“Based on our experiences, and in talking with the legal aid staff, these seven stories were typical,” Roma says.
Roma’s specific role is to help the women prepare a convincing case for “credible fear” interviews that will be conducted by Department of Homeland Security officials to determine whether they can stay in the United States to pursue asylum claims or will be deported back to their home countries. Only a small fraction of such claims will be successful. It is not enough that someone wants to kill you, Roma tells us; applicants for asylum must demonstrate persecution based on one of five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Even with the preparation that Roma and other legal volunteers provided, these women and many others, often traumatized to the point where they can barely communicate, will face steep odds of success.
By alternating in voice from the detached legal professional to that of an impassioned mother of two children of her own whose safe and protected lives Roma juxtaposes with those of her interviewees, Roma has chosen an effective way of engaging the reader and making an abstract political debate personal. She makes the stories of the families real to us by presenting the common denominators shared by not just mothers devoted to their children, but by all survivors who by sheer will and courage refuse to let themselves be defined by the tragedies they have lived through.
The story Roma begins and ends with in By the Bridge or By the River? is that of Sophia, who in some ways is the emotional heart of the book. In Sophia’s harrowing tale—and behind the reason for her decision to leave her native Guatemala with one of her two young daughters—are many of the themes that recur in the stories of the other women Roma interviews: experiences of gang rape and beatings, intimidation, kidnapping, governmental corruption, murder or the threat of murder, and threats to other family members. Her escape is made possible because of a compassionate, elderly neighbor, whose son, Pedro, immigrated to the United States years earlier. Pedro is convinced that Sophia and her daughter, Caroline, who was threatened by Sophia’s torturer at her school, will die unless they can make it to the United States. He agrees to take them in if they can get to the U.S. to apply for asylum. His family arranges for coyotes—human traffickers who charge thousands of dollars for the trip—to provide transport.
Sophia’s youngest daughter, Maria, was ill, and Sophia knew she had no time to waste. She and Caroline made the precarious journey from Guatemala, “up to Mexico and across the Rio Grande River, which separates Mexico from the United States,” Roma writes. “They crossed on a rickety raft crowded with people in the pitch darkness of night. Once they landed on shore in the United States, the coyotes robbed them—taking their money, food, water, and phone—and told them to start walking into the cold desert night.”