Review: Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The New American

Emilio survives the harrowing journey, and although “still uncertain of our future,” it is not difficult to see his odyssey as a story of “human determination and even some kind of hopefulness that we might carry.” Indeed, the promise of a new reality for him, as for many others, starts with the very title of the book. Emilio is “not afraid all the time anymore, because I am home” (italics mine). He and Matilde are in love. They are expecting a baby boy, “The New American.”

Nonetheless, the novel remains the story of the hell Emilio and his four Central American traveling companions go through to cross the border into the United States, to start their “better” lives. Pedro, Matilde, Jonatan and William are fleeing violence and poverty in their homeland: “In Honduras there is no future for us. No hope.“ The two-thousand-mile long trail, controlled for the most part by armed gunmen, is dangerous. There are kidnappings, rapes, killings. At the railroad stations, helpless migrants push one another to make it aboard the cargo train they have nicknamed “La Bestia.” At one point, when Emilio thinks he has lost his companions in the chaos, he frantically “grabs onto one of the last ladders on the last car,” risking getting pulled beneath the wheels, “as the great Beast moves forward.” Emilio jumps from wagon to wagon, running across the roofs of the boxcars the entire length of the train, looking for Matilde, the “pretty young Honduran in a grey hooded sweatshirt” he was falling in love with. “Have you seen her?”

The horrifying journey builds to the climax of the group’s final days in the Sonora desert at the US-Mexico border. With swollen ankles and open sores inside their shoes, those who have survived — Jonatan has been kidnapped, Pedro is dying —walk through the barren desert in the scorching heat, “on the broiling desert floor,” for days with no food or drink. With her vivid details Marcom makes their “invisible hunger and fear” visible. “The sun overhead is . . . pulling along with the air every bit of moisture from their bodies . . . They are all thirsty; they are all unbearably hot.” “Only God and not even the lizards can live here,” she writes. “The sun is our enemy, Emilio thinks. The sun could be God.”

There are of course Las Patronas, the kind ladies who throw bags of food and plastic bottles of water to “the unknown weary who pass by them each day on the moving Beast.” There are the volunteers at the Houses of the Migrants who provide food, care and shelter; and the priest who “tries to discourage their crossing over” but “cannot dissuade any from continuing his journey.” “We put our faith in God. God accompanies me, father, He will care for us.” These humane souls may mitigate the pain of the tired and fearful travelers, but they have no recourse to changing the policies which appear to have little to do with compassion or humanity. The ongoing violence in the world — we wake up to a new conflict every day — evidences that the displacement is here to stay. There are eighty million refugees around the world today, with more violence, more instability, more poverty, the only promise.

Aharonian Marcom’s commitment to tell history’s untold stories is nothing new. In her first three novels she had tapped into her roots, her Armenian heritage, to bring to life the 1915-1918 massacres and deportations of Armenians at the hand of the Ottoman Turks. The New American tells the story of the journey North of Central Americans fleeing unlivable conditions in their hometowns. Marcom feels comfortable with both histories. With her empathy for her characters and deep insight into their situations she gets inside their worlds and exposes horrors many may not be familiar with.