No Option But North

February 24, 2020
Journalist Freeman’s earnest and self-reflective debut advocates for “a more sensible, decent approach to immigration policy” by telling the stories of Mexican and Central American migrants passing through the city of Celaya in central Mexico on their way to the U.S. border. Interviewing her subjects, some of whom are making their third or fourth journey north, at a local migrant shelter (which she later learns has been selling migrants to kidnappers), Freeman documents their experiences of sexual assault, poverty, and extortion in their home countries; untangles the web of connections between drug cartels, corrupt government agents, and human traffickers who prey on migrants; and documents how U.S. and Mexican policies make legal avenues of migration practically impossible, thereby forcing people “to put themselves at extraordinary risk to climb the ladder toward safety and prosperity.” Freeman routinely scrutinizes her “enormous privilege” in relation to her subjects, juxtaposing their lack of options with her own freedoms; though these asides raise useful questions about the ability of outsiders to accurately portray the migration experience, they fail to deliver essential insights and distract from the book’s central aims. Nevertheless, this respectful, carefully documented account succeeds in humanizing an issue that often gets obscured by political rhetoric.

February 15, 2020
An earnest advocacy piece concerning the immigration crisis at the southern border. Why do migrants travel north from Central America and Mexico to the U.S.? For many reasons, writes Freeman, a former Fulbright fellow in Mexico. Some have to do with economics, with migrants seeking better opportunities in the richer country instead of the $5.45 daily minimum wage in Mexico or the $0.37 in El Salvador. Many are forced to flee from gangs, drug cartels, and sex traffickers, groups that implicate everyone in a community, not just the foot soldiers. As the author notes, "these gangs run through the currents of everyday life, and efforts to avoid them are impossible." Freeman is strong on sociological data and statistics. She also delivers meaningful portraits of migrants on the move from the vantage point of a shelter in central Mexico. In that business, no one's hands are clean: One of the workers in that shelter, for example, is caught up in the human trafficking trade while many U.S. agents are nothing short of sadists, energized by Trumpian rhetoric. "If migration were actually a game," writes Freeman in an apt passage, "it would be a life and death affair where 'winning' meant boarding a moving train without getting maimed, killed or assaulted. And the prize for winning would be to be sent home in handcuffs, only to have to play again and again." Parts of the narrative are less graceful than all that, and too often the story is about the author and not the migrants. Her criticism of writers who have committed "the sort of immersion journalism that pretends that observing the migration phenomenon doesn't affect it" is unfortunate given her too-frequent presence in the narrative as more than just narrator. For a clearer, more memorable portrait of "the twisted knot of migration," readers should turn to Kathryn Ferguson's The Haunting of the Mexican Border (2015) instead. An intermittently insightful but marginal addition to the literature on the immigration crisis.

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