The price of women’s immigration
After it was over, the nightmares came: the sound of the thundering train, and the threat of gangs — including Los Zetas, Mexico’s most infamous cartel — that loomed at every turn. Sometimes the dangers presented themselves randomly. Once, a branch swooped down. Sonia Nazario ducked just in time, but a child, farther back on the train, was whisked off, likely taken under the train’s unforgiving wheels. Nazario was traveling from Honduras atop a speeding freighter alongside Central American migrants on the journey known as la bestia — the beast — or more grimly, perhaps more accurately, el tren de la muerte — the train of death. In the name of research, she twice had volunteered herself for this trek, the kind that thousands of desperate migrants daily undertake, barreling through Mexico toward the United States on a train top, sleeping with one eye open, always anticipating robbery, rape, mutilation, and murder. “The...