Leaving El Salvador

Cristhian Roberto Perla Henriquez grew up in a small farming town  in the Ahuachapan province of El Salvador.

For Cristhian, living on a farm meant waking  up every day at 6 a.m. to turn beans and corn into powder by hand.

After four hours of manual labor, he would do his homework and get ready for school, which was in session from noon to 6 p.m. Afterward he would hurry home for the night, doing his best to stay out of trouble, which wasn’t easy in El Junquillo.

“There were a lot of gangs; you could not go out at night. It was very dangerous,” Cristhian said.

Gang violence and organized crime are astonishingly bad in El Salvador, which is ranked one of the most dangerous countries in the world with the highest murder rate globally.

The gang culture in El Junquillo was a main reason that Cristhian moved to the U.S. in the first place. His life was in serious danger. El Junquillo and neighboring towns all had their own gangs, and some kids in high school and older were a part of these groups.

Occasionally, tension between groups became violent. “There would be shootouts, but they were mainly in other neighborhoods,” he said.

Gangs tried to recruit kids who were as young as 13,  and if a kid declined, there could be deadly consequences.

They soon recruited Cristhian; however, he says he did not give in, even without a father figure to guide him.

Most of Cristhian’s 12 siblings were already adults when his father died. But Cristhian was just two. The death of his father left his mother to care for the children alone.

Oftentimes, Americans take for granted the financial freedom that brings millions of people to this country every year in hopes of a better future. In El Salvador, upward mobility is not as obtainable, and most of the time, people who are born into poverty, stay in poverty. This, along with the high crime,  motivated more than 95,000 people to flee El Salvador for the US in just the past year alone.

This year has been the busiest year ever at the U.S. border with Mexico. Many of the 1.7 million encounters at the border include people trying to escape poverty and violence in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

In 2016, Cristhian added his page to the story of Salvadorans immigrating to the US. After finding out that Cristhian was being targeted by a gang in his community, his family decided they had to move him immediately. His sister, Alba, who was in the U.S., came up with the plan to send Cristhian’s mother money in order to get him to the U.S.

Cristhian and his brother, Anibal, then embarked on a 27-day journey with a goal of making it to America. Much of the journey was taken by commercial bus, which they rode through Guatemala and Mexico. They stopped many times along the way, either for food or to spend the night somewhere safe.

Cristhian does not think he could have made the trip without his brother. “Having Anibal with me made me feel safe,” he said.

He considers the final part of the journey to be “one of the scariest things” he has ever done in his life.

When Cristhian and his brother arrived in America, they took a flight from Texas to Washington, D.C where Cristhian enrolled in 7th-grade while living with an aunt and her family. Alba, who was living in D.C. at the time, did not live with Cristhian during these two years but checked in with him frequently.

He experienced his first bit of culture shock when he did not have to wake up at 6 a.m. every day to work. Although his new schedule proved to be much less demanding than his previous routine, it was hard for Cristian to get used to the dramatic change. Still, the teenager in him was grateful that he no longer had to work at the crack of dawn before heading off to school.

However, he was living without his mother, who remained in El Salvador.

“She did everything for me: she cooked for me, she cared for me. Right now, I feel bad thinking about her, that she’s not with me. It’s hard,” he said, as a tear emerged from his eye.

At school, he quickly made friends, but with the wrong group of people. His “friends” would start fights, get suspended, and just cause trouble. For someone who had just broken out of that same type of culture, he couldn’t risk falling into a similar cycle.

Cristhian began to keep to himself so he could stay out of trouble and keep this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity alive. His family then decided it would be best if Cristian moved again.