The place called Peñón de los Baños was once an island. In the heyday of the Aztec empire, it rose from Lake Texcoco and was famed for mineral hot springs that flowed from its base. People would visit to bathe and to heal. To find refuge. Then the conquistador Hernán Cortés came and took it — along with the rest of what had come before. Over the next three centuries, his successors drained Lake Texcoco until Peñón de los Baños was no longer an island, but a hill, until it became one neighborhood in a metropolis of 22 million, abutting the northwestern edge of Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. Many today cannot even say why it’s called Peñón de los Baños — “rock of the baths.” Certainly, Alfredo cannot.
He knows the name only from seeing it on smartphone maps. He knows little else about the place, save for which carnicería sells the cheapest meat, and which abarrotes stocks the cheapest milk. Despite coming from Cuba and speaking fluent Spanish, he’d never heard that word, abarrotes, until he came here. He learned it was Mexican shorthand for the kinds of shops people in the U.S. might call convenience stores. Mini-marts. Bodegas. He’d prefer to use those terms. The American terms. What he would give — what he has already given — to live with them as vernacular.
Alfredo seems to be answering the call of Ronald Reagan, who positioned the United States as a place “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
When he returns home from work or from errands, limping slightly on his bad leg, he shuffles past a clothesline that, on most days, flaps with life. It hoists laundry for seven people across three households, from a two-year-old’s socks to a 47-year-old’s T-shirts. They wash the garments collectively, first in buckets. They wring them and rinse them and wring them again before pinning them on the shared clothesline. Then the residents of the courtyard lot behind Chimalhuacán 32 go inside and wait.
In the bathroom, a seatless toilet wobbles and the showerhead hangs on a hook, awaiting its next dip into a bucket for bath time. There is no kitchen, so Alfredo’s wife Mari’s garbanzos hiss in a slow cooker on a portable gas stove, brought to life with the flick of a cigarette lighter. And there is but one bed, where the couple’s son, Alfredito, sleeps between his mom and dad at night.
The family shares the setup with Alfredo’s half brother and his half-brother’s girlfriend, and with two other women, a pair of sisters they’d never met before happenstance brought them together here, occupying the same thin clothesline, running through the same courtyard, in the same forgotten piece of Mexico City, where they all dream of places other than this one. (They requested that Deseret Magazine use only their first names to avoid jeopardizing their potential immigration status.)
Not long ago, those dreams looked like some version of the American dream. That’s the shared vision that brought them here, and the one Alfredo still clings to. “I will be in The Land of the Free,” he likes to say, as a sort of mantra, as if responding directly to Ronald Reagan. The 40th president, in his 1989 farewell address, positioned the United States as a place “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, has long made curbing immigration a cornerstone of his politics, and particularly since returning to office last year. He’s signed multiple executive orders since then aimed at enhancing border enforcement, facilitating deportations and virtually halting all refugee resettlement. He’s also helped secure a funding windfall for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose budget has increased by 400%, while revoking temporary protected status for migrants from certain countries, including Cuba, who did come legally and effectively ending the asylum process at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s all had a significant impact on migrants already en route to the United States.
It’s especially visible in Mexico City. “It wasn’t common to see people in the streets from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Cuba, from Afghanistan,” says Isabel Gil Everaert, an associate professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Now there’s people from many nationalities who are in Mexico City streets much more than ever before.” Some of them, she suspects, will end up going back home. Others will stay in Mexico, or perhaps in some third country, like Costa Rica or Panama, “which is a different flow,” she says, “that’s starting to happen.”
I’ve known Alfredo since 2022, when I visited Cuba and hired him as my fixer. We’d stayed in touch since, and I knew he’d left the island in a quest to reach the U.S. He’d sent a few pictures along the way, crossing rickety bridges in the Guatemalan jungle. I didn’t hear from him for a long time after that. Several months later, fearing the worst, I learned he’d reached Mexico City.
In this corner of Peñón de los Baños, where centuries ago the Aztecs sought refuge and eventually found something very different, Alfredo and his fellow migrants are stuck in a way they never imagined possible. Now, together, the members of this enclave must figure out what comes next.
Welcome to purgatory
Alfredo meets me at the Mexico City airport in March 2025 and guides me a single block to his housing complex. Behind a metal gate, we follow a colorful path of chipped tile that wraps around the property’s main home and opens into a courtyard. His house, home to a group of Venezuelans before him, is in the back on the far left, up against the fence, square and yellow and standing beside a hose and a cinder block sink. A second unit above Alfredo’s home is a bit more subtle. It’s accessible only by ladder.
Alfredo, 35 at the time, introduces me to the man who lives inside it: his half brother, Ernesto. Tall and slim and shirtless, Ernesto looks older than his 25 years, with a toned stomach and an arch at the bottom of his front teeth. He arrived here more recently than Alfredo, even though he left Cuba a month earlier.
He’d fled to Nicaragua, alongside his 22-year-old girlfriend, Fátima, prodded by the same abject poverty, desperation and Communist Party meddling that have made Cubans flee for decades. The Nicaraguan government has allowed Cubans to enter visa-free since 2021, knowing that many of them use this privilege as a “land bridge” en route to the United States. That’s what Alfredo did. But his brother planned to stay. “The point,” Ernesto said then, “is that Nicaragua is better than Cuba.” But life there was not what they expected, and after a few months, they hired a smuggler recommended by Alfredo to reach Mexico City. They were out of money in Tapachula, a border city in Mexico’s far south, and were stuck there for six months. In January, they heard on TikTok about a migrant caravan that would be departing that same night from a local park. They packed two bags and headed over.
This caravan was almost certainly the same one Reuters covered on Jan. 22, 2025, which had departed, trailed by police and an ambulance, just hours before Trump took office for a second time. It was a hard thing to see, Ernesto remembers: children and pregnant women making that long, grueling walk. All searching and desperate. After a few days, his and Fátima’s legs had turned swollen and red. She could no longer keep up with the pack. They’d walked nearly 200 miles by then, but without proper paperwork, they were returned to Tapachula.
The American dream is the opportunity to have, by your effort, what you couldn’t have in your country.
They called in some favors and cobbled together enough cash to pay for bus fare. They arrived in Mexico City on February 12. Alfredo welcomed them with the room above his apartment — a room with no bathroom and no way to get up and down aside from that ladder. Ernesto found work mopping floors. Then in a poultry factory, with shifts beginning at 4 a.m., six days a week at minimum. Fátima started folding clothes at a laundromat. They hadn’t considered going back to Cuba until the door to the American dream was slammed shut. Now, they have no interest in going to the U.S. illegally, nor do they want to stay in Mexico. “It is better here,” Fátima admits. “But it’s also not what we expected.”
Fátima misses her grandmother. Ernesto misses his mom, and his everyday existence on his family’s farm. “It’s just a different vibe,” he says. “Here, it’s just work, then home. Home, then work. Work, then home.” They’ve decided that in a few months, after saving some cash, they’ll go back to Cuba. “I’m against that,” his brother says. The goal should not be a better life just anywhere, Alfredo insists. “The goal is the American dream.”
But Ernesto and Fátima will not wait here for a future they may never see. They will not sacrifice their youth to an ideal. Ernesto will go back to the family farm, and Fátima will open a nail salon. And hopefully the situation in Cuba improves — but in their eyes, it’s already no worse than their Mexican purgatory.
Exodus on hold
Across the courtyard, another Cuban migrant lives in a dwelling similar in size to Alfredo’s. Inside, the perforated drywall lets in streaks of daylight. Above the front door, a gap invites in any and all critters. The floor is cracked. The roof leaks. And someone — long ago, by the faded look of it — has painted on the far wall a mural of the cartoon characters Rick and Morty, running away from some unseen danger — arms flailing, mouths hanging open. The migrant’s name is Mima. Her sister, Yeli, lives above her in a space accessible via a twisting, rusted staircase. Like Alfredo, Ernesto and the millions of other Cubans who’ve fled the island over the decades, they’ve ended up here because of a belief in something better.
Since Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, not a decade has passed without mass exodus. In the beginning, Cuban refugees fled the Communist, authoritarian government. The U.S. passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which essentially allowed them to migrate to the United States worry-free. During the Cold War, the optics were fantastic: refugees of Communist horrors, risking it all for American freedom. Of course we’d welcome them. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Cubans started coming on makeshift rafts to escape economic calamity more than political ideology, the American “wet foot, dry foot” policy allowed them to stay if they could just make it here. That policy ended in the final days of the Obama administration, and in the early days of Trump’s first term, the new president made it clear that special treatment for Cubans was, indeed, over.
Poverty on the island, meanwhile, reached a level unseen in Cuba’s tumultuous post-Revolutionary history. Combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, the summer of 2021 produced the country’s most significant anti-government protests since 1994. With its agricultural base long abandoned and its main economic driver, tourism, nonexistent starting in 2020, food shortages were constant. Medicine was inaccessible. Thousands took to the streets. The government responded, as it always has, with repression. Hundreds were arrested. Many were told to leave. Many did — especially young, educated professionals, who saw no future for themselves in Cuba. “We oldies are the only ones who are left,” one Cuban woman told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, whose September 2025 dispatch reported theft, assault and scamming on the rise across Havana. “What we have been enduring for some time now isn’t life; with these horrendous heat waves, without electricity most of the time, one cannot be sure of having enough to eat nor sufficient sleep,” a Cuban reporter, writing for a Communist paper, said in July 2025, “and what is needed is not more explanations but concrete solutions.”
So far, nothing has materialized. And the exodus unleashed after 2021 has continued, becoming something historic. As many as two million people are estimated to have left Cuba this decade. That’s close to 20% of the island’s population — and 16 times more than those who fled during the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Many have gone to Nicaragua, given its lax entry laws. And from there, given the United States’ historic welcoming of Cubans, many have headed north, toward the border, in search of freedom from tyranny, socioeconomic mobility or some combination thereof. Under the current White House, they’ve found an unexpected reception.
That’s how Mima and Yeli ended up here, and it’s unclear how many more like them — from Cuba, Afghanistan or elsewhere — are waiting in Mexico City and across Mexico. No one officially keeps track. The answer is, however, likely more than ever before. The Spanish newspaper El País reported in August that at least 5,000 were living in shelters around Mexico City but cautioned that the numbers are always in flux. “Nothing about what has happened to us is easy,” Yeli tells me, placing a moka pot on the apartment’s camping stove. “And now we’re here, hopeless.”
The fact that the United States will not welcome Alfredo is no deterrent. He believes he will prove himself worthy.
Mexico itself has seen a radical uptick in asylum-seekers, and not just because of Trump. Gil Everaert, the researcher, says Mexico saw about 750 asylum requests as recently as 2011. By 2017, the number had risen to over 14,000. By 2023, 140,000. For those hoping to continue toward the United States, the Biden administration built out the CBP One app — originally launched in the final days of the Trump administration to facilitate commerce — to also facilitate coveted interviews at American ports of entry. In the early days, the app only worked in the capital and farther north. Combined with the city’s job and housing opportunities, that suddenly made Mexico City a desirable waystation. Eventually, access to CBP One expanded to all of Mexico until the Trump administration remade it to facilitate “voluntary deportations.” Without the CBP One app, some have indeed started migrating south. Others will surely turn to smugglers. And many, including Mima and Yeli, will wait, unsure of what they should do.
Near the boiling moka pot, Alfredo’s wife brushes a coat of white paste into Yeli’s hair. They stew over how many “bad people” got through to the U.S., back when it was easier to get through, before the policies that have trapped them here. “Then again, look at how many people they’re deporting now,” Yeli says. “Who can say why God allows these things to happen?” Alfredo says little, despite having plenty to say.
On his shoulders
Alfredito, who is two, goes to bed every night between his mother and his father in a single bed. Sometimes Alfredo looks at his boy, then closes his eyes and tries to doze. Sometimes that works. But other times, the memories of what he did to get here keep him awake. Like when he floated from Guatemala into Mexico on a raft made of innertubes and two-by-fours, at 2 o’clock in the morning, in the pouring rain, with his wife and his child, piloted by a swift current and a smuggler with a very long stick. Or the three houses they’ve lived in over eight months since, each one cheaper and smaller than the one before. Or the five jobs he’s had, from truck driver to car washer to English teacher, none paying more than any other.
Sometimes — though rarely, because Alfredo is a forward-looking man — he also recalls what he left behind in Cuba. Life there was never perfect, but by Cuban standards, he made an excellent living as manager of a private tourism company’s fishing operation on the Bay of Pigs. He had a two-bedroom house, a car and a salary that allowed him to save $14,500. He remembers that now as the happiest time of his life. Every day, he gets further away from it — but no matter. When he dwells too long, he need only glance at Alfredito again.
Alfredito would never forgive him, he believes, if he hadn’t made this trip. If he hadn’t taken this risk. Alfredo never would have forgiven himself, either. It was always a leap of faith — one whose verdict is still undetermined. But he had to do it. “When you have nothing,” he says, “you have nothing to lose.” And, in his mind, everything to gain.
Yes, Alfredo knows all about the American dream, or so he thinks. He speaks of it with zeal. He’ll die, if he must, in its pursuit. “The American dream is the opportunity to have, by your effort, what you couldn’t have in your country,” he told me. “The American dream is the possibility given in the States to be a free man. To be a worker. To be respected. That’s the American dream. The rest is on your shoulders.” The very forces conspiring to keep him out, he believes, are what make this dream great to begin with. The United States is great, in his view, precisely because of its willingness to doggedly enforce border security. In fact, he’s a Donald Trump fan. He believes Americans were correct to vote him into office, even though it torpedoed his own pursuits.
On those nights when he drifts toward despair, thinking about where the journey has led him so far, he thinks instead about the opportunity before him. The fact that the United States will not welcome him is no deterrent. He will prove himself worthy. “I will be in the Land of the Free,” he says.
The Land of the Free, meanwhile, continues to conspire against him, and Alfredo knows it. But there is no going back to some wistful before. The new political paradigms guarding the border don’t change his calculus. He has to be getting closer. Has to be.
The cruel irony is that Mexico City sits 600 miles from the nearest border crossing, while Havana is just 90 miles away by sea.
The next day, Ernesto secures a job at the poultry plant for Alfredo, too. I watch Alfredo do the math on his phone: If he works 13 of every 14 days, he’ll bring home about 10,400 Mexican pesos per month. “With that,” he tells me, “I’ll be able to pay for the rent and the food.” He jumps at it despite the 4 a.m., 11-hour shifts. The day before he begins, I invite him, Mari and Alfredito to have tacos across the street from Mima’s laundromat, in the heart of Peñón de los Baños. On our way, we walk right past the mineral hot springs that gave this place its name.
Alfredito doesn’t know many words, but he recognizes Mima’s laundromat, and he’s eager to say hi. It amazes Alfredo that his son knows this place by sight. Mima smiles when she sees Alfredito in the window, but she can’t come out. She just waves, then goes back to ironing shirts. The toddler, pleased enough, leads us back home.
He’s getting quicker, Alfredo tells me. And he loves stairs, taking every opportunity to run up and down as we pass them. That’s tough for Alfredo, who has a grapefruit-sized lump between his left knee and ankle, the aftermath of a motorcycle accident. It’s getting harder to keep up. By the time we reach their street, having traversed the nearby Parque del Niño Quemado — “Burned Boy Park” — the toddler’s way out in front.
Alfredo doesn’t seem to mind. That’s what this is all about: his son. That’s why they’re here. They will reach the American dream. Alfredo tells himself so month after month, day after day, hour after hour. The lack of change lately, he assures himself, is just an illusion.
They will reach the American dream. Alfredo tells himself so month after month, day after day.
Just like it was for the Venezuelan migrants who lived in Alfredo’s home before him. And the indigenous Mexicans before them. And on and on and on, down through the conquistadors and the Aztecs and whatever group occupied this place some 12,000 years ago, when one of the oldest people ever discovered in the Americas died near the springs. The place remains through it all, but the context does not. What was once an island spa can become an apartment complex. No place stays the same forever.
Nor does any group of people.
In September 2025, Alfredo texted me saying he’d moved to Monterrey, about 150 miles from the nearest border crossing. He planned to move again soon, he added, to Piedras Negras — a border town across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas. “You know,” he told me, “that I have to see my little boy grow up and vote in America.” Texas, meanwhile, has reinforced Eagle Pass with stacked shipping containers and many miles of barbed wire. Vice President JD Vance visited in March, around the time I visited Alfredo in Mexico, to tout the Trump administration’s commitment to border security. This, Vance said, was just the beginning. “Rome,” he added, “wasn’t built in a day.”
When I asked Alfredo about the others, he told me Ernesto and Fátima were still planning to return to Cuba but hadn’t yet. And Yeli and Mima were still stuck in the same place as before. Some things had changed since March. But his resolve, faced with barbed wire and detention centers and mass deportations, remained intact almost a year later. “Same old story, my friend,” he wrote, “working and hoping to get some day to the Land of the Free.”
This story appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.