Teen mom, newborn eye life from Tijuana shelter
TIJUANA, Mexico — The tiny, monthold boy slept soundly on the bottom bunk, seemingly undisturbed by the squealing Central American toddlers running by and a kitten leaping from the neighboring bed.
About 25 people sleep in the cinderblock room crammed with seven bunk beds at a Tijuana shelter overflowing with migrants, primarily from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador but also from as far away as Africa.
For 16-year-old Milagro de Jesús Henríquez Ayala, her cramped corner bunk covered in eight backpacks with donated diapers, toys and clothing is not the ideal spot for raising her newborn son, but it is the best place she has found since she left her violent homeland of El Salvador with her younger sister, Xiomara, after gangs threatened their family.
The sisters, who were 15 and 13 at the time, were part of an untold number of Central American minors who traveled without their parents, accompanied only by other migrants, in a caravan that crossed Mexico and landed in this crime-ridden city in November. Henríquez Ayala became pregnant by her then-boyfriend during the trip, before arriving in Tijuana.
Henríquez Ayala said she is no longer seeking the American Dream — at least not for now.
She has finished the paperwork for a Mexican visa and is determined to build a life on the south side of the U.s.-mexico border, though the lanky girl has no idea how she’ll do that. She left middle school and has almost no job skills, and now she must find work that allows her to be with her baby, Alexander.
Henríquez Ayala bathed Alexander in a small plastic tub on the cement floor next to her bunk bed. Like all her baby’s belongings, it was donated by someone across the border. Alexander wiggled and cried as she gently washed his black hair.
“I’m baptizing him,” she joked to the Rev. Albert Rivera, who runs the Agape Mision Mundial church.