Eyder Peralta
speaker
76 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 10 Jan
Eyder Peralta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Each story is different.
How much have your past experiences prepared you for this story?
NPR's Eder Peralta speaking to us from Cucuta, Colombia.
Eder, thanks so much for your reporting.
This episode was produced by Gabriel Sanchez.
It was edited by Adam Rainey.
Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.
It's Consider This from NPR.
I'm Sarah McCammon.
I remember there was this one kid who was putting plastic bottles on the train tracks just to see what happened to them.
So at some point I gave him a little coin so he could put it on the train track and see what happened to it. And indeed, I had never done this before.
Yeah, and it flattens it, right? It's like one of those machines.
They have like their whole lives with them. You know, they have just bags full of coats and blankets and they have jugs of water. When a train would finally approach... They're so heavy that like the earth beneath it sort of heaves as they move across, right? It almost feels like the gravity of the train pulls you toward it.
So they have this term that they say, which translates to we're going to puncture the train. And so the young people, they will put on gloves, like a ski mask to protect their face and their eyes. And then as the train comes, they just sprint like right beside it and they somehow jump on and then they just start turning knobs and pulling levers.
And what they're hoping will happen is that it disrupts the train's air brakes. And so that would usually cause an emergency stop.
There was this Venezuelan woman who I met, and she had slung her little girl just on her shoulder. And I asked her, like, you know, why do this, and why do this right now? And she sort of, like, looked at me, surprised, I think, at the question, and she said, You know, you guys think that the American dream is dead. But for us, the American dream is still very much alive.
And I think what the explanation for that, that I got over talking to dozens of migrants, is that the American dream is not this grand idea. It's a really simple idea. For her... It was that her two kids could get an education. I also met this mother and son from Venezuela as well, Brian and Yalitza, who was his mom. And his mom was in her 50s and he was 23, right?
And Yalitza's husband died and she says she told Brian, you know, this is our chance. I've got nothing to lose. We can do this and you can find a better life now. And so they left. And so she told me why I'm doing this is because I think that Brian, my son, could become an entrepreneur. He can have a better life. And then talking to her son, he told me something much simpler, right?
Which was that he had a little kid in Venezuela.
What this trip could mean, what this American dream could mean, is that one day his kid could have a birthday present.
Showing 21–40 of 76 · page 2 of 4
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