An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  As for Nunez, he was gentle, polite, and perhaps a bit embarrassed, since everybody knew that the arrest was just a momentary hitch—an inconvenience on the order of a traffic ticket—in a journey that would soon continue.

  “Where are you from?” Nunez asked.

  The oldest-looking man answered. He kept glancing menacingly at the coyote, as if he wanted to strangle him. “Oaxaca,” he said. Oaxaca is home to Mixtec and Zapotec Indians. It is sixteen hundred miles to the south, and its hills are so eroded that a corn crop, which has always been a staple of the Indians, can scarcely be grown there anymore.

  “Why are you crossing?”

  The man shrugged. “To work,” he said.

  Trabajar—to work. All night, whenever Nunez asked “Why are you crossing?” the word was repeated. People wanted to work, and they didn’t care what the work was like. They would do stoop labor, wrecking their backs and their knees picking strawberries or artichokes, and they would prune vineyards and orchards that had been sprayed with pesticides. They would swab floors, bathe infants, scrub pots and pans, and breathe in formaldehyde vapors in factories where particleboard was made. They would sell bags of oranges from traffic islands in Santa Monica, and they would hammer dents from bumpers at auto-body shops in Glendale. Contractors would employ them to dig ditches for foundations. They would agree to remove asbestos from around heating ducts and scrape lead-based paint from walls. They would pour hot tar for roofs, handle beakers in meth labs, mow lawns, deliver circulars, clean sewers—anything at all.

  The van came, and the Oaxacans climbed into it. They’d have to ride around until it was filled to capacity—about seventeen passengers—and then they would be processed at Brown Field Station. They could be detained for a maximum of seventy-two hours, although it was probable that they would be gone before morning. For a while after arresting them, Nunez had no luck. He spotted only “onesies” and “twosies,” and because they were far away he didn’t bother to go after them. He did chase four men down a hill, but they “bushed up” on him, vanishing into the mesquite scrub. He spent fifteen minutes tailing a suspicious car and keeping in contact with a fellow-agent, who finally stopped the driver and reported that he was “a Japanese gentleman with a valid passport.”

  And then Nunez was distracted. Somebody was walking toward him at a brisk clip, reversing the usual order of things. The man approached the Blazer, took off his knit cap, and grinned broadly, as if he’d bumped into an old pal. When Nunez asked for his documents, he fumbled in a pocket, struck himself in the forehead with the palm of a hand—¡ay, caramba!—and said that he had left them at his uncle’s house in San Ysidro.

  The story delighted him out of all proportion to its merits. It was clear he’d been drinking. Drunks were always wandering across the mesa, often just because another drunk in a pulque shop had dared them to, and they wasted everyone’s time. The man tried a few more excuses, but he could not invent one that pleased Nunez, and at last he collapsed into a rueful posture of acceptance and sat down to wait for a van.

  The night dragged on. There were more arrests, but they were ordinary. Then, at about eleven o’clock, Nunez received a radio call informing him that a big bunch of Salvadorans, as many as twenty of them, were being rounded up. That made him sigh. Central Americans required a lot of paperwork, and he’d have to put in about forty-five minutes with each of them. His shift would stretch into the wee hours. The Salvadorans would ask for political asylum, whether or not they were genuine refugees, and by the time a court date was set they would be working somewhere—and if they weren’t working they wouldn’t show up in court.

  Such job-related frustrations subject agents to constant stress and may cause them to burn out. Some have marital problems, some have problems with booze, and some, who lack Nunez’s equanimity, get headaches from patrolling the mesa in the dark and realizing that they often have no idea where Mexico ends and California begins.

  * * *

  In the last ten years, more and more Oaxacans have crossed into San Diego County, leaving behind one of the poorest and most fractious states in Mexico. There are five hundred and seventy villages in Oaxaca, all dating from the pre-Conquest period, and all fiercely independent. The villages have their own rules and laws, which take precedence over the country’s civil codes. And sometimes an extended family within a village will have its own subset of rules and laws, which contradict all the other rules and laws. Disputes are part of everyday life in Oaxaca. Some of them have been raging since the time of Cortes. They center on communal land rights, and lead to altercations, fistfights, and small-scale battles. Tradition matters deeply to Mixtecs and Zapotecs, and, in the face of grinding poverty, it is becoming traditional for the men of both tribes to look for work on American farms, where their friends and relatives have worked in the past.

  The farms around San Diego are disappearing rapidly, though, and the men often arrive to find condos where the beans and tomatoes used to be. Yet some farms with a history of hiring Oaxacans are still around, such as one in Carlsbad, where some Mixtecs work. It is a big spread, surrounded by suburban developments, and it has a hundred acres planted to strawberries. The Mixtecs earn three dollars and sixty-five cents an hour to hoe the fields and harvest the fruit, but there isn’t always work, and they may have a week or two of inactivity. They aren’t as disconcerted by this as Americans might be, since they’re accustomed to hardship and know how to make it through a slack period. They behave as they might in their home village, staying close to camp and using their free time to relax, playing cards for pennies and nickels or chatting in the sunshine.

  The Mixtecs live in camps out of economic necessity, fear, and ignorance, and also for the comfort of being near their own people. The apartment rents in Carlsbad are way beyond their reach, and, besides, the Mixtecs are saving money to take back to Oaxaca.

  If they have any English at all, it will be limited to “yes” and “no” and “O.K.,” and when they go out in the streets they get confused and are afraid—or don’t know how—to ask questions. Many of them have documents, but they are still uneasy, and believe that they might be deported at any moment. They never bank any of the cash they make, storing it instead in their underwear, their bedrolls, or the ballcaps they love to wear. Thieves descend on them sometimes, including youth-gang members looking for a score. The growers in the county use private security forces to patrol their farms and keep out trespassers, and the guards are responsible for protecting the workers, too, whether or not the workers have asked for protection.

  The Mixtec camp in Carlsbad is home to about sixty men. It’s built in a dry creekbed below the fenced strawberry fields, in a grove of oaks, bay laurels, and pungent eucalyptus trees. The men live in shacks made of scavenged lumber and cardboard. Some of the shacks have been around for a decade. The Mixtecs are short, but they can seldom enter the doorway of one of their shacks without bending over.

  If a man in camp has a mattress, he is doing well. A man with a mattress, a chair, some bedding, and a framed religious picture might be considered rich. There are no toilets available, and no electricity or running water, so trash and excrement lie about, despite the Mixtecs’ attempts to be tidy. They buy most of their groceries from a quilt truck they call a fayuca, or a “roach wagon,” paying too much for canned goods and worrying that they’ll get sick because they’re not eating fresh vegetables. For sundries, they go to a woman, Dona Elvira, who keeps a shop in a tract house up the road. She lets Mixtecs use her telephone in an emergency. At night, they sit outdoors on her patio and watch programs on a black-and-white TV.

  For most of the year, the Mixtecs don’t mind the camp, but when winter comes they suffer. They have kerosene lanterns and candles to light their shacks, but they knock them over and start fires. Sometimes they try to heat a shack with charcoal briquettes, or with kindling. They stuff magazines and newspapers into the walls for insulation, much as people do at La Libertad, holding the material in place with thumb
tacks or chicken wire. On the day I visited, I saw a U.S. government publication for immigrants jammed between some plastic and some cardboard, with the pages turned to a paragraph that began, “The United States has fifty states. Rhode Island is the smallest state.” A Mixtec was standing nearby, and when I asked him, in English, about Rhode Island, he nodded, smiled, and said, “Yes, O.K.”

  My guide at the camp was Roberto Martinez, the regional director of the American Friends Service Committee, whose offices are in San Diego’s Logan Heights barrio, around the corner from some safe houses. For the last few years, Martinez has involved himself in the lives of migrants, both legal and illegal, and has been keeping a record of various abuses committed against them by the Border Patrol, the San Diego police, and vigilantes.

  There are dozens of migrant camps in the county, and Martinez knows them all and drops by on a regular basis to hand out donated blankets, sweaters, and food. He likes this aspect of his job, because it gets him out into the fresh air. In his opinion, the Mixtecs’ camp isn’t a particularly bad one. At other camps, men live in “spider holes,” digging a pit and then covering the top with leaves and branches. The Border Patrol rarely raids any camps, nor do any of the county agencies. Martinez isn’t sure why this is so.

  The Mixtecs were taking it easy that morning. They’d just finished planting some strawberries and now had to wait for the weeds to grow. They were doing their laundry in buckets of water carried down from Dona Elvira’s, and hanging the wash on tree limbs to dry. They had a rusty basketball hoop nailed to a tree, but they couldn’t play because their ball was punctured and flat.

  The Mixtecs ranged in age from about sixteen to about sixty, and they had inky hair and were dressed in very clean clothes, given the circumstances. They seemed to have only two emotions: extreme pleasure or extreme misery. They smiled in an open, unaffected, and generous way, but they’re also capable of falling into a funk and going wild, especially if they’ve been drinking. There was no alcohol in the camp and no women, either, but prostitutes have been known to pay calls. All the men wore cheap digital watches, and nine out of ten wore ballcaps that said, across the crown, such things as “SWAT” and “OLD FART” and “CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL.”

  Martinez asked if they were all from the same Oaxacan village, and they nodded and said, “Si, mismo pueblo.” Then he asked if they had papers. They nodded again, but not with as much enthusiasm, and a couple of them remembered chores they had to do and vanished into shacks.

  It was Martinez’s guess that about three-quarters of the men were in the country legally. Since Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), in 1986, there are more documented workers in the States than ever before, and most of the workers at any farm will be legal—although at harvest time everyone works, papers or no papers. (In businesses other than agriculture, the rate of compliance is much lower.) IRCA hasn’t been an unqualified success, however. Some employers use it to discriminate: they refuse to hire Hispanics by insisting that their documents look fake. Or an employer may hire somebody with forged papers, let him work for two weeks, and call in the Border Patrol the day before payday. And there are many crooked lawyers who bilk migrants, charging them five hundred dollars to fill out forms that require only a birth date, a signature, and the remittance of a ten-dollar bill.

  In many respects, the most ticklish consequence of IRCA is that it has made a previously invisible phenomenon visible. There have always been plenty of migrant workers in San Diego County, but they have tended to be undocumented and to stay in hiding. A man with papers feels free to roam about, so you now see many more migrants on the streets.

  Even the Mixtecs venture into Carlsbad if they run low on money. They walk a few miles to a 7-11 and stand in front of it, flagging motorists in the hope that someone will offer them a day job. If nothing happens by noon or so, they lose their ambition and may lounge around for the rest of the afternoon, as if they were in the zocalo in Oaxaca. They sit on curbs or lean against cars and tease one another, and when a pretty woman goes by they lift their eyes and comment appreciatively. If they get sleepy, they take a nap. If they have to pee, they step behind a bush. They don’t realize they might be causing offense, or that their very presence might be frightening shoppers away.

  These groups of documented migrants can be found in any city in Southern California. The men often segregate themselves by nationality—the Guatemalans on one side of a block and Nicaraguans on the other. Mexicans draw very fine distinctions, with Jaliscans, say, here and Zacatecans there. The groups can be big—up to three hundred—and also rambunctious, and as their size increases so do the protests against them. Irate homeowners phone the Border Patrol and ask that the foreigners be removed. That puts the Border Patrol in a sort of double bind, which the agents recognize but, as public servants, are compelled not to mention; that is, the migrants wouldn’t be standing on corners if some people in Vista and Oceanside and Carlsbad and Encinitas weren’t hiring and paying them—in cash, off the books, and way below union scale, without deducting any taxes for Uncle Sam. So the agents explain to callers that the men, though demonstrably foreign, are only exercising their right to assemble.

  In the old days, the Border Patrol ran sweeps to deal with such complaints. Agents came by in a van, grabbed all the Hispanics in sight, and sifted through them later at the station, apologizing to the few legally documented aliens who happened to crop up. They can’t do that anymore. A wrongful arrest brings charges of harassment and may result in a civil-rights suit. Agents in a suburb like El Cajon, northeast of San Diego, must be very cautious about whom they arrest, and how the arrest is conducted, even though they’re under pressure from citizens to be more forceful. Throughout the county, there’s been a subtle change in the way Mexicans and Central Americans are perceived. Formerly, when an agent hauled in a migrant, he might be met with disapproving glances, as if he were bullying a poor person. Now an arrest outside a convenience store is likely to be greeted with applause.

  At the El Cajon Station, agents are concerned about a rise in acts of discrimination, and even violence, against migrant workers. They believe that a backlash has set in. This backlash takes many forms, some open and some covert. It can have an absurdist streak, as it does at Fairbanks Ranch, a wealthy subdivision. Workers loiter by the ranch gates, looking to trim hedges or shovel manure, and periodically some neighborhood matrons give them litter bags of their own, so they won’t throw their trash on the grass. Or it can be mean-spirited and life-threatening, as it was at the Carlsbad Country Store, where, two years ago, a butcher and a baker kidnapped a loitering Mexican, bound him with tape, put a paper bag over his head, and left him in a field. The kidnappers’ claim that they were making a citizen’s arrest for trespassing did not hold up in court.

  * * *

  In the suburb of Del Mar, in San Diego County, there is a Oaxacan camp right off a two-lane road, across from Evergreen Nursery, where most of the men work. The men here are Mixtecs—about twenty-five in all—but their shacks are cruder than the ones in Carlsbad, more battered and wind-pierced, filthier. The Mixtecs live on brushy land without any shade trees, and the camp smells of decaying garbage, not eucalyptus or bay laurel. In the brush you find crushed beer cans and empty wine bottles. The shacks are thick with dust, because bulldozers are levelling the earth nearby, preparing it for a new housing tract. That means that the Mixtecs will soon have to move, although no one knows where.

  It is strange to stand in the camp and look over your shoulder at the bulldozers and, beyond them, the orderly lines of pink and rose-colored condos stretching toward the ocean. In fact, if you’re tired or a little disoriented—if you’ve been crossing the border yourself—you can forget exactly which country you are in. At quitting time, when the Mixtecs return from work, one begins strumming a guitar, while a woman—the only one around—goes from shack to shack borrowing ingredients to make a caldo de res for her lover. Her feet are bare, and she wears a new cotton
dress that clings to her body. The man with the guitar sighs and wishes aloud that he had a chicken to eat, or at least some tequila to drink.

  Samuel Solano shares a shack at the camp with three others from his home village, sleeping on a cheap sleeping bag that pours out cotton stuffing. He has shoulder-length hair and a full beard, and if you tell him, as a joke, that he looks like a hippie he enjoys it very much. He works only three days a week at the nursery, because he doesn’t yet have documents. He has applied for them, though, and carries around a creased and dirty envelope that contains photocopies of some formal letters pertaining to his request.

  His wife, also a Mixtec, is across the border in Ensenada, less than a hundred miles away, with their four children, and, in season, she picks tomatoes. Samuel wants to visit his family, but he doesn’t dare cross over, because he isn’t sure he could get back in. The risk is too big, he says, scratching at his beard, so he plans to wait for his documents to arrive. That might happen in the new year, he thinks. Then he will go south for a while, until it’s time to leave his wife and head north once again.

  The New Yorker, 1990

  The Victim’s Wake: Murder in the Caribbean

  In the Caribbean, there’s an old saying that Americans come to the tropics to misbehave. Whacked out on the rum and the sun, they do things they’d never do at home, but few tourists have ever gotten into as much trouble as Jim and Penny Fletcher, a wealthy yachting couple from Huntington, West Virginia, whose run through the islands landed them in prison. The Fletchers found themselves accused of murdering a water-taxi operator, Jerome “Jolly” Joseph, on the little island of Bequia, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a former British colony. They were denied bail and held in bleak, dungeonlike cells for about nine months while they waited for a trial date. If convicted, they would be sentenced to death and hang from the gallows.