We meet them in the home where they have grown up. In her marvelous and meticulously reported book The Far Away Brothers, Lauren Markham introduces us to Ernesto and Raúl, identical twin brothers from a small town in rural El Salvador called La Colonia (some names of people and places have been changed in the book for the safety of those involved). They were unable to pick us up and plop us down in the well-worn shoes of the boys and girls whose lives had been uprooted time and again by gang violence, economic desperation, and abuse of all kinds. But what the headlines were incapable of doing was making this humanitarian crisis personal. And, at times, they spurred us to compassionate action. We pray to God that he would keep them far away from us. They are unexplainable and deadly phenomena that threaten our existence. Tsunamis may have names, but they are not people. The words we kept hearing were “flood” and “surge,” conjuring images of a dark and stormy sea washing over our southern border – perhaps the violent waves of a tsunami crashing ashore.

And they were doing all of this, at great expense and risk of death, unaccompanied by their parents.

They were making the long, arduous trek to El Norte through the vast expanse of Mexico and the borderlands. These children, we learned, were fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in record numbers. In 2013, stories about unaccompanied minors started coming across our airwaves, feeds, and timelines. Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Lifeīuy Now: Amazon ] Kindle ] 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.In Search of AmericaĪ Feature Review of The Far Away Brothers: With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience. 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. 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. 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. Summary 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.

The Far Away Brothers by Lauren Markham