For Immigrants ‘Broken Into Pieces,’ Denver Bus Binds Two Worlds

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/denver-bus-immigrants-mexico.html

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I pass this spot every day. It’s a nexus between two lives, shuttling people to family, businesses and dreams on the other side of the border.

DENVER — The $65 bus to Mexico rolled into a parking lot here recently, belching exhaust into the Colorado night as a river of people — crying, kissing — thrust belongings into the belly of the vehicle and climbed aboard.

Frank Torres, 64, a driver in black slacks, descended from his perch above it all.

“This is true drama,” he said, surveying the scene. A boy wailed to his left. Travelers burdened by packages passed on his right. Mr. Torres, snacking on a coconut Popsicle, took a meaty bite. “Separation. You see a lot of that. The mother leaving her child. The child leaving the mother. This is how it goes.”

Nearly every night I pass this lot off a main thoroughfare in the heart of Denver. From here, Autobuses los Paisanos — “the buses of the people” — ferry Colorado’s immigrants to dreams and dramas on the other side of the border. They are mothers off to visit deported children, single men in cowboy hats bound for weddings and funerals, grandparents moving home after years of work in factories and fields in the United States.

Sometimes I stop to chat. And I’ve come to see this place as a window into a deeply American feature: The immigrant’s split soul.

“Part of my heart stays here,” said Paty Ruelas, 50, who lives in Torreón, Mexico, and had come here last month for the birth of a granddaughter, Bella. Now, she was headed back to a restaurant she owns some 1,190 miles away. “I have a business there,” she said. “I have to go back. I have no choice.”

Across the lot, Alicia Perez, 70, stood in a sea of suitcases, boxes and carefully bundled consumer electronics. Her travel partner was her consuegra, her daughter’s mother-in-law, who also happened to be named Alicia Perez.

They live here. They were off to visit children on the other side.

The first Ms. Perez said she came to the United States 38 years ago. “I worked in the fields. Onions, vegetables, potatoes. I worked so many years that I can barely walk or hold a thing,” she laughed, hobbling forward with a cane. “But I am happy now, because my children are fulfilled, my grandchildren are on the right path.”

Five of her children live in Colorado, she said. Two live in Mexico. And so twice a year she makes the 36-hour bus journey to her home city of Durango, risking bus robberies or worse for a chance to see her family.

“Hellos and goodbyes, sorrows and joys, much has passed through this place,” she said. “Children here, children there. All of us are broken into pieces.”

Ms. Perez climbed into her seat with the help of two daughters and a granddaughter. A once teeming parking lot had turned quiet.

With the beep of a horn, the white vehicle dipped into the Denver night. And Ms. Perez, her eyes locked on her family, peered out the window, making the sign of the cross, over and over.

The bus would pass brightly lit cities, carpets of sagebrush and abandoned farms, before hitting El Paso, where passengers would cross the border.

From there, each would find a new bus to his or her destination.