The fences at Tijuana were erected by a government that doesn’t know the history of the last twenty minutes.
There was a night in Berlin in 1989 when crowds cheered in the damp night air for each sledgehammer that thudded into the Berlin Wall. And two women who took their first subway ride out of East Berlin in twenty-eight years came up the steps in West Berlin. The commercials of the West had drifted over the wall and into the taste buds of the people on the desolate streets of East Berlin.
They were astonished by the blinding neon of democracy. Right away, one of them said: “Ah, look. Burger King.”
And as if Berlin had never happened, the United States government boasts that it has a wall that can keep out millions who have watched since they were first able to see a ceaseless rainfall of American diamond chips on their television.
No matter. The federal immigration people were enthralled by the sight of the highway fence at San Ysidro. Right away, they erected a double corrugated metal fence along the border that was high enough to repel an immigrant trying to cross on a cherry picker. The fence sits like a dreary surprise to somebody turning a corner on the streets of the freight center at Otay Mesa, which is a minute or two from the border gates at San Ysidro. The tan metal has a deadening effect on the commercial street. Light towers like those usually found at a ballpark rise over the fence, and at night their harsh, ominous glare makes a prison wall seem soft. A white Border Patrol car with an agent is on the street. Another car sits on an embankment and is almost flush against the fence. The fence runs for 180 miles with border guards said to be in sight of each other all the way. These are figures that can be checked only by going into the desert.
The Border Patrol is the most untruthful of government agencies after the White House. Even if real, these seemingly impressive statistics are out of a candy store. The border is over two thousand miles long, and enforcement at familiar places, the Tijuana crossing or one at Laredo, Texas, or Nogales, Arizona, only forces so many Mexican immigrants to walk blindly into lonely, dangerous areas where there is a river that takes lives, then miles of thorny, knee-high scrub running up to the mountains and then farther out, into the bare hot lands of Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, a desert that is the basement floor of the earth.
CHAPTER SIX
Silvia left San Matías with her uncle and took several buses that crawled to Matamoros, on the Gulf of Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. By now there were five who had paid for the coyote. They checked into the Fontana Hotel for $400 for the one room and remained there a day. Then there was banging on the door and a young guy of about nineteen told them they were leaving immediately. The price for walking from the border with a guide to Houston was $600, and Silvia was told the trip would take fifteen days. They were stacked atop of each other in a taxi like luggage. Piling out at the edge of the town, they followed the coyote into high weeds that turned into hot red dirt with low thorny bushes.
Silvia remembers that the coyote yelled, “Run,” and they ran, then “Walk,” and when they had their breaths back, they ran again. Silvia congratulated herself for bringing a minimum of clothes in the small suitcase, for there was no way of carrying anything heavy. She thinks they ran and walked for five hours, until suddenly the next step was into a ditch, at the bottom of which was the river, narrow—the water dark and seemingly shallow and seemingly innocent. A stick on the surface was moving quickly enough to indicate a strong current. Silvia took off her sneakers and held them high over her head with the suitcase. Then she went barefoot into the water. At this point in the nineteen-hundred-mile-long Rio Grande, the water is shallow and the current deceptive. Then the river can widen and rise until it is sixty feet deep and cold, with a current strong enough to carry a house away. At all times, it is treacherous for young Mexicans, whose experience with water is usually limited to a bucket in a well.
On this day, Silvia listed herself as sixteen, but she was still a little short of that. She had no experience in water, but went into the river with the nerves of a trained guerrilla. The river bottom was sand. Each small step brought her deeper, until the water was up to her neck. She remembers that the current pushed hard on the back of her ankles and lifted her heels and curled under her toes and tried to yank her feet from the sand, turning her into part of the current. Her uncle remembers the strength of the current taking him by surprise. Silvia had strong and limber legs that secured her footing. She dug her toes in and took one step at a time, holding one foot in the sand as an anchor, and soon each step was firmer and took her upper body out of the water.
Many become paralyzed with sudden fear and go off their feet and drown in three feet of water. Any page of any record of the United States Border Patrol has columns filled with lists such as this:
NAME COUNTY CAUSE OF DEATH
Unknown Maverick Drowning
Unknown Maverick Drowning
Unknown Uvalde Unknown
Unknown Kinney Drowning
Jeronimo Mendoza Guzman Zavala Drowning
Del Rio Patrol Sector
NAME COUNTY CAUSE OF DEATH
Raul Martínez Delgado Maverick Exposure—Heat
Unknown Maverick Exposure—Heat
Raul Albarran Maverick Exposure—Heat
Unknown Maverick Exposure—Heat
Unknown Dimmit Unknown
Jorge Cabrera Tovar Uvalde Exposure—Heat
Unknown Kinney Unknown
Silvia and the group were now in Kenedy County, Texas, and in fact on the Kenedy Ranch, 230,000 acres of mesquite and sandy soil and emptiness, in whose hollows were sometimes found the bleached bones of those who have tried to hide from the sun. She wore two pairs of jeans to protect against the snakes that coiled across the land. These snakes are mostly diamondback rattlers as thick as a fuel hose.
They walked at night, starting at 9 P.M. These were old trails. Often there would be a warning sound from the coyote leading them, and they would promptly fall onto the dirt and, looking up, see a Border Patrol wagon jouncing along.
Somewhere in the night, Silvia was on the ground when the guy nearest her made a motion with his hand. Silvia heard the snake, a hissing sound as it moved over the dirt. If she stood and ran from it, the Border Patrol would see her and probably all the others, and they would be sent back to Mexico—and she was not here to be in Mexico. If she stayed down, the snake could be on her. It was the same as all the other snakes, but it hissed rather than its tail rattling like a gourd. Was it so much closer? The patrol wagon rocked and roared. Was it ever going to get farther away?
“I got ready to kick at the snake,” she remembers. “That is all I could do.”
Soon the Border Patrol was gone, and she crawled rapidly away from the snake.
Sometime later they came to railroad tracks that suddenly appeared in the mesquite. There were no signs or gates or poles. Just railroad tracks in the emptiness of the night.
“These are good,” somebody said. “Snakes don’t go on tracks. We’ll stay on these for a while.”
Records of the county coroner show that the sixth young man to die in a six-month period in Kenedy County, Texas, stopped on the railroad tracks running through the flat hot land, and he and the guy with him intended to rest with their heads on the rails. Mexicans on the trudge north believe that snakes recoil from steel tracks. Instead of resting, they fell asleep with their heads on the rail. A freight train running fast, with no crossing to worry about, no lights, no horns, roared down the tracks. One of the two on the tracks got up and fled. The other was still asleep as the train engineer tried to stop the freight, but he needed a mile for that and he cut through the young guy on the tracks like a steak knife. On another night, a mile away, on the same tracks, a train came rushing up on three who were sleeping. Two rolled away; one stayed and was left in ribbons. Then six were asleep on the tracks when a 105-car Union Pacific freight train carrying scrap metal and paper came through the night at fifty miles an hour and wiped them out. The e
ngineer thought he saw something on the tracks, but there was no way of stopping.
The record was set at Kingsville, where forty Mexicans were walking north on a railroad trestle in the middle of a Saturday night when a train came around a curve and directly at them. Some jumped into a creek four stories down. Some tried to outrun the forty-three-car freight train. Others flattened themselves against the side of the trestle. Four died.
Silvia went on the railroad tracks, stepping from one tie to another, free of the fear of snakes and with no Border Patrol in sight. They walked that way for an hour, she remembers, and then one of them turned in the darkness. “Tren!” They hadn’t bothered to look, and they could hear no sound even in the stillness of the night. Silvia remembers that the one big light seemed a long way off. People sauntered off the tracks. She looked as she was getting off and suddenly the light was closer. She jumped off the tracks and went down the embankment just as the train moved through a night that thwarted depth perception. Two engines raced by furiously, and behind them came freight cars whose wheels squealed as if they were being ground. She turned icy as she realized how close the train had been. And now that she was off the tracks, she had to worry about snakes again. Anything you can see that looks different is a snake, she told herself. But mostly she could not make out the ground itself and stepped blindly.
At dawn, the group stopped while the guide looked at his watch and muttered. A truck was supposed to be here, he said. They waited for two hours. Then in the first heat of morning, Silvia walked into a town with her uncle and Moisés, Eduardo’s cousin, to buy food. Suddenly a white Border Patrol van came onto the street. The three crouched behind bushes—big bushes that could hide them all day, Silvia thought. Some moments later, she heard a sound alongside her. Next to her now was the polished boot of an immigration agent. Several Border Patrol cops with guns in their hands stood over them. They put Silvia, her uncle, and Moisés into the van and drove them through the border station over the small bridge across the river and threw them out in Matamoros.
“Don’t ever come back or we’ll put you in jail,” they told her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In San Matías and the thousand other Mexican towns where hope sits in a fading light, the young never did consider the idea of danger of going north to the United States. Their destination is the Job, not the town or city. And ahead of them, a country fearful and hateful of them has its fences up at the logical crossing points: Tijuana into San Diego on one coast, and through Nogales and Douglas in Arizona and Laredo in Texas and on into El Paso in the middle of the Southwest, where the Mexicans are pushed into the desert as if they are going through a turnstile. After that, they walk until they make it or die. They walk for the Job. There is no time to the Job. It is before all and after all.
They come across the riverbanks and the dry borderlands, these people who want to work, who want to scrub floors and clean pots, or mow lawns, or live in shacks alongside the farms they work on, or show up every day in the grimmest of factory jobs, or wash dishes in the coffee shops of the country—or work construction in Brooklyn for low wages on jobs on which white union members are paid five times as much.
And trying to get there, in all the dust from the wind and the powdered earth rising from their feet, crystals of air snap and unseen fingers high up in the dust clouds suddenly determine the fate on the ground. Nobody disputes this. It happens too often.
Bleached bones were found in the desert outside of Dateland, Arizona. A birth certificate in the sand alongside the bones identified Oscar Peña-Moreno, who had left Guasave, Sinoloa, in May 1996 with two lifelong friends. Their trip north would logically have been through El Paso, but with that town now heavily patrolled, they must have headed west. The three were married to sisters. They were not heard from again. Agents came upon the bones on December 4, 1997, and brought them to the coroner in Pima County, which is Tucson. Of course the flesh was no more. Desert hogs, coyotes, and birds had eaten all. Oscar Peña-Moreno’s wallet, which contained his identification, was found in a pair of pants recovered with the bones. For some reason, the coroner cremated the bones and held them in an urn for the family. The people in Guasave pooled whatever money they had and sent the mother of Oscar Peña-Moreno and his wife, Ramona, to Tucson. She took the urn from the coroner and stood motionless with it. Then she put it down on a counter.
“This is not my son,” she said.
The coroner explained that of course it was her son. Here is his birth certificate.
“This is not my son,” she said.
She went back to Guasave.
Victor Chacon, who is with the federal public defender’s office in Tucson, shrugged when he caught the case. This would not be the first time that something in the sky was right and everybody here was wrong. Later, the widow of Oscar Peña-Moreno, whose name is Ramona Quintero, said that of course the mother was right in refusing the ashes. “She prayed to the saint,” she said. “She awaits his return. He is alive somewhere.”
After which, in the matter of Peña-Moreno’s ashes, he found it unsurprising to receive unrelenting pressure from the mother, who said her son and the two who had been with him were working in a logging camp in Utah.
Victor Chacon mistrusted the identification found in the desert. He stated in his report, “Illegal immigrants are often accosted by bands of robbers in remote areas. The robbers make the victims remove all of their clothing. This way the robbers know that the victims are not hiding anything of value. The coroner stated that because clothing gets mixed up, identifications are lost or wind up in other clothes. He states that he has had two cases recently in which the dead person was carrying someone else’s identification.”
Before the cremation, an autopsy had showed the victim had sixteen teeth in the upper jaw. Peña-Moreno’s mother said that one day he had jumped on a bike and had gone to have a throbbing upper molar pulled. She didn’t know the dentist. Chacon called every dentist in Peña-Moreno’s area. None kept records. His phone calls and the realization that many were dying unidentified have now caused dentists to begin keeping records. However, a woman dentist said that she remembered taking the molar from Peña-Moreno’s upper jaw. There was no evidence of any missing molar in the remains examined in Tucson.
The mother was right. The sky had told her so.
For Silvia and the others from San Matías, their being women didn’t hinder them from attempting the crossing. The tragedy of the border could be seen on the television now and then, but not enough to stop them. There were only some distinctions that caused special attention: a pregnancy or a babe in arms. Otherwise, women went walking the same as men under a pitiless sun that raises temperatures to 140 degrees.
THE NURSE STANDS in the hospital in Bisbee with a hand on the little boy’s shoulder as he sits on the examining table. The boy’s feet dangle in muddy ripped little tennis shoes.
A nurse looks at the thin man in the doorway, sees his bleak look, and says nothing. He has on a short-sleeved shirt and tie.
The man has been trying to think of something he can do for this kid, and when he sees these ripped and muddy tennis shoes he tells himself, new shoes.
Now he hears people coming along the hall, and his mind out-races the sound of their feet. He knows exactly what it means, and he doesn’t want to deal with it. At sixty-five, Miguel Escobar Valdez, the Mexican consul in Douglas, Arizona, has been everywhere for his government. He was in Chicago when they reassigned him here. He is calm enough to be helpful at a moment like this, in this room in the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, the next town up from Douglas, a town of a few empty streets that are the last ones in America.
He is here because this little boy, Carlos Bacan, five, started out ten days ago with his eleven-year-old sister, Ana-Laura Bacan, and their mother, Rosalia Bacan Miranda, thirty-three, from the town of Coacoalco, outside of Mexico City. At 10:30 in the morning of the tenth day they were walking for the long last day before reaching the border, which was
forty miles away. Two days earlier, they were in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town that is on the other side of a fence, and one pace in the sand, across the border from Douglas. The fence and the Border Patrol agents at Douglas force people to walk far out into the desert to go around the fortifications. The mother and children were trudging with two neighbors from their hometown. The boy could not keep up with the adults, and neither could his mother, who moaned as she lifted her foot for another step. The neighbors said they were going ahead to see if any Border Patrol agents were around. They said they would return to Rosalia and her children. Sure they would. When the sand turned to snow. They walked off. They left the mother and two children to suffer through hours of hot dirt and the sweeping bitter fields of unyielding knee-high thorn bushes. In the distance on three sides, dark mountains crowded into clouds. Ahead was a sky the color of heat. The mother, Rosalia, had brought only a large bottle of water; most of it was gone, and though she was dehydrated, she took only tiny gulps of water and gave the rest to her children.
The blood of an adult at all times needs five to six liters of water, and when there is less, the vessels contract, the kidneys become dangerously inactive and simultaneously the heart deals with less blood for all the body. Sometime soon, the problem is solved by either fluid or death.
That day it was about 110 degrees everywhere, but out in the desert, where the land throws off heat that mixes with the rays of the sun, the temperature is measured by what it does to people. Rosalia sat, then tumbled full-length into the red sand. Her breathing came from a strangled throat. The daughter tried to give her water, but the mother said no. Her hand waved weakly. You and the boy take the water. She passed out.
The daughter thought she had fainted. She shook the last drops of water onto the mother’s cracked lips. The mother didn’t respond and the water dripped from her lips. Ana-Laura told her brother to stay with the mother. She walked through thorn bushes until she came to a brown rutted road. She saw and heard nothing. Suddenly, a gas company truck came along and pulled over. The driver called the Border Patrol.
The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Page 4
