No Refuge: An Oral History of a Salvadoran Asylum Seeker

He told me to use the name Ernesto because he was scared to use his real name. And his mujer—his “woman”—told him that she’d always liked the name. It was hard to imagine this skinny, pimply, smirky kid as having anything like a “mujer,” though, I would soon learn that Ernesto has been wizened by violence, prison, poverty, abandonment, voices in his head, visions of death, a persistent threat of murder, and an uncertain tomorrow—the latter of which is not a manner of speaking, but a very pressing reality: two days after I spoke with him he set out for the US with nothing but fifty dollars in his pocket and a backpack stuffed with a change of clothes.

Ernesto and I met outside of the Metrocentro mall in Sonsonate, the capital of the hot and humid department of the same name in western El Salvador. Inside The Coffee Cup, Ernesto and I sat in a corner away from the other patrons and talked quietly for hours. The coffee was better than I expected—strong and earthy.

When Ernesto was eleven, he told me, he confronted the gangsters who had been calling his sister a whore and threatened them. It sounded like the sort of schoolyard spat any kid might deal with, but he was only eleven, and he wasn’t confronting a bully, but a group of killers. When he was thirteen he shut himself in his room and did nothing, hardly leaving for over a year. He didn’t listen to music, play video games, read, watch TV, or surf the internet. Occasionally, he told me, he heard voices in his head, voices he called demons.

“You have to talk to demons like you talk to gangsters,” he told me. “They’re pretty much the same thing.”

His family, instead of inviting him to eat with them at the dinner table, only offered him the leftovers. His aunt—his legal guardian after his adopted mother migrated to North Carolina—didn’t seem to love him. In 2014, a group of gangsters approached him behind his school. They took him to his house because they needed to talk to him. They wanted him to join the gang. When he refused, they put a pistol to his head and told him he had 24 hours to join up. Otherwise, they would kill him. He stood his ground, but has been on the lam ever since. On the day I met Ernesto, despite sneaking him into our car, driving to a public, slightly bougie coffee shop, and huddling in the corner to talk just barely above a whisper, he was still on edge. At one point in our conversation, he looked out...