The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

“The United States is still young and is ever reiterating itself as demanded by its people, both those who have lived here for a long time and those who have just arrived. Immigrants have always shaped our country’s future. Yet our country has not always done well in welcoming our newest immigrants or integrating them into society; this is particularly the case for newly arrived young men.”

Immigrants shape the history of the United States. The country’s first known inhabitants are immigrants from Asia. Yet, the country’s history is also shaped by an unwillingness to welcome immigrants and conditions that make immigrants’ lives more difficult than necessary.

“It’s hard to know who the particular killers in this new war are. Most homicides—especially the mass graves, like the one from which the young mother was pulled—are known to be the work of the gangs. Yet around 95 percent of crimes in the Northern Triangle go uncharged. To report a mass grave or denounce a gang member for murder carries a near-certain death sentence for the accuser and often for his or her family, too. So people keep quiet; the bodies pile up.”

The gang war is more violent and deadly than El Salvador’s Civil War. Both scourges have occurred in short succession, and their combined effects on the country and its people are catastrophic. Life is devalued, and those who wish to survive abandon their families for the north.

“The first of the infamous (and infamously Salvadoran) gangs had formed in the United States among Salvadoran exiles, mostly undocumented youth who had fled violence and forced military recruitment during the civil war. They formed allegiances in the image of other Los Angeles gangs of the 1980s and ‘90s. Like the Italian mafia and the Irish gangs that rose to power in the early twentieth century, their lower ranks comprised young immigrants with limited economic options in a society trying to keep them out. Thousands of young men in Los Angeles were incarcerated then deported back to El Salvador, and along with them came the gang culture.”

Salvadoran gangs were born in the United States, initially to protect young Salvadoran immigrants from other gangs in Los Angeles. They migrated south when their members were deported, and proliferated. Like many problems in Central and South American countries, they are the product of the United States. United States politicians fearmonger that Central American immigrants are bringing their gang culture to the United States, but it is the United States that brought gang culture to Central America.