We Are Not from Here

Pequeña is 17 and gives birth to a baby boy as the novel opens. It is gradually revealed that the baby’s father is the gang leader Rey, who sexually assaulted her. Rey’s demand that she marry him, along with a vision of the danger in which Pulga and Chico find themselves, prompts Pequeña to tell the boys that the three of them must run away and seek asylum in the United States. Pequeña is close with her mother Lucia and is heartbroken to leave her, but the prospect of a life with Rey is, she feels, no prospect at all. She has little remorse leaving the baby and seeks medicine at the pharmacy that will help her milk to dry up, attempting to erase the unwanted baby from her body. As she travels north toward their hoped-for freedom, Pequeña finds herself drawn into a kind of caretaking role for the boys though they are only slightly younger than she is; she stays with Chico as he runs more slowly than Pulga on and off the trains and lets Pulga know gently that it is all right if he makes mistakes. She makes an abundant effort to persuade Pulga to continue on after Chico dies; she manages to get him within one night’s walk of the American border before he becomes totally unresponsive to her attempts. Pequeña runs from border patrol agents in the desert because of a new threat of sexual violence and maintains her courage even in the face of certain death.

Pequeña’s many visions and belief in La Bruja, a part-witch, part-angel figure who looks over her and helps her to see events in the present and future, situate Pequeña as the character most representative of the novel’s nod to magical realism. Pequeña’s ultimate rescue is also positioned as supernatural, as Marta encounters her entirely by chance and is the sister of Soledad, a woman with whom Pequeña felts a spiritual connection earlier in the novel. Pequeña even considers her physical body as “magical” due to its resiliency after giving birth, foreshadowing her ability to sustain her will to survive along the journey. Pequeña’s character arc is interwoven with her own acknowledgment of her transformation from a victim of violence into a free young woman complete with a new identity—Flor. In Pequeña, Sanchez explores the enormous, almost super-human strength of character necessary for surviving the migrant journey with both heart and body intact. Pequeña smells the scent of burning as she is helped into Marta’s car, imagery indicative of being reduced to ashes only to come back to life, like a phoenix.

The 13-year-old Chico is Pulga’s best friend. Chico lives at Pulga’s house because his own mother was killed in a shooting years before and considers Pulga and Pulga’s mother Consuelo family. Chico is depicted as tall and large for his age, one of the reasons Pulga sought his help in the backstory scene when Nestor assaulted Pulga. Chico is characterized as youthful and generally uncertain and fearful, a child thrust too soon into Rey’s dangerous world of gang violence and, later, the traumatic journey northward. Chico suffers a concussion the first time they jump from a moving train on the route of La Bestia, which leads to his tragic death when, disoriented, he falls from a train and bleeds to death, his leg mangled by the train wheels. Sanchez uses Chico to portray an innocent migrant whose suffering is not lessened by the journey north, and for whom the possibility of a future not defined by violence was worth risking his life. With Chico’s tragic death, Sanchez emphasizes the danger of the migrant journey, the desperation that drives even children to undertake it, and that many never reach their destinations.

Rey, a dangerous criminal and organized crime lord in Puerto Barrios, serves as a powerful and effective antagonist to Pequeña, Pulga, and Chico. Pulga and Chico made an enemy of Rey through a fight with Rey’s younger brother Nestor, and Rey sees Pequeña looking up at the sky on the street one day and becomes possessive and obsessed with her. Rey is presented as purely evil; he extorts and murders Don Felicio, conscripts Pulga and Chico, and threatens to hurt or kill Pequeña’s mother if Pequeña resists in any way on the night he rapes her, then insists on giving Pequeña a ring to make their relationship official. Pequeña uses the ring to pay off the coyote at the US-Mexico border, effectively purchasing her freedom with a symbol of her pain. Rey embodies the violence that motivates Pulga, Chico, and Pequeña to seek asylum in the United States. In the backstory Rey was in prison in America for a robbery, then committed crimes in Guatemala City before coming home to Puerto Barrios to run a gang that extorts money from local businesses.