On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  As darkness fell, I was climbing to the high plains, farther from the border—the border from Langtry west to Big Bend here is too rugged for roads, a wasteland of arroyos and clawed ridges, and a much greater challenge to border jumpers. Finally, after driving 560 miles from McAllen, I came to Fort Stockton, the motels filled with workers, glassy-eyed and weary from their arduous day in the oil fields northwest of town.

  The next morning, I took I-10 west to the prosperous sprawl of El Paso, with a panorama of the dusty horizontal colonias of Ciudad Juárez, and onward on the straight roads and high desert of New Mexico to the simple hills and placid, wooded valleys of southern Arizona. I gloried in the emptiness, the dry roadsides patterned with leafy shadows, and then past Tucson and the solid single mountains and flat gray plains, where I chose a town at random, Gila Bend, and a motel for the night.

  The road the next day slipped closer to the border, and at Yuma and Calexico, Mexico was again on the horizon: beyond the green fields of Date City, the glare of Mexicali. I passed El Centro—a beaten-up grid of hot streets and faded bungalows—and then Imperial Valley, chronicled by William T. Vollmann in Imperial, an exhaustive work of social observation, scholarship, and vagabondage. Into the stony hills toward Ocotillo and the Jacumba Wilderness Area, mountain slopes composed entirely of smooth boulders, and finally I took a detour to the desert road that led to Potrero and Dulzura and the small, poor, silent town of San Ysidro—Tijuana bustling and rackety on the other side of the fence.

  A Traverse of the Border (Una Travesía de la Frontera)

  Singing birds—warbling, cheeping, sounding piteous—were hidden in the tangled thickets of lanky shrubs, the flowering mule fat, or water-wally, and spindly willows. I had begun my traverse of the border, walking on a sandy path at the margin of Border Field State Park in San Ysidro, a township south of San Diego. It was obvious to me this early in my trip that the border is not a discrete knife cut, a slash mark in the landscape, except in the minds of politicians and cartographers; it is like most other national boundaries, a muddled blur, and it is obvious in many places that Mexico does not butt up to the border but spills over it and puddles willy-nilly—troche y moche, as Mexicans say—giving many border towns a jumbled cultural ambiguity.

  San Ysidro looked as Mexican and as poor as any town in Mexico, and the last census, in 2010, showed it to be 93 percent Hispanic. Yet compared to the humble houses in distressed San Ysidro, the villas on the Mexican side in Tijuana, on the heights of Calle Cascada, looked proud on their natural palisade. Up there, on the far side of the fence, a Tijuana resident was unknotting a garden hose, two big dogs lolloping around him. He caught my eye, saw me staring, and waved in a neighborly way, from his own country.

  This was the far western end of the frontier, which is marked by a tall, rust-colored, iron-slatted fence—paralleling an older, lower fence—blistered with corrosion, which extends below the tidemark, its end sunk in the Pacific Ocean. It happened to be low tide that midmorning, and I was to discover that this detail mattered: a low tide allows migrants to splash more easily around the fence and sprint up the oily beach into the American thickets.

  So, along with the twittering birds in the park, there are often some desperate human fugitives, too. Three birds, once endangered, have been brought back from the brink of extinction, and are diligently nesting in this area, through the efforts of conservationists—the least tern, calling kip-kip-kip-kiddeek; the western snowy plover, chirping o-wee-ah; and the clapper rail, this last one seldom visible, but its clanking ik-ik-ik call echoes in the bushes here. The migrants make no sound.

  Cars are forbidden from entering the park, which is not bosky or park-like at all but a sandy waste of gritty paths in low dunes and muddy swamp, the brittle scrub just high enough to hide anyone in its density, diminishing to salt marsh nearer the Tijuana River estuary. Only hikers and bird watchers are allowed inside the park gate. I was on my own that hot day. The only sound was birdsong, soon overwhelmed by the headlong buzz of two Border Patrol officers on all-terrain vehicles, zipping past me much too fast on the flat paths, their big wheels tossing up damp sand.

  “They’re looking for someone who just came over, because of the tide,” a passing park ranger told me. I had hailed him in his truck to ask directions. “He’s over there somewhere.”

  The migrant had gone to ground in the brush on the northern side of the wetland, near the Tijuana River, hiding in the tall grass that was within sight of Imperial Beach. The men on the ATVs were scouring the area, and a helicopter had now arrived and was hovering near the raptors, kestrels, and harriers.

  “If he manages to elude them until dark,” the ranger said, “he’ll make a run for it in the middle of the night.” Then he smiled in reminiscence. “Years ago it was so different. I’d see thirty or forty guys bum-rush the fence, on the assumption that two or three would make it. You don’t see that anymore.”

  Hiking onward, nearer the fence I saw the Tijuanero on the Mexican side with his frolicking dogs, his arms around the green garden hose, the two dogs barking at him as though trying to provoke him to play. With the hose in his hand he looked toward the fence and faced me.

  I waved. He waved back again. Then he dropped the twisted hose and began to play with his dogs. I walked as far as I could go—the Plaza Monumental bullring looming above me on the Mexican side, and a mural of the joined US and Mexican flags lettered LOVE TRUMPS HATE and EL AMOR VENCE AL ODIO—to where the iron-slatted fence extends, and ends, about a hundred yards from shore, half submerged in the ocean. The Border Patrol ATVs were still buzzing, the helicopter still yakking, and a Border Patrol officer was standing by his distinctive black-and-white car, scanning the bush with binoculars. Somewhere in the swamp grass, between the river and the Sunset Spur trail, a man was hiding like a rabbit in a thicket, dead still, his head down, his heart beating madly.

  What he had done was not remarkable. Having taken note of the low tide, he had made his way through central Tijuana, to the west end of town through the Jardines Playas de Tijuana residential district, crossed the coastal highway, Avenida del Pacífico, descended to the malecón and the promenade by the beach, Paseo Costero, and then vaulted from the low wall onto the sand itself, walking north along the beach until he came to the fence, bisecting the beach. Had he been a strong swimmer, he could have swum a bit out to sea, paddled around the end of the fence, and bodysurfed sideways through the riptide into the United States, landing on the beach at International Friendship Park.

  But he had set off at low tide, probably clinging to the fence, and having splashed onshore had made a dash for it into the bushes, where he was spotted at about the time I had started to hike, ten in the morning. Now he was crouched, blinking and sniffing, counting on the dark camouflage of his wet clothes, instinctively rigid until the danger passed. He was waiting for night to fall, so that he could insert himself farther into San Diego County. If he made it across the river and into the streets of Imperial Beach, he could be in Chula Vista by morning.

  The hunted man was alone and living by his wits. Other migrants, with money, often had help, from cartels or from the facilitators known as coyotes. In a seven-month period, at the time I was walking by the fence, 663 Chinese nationals had been arrested trying to cross from Tijuana, a number of them snared at the end of a long tunnel under the fence. It was estimated that they had paid anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 apiece to be shepherded into the US. China is now one of the world’s leading sources of illegal migrants, along with opportunists and economic migrants from the Middle East and south Asia.

  Not long after I was in that sector of the border, a California congressman visited the US federal prison in Victorville, expecting to find persecuted Central Americans seeking asylum. He was startled to find that of the 680 detainees under lock and key, 380 were Indian nationals who had flown from India to Mexico City, where they paid thousands of dollars to coyotes to be smuggled into the US. Twenty percent of the detainees at the Imm
igration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the Adelanto Detention Center, near Victorville, were Indian nationals. In the first half of 2018, the Los Angeles Times reported (August 13, 2018), more than 4,000 Indian nationals had been caught crossing the US border illegally. After being caught, they claimed they were seeking political asylum (from the country known as “the world’s biggest democracy”). Around the same time, 671 Bangladeshis were arrested crossing the border near Laredo, Texas—helped across the river (so they claimed) by members of the Zetas cartel, to whom they paid upward of $27,000 apiece.

  These non-Mexicans are the SIAs—Special Interest Aliens, who, along with Chinese, included Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Syrians, and Africans (predominantly Nigerians). Most were aided by coyotes, who worked for cartels. But some arrived by more ingenious strategies—on Jet Skis glissading through the surf, and a dozen at a time in panga boats (a simple, seaworthy design, with an upswept bow, powered by an outboard motor, and favored by third-world fishermen, Somali pirates, and human traffickers). Such boats were routinely seized by the California Border Patrol as they deposited migrants sprinting across Imperial Beach.

  The helicopter was still circling over Border Field Park as I walked to the entrance, and drove—not far—to a parking lot near the entry to Tijuana. I walked across the border, filled out an immigration form, and had my passport stamped. Then I took a taxi to Avenida Revolución, the heart of Tijuana, and walked to a restaurant, Cenaduría la Once Antojitos, which had been recommended to me for its posole. Sitting there, bringing my notes up to date, I was happy—well fed, amazed at the ease of my border crossing, and enlightened by a conversation with a man at the Cenaduría.

  “We go to California all the time,” he said. “We buy jeans, shirts, TV sets. A lot of it is made in Mexico. Even with the Mexican duty we have to pay on the way back, it’s cheaper for us.”

  This explained the many Mexicans I saw struggling with bundles at border posts all the way to Brownsville. And like most of the Mexican border towns I was to visit, Tijuana was thick with pharmacies, dentists, doctors, and cut-price optometrists.

  “Properties, customs offices, real estate deals,” Carlos Fuentes writes in his sequence of border stories in The Crystal Frontier, “wealth and power provided by control over an illusory, crystal border, a porous frontier through which each year pass millions of people, ideas, products—in short, everything (sotto voce: contraband, drugs, counterfeit money, et cetera).”

  In a routine that served me for the next few weeks, I wandered around the busy, seemingly safe part of the city. As in other border towns, I was welcomed as a harmless older gringo who might buy a sombrero, a leather jacket, or a belt buckle bulging with a dead scorpion encased in epoxy.

  “What do you think of Donald Trump?” was a frequent question. Predictably, he was not a favorite with Mexicans, whom he characterized as rapists and murderers. But many members of the US Customs and Border Protection agency I engaged on this subject acknowledged they’d voted for him, and their union, the National Border Patrol Council (more than eighteen thousand members), for the first time ever involving itself in a presidential election, had endorsed his candidacy.

  Retail business was slow in Tijuana, and though the dentists were busy and the pharmacies crowded (Viagra at $5 a pill), the bars and strip clubs and brothels at the north end of town—Zona Norte, around Calle Coahuila—were so thinly visited that when I entered a bar I caused a buzz of attention, being one of only a few gringos in the place. The bars are grim: beer-soaked, smoky, and noisy; the girls, old and young, sitting in clusters at banquettes, hoping to ensnare a client to buy an expensive drink and then negotiate a price for an hour in one of the rooms upstairs, in what is advertised outside as a hotel.

  “Solo mirando,” I said at each place. Just looking, the theme of my traveling life.

  The Zona de Tolerancia—Zona Norte in Tijuana, “Boys’ Town” elsewhere on the border, and the Zona Rosas deeper in Mexico—is the Mexican answer to regulating sex workers: a designated neighborhood, usually at the edge of cities and larger towns, where prostitution is legal. On these streets, in these seedy bars, sex workers are licensed and given routine medical checks. Though this seemed a rational solution to an age-old issue, it was obvious in Tijuana that this Zone of Tolerance attracted pimps and parasites, the drug trade, pests, and hangers-on.

  In midafternoon the bars and hangouts smelled of mildew and spilled beer and were mainly empty; I was assured that they would liven up after dark. But people I met said that if I insisted on seeing the border, I should do so in daylight. As night fell, I was in a queue of perhaps four hundred people, none of them gringos, crowding to leave Mexico, while a gruff American immigration officer at a turnstile shouted at us.

  “Back up! Hey, lady. Yes, you—did I tell you to move?!”

  I approached him, holding my passport, but he waved me away.

  “Back in line!”

  The border is not the simple line it seems, and it’s hard to believe that in time—so we are promised—it will be the site of the battlements of the Murus Hadrianus Trumpus. It has altered greatly over the past 170-odd years, been disputed and redrawn. The United States has expanded; Mexico has shrunk. Much of what is now our West and Southwest—Texas and New Mexico, all of Arizona, and most of California—was once Mexican territory. But that northern one-third of old Mexico was ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which was provoked in 1845 by the US annexation of Texas. California at that time was still sparsely settled, just a chain of missions on the Camino Real, from San Diego to San Francisco, as Richard Henry Dana described in Two Years Before the Mast, when he sailed as a deckhand up this Mexican coast of Alta California in 1834. (On a second visit, twenty-four years later, Dana noted how the Gold Rush had turned the tiny mission of San Francisco into a big city.)

  After Texas became part of the Union, its southern border followed the Rio Grande. Arizona did not become a state until 1912, but earlier, when it was still part of the territory of New Mexico, its southern portion was defined by a patch of the Gadsden Purchase (1854)—straight lines, as the border is designated today, inconvenient and hard to police, across stony hill and dusty dale, in the desert.

  Throughout the border disputes among the colonials and newcomers, the Native Americans, who had occupied this region for hundreds of years, were regarded as a nuisance. They were fought for objecting to the interlopers and for asserting their ancestral claims to their home. The Apaches (to use the popular term for a collection of nations) were particularly tenacious; for their veneration of the land, they were seen as warlike, and slaughtered. The descendants of the depleted populations of all these native peoples remain, and following the border today, one encounters the reservations and tribal lands of indigenous folk—from the Cahuilla people near Coachella, California, to the Ewiiaapaayp Band of Kumeyaay Indians (also known as the Cuyapaipe) near San Diego, from the Cocopah at the Arizona state line to the Tohono O’odham farther east, from the Mescalero Apache in southern New Mexico to, in Texas, the Ysleta del Sur near El Paso and the Kickapoo people in Eagle Pass. Among other things, the borderland is a living repository of native peoples.

  The Mexican border we know today was established as an international frontier in about the middle of the nineteenth century. For more than a hundred years, from before 1900, Mexicans were encouraged by American farmers to cross the border to work in the fields—much to the Mexican government’s disapproval, because their labor was needed at home. These men and women were the primary source of agricultural labor in the Southwest and California. To regulate the flow of fieldworkers, the Bracero Program (Mexicans working on short-term contracts) was established in 1942 under an agreement between the US and Mexico.

  The American need for cheap labor has defined the border culture. Once, the border had been porous, and in many places informal and notional, people strolling across in both directions to work, to shop, to find entertainment, and to s
ettle. Mormons fled south across the border to escape US persecution for polygamy, sanctioned in their church’s Doctrine and Covenants (132:61–62: “If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another . . .”). Mexicans headed north for work. The border itself was relatively harmonious. “We used to go across all the time,” people told me, on both sides. The Bracero Program allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to cross the border to work as manual laborers in the US. After twenty-two years and five million braceros, the program ended in 1964; the remaining braceros were sent home. It has been proven that the braceros—the term means “men who work with their arms”—were generally exploited and manipulated as low-wage workers.

  Still, the border remained lightly policed and simple to cross until the Clinton administration activated Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. The border was beefed up with more officers, and characterized by high fences, patrol cars, security technology, and massive deportations of illegal border crossers. Crime, the drug trade, illegal immigration, cartel violence, and the fears raised by the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993, created the need to tighten the borders further. And that is where we are today, the border a front line in what sometimes seems a war, at other times an endless game of cat and mouse.

  America’s tattered southern fringe is 1,952 miles long, from the rusty fence in the slosh of the Pacific at Tijuana to Matamoros, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, where the soupy green river pours into the Gulf of Mexico at the estuary, just south of Boca Chica, and its brown, burgeoning surf.