 
They shook their heads no.
 
“I asked you a question!” barked the guy in the truck.
 
Ernesto’s gaze was lowered, but he could feel the men staring down at him. “I asked if you f***ers were from eighteen!” the man shouted. At that, one of their friends took off running into the woods. Suddenly— they couldn’t remember who moved first—the twins were sprinting through the forest that flanked the town soccer field, Ernesto first, Raúl close behind, panting and flying over dips and gullies, pushing past banana trees and crashing through the tall grasses while shouts and a scatter of gunshots crackled behind them.
 
Running away from a truck of gangsters was either an admission of guilt (in this case, allegiance to the rival Barrio 18 gang) or, at the very least, a sign of a lack of respect for MS-13 authority.
 
When the shouts felt far enough away, the twins hit the ground, lying on their bellies in the brush. They stayed there for what felt like several hours—until they were sure the truck was gone. They were too scared to go back to the field and look for their cards, which, for anyone vigilando, or keeping watch over the area, might tag the twins as the ones who ran. For a while, at least, no more poker.
 
---
 
The road to La Colonia is meandering but smooth, thanks to the scant traffic. It weaves through a tangle of greenery: vines overhang concrete walls alongside tall, tight rows of banana trees, diaphanous canopies of barillos, pink flowering cacao, dense cedro negro, and flushing palms. The road begins in a valley and winds upward to where La Colonia, about thirty miles from San Salvador and home to fewer than four thousand people, spreads up and around the slopes of a gentle, low hill.
 
The houses along the road are simple but comfortable, built from concrete, many of them painted colors that were once bright—ice blue, cotton candy pink, white with fuchsia trim—but that now, with weather and time and dust, have faded. Less fortunate homes speckle back into the adjacent hills and farmland. Flags of the conservative ARENA party flap from electric poles and appear painted on buildings. Along the road stand La Colonia’s schools—two high schools and an elementary school. One of only about a dozen Flores family photos is of the twins and their older sister, somber-faced and gangly beneath too-big dress clothes, on the proud occasion of their ninth-grade graduation.
 
Cows use the road as often as people do, lashed together by the horns and plodding along between farm and pasture, and dogs warm themselves in the middle of the street looking like splayed corpses. At the sound of approaching cars they rise, shake themselves, and lumber off to where the road turns to dirt. During harvest time, families turn the two-lane road into one as they lay their bean pods and corn out to dry, the kernels spread like a blanched mosaic along the tarmac.
 
The road crests the hill and begins to dip downward, and that’s where the Flores home sits, a stone house lined with crumbling stucco. From there it’s not much farther to the center of town, a sleepy square rimmed by a block or two of houses and a few businesses—family-run restaurants, sundries shops, the mayor’s office. The high-rising church is the town’s main attraction, its tower wielding a hulking cross that casts a daily shadow into the central square. At noon the church bells chime.
 
Until the twins were teenagers, the town center was frequented day and night. Kids ran around the small playground, people took refuge on the shaded benches, and boys played soccer on the open concrete court, even in the afternoon heat. People came to use the copy shop or buy soap or soda or enter a complaint at the mayor’s office. Children who’d begged spare change from their parents bought snow cones from the heavyset woman with the mobile stand, the bright, tacky syrup staining their faces. The pupuserías were open until eleven, midnight even, playing music and serving sodas and beers, the lady proprietors flipping the cakes of corn masa against the griddle until the edges were crispy yellow-brown.
 
“It was a beautiful town,” Raúl remembers. “It was.”
 
---
 
Like the rest of the farmers in La Colonia, the twins’ father, Wilber, regarded the mountain and its fertile land as a divine inheritance. The land was good to him; God provided. This was Wilber’s credo. “The way to survive this world is to stay close to God,” he said to his children. “And keep manos limpias”: clean hands.
 
Wilber carried a small Bible in his pocket at all times, the binding frayed and worn from use. Tucked inside were several prayer cards, his Salvadoran national ID, the photo taken when he was a very young man, and a picture of his bride, Esperanza, now faded and tattered. Every now and then he’d pull out the keepsakes to have a look.
 
“See how young you were!” he’d say. Esperanza tittered like a girl, waving her hand as if shooing a fly.
 
Wilber and Esperanza had always wanted a big family, but for many years they’d felt they might be cursed. They got married in the midst of the country’s civil war, in 1985, and when Esperanza gave birth to her first baby, Ricardo, two years later, the war still raged. La Colonia wasn’t a hot zone, but soldiers marched through it on occasion. This never meant anything good for poor farmers like the Flores family, whom the government often suspected of being guerrillas. “The soldiers came looking for people,” Esperanza explained. “They could mistake you for someone else and punish you for something they did.”
 
Once when Wilber was out of town working on another farm’s harvest, news spread that the army was on its way. Esperanza snatched up Ricardo, who was barely a year old, and walked out of town up into the hills, where she stayed along with some neighbors for a couple of days, hoping Ricardo didn’t cry too loudly. The army passed through without fireworks or massacres. Esperanza came down from the mountain, and they resumed their lives at home.
 
It was a dirty war, as Wilber put it—a war between the rightist government, beholden to the country’s powerful oligarchy and operating with brute military force, and the mounting leftist guerrilla movement, fighting for the interests of the impoverished working class, especially the country’s rural farmers. But the Flores family thought it best to stay out of politics.
 
In cities and in the countryside, mutilated bodies showed up in the streets. Political prisoners—dead and alive—were heaved off the Devil’s Gate cliff in the dense hills above San Salvador. Both sides played dirty, but the government death squads were brutal: a UN-appointed truth commission report asserts, with some contestation from within El Salvador, that 85 percent of the atrocities were carried out by the government. In the early 1980s, the United States trained and backed the government forces—death squads and all—to prevent a guerrilla takeover: an effort, in the thick of the Cold War, to prevent the proximal spread of Communism.
 
“It was a terrible time,” Wilber says. He won’t say much else about the war.
 
In 1988, as the violence heated toward its final boil, Esperanza gave birth to another son: Wilber Jr. Then, as peace negotiations were under way in Mexico City, she gave birth to a daughter who died at just several weeks old. They buried her in La Colonia. Esperanza kept praying for more children, placing offerings upon the altar and asking God and the Mother Mary for their blessings every Sunday in church. The peace accords were signed in Mexico City in 1992, and as the government and the guerrillas agreed to lay down their weapons for good, Esperanza got pregnant again. This baby, too, died at just several weeks old, and another after that made it only a few days before she turned blue and they had to bury her as well. Was Esperanza cursed? Was she too old?
 
In 1994 El Salvador held its first free and fair peacetime elections. The conservative ARENA party won, but the war was over. After so many years of conflict, it was a time of rebuilding. That year Esperanza’s prayers were answered: she gave birth to her sixth child, a girl, Maricela. Maricela lived.
 
The Flores family were still farmers who scraped by harvest to harvest, who struggled to find money to buy clothes or take a child to the doctor. But as Esperanza looked back, she regarded those as good years: three healthy babies, a country out of war.
 
Then the curse reared again: another baby, who died another mysterious death just a few weeks after he was born. That made seven children in all, only three of whom had made it to a year. In a place with little medical care, tragedies like this were common enough, but four tested Esperanza’s faith. At the end of 1995, when her belly began to swell again a few months after the fourth baby died, she prayed she wouldn’t lose this one, too.
 
After a bit of nausea early on, she had a good feeling—this one, she thought, would keep. The closest doctor was a thirty-minute drive away, and anyway, she couldn’t afford him. Prayer was more important, she felt in the end. Within just three months she was bigger than she’d ever been at that stage. By month five she was exhausted, walking wide-legged, having to heave herself out of the bed each morning to feed the children and scatter corn for the chickens. She’d squat to tug at the cow’s udders for milk, her back aching, her knees on fire.
 
Wilber prayed for her at church, crooned hymns and strummed the guitar in the front of the congregation. He worried that the bigness and the fatigue were due to her age, mid-thirties, so he put more offerings onto their altar—corn, beans, flowers from the blooming trees, and vines around their house, a plump orange, a twin tomato. God was good. He’d let them keep this one.
 
“Look how big I am!” Esperanza boasted. Must be a boy, some neighbors said. She was eating so well after the year’s good harvest. Maybe she was further along than she thought?
 
Esperanza had her own quiet suspicions. She didn’t want to jinx it, but she thought she might be carrying two. It wasn’t just the taut globe of her belly; she had a warm, warbling sense of it in her heart.
 
They saved up some money. When it neared her time to give birth, she took the bus down to the hospital, where they listened to her stomach and brought a picture onto the screen.
 
“Twins,” the nurse said.
 
She’d been right. There were two little bodies, the thump of two heartbeats. Fifteen days later she went into labor. Ernesto slipped into the world first, screeching. She felt relief and then a wild need to push again. She labored the other baby out twelve minutes later—Raúl. Two identical creatures, writhing, their brown-pink bodies slick with birth. The nurses brought them both into her arms. They’d make it, she thought.
  • WINNER | 2018
    Northern California Book Reviewers Award (previously BABRA)
  • WINNER | 2018
    Ridenhour Prizes
  • SHORTLIST | 2018
    Lukas Prize Project: J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2018
    PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
  • RUNNERUP | 2018
    California Book Award
  • FINALIST | 2017
    L.A. Times Book Prize (Current Interest)
"The Far Away Brothers is impeccably timed, intimately reported and beautifully expressed. Markham brings people and places to rumbling life; she has that rare ability to recreate elusive, subjective experiences—whether they’re scenes she never witnessed or her characters’ interior psychological states—without taking undue liberties. In many ways, her book is reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. It’s about teenagers who raise themselves."—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

“This is the sort of news that is the opposite of fake…Markham is our knowing, compassionate ally, our guide in sorting out, up close, how our new national immigration policy is playing out from a human perspective...An important book.”The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An indelible picture...of one imperfect family driven apart and astraynot by inequality or lax enforcement, but by the humanitarian crisis of gang warfare."Vulture

“Painstakingly reported…A compassionate look at the lives of two young men and the family they left behind when they were seventeen years old…[This] book could not have come at a more relevant time.” Mother Jones

"Markham recreates each step of the story in rich detail...Powerful." Pacific Standard

"Deserves a place alongside the strongest in the genre....By the book’s end, it’s impossible to not be rooting for [the Flores brothers]. The book’s true victory, however, is in its insights into how the gang crisis in El Salvador and neighboring countries is impacting individual lives—and what lengths these individuals will go to, in chillingly descriptive detail, to persevere." PopMatters

"Lauren Markham understands the complexities of immigration to the United States...Compelling." Sojourner

"Excellent...a clear-eyed look at what many [immigrants] actually experience." The Mercury News

"Markham functions as an empathetic intermediary amid ordinary and extraordinary struggles. She is implicated in the boys’ search for a livable life, but her closeness to the situation does not impede her analysis....The Far Away Brothers...tell[s] a story of courage and failure, tenacity and loss, loyalty and fumbling steps into an unknown future." The Christian Century

“Timely and thought-provoking…Markham provides a sensitive and eye-opening take on what’s at stake for young immigrants with nowhere else to go.”Publishers Weekly

“Powerful…Focusing primarily on one family's struggle to survive in violence-riddled El Salvador by sending some of its members illegally to the U.S.,...[this] compellingly intimate narrative…keenly examines the plights of juveniles sent to America without adult supervision….One of the most searing books on illegal immigration since Sonia Nazario's Enrique's Journey.” Kirkus [starred review]

“A stark examination of youth migration and the extreme risks taken to access a better life....Markham questions the accessibility of the American dream while compassionately narrating Raúl and Ernesto’s experiences.” Booklist

"An affecting and personal look into the experiences of minor migrants." Library Journal

"This brilliantly reported book goes so deeply into the lives of its protagonists and is so beautifully, movingly written it has some of the pleasures of a novel—but all the force of bitter truth, the truth about the lives of unaccompanied minors in the USA, about poverty, the ricocheting wars here and there, and the caprices and brutalities of immigration policy. Anyone who wants to understand more deeply how we got here and why we need to keep going until we get someplace better should dive into this book." —Rebecca Solnit, author of The Mother of All Questions

"Beautifully written, The Far Away Brothers examines the claustrophobic space between grinding poverty and brutal gang violence that drives so many children from El Salvador to make the dangerous journey North. Lauren Markham applies the eye of an artist to the dogged reporting of an investigative journalist. What a fine and timely book!" —Ted Koppel, author of Lights Out

“In the midst of a contentious debate in which reality is too often bent or ruptured entirely, The Far Away Brothers is a necessary book. But it is so much more than just that. Told with elegant detail, profound compassion, and painful truth, you will come out of this story with so much knowledge and, more importantly, understanding—of immigrants and also of youth. Lauren Markham has written this book in a hard and noble way, depicting the Flores brothers not only as representatives of a vital issue, but as human beings: complicated, special, humorous, and flawed. You need to meet these young men.” —Jeff Hobbs, author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

"A twenty-first century odyssey, The Far Away Brothers will take readers to unimaginable places, mapped and unmapped, in heart and mind as well as on the earth’s surface. This is one of the finest accounts ever written of the plight of unaccompanied migrant children, full of insight and empathy, and as gripping a tale as one might hope to find in a masterful suspense novel. By making the Flores twins come alive, Lauren Markham puts flesh and bone on one of the most shadowy yet most pressing crises of our day and age." —Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami

"Lauren Markham has written a modern day epic with The Far Away Brothers. It is a wonderfully unfolding, intimate portrait of family and the dangers people are still willing to risk for a simple chance at a better life. Markham's writing reads like the best of fiction out there, and yet... remember, this happened to real people. This is the sort of book you'll be thinking about at night." —Domingo Martinez, author of The Boy Kings of Texas

“The most moving revelation of this book comes not from the geo-political lessons we learn, the path of the brothers through the desert, or the obstacles they face in U.S. courts—rather, it’s the insight into how that journey affects them, plaguing them with anxiety and guilt but also inspiring hope, ambition, and responsibility. From a lesser writer this would be a simple migration story, but thanks to Markham’s relentless reporting and care, it becomes a deeply relatable tale of human transformation—messy, stumbling, and bursting with optimism.”—Laura Tillman, author of The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

"Once you've read this remarkable reporting, 'immigration' will never be an abstract or airless debate for you again. It's hard to imagine a more timely or more valuable volume." —Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont
© Andria Lo
Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. A US American of Greek heritage, she has been working with migrants for two decades, and writing about migration and other social issues in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA. View titles by Lauren Markham

Educator Guide for The Far Away Brothers

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About

Selected for common reading at: 

Brescia University 
California State University, Northridge
Indiana University Kelley School of Business
University of Iowa Center for Human Rights


NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE | SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE | SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California—fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong.

Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores—until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience.

Excerpt

Author’s Note
 
In the winter of 2013, I received an assignment from the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) to travel to South Texas and write about the recent uptick in immigration by unaccompanied minors and what happened to them once they’d made it into the United States. These were children, mostly from Central America, who had crossed the border without papers or parents. I spent that spring reporting the story, digging into the massive infrastructure of apprehending, detaining, caring for, and litigating the cases of these thousands of young migrants who, that year, more than tripled their historical annual average. The article, “First the Fence, Then the System,” came out that June.
 
Since 2006, I’d been working with refugees and immigrants in Oakland, California, at various nonprofit agencies and then the Oakland school district. In 2011 I started working at Oakland International High School, a school for newly arrived English-language learners, where I coordinated programs for students and families, such as parent classes, after-school programs, and health and mental health services. Our school had enrolled a few unaccompanied minors over the years, but I understood little about their circumstances and even less about their experiences navigating the immigration system.
 
In the VQR story, I had focused on the children who were caught, but I soon found myself chasing another story: what happened to the children who weren’t caught? My story on the growing number of unaccompanied minors working in the California agricultural system, “The Lost Boys of California,” was published in VICE in March 2014.
 
Just as I was filing the first draft, Mr. David, a co-worker at Oakland International, came into my office to tell me that “we really need to do something about all the kids with upcoming court dates.”
 
What?
 
He explained that a number of our new ninth and tenth graders had been ordered to appear in immigration court in the coming months. The students, who were undocumented and had been apprehended by the authorities after crossing the U.S. border, were almost universally unaccompanied minors, or “unaccompanied alien children.” They had all been ordered deported and would have to fight in court for the right to stay. They were terrified of court; none of the students David had spoken to had a lawyer. Of the twenty-five or so students he advised, seven were unaccompanied minors.
 
While I had been away reporting on the issue outside Oakland, this population had been surging at my school, the place where I spent four days a week, right under my nose. By spring of 2014, more than sixty unaccompanied minors had enrolled at Oakland International High School, out of a student body of just under four hundred. By the following fall, the number surpassed ninety. In 2017, unaccompanied minors make up over a quarter of Oakland International’s student population.
 
After my conversation with David, I spent many an afternoon shepherding kids to pro bono legal agencies and court dates and setting up intake appointments and “know your rights” information sessions at the school. The students needed counseling and tutoring and doctors’ appointments; some of them needed help finding homeless shelters and access to food and clothing. Supporting unaccompanied minors quickly became one of my primary responsibilities.
 
In February 2014, I met the Flores twins. (To protect the anonymity of the “Flores” family, I have changed their names and those of many others who appear in this book, as well as the name of their hometown.)
 
They told me why they had come, but I had so many more questions. What were these children really risking—and enduring—to come here, and what was the likelihood they would gain the right to stay? Would they really be better off if they did? Were the stories I was hearing overblown, and could I take their reasons for coming to the United States at face value? Answering these questions became a personal imperative, one that would help me better understand my students, my country, and the endless churn of southern migration into the United States.
 
To learn more about the Flores family’s story, and that of the hundreds of thousands of migrants like them, I traveled to El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, and Texas, reporting from various fulcrums of violence in El Salvador as well as at stations along the migrant trail north. Parts of this book I witnessed myself, and other parts have been reconstructed through extensive reporting and interviews, all in service of investigating the changing dynamics of migration.
 
Since reporting that first article for VQR, I have heard countless stories from young people traveling alone to reach the United States. Every story is different, but there are also striking similarities, often having to do with mounting violence in the children’s home countries. These girls and boys are crossing into the United States in search of the fabled “better life” that has attracted migrants, authorized and unauthorized, since before the Mayflower landed. But in the Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—a “better life,” for many, means a life where they are not afraid of being killed.
 
I began reporting this book during the Obama administration, a time rife with anxiety for undocumented migrants. It was completed after the election of Donald Trump, marking an era of unprecedented fear among immigrants and refugees past and present. In a time when immigration is in the daily headlines yet is too often reduced to a matter of binary politics—keep them out or let them in, wall or no wall—this book seeks to offer a complex understanding of why immigrants leave their country, what struggles they endure to get here, and the challenges they face setting roots in a foreign land.
 
The story of the Flores twins isn’t the most harrowing, or the most unjust, or the most extraordinary I’ve come across as an educator and a journalist—far from it. But something in their story illustrates, roundly and heartbreakingly, the wounds of war, the spirit of a new generation of immigrants, and the impact of migration on the United States as well as on the tiny, time-battered country of El Salvador.
 
The United States is still young and is ever reiterating itself as demanded by its people, both those who have lived here for a long time and those who have just arrived. Immigrants have always shaped our country’s future. Young Central Americans are coming here in unprecedented numbers, and how they are or are not received and supported will determine, in part, the next chapter in the American story.
 
“For a child to choose to make that journey,” an advocate told me during my first trip to South Texas, “there’s a reason.”
 
Since 2012, hundreds of thousands of minors, paperless and parentless, have crossed into the United States. “Why are they coming, and why so many?” I wrote in my first piece on unaccompanied minors. It was an earnest question. Every answer raised another question, and the result is this book. It is about who these young men and women are, where they come from, the choices they’ve made, and what their stories reveal about who we are as a country, and what we will, or might, become.
 
 
Chapter 1
 
“You boys from eighteen?” one of the young men said, pointing his gun toward the retaining wall marked by a small graffito tag: barrio 18.
 
It was 2008. The Flores twins, twelve, were playing poker on the town soccer field with their older brother and six friends when the pickup pulled up. Ten or so guys stood in the truck bed brandishing guns and machetes, sporting hip-hop clothes and tattoos. They were MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, the twins knew—members of the gang that was then slinking into the small town of La Colonia. The Flores boys and their friends were high on adrenaline from having won a big soccer match that morning, a feeling that mixed nicely with the bravado of early adolescence. But the sight of the armed men scared them silent.
 
They shook their heads no.
 
“I asked you a question!” barked the guy in the truck.
 
Ernesto’s gaze was lowered, but he could feel the men staring down at him. “I asked if you f***ers were from eighteen!” the man shouted. At that, one of their friends took off running into the woods. Suddenly— they couldn’t remember who moved first—the twins were sprinting through the forest that flanked the town soccer field, Ernesto first, Raúl close behind, panting and flying over dips and gullies, pushing past banana trees and crashing through the tall grasses while shouts and a scatter of gunshots crackled behind them.
 
Running away from a truck of gangsters was either an admission of guilt (in this case, allegiance to the rival Barrio 18 gang) or, at the very least, a sign of a lack of respect for MS-13 authority.
 
When the shouts felt far enough away, the twins hit the ground, lying on their bellies in the brush. They stayed there for what felt like several hours—until they were sure the truck was gone. They were too scared to go back to the field and look for their cards, which, for anyone vigilando, or keeping watch over the area, might tag the twins as the ones who ran. For a while, at least, no more poker.
 
---
 
The road to La Colonia is meandering but smooth, thanks to the scant traffic. It weaves through a tangle of greenery: vines overhang concrete walls alongside tall, tight rows of banana trees, diaphanous canopies of barillos, pink flowering cacao, dense cedro negro, and flushing palms. The road begins in a valley and winds upward to where La Colonia, about thirty miles from San Salvador and home to fewer than four thousand people, spreads up and around the slopes of a gentle, low hill.
 
The houses along the road are simple but comfortable, built from concrete, many of them painted colors that were once bright—ice blue, cotton candy pink, white with fuchsia trim—but that now, with weather and time and dust, have faded. Less fortunate homes speckle back into the adjacent hills and farmland. Flags of the conservative ARENA party flap from electric poles and appear painted on buildings. Along the road stand La Colonia’s schools—two high schools and an elementary school. One of only about a dozen Flores family photos is of the twins and their older sister, somber-faced and gangly beneath too-big dress clothes, on the proud occasion of their ninth-grade graduation.
 
Cows use the road as often as people do, lashed together by the horns and plodding along between farm and pasture, and dogs warm themselves in the middle of the street looking like splayed corpses. At the sound of approaching cars they rise, shake themselves, and lumber off to where the road turns to dirt. During harvest time, families turn the two-lane road into one as they lay their bean pods and corn out to dry, the kernels spread like a blanched mosaic along the tarmac.
 
The road crests the hill and begins to dip downward, and that’s where the Flores home sits, a stone house lined with crumbling stucco. From there it’s not much farther to the center of town, a sleepy square rimmed by a block or two of houses and a few businesses—family-run restaurants, sundries shops, the mayor’s office. The high-rising church is the town’s main attraction, its tower wielding a hulking cross that casts a daily shadow into the central square. At noon the church bells chime.
 
Until the twins were teenagers, the town center was frequented day and night. Kids ran around the small playground, people took refuge on the shaded benches, and boys played soccer on the open concrete court, even in the afternoon heat. People came to use the copy shop or buy soap or soda or enter a complaint at the mayor’s office. Children who’d begged spare change from their parents bought snow cones from the heavyset woman with the mobile stand, the bright, tacky syrup staining their faces. The pupuserías were open until eleven, midnight even, playing music and serving sodas and beers, the lady proprietors flipping the cakes of corn masa against the griddle until the edges were crispy yellow-brown.
 
“It was a beautiful town,” Raúl remembers. “It was.”
 
---
 
Like the rest of the farmers in La Colonia, the twins’ father, Wilber, regarded the mountain and its fertile land as a divine inheritance. The land was good to him; God provided. This was Wilber’s credo. “The way to survive this world is to stay close to God,” he said to his children. “And keep manos limpias”: clean hands.
 
Wilber carried a small Bible in his pocket at all times, the binding frayed and worn from use. Tucked inside were several prayer cards, his Salvadoran national ID, the photo taken when he was a very young man, and a picture of his bride, Esperanza, now faded and tattered. Every now and then he’d pull out the keepsakes to have a look.
 
“See how young you were!” he’d say. Esperanza tittered like a girl, waving her hand as if shooing a fly.
 
Wilber and Esperanza had always wanted a big family, but for many years they’d felt they might be cursed. They got married in the midst of the country’s civil war, in 1985, and when Esperanza gave birth to her first baby, Ricardo, two years later, the war still raged. La Colonia wasn’t a hot zone, but soldiers marched through it on occasion. This never meant anything good for poor farmers like the Flores family, whom the government often suspected of being guerrillas. “The soldiers came looking for people,” Esperanza explained. “They could mistake you for someone else and punish you for something they did.”
 
Once when Wilber was out of town working on another farm’s harvest, news spread that the army was on its way. Esperanza snatched up Ricardo, who was barely a year old, and walked out of town up into the hills, where she stayed along with some neighbors for a couple of days, hoping Ricardo didn’t cry too loudly. The army passed through without fireworks or massacres. Esperanza came down from the mountain, and they resumed their lives at home.
 
It was a dirty war, as Wilber put it—a war between the rightist government, beholden to the country’s powerful oligarchy and operating with brute military force, and the mounting leftist guerrilla movement, fighting for the interests of the impoverished working class, especially the country’s rural farmers. But the Flores family thought it best to stay out of politics.
 
In cities and in the countryside, mutilated bodies showed up in the streets. Political prisoners—dead and alive—were heaved off the Devil’s Gate cliff in the dense hills above San Salvador. Both sides played dirty, but the government death squads were brutal: a UN-appointed truth commission report asserts, with some contestation from within El Salvador, that 85 percent of the atrocities were carried out by the government. In the early 1980s, the United States trained and backed the government forces—death squads and all—to prevent a guerrilla takeover: an effort, in the thick of the Cold War, to prevent the proximal spread of Communism.
 
“It was a terrible time,” Wilber says. He won’t say much else about the war.
 
In 1988, as the violence heated toward its final boil, Esperanza gave birth to another son: Wilber Jr. Then, as peace negotiations were under way in Mexico City, she gave birth to a daughter who died at just several weeks old. They buried her in La Colonia. Esperanza kept praying for more children, placing offerings upon the altar and asking God and the Mother Mary for their blessings every Sunday in church. The peace accords were signed in Mexico City in 1992, and as the government and the guerrillas agreed to lay down their weapons for good, Esperanza got pregnant again. This baby, too, died at just several weeks old, and another after that made it only a few days before she turned blue and they had to bury her as well. Was Esperanza cursed? Was she too old?
 
In 1994 El Salvador held its first free and fair peacetime elections. The conservative ARENA party won, but the war was over. After so many years of conflict, it was a time of rebuilding. That year Esperanza’s prayers were answered: she gave birth to her sixth child, a girl, Maricela. Maricela lived.
 
The Flores family were still farmers who scraped by harvest to harvest, who struggled to find money to buy clothes or take a child to the doctor. But as Esperanza looked back, she regarded those as good years: three healthy babies, a country out of war.
 
Then the curse reared again: another baby, who died another mysterious death just a few weeks after he was born. That made seven children in all, only three of whom had made it to a year. In a place with little medical care, tragedies like this were common enough, but four tested Esperanza’s faith. At the end of 1995, when her belly began to swell again a few months after the fourth baby died, she prayed she wouldn’t lose this one, too.
 
After a bit of nausea early on, she had a good feeling—this one, she thought, would keep. The closest doctor was a thirty-minute drive away, and anyway, she couldn’t afford him. Prayer was more important, she felt in the end. Within just three months she was bigger than she’d ever been at that stage. By month five she was exhausted, walking wide-legged, having to heave herself out of the bed each morning to feed the children and scatter corn for the chickens. She’d squat to tug at the cow’s udders for milk, her back aching, her knees on fire.
 
Wilber prayed for her at church, crooned hymns and strummed the guitar in the front of the congregation. He worried that the bigness and the fatigue were due to her age, mid-thirties, so he put more offerings onto their altar—corn, beans, flowers from the blooming trees, and vines around their house, a plump orange, a twin tomato. God was good. He’d let them keep this one.
 
“Look how big I am!” Esperanza boasted. Must be a boy, some neighbors said. She was eating so well after the year’s good harvest. Maybe she was further along than she thought?
 
Esperanza had her own quiet suspicions. She didn’t want to jinx it, but she thought she might be carrying two. It wasn’t just the taut globe of her belly; she had a warm, warbling sense of it in her heart.
 
They saved up some money. When it neared her time to give birth, she took the bus down to the hospital, where they listened to her stomach and brought a picture onto the screen.
 
“Twins,” the nurse said.
 
She’d been right. There were two little bodies, the thump of two heartbeats. Fifteen days later she went into labor. Ernesto slipped into the world first, screeching. She felt relief and then a wild need to push again. She labored the other baby out twelve minutes later—Raúl. Two identical creatures, writhing, their brown-pink bodies slick with birth. The nurses brought them both into her arms. They’d make it, she thought.

Awards

  • WINNER | 2018
    Northern California Book Reviewers Award (previously BABRA)
  • WINNER | 2018
    Ridenhour Prizes
  • SHORTLIST | 2018
    Lukas Prize Project: J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2018
    PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
  • RUNNERUP | 2018
    California Book Award
  • FINALIST | 2017
    L.A. Times Book Prize (Current Interest)

Praise

"The Far Away Brothers is impeccably timed, intimately reported and beautifully expressed. Markham brings people and places to rumbling life; she has that rare ability to recreate elusive, subjective experiences—whether they’re scenes she never witnessed or her characters’ interior psychological states—without taking undue liberties. In many ways, her book is reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. It’s about teenagers who raise themselves."—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

“This is the sort of news that is the opposite of fake…Markham is our knowing, compassionate ally, our guide in sorting out, up close, how our new national immigration policy is playing out from a human perspective...An important book.”The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An indelible picture...of one imperfect family driven apart and astraynot by inequality or lax enforcement, but by the humanitarian crisis of gang warfare."Vulture

“Painstakingly reported…A compassionate look at the lives of two young men and the family they left behind when they were seventeen years old…[This] book could not have come at a more relevant time.” Mother Jones

"Markham recreates each step of the story in rich detail...Powerful." Pacific Standard

"Deserves a place alongside the strongest in the genre....By the book’s end, it’s impossible to not be rooting for [the Flores brothers]. The book’s true victory, however, is in its insights into how the gang crisis in El Salvador and neighboring countries is impacting individual lives—and what lengths these individuals will go to, in chillingly descriptive detail, to persevere." PopMatters

"Lauren Markham understands the complexities of immigration to the United States...Compelling." Sojourner

"Excellent...a clear-eyed look at what many [immigrants] actually experience." The Mercury News

"Markham functions as an empathetic intermediary amid ordinary and extraordinary struggles. She is implicated in the boys’ search for a livable life, but her closeness to the situation does not impede her analysis....The Far Away Brothers...tell[s] a story of courage and failure, tenacity and loss, loyalty and fumbling steps into an unknown future." The Christian Century

“Timely and thought-provoking…Markham provides a sensitive and eye-opening take on what’s at stake for young immigrants with nowhere else to go.”Publishers Weekly

“Powerful…Focusing primarily on one family's struggle to survive in violence-riddled El Salvador by sending some of its members illegally to the U.S.,...[this] compellingly intimate narrative…keenly examines the plights of juveniles sent to America without adult supervision….One of the most searing books on illegal immigration since Sonia Nazario's Enrique's Journey.” Kirkus [starred review]

“A stark examination of youth migration and the extreme risks taken to access a better life....Markham questions the accessibility of the American dream while compassionately narrating Raúl and Ernesto’s experiences.” Booklist

"An affecting and personal look into the experiences of minor migrants." Library Journal

"This brilliantly reported book goes so deeply into the lives of its protagonists and is so beautifully, movingly written it has some of the pleasures of a novel—but all the force of bitter truth, the truth about the lives of unaccompanied minors in the USA, about poverty, the ricocheting wars here and there, and the caprices and brutalities of immigration policy. Anyone who wants to understand more deeply how we got here and why we need to keep going until we get someplace better should dive into this book." —Rebecca Solnit, author of The Mother of All Questions

"Beautifully written, The Far Away Brothers examines the claustrophobic space between grinding poverty and brutal gang violence that drives so many children from El Salvador to make the dangerous journey North. Lauren Markham applies the eye of an artist to the dogged reporting of an investigative journalist. What a fine and timely book!" —Ted Koppel, author of Lights Out

“In the midst of a contentious debate in which reality is too often bent or ruptured entirely, The Far Away Brothers is a necessary book. But it is so much more than just that. Told with elegant detail, profound compassion, and painful truth, you will come out of this story with so much knowledge and, more importantly, understanding—of immigrants and also of youth. Lauren Markham has written this book in a hard and noble way, depicting the Flores brothers not only as representatives of a vital issue, but as human beings: complicated, special, humorous, and flawed. You need to meet these young men.” —Jeff Hobbs, author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

"A twenty-first century odyssey, The Far Away Brothers will take readers to unimaginable places, mapped and unmapped, in heart and mind as well as on the earth’s surface. This is one of the finest accounts ever written of the plight of unaccompanied migrant children, full of insight and empathy, and as gripping a tale as one might hope to find in a masterful suspense novel. By making the Flores twins come alive, Lauren Markham puts flesh and bone on one of the most shadowy yet most pressing crises of our day and age." —Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami

"Lauren Markham has written a modern day epic with The Far Away Brothers. It is a wonderfully unfolding, intimate portrait of family and the dangers people are still willing to risk for a simple chance at a better life. Markham's writing reads like the best of fiction out there, and yet... remember, this happened to real people. This is the sort of book you'll be thinking about at night." —Domingo Martinez, author of The Boy Kings of Texas

“The most moving revelation of this book comes not from the geo-political lessons we learn, the path of the brothers through the desert, or the obstacles they face in U.S. courts—rather, it’s the insight into how that journey affects them, plaguing them with anxiety and guilt but also inspiring hope, ambition, and responsibility. From a lesser writer this would be a simple migration story, but thanks to Markham’s relentless reporting and care, it becomes a deeply relatable tale of human transformation—messy, stumbling, and bursting with optimism.”—Laura Tillman, author of The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

"Once you've read this remarkable reporting, 'immigration' will never be an abstract or airless debate for you again. It's hard to imagine a more timely or more valuable volume." —Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont

Author

© Andria Lo
Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. A US American of Greek heritage, she has been working with migrants for two decades, and writing about migration and other social issues in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA. View titles by Lauren Markham

Guides

Educator Guide for The Far Away Brothers

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First-Year Reading (FYR) Guide for The Far Away Brothers

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Register for the 2025 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

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What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 336 programs and their title selections, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this listing to provide the

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2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

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