In The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), Lauren Markham tells the true story of 17-year-old Salvadoran twins, Ernesto and Raúl Flores, who flee violence in El Salvador to build new lives for themselves in America. It follows the twins from their initial exodus from El Salvador, across the Rio Grande, and into the United States, where a world of both unbounded possibility and undeniable danger await them.

Plot Summary

Raúl and Ernesto Flores are raised in a farming family from La Colonia, a rural village in El Salvador, shortly after the long and bloody Salvadoran Civil War. After the war ends, thousands of Salvadoran youth are deported from the United States where they had been permitted to reside because of the violence in their homeland. When they return, they bring with them a gang culture they developed in Los Angeles. Now gang violence in El Salvador is just as bad, if not worse, than the violence of the Civil War. Their older brother Wilber Jr. goes north to the United States for economic opportunity and becomes a “far away brother” living in California as an undocumented immigrant. Seven years later, Raúl and Ernesto follow as unaccompanied minors to flee gang violence in El Salvador.

Their journey north is difficult and traumatic. To reach the United States, migrants must hire a coyote—a person paid to smuggle Latin Americans across the border into the United States—to guide them through El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Texas, where violence and unscrupulous people abound and the terrain is a vast, deadly wasteland. They experience trauma and nearly die. After crossing the Rio Grande River to enter the United States and traversing the scorching Texas desert for days, they are apprehended by United States Border Patrol. Because they are minors, they are not immediately deported. They are instead transferred to an immigrant detention center, where they are assigned court dates with pending deportation orders and released to Wilber in California.

Life in California is difficult for the twins. They owe $16,000 to their coyotes, but because they were apprehended and are in the immigration system, they must attend school rather than work. They work off-the-books after school, which hinders their academic performance and doesn’t afford them enough shifts to repay their debt. The emotional toll of their journey wears on them, and tensions rise in the cramped apartment they share with Wilber, his girlfriend Gabby, her mother and two younger siblings, and three other grown men. The twins abuse alcohol to cope.

While Ernesto and Raúl struggle in the United States, the Flores family struggles in El Salvador. The twins’ sister, Maricela, has a baby and is abandoned by the father; she later has another baby with another man who also abandons her. Gangs attempt to recruit the twins’ older brother Ricardo. Ernesto and Raúl’s parents use a plot of their farmland as collateral for a loan to pay the coyotes that guide the twins north. As time progresses and they fail to pay the debt, the family risks losing their land.

School is another equally dominant and stressful aspect of the twins’ lives. At 17 years old, the boys are suddenly thrust into American high school life. Still learning the language and the intricacies of the culture, they now must focus on things like tests and homework. Markham meets Ernesto and Raúl in a school in Oakland, California. She works assisting young immigrants, and she is captivated by the twins’ story—not because of its brutality or the courage with which the twins faced challenges, but that the twins’ story was just one of the countless similar tales of brutality and courage. In the world of undocumented immigrants, their experience was all too common. Markham is compelled to tell their story because it is indicative of the bravery, sacrifice, and fortitude of not just Ernesto and Raúl, but of all immigrants.

At the end of the book, it is three years later, and Ernesto and Raúl are still living in California, settling into their new lives. However, a new reality—and a potential threat—has cast a shadow on all the progress they and millions like them have made. Donald Trump has just been elected president. The future for immigrants to America has never been so uncertain.