Meanwhile, across the river, El Paso bills itself as one of the safest cities in America. Border towns are typically crammed with local cops, U.S. Marshals, Border Patrol agents, and members of the Texas National Guard. Sometimes, however, bullets from gunfights in Juárez fly over the border. In 2012, a woman was pushing a stroller in downtown El Paso when a stray shot hit her in the leg. Bullets from Mexico also struck a building at the University of Texas branch in El Paso, and another broke a picture frame in the city hall.
I checked into the Camino Real Hotel in downtown El Paso. My memory was that I had stayed here with my two sisters after the bus wreck, while our parents were still in the hospital in Juárez, but as soon as I arrived I realized that I had never been in this hotel before.
I’m fascinated by the ways in which memory fails us, how vivid incidents can be distorted or lost—or “repressed,” to use Freud’s term. I had never forgotten the bus wreck or the sight of my parents in the Mexican hospital entirely encased in body casts. But there were details that had dropped away after fifty years. I recalled that I had to hire a lawyer to get a writ that would let my parents leave Mexico. One of the first words I learned in Spanish was abogado. But I was at a loss about why I couldn’t remember the hotel.
I called my sisters.
“We were never in El Paso,” Roz told me. “We were always in Juárez.” She thought we were there for a week or ten days after the wreck. The hotel wouldn’t let me make an international call to contact people who could help us, so we were trapped. “You finally went to a bank and told them that your father was a banker, too, and they let you use the phone,” Roz said.
That must have been when I called our family doctor, Robert Cox. He came down on a private plane to ferry our parents back to Dallas. Dr. Cox was a giant, about six feet seven or eight, and he towered over the Mexican doctors in my parents’ hospital room. He had asked me to find an extra-long bed at the hotel for him, which I couldn’t do.
Kathy remembered that he came with a wad of dollars, which he spread around in the hospital and at the border to ease us all out of the country.
“Why did I have this memory of being at the Camino Real?”
“I think there’s another hotel by that name in Juárez,” Kathy said. “I remember because I stole the room key.”
She was right. As soon as she mentioned the key, I recalled the baronial keys, and the archways and Saltillo tiles of the hotel we had actually stayed in. Kathy asked if I would repay the hotel for the stolen key. Apparently, it had weighed on her conscience all this time.
Kathy told me another thing that I had forgotten. On the flight home, Dr. Cox called the three of us together, as Mother and Daddy lay sedated on their gurneys. “He told us that our parents were going to be invalids for the rest of their lives,” Kathy said. It may have had something to do with their bodies atrophying inside those body casts. “He said we might not even be able to finish high school.”
You’d think I would have remembered that.
When we got to Baylor Hospital in Dallas, the casts were cut away and our parents were encouraged to move around. They wore braces for a long time, but they recovered. I wonder what happened to all those other passengers.
* * *
DOWNTOWN EL PASO IS in the middle of a renaissance. The city had been devastated by the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA—in 1994, which eliminated most tariffs between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Until then, much of the city’s economy derived from the garment industry, but those jobs jumped over the border into maquiladoras—the factories that are allowed to import certain materials for assembly or manufacturing and then return them to the United States as finished products. The goal of NAFTA was to draw Mexico into the high-wage economies of its northern neighbors and turn the entire North American continent into a single market. The Mexican president at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, said it would transform his country’s economy, so that it would “export goods, not people.”
Donald Trump has decried NAFTA as the worst deal ever, and it’s true that the agreement has had a mixed record for the United States and Mexico. In 1993, the balance of trade showed a narrow $1.7 billion U.S. surplus over Mexico; by 2016, after more than twenty years of NAFTA, that surplus had swung to a $64 billion deficit, the highest it has ever been. About 350,000 autoworkers lost their jobs in the United States, while about 430,000 such jobs were created in Mexico. Texas alone lost nearly 50,000 jobs in the two decades after NAFTA’s passage, about 18,500 of them in El Paso. Some economists argue that the American jobs would have been lost in any case, because of globalization and automation, and that, in fact, the linkages with cheaper labor in Mexico gave American automakers an advantage in dealing with China. In any case, the percentage of Mexicans living below the poverty level—about 46 percent of the population—remains at roughly the same level it was when the trade deal was passed, and unemployment has actually risen. Almost two million Mexican farmers have been put out of work, unable to compete with their industrialized American counterparts. That has driven many of them to cross the border seeking better jobs. Cheaper goods have kept inflation down in the United States, but wages have also been slow to grow. Both countries have witnessed unprecedented levels of income inequality.
“I completely understand the fear that comes from NAFTA—we lived it,” Veronica Escobar, then a county judge in El Paso, told me. “When the manufacturing left after NAFTA, El Paso became a ghost town.” Now, she says, “we’ve reinvented ourselves.” El Paso has adapted in part by servicing the maquiladoras across the border. There’s a new medical school and a children’s hospital in town. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in renovating landmark buildings downtown. But the manufacturing jobs never returned. Seven out of the top ten employers in the city are telemarketing call centers. Across the river in Juárez, three hundred maquiladoras make parts and equipment for Bosch, Foxconn, Flextronics, Delphi, Lear, Boeing, Sumitomo, and other multinational corporations. Meanwhile, Mexico has raised the minimum wage to seventy pesos a day—less than four U.S. dollars.
I got a tour of El Paso with Max Grossman, a professor of architectural history and a member of the local historical commission. He’s a trim man with a snap-brim fedora, like a film noir character. “In 1920, El Paso was the largest city between Dallas and San Francisco,” Max said, as he pointed out some of the highlights of the city. The Plaza Hotel, formerly a Hilton, was where seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor stayed before she was briefly married to Conrad Hilton Jr. In the window of the oldest building downtown, now a pawnshop, was the blackened mummified trigger finger of Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary general, which was on sale for $9,500. Nearby was the office building where the gunslinger John Wesley Hardin had his law practice before he was shot in the back in a saloon. “El Paso was legendary for its lawlessness,” Max said happily. There were the handsome concrete Caples Building, where Francisco Madero planned the Mexican Revolution, and the CVS pharmacy, formerly the Elite Confectionary, where Pancho Villa indulged in strawberry sodas and peanut brittle. Afterwards, we had dinner next door to a hotel where John Dillinger spent the night.
* * *
MÓNICA AND I DROVE OUT to a well-known crossing spot in the desert just west of El Paso. A massive fence was under construction. There are already nearly seven hundred miles of fence along the two-thousand-mile U.S.–Mexico border, as a result of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, passed during the George W. Bush administration. This stretch was not yet completed.
It was dark and cold. As we crossed the railroad track, we ran into a couple of Border Patrol agents, who told us it had already been a very busy night. “We caught two different groups of forty to fifty people, and another group of twenty,” one of the agents said.
The next day, Mónica and I rode with another Border Patrol agent, George Gomez. He grew up in the region, at a time
when the border was completely open. “I would go out to shoot jackrabbits with a BB gun,” he said, as we passed through the sandy hills. “I’d see hundreds of people coming across on a daily basis. They’d be landscapers, carpenters, maids. In the evening, you’d see them going back. El Paso was basically an open border.” There was a barrier then, of sorts—a cable running through upright railroad ties—but people just stepped over it. Folks on both sides thought of themselves as citizens of the border, as if it were a region, not a boundary. The border was what they had in common; it united them and made them distinct from their countrymen farther away.
In many respects, that’s still true. Whenever I’m on the border, I hear the resentment against authorities whose job is to enforce the laws. Because of the language skills required, a large portion of the Border Patrol workforce is Hispanic. Many border people see them as traitors. “They despise us, really,” Gomez told me. Kids throw rocks at them. Cartels sometimes issue a “green light” to assassinate particular officers. When Gomez is off duty and people ask what he does for a living, he tells them he’s an assistant baseball coach.
In 1984, in response to a large influx of immigrants, the United States put up a chain-link fence that offered negligible deterrence. “Sometimes we’d apprehend the same individual three or four times a day,” Gomez said. In the mid-1990s, the Border Patrol began cracking down, but the migrants created strategies to defeat the new enforcement—for instance, by forming a mob of dozens or hundreds, then charging all at once across the border and scattering every which way. “We’d catch the kids and the grandmas,” Gomez said. Once, while he was acting as a canine handler at a checkpoint, he uncovered a migrant who had been upholstered to resemble a captain’s chair in a van; if it hadn’t been for the dog, no one would have noticed.
Despite the recent increase in illegal crossings, the trend has been declining drastically for a decade. “In 2006, in the El Paso sector, there were 122,256 apprehensions,” Gomez said. In 2015, apprehensions dropped to 14,495, before rising again. “El Paso prosecutes every individual who comes in,” Gomez told me as we headed west on I-10. “They are going to be jailed, if even for a day.”
The average stay in the immigration detention centers is about thirty days, but those who challenge their deportation typically remain in detention for months or even years. According to Gomez, those who have gotten court dates a year or two in the future often disappear into America. “Right now, there’s no way of tracking them. They just get lost.” The backlog in the immigration courts is about two years.
Historically, the vast majority of detainees are Mexican citizens, but in 2014 the balance shifted to Central Americans, including an alarming increase in unaccompanied minors. Gang violence, in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—among the most violent countries in the world—has created a spike in asylum seekers. “A fifth of the population of El Salvador is now living in the U.S.,” another guard told me. Nearly 45,000 migrants from Guatemala were picked up in Texas in the first eight months of 2016. Many of them speak only Indian languages, confounding immigration officials and legal services.
Gomez took us up on a hilltop above a landfill. We were now standing in the southeast corner of New Mexico. From there, we had a clear view of the Texas-Mexico border as it runs toward the gray mountains. There were two parallel highways, I-10 on the American side and Carretera Anapra–San Jerónimo on the Mexican side. The sprawling suburbs of Juárez mirrored the American community to the north. As we watched, a Union Pacific freight, double-stacked with shipping containers filled with goods from the maquiladoras of Juárez, headed west toward Los Angeles.
Between the two countries runs the new fence, like an industrialized Christo installation. There are actually two kinds of fences—one for vehicles, which is really just a metal rail running between concrete-filled pylons; and one for pedestrians. It is eighteen feet high and covered with a fine mesh that makes it difficult to get a grip. Yet people still come through. “They use rope, grappling hooks, ladders, garden hoses—some even use screwdrivers and scale it like Spider-Man,” Gomez said. But once a person gets over the top, he has to jump down, risking a broken leg or a jammed knee. Drug smugglers usually drive through the desert, where the fence is low; sometimes they use plasma cutters to slice through the barrier rail and then carefully weld it back together and erase the tire tracks. The towering pedestrian fences pose a greater challenge for vehicles. “They’ll use ramps,” Gomez says. One time he saw a Jeep that was stranded on top of the fence; it had to be lifted off by crane.
From our perch on the hilltop, Gomez pointed out the glint of the windshields of Border Patrol agents in strategic vantage points, lying in wait. One was stationed in a parking lot at a shopping mall; another was near a cypress tree in a spot informally called Two Cup because the homeowner always offers coffee when he sees an agent. Torre’s Windmill was named after an agent who was injured. Backpacker’s Corner is a spot on the slope of Mount Cristo Rey on the horizon. There are sensors buried all around, high-intensity stadium lights, and usually helicopters swooping overhead. Still, thousands continue to cross the Texas border every month.
Undocumented migrants who make it into Texas are trapped inside a ribbon about fifty miles wide, defined by checkpoints—twenty-three of them—on every road leading away from the border. They call that strip between the border and the checkpoints la juala, the cage. Many choose to stay within that perimeter, unwilling to go back to Mexico or to take the risk of venturing farther into the United States. Often their families are just a few miles away in Mexico.
I spoke to Will Hurd, who represents the massive Twenty-third Congressional District, which stretches from the west side of San Antonio to the edge of El Paso. His district is larger than most states east of the Mississippi, and contains 820 miles of Texas’s border with Mexico. A former undercover CIA agent who now serves on the intelligence committee in the House, Hurd is the first black Republican elected to Congress from the state, although the district is 70 percent Hispanic. He is also one of the few Republicans in Congress to speak against the construction of a wall. “The cost is estimated to be anywhere between twelve billion dollars to forty billion dollars,” he said, citing a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The entire U.S. intelligence budget is fifty-three billion dollars.” He agrees that in densely populated areas, a physical barrier makes sense, but he thinks the hundreds of miles of remote Chihuahuan Desert would be better protected, and far more cheaply, by sensors and drones.
Hurd does not believe that a wall would stop the flow of drugs from Mexico into the United States. “It’s a fifty-billion-dollar business, and you’re not making that amount of money by sending cocaine across the border in some kid’s book bag. You’re bringing it across in vehicles, in fixed-wing aircraft and submersibles. The wall doesn’t address that.” He says it is more effective to work with Mexican police and intelligence counterparts, focusing on drug kingpins, in order to stop the flow of narcotics before it reaches the U.S. border. But such close cooperation depends on good relations between the two countries.
Hurd is especially worried about the future of NAFTA. “Mexico is Texas’s number-one trading partner,” he says. If NAFTA were to be overturned, Texas would be especially hard hit. “The trade imbalance is only one indicator of the relationship. It doesn’t take into account the service industries. It doesn’t take into account the people from Monterrey who come to San Antonio to shop. Our relations are too complex to boil down to a single number.”
* * *
“THERE ARE TWO NARRATIVES about what the border is,” Fernando Garcia, the founder of the Border Network for Human Rights, told me. “The farther away you are, the more chaotic and violent it appears, but when you live at the border, there is a different reality.” Alarmed by the increasing militarization along the border and the abuses that were taking place against undocumented migrants, Garcia began organizing the
immigrant community and informing people of their rights. He says he has found a surprisingly willing partner in the El Paso Sector of the Border Patrol, which reviews every case of abuse that Garcia’s organization collects, and as a result, complaints have decreased substantially.
One of the projects Garcia has worked on with the Border Patrol is called Hugs Not Walls. For a few brief minutes, families on both sides of the Rio Grande line up. Those on the American side—many of them undocumented immigrants—wear blue T-shirts, and those on the Mexican side wear white. Then, at a signal from the Border Patrol, they walk down the sides of the culvert into the muddy riverbed. Many of them are weeping even before they meet, then they fall into embraces and take photos. Four hundred families were brought together in the first two events. A third “hug” took place in February 2017, days after the newly inaugurated President Trump issued an executive order to build a wall on the border.
I spoke to several women who participated. One had been living in El Paso and hadn’t seen her father and siblings for sixteen years. Another woman said she and her husband had been living together in El Paso for twenty-seven years until he was arrested for drinking and driving and was sent back to Mexico. A third woman has a daughter who is one of the “dreamers” who grew up in America and hopes to gain citizenship. “Our situation is precarious under the new administration,” the woman said. “We’re living in the shadows now.”
One can’t live in Texas without being aware of those shadow people. They tread a line that the rest of us scarcely acknowledge. At any moment, everything can be taken away, and they are thrown back into the poverty, violence, and desperation that drove them to leave their native lands and take a chance living an underground life.
God Save Texas Page 27
