Sleeping in a public park in Panama City on a hot summer night in June, Saul Flores was physically and emotionally drained.
The 20-year-old undergraduate was less than a month into a three-month odyssey that would take him across 10 Latin American countries spanning more than 5,000 miles.
“I wanted to give up,” he says. “I was filthy, hungry and exhausted.”
But Flores pressed on.
By the time he returned to campus in August, Flores had experienced many of the rigors facing immigrants traveling north to the United States. He was picked up and interrogated by border agents in Colombia, sidelined for several days with a paralyzed leg after encountering a poison dart frog in Panama and forced to beg for spoiled vegetables in a Honduran market when he ran low on money.
The day he arrived in Juarez, Mexico, on the U.S. border, gangs fighting for control of the region’s drug trade killed 52 people in the city.
Flores made most of the journey on foot, walking up to 12 hours a day when he couldn’t hitch a ride with a stranger or jump on the back of a bus. Throughout the journey, he took more than 20,000 photos, documenting both the beauty and the poverty of the region.
Flores hopes his photos and experiences will help educate Americans about Latin American culture and the difficulties facing people in the region, especially those who make the dangerous “walk of the immigrants” to reach the United States.
Flores, who is majoring in graphic design and business administration, is selling prints of the photos online and using the proceeds to support an impoverished elementary school in Mexico as part of the Caldwell Fellows program.