Across the Wire

by Luis Urrea

  But the Mexicans keep on coming—and the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Panamanians, the Colombians. The seven-mile stretch of Interstate 5 nearest the Mexican border is, at times, so congested with Latin American pedestrians that it resembles a town square.

  They stick to the center island. Running down the length of the island is a cement wall. If the “illegals” (currently, “undocumented workers”; formerly, “wetbacks”) are walking north and a Border Patrol vehicle happens along, they simply hop over the wall and trot south. The officer will have to drive up to the 805 interchange, or Dairy Mart Road, swing over the overpasses, then drive south. Depending on where this pursuit begins, his detour could entail five to ten miles of driving. When the officer finally reaches the group, they hop over the wall and trot north. Furthermore, because freeway arrests would endanger traffic, the Border Patrol has effectively thrown up its hands in surrender.

  It seems jolly on the page. But imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know. Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let’s take it further—you’ve said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you first hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think.

  Then you come hundreds—or thousands—of miles across territory utterly unknown to you. (Chances are, you have never traveled farther than a hundred miles in your life.) You have walked, run, hidden in the backs of trucks, spent part of your precious money on bus fare. There is no AAA or Travelers Aid Society available to you. Various features of your journey north might include police corruption; violence in the forms of beatings, rape, murder, torture, road accidents; theft; incarceration. Additionally, you might experience loneliness, fear, exhaustion, sorrow, cold, heat, diarrhea, thirst, hunger. There is no medical attention available to you. There isn’t even Kotex.

  Weeks or months later, you arrive in Tijuana. Along with other immigrants, you gravitate to the bad parts of town because there is nowhere for you to go in the glittery sections where the gringos flock. You stay in a run-down little hotel in the red-light district, or behind the bus terminal. Or you find your way to the garbage dumps, where you throw together a small cardboard nest and claim a few feet of dirt for yourself. The garbage-pickers working this dump might allow you to squat, or they might come and rob you or burn you out for breaking some local rule you cannot possibly know beforehand. Sometimes the dump is controlled by a syndicate, and goon squads might come to you within a day. They want money, and if you can’t pay, you must leave or suffer the consequences.

  In town, you face endless victimization if you aren’t streetwise. The police come after you, street thugs come after you, petty criminals come after you; strangers try your door at night as you sleep. Many shady men offer to guide you across the border, and each one wants all your money now, and promises to meet you at a prearranged spot. Some of your fellow travelers end their journeys right here—relieved of their savings and left to wait on a dark corner until they realize they are going nowhere.

  If you are not Mexican, and can’t pass as tijuanense, a local, the tough guys find you out. Salvadorans and Guatemalans are routinely beaten up and robbed. Sometimes they are disfigured. Indians—Chinantecas, Mixtecas, Guasaves, Zapotecas, Mayas—are insulted and pushed around; often they are lucky—they are merely ignored. They use this to their advantage. Often they don’t dream of crossing into the United States: a Mexican tribal person would never be able to blend in, and they know it. To them, the garbage dumps and street vending and begging in Tijuana are a vast improvement over their former lives. As Doña Paula, a Chinanteca friend of mine who lives at the Tijuana garbage dump, told me, “This is the garbage dump. Take all you need. There’s plenty here for everyone!”

  If you are a woman, the men come after you. You lock yourself in your room, and when you must leave it to use the pestilential public bathroom at the end of your floor, you hurry, and you check every corner. Sometimes the lights are out in the toilet room. Sometimes men listen at the door. They call you “good-looking” and “bitch” and “mamacita,” and they make kissing sounds at you when you pass.

  You’re in the worst part of town, but you can comfort yourself—at least there are no death squads here. There are no torturers here, or bandit land barons riding into your house. This is the last barrier, you think, between you and the United States—los Yunaites Estaites.

  You still face police corruption, violence, jail. You now also have a wide variety of new options available to you: drugs, prostitution, white slavery, crime. Tijuana is not easy on newcomers. It is a city that has always thrived on taking advantage of a sucker. And the innocent are the ultimate suckers in the Borderlands.

  If you have saved up enough money, you go to one of the coyotes (people-smugglers), who guide travelers through the violent canyons immediately north of the border. Lately, these men are also called polleros, or “chicken-wranglers.” Some of them are straight, some are land pirates. Negotiations are tense and strange: polleros speak a Spanish you don’t quite understand—like the word polleros. Linguists call the new border-speak “Spanglish,” but in Tijuana, Spanglish is mixed with slang and pochismos (the polyglot hip talk of Mexicans infected with gringoismo; the cholos in Mexico, or Chicanos on the American side).

  Suddenly, the word for “yes,” sí, can be simón or siról “No” is chale. “Bike” (bicicleta) is baica. “Wife” (esposa) is waifa. “The police” (la policía) are la chota. “Women” are rucas or morras. You don’t know what they’re talking about.

  You pay them all your money—sometimes it’s your family’s lifelong savings. Five hundred dollars should do it. “Orale,” the dude tells you, which means “right on.” You must wait in Colonia Libertad, the most notorious barrio in town, ironically named “Liberty.”

  The scene here is baffling. Music blares from radios. Jolly women at smoky taco stands cook food for the journeys, sell jugs of water. You can see the Border Patrol agents cruising the other side of the fence; they trade insults with the locals.

  When the appointed hour comes, you join a group of pollos (chickens) who scuttle along behind the coyote. You crawl under the wires, or, if you go a mile east, you might be amazed to find that the famous American Border Fence simply stops. To enter the United States, you merely step around the end of it. And you follow your guide into the canyons. You might be startled to find groups of individuals crossing the line without coyotes leading them at all. You might wonder how they have mastered the canyons, and you might begin to regret the loss of your money.

  If you have your daughters or mothers or wives with you—or if you are a woman—you become watchful and tense, because rape and gang rape are so common in this darkness as to be utterly unremarkable. If you have any valuables left after your various negotiations, you try to find a sly place to hide them in case you meet pandilleros (gang members) or rateros (thieves—ratmen). But, really, where can you put anything? Thousands have come before you, and the hiding places are pathetically obvious to robbers: in shoulder bags or clothing rolls, pinned inside clothes, hidden in underwear, inserted in body orifices.

  If the coyote does not turn on you suddenly with a gun and take everything from you himself, you might still be attacked by the rateros. If the rateros don’t get you, there are roving zombies that you can smell from fifty yards downwind—these are the junkies who hunt in shambling packs. If the junkies somehow miss you, there are the pandilleros—gang-bangers from either side of the border who are looking for some bloody fun. They adore “taking off” illegals because it’s the perfect crime: there is no way they can ever be caught. They are Tijuana cholos, or Chicano vatos, or Anglo head-bangers.

  Their sense of fun relies heavily on violence. Gang beatings are their preferred sport, though rape in all its forms is common, as always. Often the co
yote will turn tail and run at the first sight of pandilleros. What’s another load of desperate chickens to him? He’s just making a living, taking care of business.

  If he doesn’t run, there is a good chance he will be the first to be assaulted. The most basic punishment these young toughs mete out is a good beating, but they might kill him in front of the polios if they feel the immigrants need a lesson in obedience. For good measure, these boys—they are mostly boys, aged twelve to nineteen, bored with Super Nintendo and MTV—beat people and slash people and thrash the women they have just finished raping.

  Their most memorable tactic is to hamstring the coyote or anyone who dares speak out against them. This entails slicing the muscles in the victim’s legs and leaving him to flop around in the dirt, crippled. If you are in a group of pollos that happens to be visited by these furies, you are learning border etiquette.

  Now, say you are lucky enough to evade all these dangers on your journey. Hazards still await you and your family. You might meet white racists, complimenting themselves with the tag “Aryans”; they “patrol” the scrub in combat gear, carrying radios, high-powered flashlights, rifles, and bats. Rattlesnakes hide in bushes—you didn’t count on that complication. Scorpions, tarantulas, black widows. And, of course, there is the Border Patrol (la migra).

  They come over the hills on motorcycles, on horses, in huge Dodge Ramcharger four-wheel drives. They yell, wear frightening goggles, have guns. Sometimes they are surprisingly decent; sometimes they are too tired or too bored to put much effort into dealing with you. They collect you in a large group of fellow pollos, and a guard (a Mexican Border Patrol agent!) jokes with your group in Spanish. Some cry, some sulk, most laugh. Mexicans hate to be rude. You don’t know what to think—some of your fellow travelers take their arrest with aplomb. Sometimes the officers know their names. But you have been told repeatedly that the Border Patrol sometimes beats or kills people. Everyone talks about the Mexican girl molested inside its building.

  The Border Patrol puts you into trucks that take you to buses that take you to compounds that load you onto other buses that transport you back to Tijuana and put you out. Your coyote isn’t bothered in the least. Some of the regulars who were with you go across and get brought back a couple of times a night. But for you, things are different. You have been brought back with no place to sleep. You have already spent all your money. You might have been robbed, so you have only your clothes—maybe not all of them. The robbers may have taken your shoes. You might be bloodied from a beating by pandilleros, or an “accident” in the Immigration and Naturalization Service compound. You can’t get proper medical attention. You can’t eat, or afford to feed your family. Some of your compatriots have been separated from their wives or their children. Now their loved ones are in the hands of strangers, in the vast and unknown United States. The Salvadorans are put on planes and flown back to the waiting arms of the military. As you walk through the cyclone fence, back into Tijuana, the locals taunt you and laugh at your misfortune.

  If you were killed, you have nothing to worry about.

  Now what?

  Perhaps you’ll join one of the other groups that break through the Tortilla Curtain every night. The road-runners. They amass at dusk along the cement canal that separates the United States from Mexico. This wide alley is supposedly the Tijuana River, but it’s usually dry, or running with sewage that Tijuana pumps toward the U.S. with great gusto.

  As soon as everybody feels like it—there are no coyotes needed here—you join the groups passing through the gaping holes in the fence. Houses and alleys and cantinas back up against it, and in some spots, people have driven stolen cars into the poles to provide a wider passage. You rush across the canal and up the opposite slope, timing your dash between passing migra trucks and the overflights of helicopters. Following the others, you begin your jog toward the freeway. Here, there are mostly just Border Patrol officers to outrun—not that hard if you’re in good shape. There are still some white-supremacist types bobbling around, but the cops will get them if they do anything serious. No, here the problem is the many lanes of I-5.

  You stand at the edge of the road and wonder how you’re going to cut across five lanes of traffic going sixty miles an hour. Then, there is the problem of the next five lanes. The freeway itself is constructed to run parallel to the border, then swing north. Its underpasses and storm-drain pipes offer another subterranean world, but you don’t know about them. All you know is you have to get across at some point, and get far from the hunters who would take you back.

  If you hang around the shoulder of I-5 long enough, you will find that many of your companions don’t make it. So many have been killed and injured that the gringos have put up warning signs to motorists to watch for running people. The orange signs show a man, a woman, and a child charging across. Some gringos are so crazy with hate for you that they speed up, or aim for you as you run.

  The vague blood of over a hundred slain runners shadows the concrete.

  On either side of the border, clustered near the gates, there are dapper-looking men, dressed in nice cowboy clothes, and they speak without looking anyone in the eye. They are saying, “Los Angeles. San Bernardino. San Francisco.”

  They have a going concern: business is good.

  Once you’ve gotten across the line, there will always be the question of Where do I go now? “Illegal aliens” have to eat, sleep, find work. Once across, you must begin another journey.

  Not everyone has the energy to go on. Even faith—in Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or the Streets of Gold—breaks down sooner or later. Many of these immigrants founder at the border. There is a sad swirl of humanity in Tijuana. Outsiders eddy there who have simply run out of strength. If North America does not want them, Tijuana wants them even less. They become the outcasts of an outcast region. We could all see them if we looked hard enough: they sell chewing gum. Their children sing in traffic. In bars downtown, the women will show us a breast for a quarter. They wash our windshields at every stoplight. But mostly, they are invisible. To see them, we have to climb up the little canyons all around the city, where the cardboard shacks and mud and smoke look like a lost triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. We have to wade into the garbage dumps and the orphanages, sit in the little churches and the hospitals, or go out into the back country, where they raise their goats and bake red bricks and try to live decent lives.

  They are not welcome in Tijuana. And, for the most part, Tijuana itself is not welcome in the Motherland. Tijuana is Mexico’s cast-off child. She brings in money and gringos, but nobody would dare claim her. As a Mexican diplomat once confided to me, “We both know Tijuana is not Mexico. The border is nowhere. It’s a no-man’s-land.”

  I was born there.

  My Story

  I was born in Tijuana, to a Mexican father and an American mother. I was registered with the U.S. government as an American Citizen, Born Abroad. Raised in San Diego, I crossed the border all through my boyhood with abandon, utterly bilingual and bicultural. In 1977, my father died on the border, violently. (The story is told in detail in a chapter entitled “Father’s Day.”)

  In the Borderlands, anything can happen. And if you’re in Tijuana long enough, anything will happen. Whole neighborhoods appear and disappear seemingly overnight. For example, when I was a boy, you got into Tijuana by driving through the Tijuana River itself. It was a muddy floodplain bustling with animals and belching old cars. A slum that spread across the riverbed was known as “Cartolandia.” In border-speak, this meant “Land of Cardboard.”

  Suddenly, it was time for Tijuana to spruce up its image to attract more American dollars, and Cartolandia was swept away by a flash flood of tractors. The big machines swept down the length of the river, crushing shacks and toppling fences. It was like magic. One week, there were choked multitudes of sheds; the next, a clear, flat space awaiting the blank concrete of a flood channel. Town—no town.

  The inhabitants of Cartolandia fled to the out
skirts, where they were better suited to Tijuana’s new image as Shopping Mecca. They had effectively vanished. Many of them home-steaded the Tijuana municipal garbage dump. The city’s varied orphanages consumed many of their children.

  Tijuana’s characteristic buzz can be traced directly to a mixture of dread and expectation: there’s always something coming.

  I never intended to be a missionary. I didn’t go to church, and I had no reason to believe I’d be involved with a bunch of Baptists. But in 1978, I had occasion to meet a remarkable preacher known as Pastor Von (Erhardt George von Trutzschler III, no less): as well as being a minister, he was a veteran of the Korean War, a graphic artist, a puppeteer, a German baron, an adventurer, and a practical joker. Von got me involved in the hardships and discipline he calls “Christian Boot Camp.”

  After working as a youth pastor in San Diego for many years, he had discovered Mexico in the late sixties. His work there began with the typical church do-good activities that every one has experienced at least once: a bag of blankets for the orphans, a few Christmas toys, alms for the poor. As Protestantism spread in Mexico, however, interest in Von’s preaching grew. Small churches and Protestant orphanages and Protestant barrios, lacking ministers of their own, began asking Von to teach. Preaching and pastoring led to more work; work led to more needs; more needs pulled in more workers. On it went until Von had put in thirty or so years slogging through the Borderlands mud, and his little team of die-hard renegades and border rats had grown to a nonprofit corporation (Spectrum Ministries, Inc.), where you’ll find him today.

  Von’s religious ethic is similar in scope to Teresa of Calcutta’s. Von favors actual works over heavy evangelism. Spectrum is based on a belief Christians call “living the gospel.” This doctrine is increasingly rare in America, since it involves little lip service, hard work, and no glory.