WITHIN THE FIRST pages of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life , it becomes clear that Lauren Markham understands the complexities of immigration to the United States and has personally worked with immigrants stuck in its tangled web. In a journalistic style, she reports the story of teenage twin brothers Raúl and Ernesto, fleeing gang violence in El Salvador, hoping to find safety and new opportunities in El Norte.
Markham has worked in refugee resettlement and immigrant education for the past decade. In this book she covers all aspects of immigration in well-researched detail. But she also seems to understand that while any reader could argue immigration policy, no one can argue with the Flores brothers’ story, from the crippling poverty in rural El Salvador, where life is cheap and disposable, to the stark loneliness of their lives in the U.S., far from the comforts of family and home.
The book is mainly a narrative of the brothers’ immigration journey as unaccompanied minors, but it is interspersed with chapters that describe broader experience for those who dare to cross the border illegally, including the deportation process and repatriation, the unique vulnerabilities of women and girls, and the brutal reality of life in Mexican border cities. Markham sprinkles in facts and statistics about immigration and the mire faced by those seeking to become documented. At times these additions make the book preachy and interfere with the flow of the story, but these are forgivable missteps in an otherwise compelling narrative.
Told in a mostly omniscient voice, the story enables the reader to know the Flores brothers in all their human complexity. This is where the book really finds its stride and becomes most effective: It does not turn its protagonists into model immigrants, surely a temptation for an immigrant advocate such as Markham. The brothers are at times honorable, kind, and loving and at others proud, impulsive, and given to vices.
Reading between the lines, this is also a story about alienation and loss. And the losses are astronomical—the brothers don’t just lose their country but also their childhood, their family, and, to some extent, their mental health. Few authors deal as extensively with the type of trauma the brothers face in their country, on the journey north, and even once they settle in Oakland, Calif. This is not your father’s story of a challenging but triumphant immigrant experience. Even in the relative safety of northern California, the brothers battle night terrors, depression, and bouts of anxiety, unable to forget the softness of a dead migrant’s body they literally stumbled into in the desert, the cavalier violence of the coyote (human smuggler), and mounting fear over the insurmountable debt their parents took on to enable the boys’ journey north.
As they build their new lives, the brothers want to belong in their adopted country, even as they willfully skip school and make few American friends. It will be difficult for the reader to remember that the brothers are teenagers with adult problems and responsibilities rather than adults behaving childishly—the word childish came to mind often, and I had to stop and remind myself that they are, indeed, children.
The Far Away Brothers paints a picture of immigrant anxiety, despair, and tenuous hope as it unfolds against the backdrop of the Trump campaign and election. As the author succinctly states, immigrants are stuck: “The specter of violence down south, the specter of deportation up north, and the mess in between.” Indeed, that is our political moment.
Karen González is a speaker, writer, and immigrant advocate who lives in Baltimore. She is the author of Beyond Welcome: Centering Immigrants in our Christian Response to Immigration.
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