When Ernesto’s life is threatened (in 2015, El Salvador’s murder rate reached 103 per 100,000 people), the Flores family must make a very difficult decision: Is it best if Ernesto and Raul, too, go north? Ernesto and Raul make the trip at age 17, and by then, they’ve already seen their friend, their sister’s boyfriend, and their older brother Wilber depart for el norte. In a mix of journalism and literary nonfiction, Markham tells Ernesto and Raul Flores’s tale, as well as giving some critical context to the unaccompanied minors crisis.Īs one might guess, the Flores brothers, like their friend in chapter one, become hermanos lejanos (“faraway brothers”), a term that’s come to represent Salvadorans who leave the country - usually for the United States but sometimes for their relatively safe neighbor, Mexico.

She witnessed firsthand the influx of unaccompanied minors filling the halls of California schools (25 percent of students in California are English-language learners) and sought to understand what was bringing these young men and women across the border in droves. She’s covered immigration issues for publications as far ranging as Vice and The New Yorker, but it was in her capacity as a school administrator in Oakland that she first met the Flores brothers. It’s a refrain that will occur over and over in this new book by investigative journalist Lauren Markham. As his mom succinctly explains: “He went to the North.” There’s a scene at the end of the first chapter of The Far Away Brothers where the title characters - identical twins from a small town in El Salvador, at the time in their early teens - walk up to the doorstep of a good friend.

Lauren markham the far away brothers