By Jonathan Blitzer. At sunrise on Friday, after spending five hours trying to hitch a ride out of a tiny city in southern Mexico called Pijijiapan, Mauricio Ramos, a thirty-four-year-old Honduran, was questioning whether he should take his family any farther. The migrant caravan, which has travelled up the western edge of Chiapas for the last two weeks, was headed for Arriaga, sixty miles away.
The family spread out along the roadside in the hopes of luring a driver to stop for one or two of them separately. Carolina, who is travelling with the caravan, holds the infant daughter of Mauricio Ramos and his wife, Cindy, as her four-year-old daughter sleeps along the side of the road outside Pijijiapan, Mexico, on Friday.
A few days before, as the caravan left a town farther south, called Huixtla, a boy was killed when he fell off the back of a truck. Ramos and his family walked past his body on the road, covered by a sheet, with blood seeping out from beneath it.
At A. Ramos and his family giddily chased after it. Arriaga is not, strictly speaking, a border town, but it feels that way. Positioned between the Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, it has become a transit hub for Central American migrants heading north. A water truck provides water for bathing in Arriaga, Chiapas, where the caravan arrived on Friday afternoon amid intense heat. By midday Friday, the city had been transformed into a de-facto refugee camp.
The streets were lined with families sleeping on cardboard boxes and tattered blankets, and the main park was covered in a dense thicket of pitched tarps and lean-tos.
