Washington Heights Woman Welcomes Honduran Family Into Her Home (original) (raw)
In the center of Laura Kaplan’s living-room floor, 10-year-old Zoe draws with colored pencils while her younger brother, 8-year-old Hector, drives toy cars around an imaginary track on the hardwood. Occasionally, Hector pops up and finds the lap of his mother, Elba, who is sitting on the couch against the wall. The children’s father, Allan, watches on from a chair across the room — which is only four or five feet away considering how compact the space is.
“We were supposed to cross the river and walk straight [to Tapachula],” Allan explains as he pulls up satellite images of the Guatemalan city Tecún Umán and a wide, muddy river. He and Elba take turns telling the story of how they traveled from their native San Pedro Sula in Honduras to New York City. Their family is among the more than 100,000 asylum seekers that have come to the city since April 2022.
Allan has reached the most perilous part of their trip: crossing the Suchiate River, which flows along the border of Guatemala and Mexico. The river itself is shallow, but the market for transporting migrants across — run by various gangs — is full of potential wrong turns. Elba comes around and shows everyone a photo that she took of the makeshift rafts: long wooden planks strapped over two inner tubes of tractor tires. They look not unlike the kind of tubes you might see a family here in the United States attach to the back of their boat for a nice day at the lake.
Laura Kaplan, a bilingual education professor at Pace University, is one of a small group of New Yorkers who have opened their doors to migrants seeking shelter. Seated at the dining table, she listens intently as Allan relays their journey. On the Mexican side of the Suchiate, the family had a close call with the cartel. In Mexico City, they struggled to schedule an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, using the American-made CBP One app, which was frequently disrupted due to the volume of migrants trying to process asylum claims. At their final stop in Mexico — Reynosa, a border town across from McAllen in southeastern Texas — they waited a week for their customs appointment to arrive. That week in Reynosa was the second-most dangerous point in their travels.
“The receptionist [at our hotel] said that the kids can’t leave for any reason,” Allan said in Spanish.* The cartel, the hotel staff explained, would go through their guestbook to find families to extort. As a result, Allan and Elba were listed as an elderly couple in the hotel’s records. The children were left out completely.
Many of Laura’s friends and neighbors couldn’t believe she invited four strangers to live in her small apartment.
Allan finishes the story by showing a photo of Zoe and Hector sitting against the chain-link fence of the Reynosa-McAllen border-crossing bridge. It was taken on a sunny day over the Rio Grande, and Zoe’s long black hair is blowing around in the light breeze. The two kids throw up peace signs to the camera, their roughly three-month migration coming to an end.
During the pauses in our conversation, the sound of Zoe’s pencil sharpener fills the space. She loves artwork and later on shows off two paintings of snowy landscapes she made. Zoe and Hector — whose head is now propped up on a blanket while he lies on the floor watching a video on someone’s phone — saw their first snow during the storm that blanketed the city in early January.
A little while after Allan and Elba finish telling their story, Kaplan reflects on what she’s heard. Not one to pry, she says quietly, almost to herself, that despite the family living in her apartment for the past four months, she knew few of the details about their journey.
AN OLD FRIEND
Allan and Elba’s family did not come to Laura’s home by blind chance. Though they had never met nor spoken to her prior to crossing the border, the family and Laura were connected through a crucial link: Allan’s mother, Elda, who passed away in April 2021, was Kaplan’s close friend.
For nearly two years, Elda, also originally from Honduras, lived in this same brightly-colored Washington Heights apartment with Laura while she received cancer treatment in New York. There is a photo of her on a bookshelf in the living room, smiling over her shoulder as she cuts a small cluster of red grapes from the vine.
“Elda was a beautiful, beautiful person,” Laura says, remembering her friend. “We did everything together.”
While she was staying with Laura, Elda told her about her family back in Honduras, about her husband’s furniture-building business and how their six children were put to work to help their father at a young age. Elda called her daughter and granddaughter on the phone nearly every day. Laura chatted with them sometimes as well, though she never spoke with Elda’s middle son, Allan, the university graduate who was not afraid to speak his mind about corruption in the Honduran government.
“I was taught that you can learn from criticism,” Allan said, explaining his inclination towards activism. “I always expressed what I thought was wrong so it could be improved. But it’s never taken that way in politics.” Allan’s first cousin is also an outspoken journalist in Honduras, making the family even more vulnerable to threats and harassment from the government.
“[Elda] was always worried and expressed her concern because Allan was publishing things on Facebook, and she thought he could get in trouble for that,” Laura said.
At one point, the family’s home was broken into, but nothing was stolen. To Allan, this was a clear sign of government surveillance and one of the reasons he felt he and his family had to flee Honduras, though they wouldn’t leave until March of 2023, nearly two years after Elda died.
Allan and his wife and children were initially staying in Austin, Texas, with his sister, who had emigrated to the country a little while before him. When Kaplan found out that some of Elda’s family had moved to the United States, she flew down to meet them, just to “check in.”
“I had no intention of bringing anyone back with me whatsoever,” she remembered, a hint of light-hearted irony in her voice. However, in Austin she found that the family’s living conditions left something to be desired. Not only was the city difficult to navigate without a car, but between the two siblings and their families, there were 11 people crammed into a two-bedroom apartment.
“I thought that even my very, very modest apartment — with one bedroom — in New York City would be a much better living circumstance for the children,” Laura said. So when Allan asked if they could go back to New York City with her and the end of her trip down south, Kaplan said yes.
‘HER FAMILY IS MY FAMILY’
Allan and his family moved in with Laura and her two small cats in mid-September 2023. It hasn’t been all roses since then; one of the biggest stresses has been trying to get Allan and Elba’s working papers. But they couldn’t get those papers until their asylum claims were processed.
‘I left my family [in Honduras]. I feel that. Even though we came here for better opportunities, I feel that.’
“These legal service agencies,” Laura said back in October, “are so backed up that they’re on waiting lists… just to get an appointment to apply for political asylum.” In the meantime, they were at least able to enroll Zoe and Hector in a nearby bilingual school, where lessons alternate every other day between Spanish and English instruction.
At first, many of Laura’s friends and neighbors couldn’t believe she invited four strangers to live in her small apartment. However, after the family was settled in, her friends became instrumental to their success. Allan and Elba learned about which social and legal services to utilize through a neighbor who works as a social worker. Other neighbors gave the family clothes for the children. Laura’s friends offered Allan and Elba odd jobs, so they could earn some cash. At Christmas time, those friends also bought Zoe and Hector gifts.
“Different people have been helping out in amazing ways,” Laura said.
Despite the harassment they may have faced in Honduras, Allan, Elba and the kids miss their home country. New York City is nice, they said, but obviously none of the tall buildings could ever compare to the family members they left behind.
“I left my family there,” Elba said. “I feel that. Even though we came here for better opportunities, I feel that.”
One particularly difficult week came in October, when Allan’s father was struck by a car back in Honduras and died. Unable to return home, he couldn’t attend the funeral or grieve alongside his surviving family.
Still, despite the initial hesitation and some painful moments along the way, neither Laura nor the family regret their coming to the city — and none of it would have happened if not for the strength of Laura and Elda’s friendship.
“Out of all her children, Allan is the one who most resembles Elda,” Laura reflected. “Sometimes I look at him and it makes me happy to see his mother’s face.” Laura said she also recognizes in Allan his mother’s generosity, her warmth and her willingness to help out whenever it’s needed.
Laura also shared her thoughts on the “refugee crisis” in the city as a whole, though she prefers not to call it that. “This is a refugee opportunity,” she said. “It is an opportunity for our country to expand and grow, for us to make new friends, and to have more workers to contribute to the economic success of all.”
In mid-January, the family finally received their social security numbers and Allan and Elba are expecting their working papers any day now. Since October, Laura and the family have visited one friend upstate for a few days and one in Pennsylvania, investigating opportunities for work outside of the city. Over the last few months, it’s become more and more clear that New York is just too expensive for them. Laura hopes they won’t go too far, though, because Allan, Elba, Zoe and Hector have become part of her family.
“One of the reasons Elda was hesitating to go back to Honduras [before she died] was she didn’t want to leave me alone,” Laura said. “I think she would be happy to know that my relationship with her has continued through her family.”