On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  Recruiters and coyotes visited such poor villages all the time, like door-to-door salesmen, encouraging suitable youths to make the crossing, and collecting down payments, the remainder to be paid on the other side, when the migrant had a job. Pedro paid $1,500 in Putla and took a bus to Mexico City, and one more to Nogales. There he was met by another coyote, with a vehicle, who brought him the fifteen or so miles to Altar, for the crossing at Sasabe. I knew from my time in Nogales that this was one of the easier and popular crossings—just desert, no fence, in the past lightly patrolled, especially on the day Pedro crossed, with a small group that had been assembled by the coyote.

  “It was September 2001,” Pedro said, shaking his head. “I was crossing the border when the towers fell down. I didn’t see any Border Patrol. I walked through the desert to Tucson”—sixty miles, with the coyote and the group of half a dozen young men. “The coyote made a call, and we went to a house in Tucson. We stayed for a few days, then to Los Angeles in a bus, to another house. Finally I took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, to Bernal Heights, to meet my brother.”

  “Quite a trip for a young fellow,” I said. There was work in Bernal Heights, he said; there were many Mexicans and other Latinos. It was near bus lines and the shipyard. And there were plenty of construction jobs all over the city that was rising on the dot-com boom.

  “I was like a grasshopper when I was a little kid,” Pedro said. “My brother was in construction. I joined him, I paid the remainder of my money to the coyotes, and I settled down. After a while I helped a plumber, who was also from Oaxaca. Watching him, I became a specialist in plumbing. I stayed in Bernal Heights, met a woman from Oaxaca there, Verónica, and married her. We had two kids, now nine and seven. We were really happy in San Francisco.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “My father,” he said. “He was very sick. This was a year ago. My brother stayed but I came back, and soon after he died. And so here I am, doing plumbing.”

  He was resigned to living here. There was work in Huayapam, but the pay was far less than in San Francisco, and seventeen years in the States had changed him. Mexico was bureaucratic, the schools were poor, and in many respects he was overqualified for the sort of plumbing he was asked to do. He could not contemplate a return to Bernal Heights, or anywhere in the US—he had a family now, and commitments, and with the price of crossing the border—and the uncertainties—another crossing was out of the question.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “here I am.” And he smiled sadly. “Home.”

  I met Ángel Barragán under a tree on a side street in Huayapam. Like Pedro, he was in his mid-thirties, and some of his story was the same—the desert crossing at Altar to Sasabe, for example. But in his case he was in a large group, 102 men and women, and because of the size of the group it was cheaper—an $800 down payment, then more after he arrived and began earning. His younger brother was with him. This was 2006.

  “What made you decide to go?”

  “To make money,” Ángel said, and smiled as though at my simplicity of mind, too dim to grasp this obvious point. “There is no money here.”

  “You crossed with a lot of people,” I said. “That must have been hard.”

  “It was five days and nights from the border to Tucson,” he said, remembering and looking grim. “We had brought one day of food, so we went four days without food. A coyote raped one of the women—well, she couldn’t pay the money, so she offered her body.”

  He considered this and became silent.

  “We ate a lot of cactus,” he said, using the word nopales. The pads of the nopal, prickly pear, can be eaten raw or cooked, with a taste—people say—like green beans.

  “And you all survived?”

  The idea of a hundred people plodding across the desert was hard to imagine—a stream of them, filing on a path through the hot gravel and spiny cactus and mesquite—but none of them were apprehended by the Border Patrol, so Ángel said.

  “No one in our group died,” Ángel said. “But along the way we saw dead bodies, just lying on the ground. Dead from thirst. Not buried.”

  “Did you see snakes?”

  “During the day, yes, many,” he said. “There are always snakes in the desert.”

  The deal was this: the group assembled by the coyote, or a syndicate, was headed to work on a farm in Huron, California, to harvest lettuce. All of them, like indentured servants. Huron, in Fresno County, with a population of about six thousand at the time of Ángel Barragán’s residence, was the city with the highest proportion of Latino or Hispanic people in the United States—98 percent—most of them migrants, working in the fields, a great proportion undocumented.

  “Harvesting lettuce, we got about $400 a week. It cost us around $180 a week for room and food and expenses,” he said. “It was very hot, sometimes over a hundred degrees. It was no better later, in Santa Rosa, picking grapes—we got about $1,100 every two weeks.”

  “How much did you send back home?”

  “Nothing. After paying rent and food, I had so little left over. See, I was still paying off the coyote.”

  “What was the name of the vineyard in Santa Rosa?”

  “The company was called Star Wines,” he said. “I could pick one hundred and fifty boxes of grapes a day. I was in a group of eight guys, most of them from Puebla and Oaxaca. If we picked more grapes than normal, we got extra money. We often picked twelve tons a day.”

  I questioned this: eight tons was sixteen thousand pounds of grapes. But he insisted the figure was accurate.

  “The company would drive us three hours away in a truck to the vineyards,” he said. It is two hundred–odd miles from Fresno to Santa Rosa, so this sounded right, but checking later, I could not find a vineyard called Star Wines; maybe I had misunderstood him. “Because of chemicals on the vines we had to wear special suits”—hazmat suits—“and boots. So it was very hot. But the pay was good. I could send some money home. I could earn in a week in the US what would take me a month and a half here. But still it wasn’t enough.” He reflected on this. “Finally after eight months, when I paid the coyote in full, I came back here. There was no point staying if I couldn’t earn extra money.”

  “How did you come back?”

  “In my friend’s pickup truck,” he said, and brightened, remembering a detail. “As we were crossing the desert we saw the Border Patrol in a helicopter.”

  “So you’re staying here?”

  “I’d like to go back—for the money. Some other people have gone to the States from Huayapam. But they’ve been gone so long I don’t think they’re coming back. For the past six years I’ve been trying to build a house here. I have children in school—and you know it costs money for children to be educated in Mexico.” He had a son, Román, who was sixteen, and two daughters, Diana, twelve, and Michelle, eleven.

  He itemized the amounts: 10,000 pesos for books, uniforms, paper, and pens for the three children—that was $550—and extra for sports equipment. Tuition was 15,000 pesos for each child for a school year. The Mexican government helped a little with a stipend: every two months, 2,000 pesos to keep the kids in school, under a plan called the Program of Opportunity. It was a struggle, and Ángel Barragán’s pay in his job as a handyman in Huayapam was just enough to support the family, but there was nothing left over, and he wondered whether he would ever finish building his house.

  Lost Migrants: Caminos Oaxaca: Acompañamiento a Migrantes

  What shocked and stayed with me in Ángel Barragán’s story was his saying that “along the way we saw dead bodies, just lying on the ground. Dead from thirst. Not buried.” In my inquiries in Oaxaca I found an organization that tracked lost migrants, Caminos Oaxaca: Acompañamiento a Migrantes, so I paid them a visit. The office was less an office than a roomy suburban villa, in a pleasant neighborhood of two-story houses on a quiet street. This was in the Colonia Yalalag, in the community of Santa Lucia del Camino, bordering San Agustín, where I had been a few days
earlier. It was three miles from the central part of Oaxaca, the house heavily gated and fenced, like most of the houses near it—like most of the larger residences everywhere in Mexico, land of fortified dwellings. But once inside, having introduced myself, I was struck by the tidiness and hum of activity, young women padding back and forth, shuffling papers, past a wide bright mural of a yellow landscape, of flowers, butterflies, and migrants—migrants as butterflies, butterflies as migrants, the yellow mariposa a symbol of migration.

  “We started this organization four years ago,” the director, Nancy García, told me in the kitchen of the house, which doubled as a reception area, a coffee machine nearby. Señorita García was a small and earnest woman in her mid-thirties, fast-talking, friendly, on a mission to locate migrants who’d become lost, or who’d disappeared during their crossing.

  “I worked for eight years in Oaxaca for an organization that helps Central Americans,” she said, “and I realized there was a greater need for Mexicans, so I founded this organization. Our focus is on Oaxacans, especially ones who have disappeared on the way north.”

  “How do you find out their names?”

  “Families come to us and say that a member of their family had gone—that they’ve lost communication with them. Or the family member says, ‘I’ll call when I get across,’ and they’re never heard from again, either on the border or afterward. The people come and say, ‘Can you help us find our family member?’ So we help them.”

  I asked the obvious question: “What might have happened to them?”

  “So many things! They might have been abducted by the cartels. They might have died crossing. Or they might have been detained, and it can be months or years without a word.”

  I mentioned that in places on the border, such as the Comedor in Nogales of the Kino Border Initiative, where migrants were sheltered, I’d come across migrants with falsified papers, fake IDs, counterfeit Social Security cards.

  “Yes,” Nancy said. “They’re harder to find. We usually call around and try to locate friends. We use the internet. We use that Nogales place—a good place, the Kino Initiative. The US immigration service doesn’t help us at all. Here’s an example: before Trump, the pages on the ICE website were bilingual. Now not.”

  “How many people have disappeared?”

  “We have records of about one hundred and twenty people missing from around here, more or less,” she said. “We’re helping to find eighty of them. The other forty disappeared completely—their families have given up. They’re tired, or resigned to the loss.”

  “Maybe,” I said, hesitating, trying for a tactful tone, “maybe some people don’t want to be found.”

  “Yes,” she said, and again, “Yes.”

  We chatted about her hometown of San Antonio, which was a distance from Oaxaca city and mainly agricultural, and how people there had to have three or four jobs in order to get by—odd jobs, making food to sell, driving taxis, cleaning houses. The usual salary was 150 to 250 pesos a day, or $7 to $13. A person hustling on their own would not make more than 600 pesos a week, or $30, which was not enough to live on.

  “Has NAFTA made a difference?”

  “Not a positive one,” she said. “It has made the rich people richer and the poor people poorer. People who leave here are untrained, so they set off across the border to work in the fields in the US, not in the factories.”

  “And some don’t make it.”

  “Yes. And the ones who’ve disappeared crossing, most likely they’ve died. At least it seems so in my experience. The ones who’ve disappeared in Mexico, most of them have died. In the US they are probably in prison or maybe living under another name. It’s our job to find out what happened to them.”

  I told her what Ángel Barragán had said to me, about seeing corpses scattered unburied in the desert.

  “We look for them as best we can,” Nancy said. “In general, we don’t know how people die. But here’s an example. There were some people from a town called San Miguel Lachiguiri.” San Miguel is in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, small (pop. 560, mainly Mixtecs and Zapotecs), coffee-growing, poor, surviving on remittances from migrants. “Six guys from there, migrants, they got to a hotel in Tamaulipas near the border. Two of the six decided to go out and get some food. While they were out, an armed gang came to the hotel—and it was a levantón, the group of four lifted, kidnapped. The gang might have been tipped off by someone at the hotel. The two who’d avoided it by going out for food went back home to San Miguel and told of the kidnapping.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s the thing. The four were never heard from again.”

  “Killed?”

  “Not necessarily. They might have been used as forced labor. They might have been made to take drugs across the border. But we found no one, nothing. Gone.”

  “I’ve heard of migrants used as forced labor on farms.”

  “One guy who disappeared returned to his town after twenty years. He escaped—por un pelo—by a hair. He’d been doing agri work. He said, ‘I wished they’d killed me. I’ve lost my whole life.’ Twenty years! When he got home to Teotitlán”—Teotitlán del Valle, another Zapotec town—“he was so traumatized and angry I couldn’t get anything from him.”

  “This farm, was it in Mexico?”

  “He had no idea. Probably in Mexico, but he was captive. All he knew was that it was a farm,” she said. “He was poor. He had nothing, like most of the people we work with—people from small towns, families who have no tools to find them, no computers, no access.”

  “And the ones who don’t want to be found?”

  “We’ve found migrants who have another life—a new life, a new family. And the wife here who had us look says, ‘At least he could have given me a divorce!’”

  “What about the ones in jail?”

  “Terrible stories sometimes,” she said. “Some guys were drunk in a town in California—fieldworkers. They were arrested on a charge of public nuisance and had to serve two years. Because they were migrants. We found them just as they were about to complete their sentence. And this is the strange part. Because of that, people thought I got them out of jail. After that, we were flooded with requests to get their relatives out of jail!”

  All the hassle, all the hard work, all the danger, I said to her. And yet people still risked the frontier.

  “The main reason for crossing is economic,” Nancy said. “There’s also a cultural reason. ‘My grandfather went,’ ‘My father went,’ ‘My cousin went.’ ‘And now it’s time for me to go.’”

  I suggested that it was, in that sense, almost a rite of passage.

  “In some cases,” she said, “a village or a community here develops its own tradition, of people going to Mexico City, or Guadalajara, or the border, or a specific city in the States, like LA or Phoenix.”

  This put me in mind of the San Agustín tradition of going to Poughkeepsie.

  “And there’s this,” she said. “Some of the people who come back don’t tell the whole story. They say, ‘I got new clothes . . . I got money.’ They don’t talk about how they were almost killed. Or that they were eating out of trash cans. They don’t talk about the dark side. So you have this elevated status in the town when you come back. People look up to you. This is especially true of the young ones—they come back and boast. The older ones tend to say how hard it was.”

  “The men of judgment,” I said, using the expression for the old.

  “Yes, and it’s really tough,” she said. “My undocumented friends in the States, I ask them about their life. They say, ‘I start work at six a.m. I work until midnight—two shifts. With my first shift I pay my rent, with my second shift I pay for my food.’ And they have to repay the loan taken out by the family for them to go, and for a year or so they have to pay off the coyote who got them there.”

  “Sorry to keep asking, but what’s the point?”

  “To have a little house, or a shop, or something—anything—
here.”

  “Is it so hard here that people risk their lives to cross the border?”

  “I’ll tell you how hard, from personal experience,” Nancy said, and for the first time in our talk she clutched her hands and seemed exasperated. “I have a little house. My bathroom was outside. My dream was to have a bathroom inside the house. I had to save for three years to get this. So, imagine what life is like in a small village, how unattainable such things are. This is why people try so hard to get to the States. Here they are living on the edge. They go. Sometimes they disappear—die or get lost. We try to find them.”

  Toledo, El Maestro

  There was one man I wished to see in Oaxaca before I left. I had begun to understand, from what he’d done and the ways in which he was praised, that this man, Francisco Toledo, was the embodiment of Oaxaca’s vortex of energy. The paradox was that apart from the ubiquity of his work and his achievements, the man himself was invisible. But he was talked about as though he was always present, wraith-like, perhaps listening, the effect of his work always in view.

  An artist, an activist, an organizer, and a motivator, Toledo was known as El Maestro. That was an appropriate description: the master, also teacher and authority figure. I saw him as the heart and soul of Oaxaca, and a kind of hero. His work, and the results of his campaigns and his philanthropy, could be seen everywhere, but the man himself was elusive. He hid from journalists, he hated to be photographed, he seldom gave interviews. He no longer attended his own openings, but instead sent his wife and daughter to preside over them while he stayed home, unwilling to speak—a great example of how writers and artists should respond—letting his work speak for him, with greater eloquence.

  He was that maddening public figure, a person so determined to avoid being noticed and to maintain his privacy that he becomes the object of exaggerated scrutiny, his privacy constantly under threat. It is the attention seeker and the publicity hound who is consigned to obscurity—or ignored or dismissed. The recluse, the shunner of fame, the “I just want to be alone” escapee—B. Traven was one, so was J. D. Salinger—seems perversely to invite intrusion. Say “Absolutely no interviews,” and people beat a path to your door.