On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “Our mission is a humanizing presence,” Father Sean Carroll said to me as breakfast was served to the migrants. A native of California who had a parish in East Los Angeles, Father Carroll has overseen the Comedor for seven years. In the midst of this confusion and distress, he is young, energetic, humble, and hopeful.

  The majority of the migrants (87 percent) have been deported and dumped over the border; the ones in transit (13 percent) are waiting for a chance to jump the fence. Father Carroll makes no judgments. His organization offers food and clothes (it sometimes snows in the winter in Nogales) and a degree of protection from the cartels and the coyotes.

  Talking to some of the migrants, I realized that all of them came from southern Mexico—none from the border.

  “NAFTA has had an impact,” Father Carroll said. “The new agribusinesses produce and export food crops so cheaply, the small farmers have been driven into poverty. Take a traditional farmer in Chiapas or Oaxaca who grows blue corn. How can he or she compete with a GMO crop?”

  The first effect of NAFTA, I learned later, was the emigration of the poor from southern Mexico who had lost their livelihoods as farmers and small manufacturers: the trade agreement had put them out of business. Some of them ended up in maquiladoras, in low-wage border factory jobs, others as border jumpers.

  To get some idea of who was passing through the Comedor, I introduced myself and talked to them.

  Deportees and Those in Transit

  Letitia: A Punitive Sentence

  Tiny, the size of a small girl, Letitia was twenty-two, from a village in the mountains of Oaxaca, an indigenous Mexican whose first language was Zapotec. Her Spanish was not much better than mine. She’d married two years before, given birth to a daughter, and her husband, from an impoverished farming family, migrated—slipped over the border, without papers—to Florida. He got a job in a fertilizer and chemical plant (there are many in Florida) and because of his status did not dare to return to Mexico. He urged Letitia to cross. She had made two attempts.

  “My agreement with the mafia was that I’d pay $7,000 altogether, first a down payment and then $4,500 when they got me to Phoenix.”

  After three days spent walking in the desert beyond Sasabe, a popular smuggling point in the desert west of Nogales, on the Arizona-Mexico border, Letitia was arrested and given two and a half months’ detention—a punitive sentence. She was dazed from her confinement in the jail cell, and her sudden deportation, and she was conflicted—her husband in Florida, her daughter in Oaxaca. After a period of recovery at the Comedor, she said she would be headed back to Oaxaca.

  Norma: “I’m going to try again”

  Norma was a well-built Zapotec woman in her early fifties from Tehuantepec, with the strong Tehuana features you see in Diego Rivera peasant portraits. Her husband, Juan, had been working undocumented for fifteen years in the fields in Fresno, picking peaches, oranges, and grapes. Norma had worked in the fields, too, but then got a job in a chicken processing plant and had worked there for nine years. She was called back to Mexico by her family in the Isthmus, in southern Oaxaca, four thousand miles from Fresno. A family funeral was planned, and Norma wanted to pay her respects. And she had another reason to return.

  “I have three children in Mexico, from a different husband. I missed them. I wanted to see them. So I took a bus from Fresno to Tijuana. I was so eager to see my children, I didn’t think about not having papers. When I decided to go back to the States, I went to Coloso and walked to the border through the mountains.”

  She had paid $500 to the cartel for the privilege, as a sort of entrance fee, with $4,000 promised to the coyote. The coyote escorted her to the border with some other migrants, three men, and directed them by cell phone.

  “The Border Patrol found us on the edge of the highway, the three men and me.

  “That was six weeks ago,” she went on. “I decided to try again fifteen days ago, from Altar”—near Sasabe—“in the same way. One coyote brought me to the border, another one was waiting on the other side. I would pay $3,500 to the coyote when I was back in Fresno with my husband.

  “But this time I was arrested and put in detention. They sent me here on a bus. My husband said, ‘Don’t go back to Oaxaca.’ You see, when I went back to Tehuantepec, they rejected me, for leaving them. I don’t want the same thing to happen with my daughter.”

  Her small daughter was in Fresno.

  Norma was lame from walking in the desert.

  “I’m going to try again,” she said, and put her hands to her face and began to cry.

  Teresa: “I’m afraid to be here because of the mafia”

  “Four days ago I was released from detention in Douglas,” Teresa told me. She was forty-eight but looked much older, sad and awkward. Her wish was to work somewhere in the US, “making beds and cleaning—another life. I worked as a cook in a restaurant in Morton, Minnesota.”

  She’d had four children in Morton, but they were grown, and her husband had run off with another woman. She had gone to Mexico on an ID that someone had sold to her, but on her way back it was spotted as a forgery. She was arrested, imprisoned, and deported.

  “I’m afraid to be here because of the mafia,” she told me. “And I am not sure what I can do in Mexico. The problem in Mexico is that jobs don’t pay enough, even the factories here.”

  Arturo: “My feet are bad”

  For ten years, Arturo, thirty-seven, worked in a restaurant kitchen in Ventura, California. He was deported after being stopped by a policeman, who saw that he was driving erratically.

  “Five beers,” Arturo said, shaking his head. He’d been dropped across the border. Attempting to return, he had walked for four days in the desert near Puerto Penasco. “My feet are bad. I had to go to the hospital for medicine. I can’t walk.”

  Daneris: Rider on the Beast

  Daneris, from Honduras, was sixteen but looked much younger, like a schoolboy. And he was very skinny from his recent ordeal. Persecuted by the thugs in Tegucigalpa (“Muchas maras,” he said; many gangs there), he resolved to leave, and traveled through Guatemala. He hopped the train from southern Mexico known as La Bestia—the Beast—and spent eighteen days riding on the roof of a freight car. He was hoping to be granted political asylum and had an appointment to meet someone here at the Comedor who would advise him on the process.

  Jacquelina: “I know about meat”

  She was thirty-one, wore a green headscarf, and was slender, smiling, and seemed composed, but it was fatalism; she had seen the worst. A single mother with three children—fourteen, ten, and five—she was worried for their future most of all.

  “I’m from Mexico City—a poor and dangerous place, Ixtapaluca.” The community at the southern edge of the city was a notorious mega-slum and the haunt of cartels and drug traffickers. “It is not safe anymore, because of kidnappings, robberies, and crime. I had a business, organizing social events, such as children’s parties and fiestas.

  “My idea was to go to Denver and work in a meatpacking plant. I know someone there. It’s hard work but I like it—I had worked in meat plants before. I know about meat.

  “I tried to cross the border three days ago. I had paid the coyote and entered from Sasabe, and got pretty far, walking in the desert with four others, but we were arrested near Tucson and deported here.

  “I don’t have any money, so I’m going back to Mexico City. My children are there, and now I need to work, because I had to borrow money to come here—about 20,000 pesos [$1,000] to get to the border.”

  Roselia and Leonardo: “There is no money in Chiapas”

  A brother and sister from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Roselia was eighteen—young, heavy, sad, serious, in a thick black dress, bewildered and lost; Leonardo was twenty-three, tough, worldly, determined, in an old wool coat, protective of his sister.

  “I was working in construction in Chiapas, fixing houses,” Leonardo said. “I wanted to go to Atlanta, where my cousin works in a restaurant. T
here is no money in Chiapas.

  “We crossed the border to the pickup place. But the men who were supposed to help us on the border did not show up. We were to be taken to Tucson to meet another car and be driven to Atlanta. The coyote was supposed to arrange the car.

  “Nothing happened. So we walked two days from the border. On the third day we saw a helicopter and tried to hide, but a motorcycle found us. We were brought to Tucson on Monday and deported on Wednesday.

  “We’ll go back to Chiapas now. I had to pay $1,500 to the coyote, my sister the same amount. It would have been $6,000 more when we got to Atlanta.”

  Roselia said, “I’m not married. I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant in San Cristóbal. I don’t have much education—I went to elementary school but didn’t finish. I was planning to work in a restaurant in Atlanta.

  “I’ll go back to Chiapas with Leonardo. Our parents are there. We’ll try to find some work.”

  Juan: A story full of holes

  His name was not Juan. He said, “I don’t want to tell you my name.” He was about forty, handsome when he smiled, which was often, ironical rather than bitter. He was one of the few who spoke to me mostly in English. I felt there was a lot of experience and perhaps some deception behind the summary of his story.

  “I’m from Chiapas—Villaflores, a small pueblo. I had been working in the fields in Chiapas, planting and harvesting melons.

  “I’ve been in the States for quite a while. I just got out of prison—I had been in for two years, for reentry. I tried four times. The longest period I had been in the States was four years, working in construction in Russellville, Arkansas. The police picked me up on a DUI. I had a problem with probation, and was arrested a second time for speeding.

  “So I was deported. I tried to cross the border again and was picked up. I made three more attempts, and then they put me in jail. Now I’m out and going home, but I’ll try again to go back to the States sometime, to see my son—my ex-wife and son are in Tennessee. She’s a gringa,” he said, and smiled, but after I looked at my notes of his story, it was full of holes.

  Ernesto: A teardrop tattoo

  A man of seventy, the oldest of the migrants I’d met at the Comedor, another English speaker, another ex-convict, Ernesto had thick white hair swept back and a white beard and various tattoos, including a teardrop tattoo just under his left eye—this ink sometimes indicates a murderer, but can also mean he’d done hard time. He was unlike any of the other migrants in his bearing and his tone, which was haughty and aggrieved.

  “I first went to the States when I was seven, to El Paso, then Los Angeles,” he said. “I was in LA for thirty-five years. Then Nebraska. I went to school—everything American. I was a house painter.

  “I was busted for illegal entry—arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was working. I got ten years. When I got out they dropped me here. What can I do at my age? My parents are dead. I’ve got four children, but they’re old now and not in touch, because I was in the joint.”

  Ten years in prison for illegal entry was not believable, but when I pressed him, he walked away, holding his coat over his shoulders like a cape, and with the same strange hauteur.

  Marcos: “I got sad and drank a lot”

  His teeth bulging in his smile, Marcos was forty-three and philosophical, tugging at the bill of his baseball cap. He came from distant Apatzingán, originally, in Michoacán, and had traveled with his parents as a child when it was easy to cross the border. He had no memory of the crossing, but remembered the work and his home in Greeley Hill, California.

  “I didn’t go to school. No one ever helped us or told us about it. I worked in the fields in Greeley and Tulare and Fresno from the time I was ten or eleven. We picked oranges, grapes, nectarines. I made about seven or eight dollars a day—the whole family was picking.

  “When I turned eighteen I went to LA and worked in roofing—houses, buildings, all sorts of roofs. I’m not married but I have three children in Colorado, two boys, one girl. They live with their mother. They’re students.

  “I got picked up in this way. My mother died six years ago. My brother didn’t call me about it. When they finally told me the news, I got sad and drank a lot. I was in Colorado then. My girlfriend tried to help me. I was drunk, I hit her, she went down, and a policeman saw us. I was arrested for domestic violence. Because I had a DUI, I got three years in Cañon City, Colorado.

  “But they sent me to ICE in Aurora. They gave me a paper and said, ‘Sign this paper.’ I said, ‘No sign.’ They said, ‘You’re illegal.’ I signed. They flew me in a plane to San Diego and then in a bus here. I guess I’ll try to work here.”

  Manuel Quinta: “I want to be a roofer”

  Manuel was small, wiry, dark, and looked defeated, his face pinched, as he talked about his failure to cross the border. He was well spoken; he said that he had gone to school in his hometown of Los Mochis, near the coast.

  “It was my first time trying to cross. I was arrested last Monday in the desert. I had been walking alone for four days. I was going to Phoenix to get a roofing job. I want to be a roofer. I know they need workers. My brother works in construction there—he told me.

  “My agreement with the coyote was that I would pay him $1,500 when I got to Phoenix.” Manuel shrugged. “Now I’ll go back to Los Mochis, and the fields and my wife and three children. My wife works in the fields there.”

  Javier: “I come from a very dangerous place”

  “I arrived here yesterday,” he said, “from Honduras.” He was much younger than most of the migrants—in his late teens, and standing apart from them. He had distinct Mayan features, the profile you see carved on some temple walls. He had just arrived by road and rail—the Beast again—from Tegucigalpa.

  “I come from a very dangerous place. I am going to the US. I am the oldest of four children. My mother died. I was working as a bricklayer. I want to go to Maryland. I have some cousins there, but I am not sure where.

  “La Bestia took fourteen days from the border. There were about two hundred people on it, from all over—Chiapas, Salvador, Guatemala.

  “I have no work in Honduras. But I have to support my brothers. My father is in Honduras, with another family.

  “I’m crossing with another guy, but we have no support. This guy knows the area.”

  Ubaldo: “I’m going to talk to a lawyer”

  “I lived in California for twenty years—twenty-eight altogether in the US,” Ubaldo said. In Oregon, Idaho, and Washington state. He was forty, his English excellent, and he was forthright, with a level gaze. “My brother and sister are there.

  “I worked in construction, in landscaping and tiles. My ex-wife is in Wyoming—we have no kids.

  “They put me in jail for drinking in public—a couple of nights. Then ICE took me to a detention center, for five months in Eloy, Arizona, where I was fighting my case.

  “They brought me here yesterday. Right now I’m going to talk to a lawyer, then get some money for a bus to Ensenada. I have a friend there. I’ll work, make some money, and then try to get back to the States.”

  Guillermo: “I broke my arm in that desert”

  His arm in a sling, in a bright new plaster cast, Guillermo was small and cautious, his knitted hat pulled over his ears, in ill-fitting clothes the Comedor might have found for him. He was hardly twenty.

  “I came from Oaxaca alone,” he said. “I crossed at Sasabe alone. I walked for ten days and got near to a town. But I entered a ravine full of rocks, and I fell against a rock. I broke my arm in that desert.

  “Soon after that I was picked up by the police and brought to a hospital. They fixed my arm and put me in detention, then sent me here.

  “I will go now to Hermosillo and try to find some work. After that, I don’t know.”

  Ramón: “It’s been twenty-five years”

  Ramón was forty and thin, but apparently in good health. At the age of fifteen he left his home in Zacatecas and crossed the
border near Tijuana. “There was no fence then. It was easy.” He went to the Bay Area, and then to Seattle, where he got a job on a horse farm. Having learned how to handle horses, he was hired to look after racehorses, as a farrier. He had been married, and his two children were now living with his ex-wife.

  “My parents are old and sick, and I missed them, so I took a chance and went to Zacatecas to see them. I thought I had a good ID, but I was stopped at US immigration when I tried to reenter. I might go back to Zacatecas, but it’s been twenty-five years.”

  In making these snapshots of migrants at the Comedor, I intended to follow the example of Chekhov, who, on his trip through Sakhalin Island in 1890, did the same, composing small portraits, before describing the place as a whole.

  And so they huddled in El Comedor, under the benign gaze of Father Sean Carroll and his helpers. They prayed, they healed, and then they dispersed, some southward to their old homes, others to make another attempt on the border. Judge not, lest ye be judged, Father Sean might have said.

  Hearing so much about the police and Border Patrol, I drove a few miles farther along the border, looking for a patrol vehicle. Very soon I found Mike Coruna in his black-and-white cruiser, on his two p.m.–to–midnight shift at the edge of Nogales, Arizona. He was a beefy man in his early thirties, his hand on his holstered Glock, glancing around as we spoke, always monitoring the fence.

  “We get fence jumpers here,” he said, which was surprising, because this was a residential part of town, the iron-slatted fence about twenty-five feet high. “The way they jump the fence here is they wedge their feet between the bars and shimmy up like monkeys.”