When the Mara Salvatrucha Defeated Trump on Long Island

Monday, April 21, 2025
Óscar Martínez

El Faro English has translated this photo essay, published in Spanish in November 2017, as MS-13 returns to the forefront of U.S. politics in Donald Trump’s second term. Read the accompanying photo essay: A Funeral March from El Salvador to Long Island.


“Why did you come to Long Island?”

It’s June 4, 2017. We are at a Subway restaurant, far from the center of any of these small towns inhabited mostly by migrants of Latin American origin, many of them undocumented. Forty minutes away is the capital of the world, New York City, but these are the suburbs, the outskirts, the periphery. We are on the border between North Merrick and Uniondale, commuter towns where the main attractions are shopping malls and traveling fairs.

The person who answers my question is an 18-year-old Salvadoran boy, the son of a tortilla maker. He was born in a canton called El Niño, in a hamlet called La Ceiba, on the slopes of the Chaparrastique volcano, in the scorching-hot department of San Miguel.

“My mom and sister were already here. My dad died when I was in El Salvador. He was drinking when a car ran him over. I didn’t live with him, but with an aunt. They hit us all the same; my aunt had four other daughters who lived in the same house. They beat us all.”

He is a wiry young man. He still has the body of a campesino: bony, with knotted muscles, forged in the milpa, cropfields. He wears a New York Yankees cap and has two gold implants in his upper front teeth.

“What was it like arriving here at the age of 11?”

“Life here is just being locked up like a dog when you’re an immigrant with no papers, no car, and no one to make space for you and show you around. You feel lost. My mom already has a husband, a Salvadoran. They came here together. We rented a basement. The three of us lived there: a single room with a kitchen and bathroom for $900. I had my bed and my wardrobe in a small corner. My mom went to work at 4 in the morning and got out at 3 in the afternoon. Sometimes she worked double shifts and stayed until 11 at night. She only came home to sleep, and then it was back to work at 4 in the morning again.”

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202505/centroamerica/27817/when-the-mara-salvatrucha-defeated-trump-on-long-island