ALTAR, Mexico (AP) — Along a northbound dirt road, a young couple clad in jeans and T-shirts jumps out of an idling van and walks toward the path’s edge, making for a white concrete box with an ornate, wrought-iron cross perched on top.
- Angela Cesere
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Dozens of candles — some lit, some melted, some broken — are crammed inside the 5-foot-high makeshift altar, along with statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes.
As the couple kneels before the display with bowed heads, a little boy runs out of the van and kisses the ground.
The humble spot some 60 miles south of the Mexico-Arizona border serves as one of the last places where migrants worship before being shuttled to spots where they will attempt to slip illegally into the United States on foot.
On their trek for economic survival, migrants traveling through the treacherous Arizona desert also find themselves embarking on a religious journey. Many rely on faith to sustain them through the trip’s perils, stopping to pray at icons or lighting votive candles to remember those who died along the way.
Before jumping aboard moving cargo trains during the trip north, 29-year-old Carlos Enrique Cano Vanega and other Central Americans he was traveling with would pray by the side of the tracks.
“We began to entrust ourselves to God and asked that he would keep us safe,” said Cano, a Honduran man who had journeyed to this Mexican community recently in preparation for an attempted trip to the United States.
People everywhere will often seek spiritual comfort during troubled times. And culturally, Latin Americans identify themselves as religious, even if they don’t attend services regularly, said Jacqueline Hagan, co-director for the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston.
In the case of poor immigrants, reliance on faith is even heavier because they have virtually no other resources, Hagan said. “The only recourse they have is to turn to religion, and that’s all they really have on the road as well,” she said.
Before embarking on the trek into the United States, indigenous residents of the Guatemalan highlands seek counsel about whether to make the trip and when to go from evangelical pastors or the Black Christ, a dark-skinned depiction of Jesus common in parts of Latin America, Hagan said.
“Religion is their spiritual passport in the absence of authorization,” she said. “They get sanctioned by God to do this.”
While on the road, some turn to biblical passages that mirror their travels, such as those citing how the Israelites wandered through the desert under God’s guidance.
For Cano and others on the train, reading the New Testament to each other brought comfort.
“You feel something … you feel safer than being out there” without anything to sustain you, he said at a migrant shelter in Altar, a city that serves as a popular staging area for migrants planning to cross the border at Arizona.
Fifty-six-year-old Ernesto Garcia Mondragon frequented the Catholic church in town to pray for his nephew, who left Mexico bound for the United States. Three months after 19-year-old Olaf Avila Gonzales departed, the family had yet to hear from him.