October 2006
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The border is wide:
Guarding the southern flank of the American Dream
For three days and nights last January, Claudia Ortiz had been hiking with her mother and father across the Arizona desert, headed for Phoenix and high school and maybe someday a job as an international airline stewardess. Now she was stranded under the fluorescent lights of the Grupo Beta station in Nogales, back on the other side of the border. Her parents were gone, her hair was filled with dirt, and some lady was scolding her from behind a metal desk. “I know you have a dream,” the lady said. “I’ve got it, too. You want to have a house, a car. But it’s impossible, and that’s just how it is.”
Lecturing was the lady’s job. Grupos Beta had been formed by the Mexican government in 1990 to hunt down drug runners and smugglers of humans, known as “coyotes,” but it had become corrupt and was consequently downscaled into an unarmed safety patrol. At Beta stations up and down Mexico’s northern border, repatriated migrants like Claudia could reorient themselves, make free long-distance phone calls, and buy discounted bus tickets home, but the price for those services was a sermon on the evils of border crossing.
Claudia did not require much convincing. She hadn’t bathed in three days, and her sweater and turtleneck had turned the color of coffee. “I don’t want to cross anymore!” she insisted. Tears made lines down her dusty, pale cheeks. But the woman, swaddled in a cop-orange windbreaker, pressed on. “Remember, child, that God—if you believe in God—God knows why he does things. Accept it! There’s a reason why you’re not going over there.”
Claudia, who was all of sixteen and just wanted a shower and some clean clothes, thought she had already survived the worst. When her group first wandered on to American soil, they had been surprised by two men who wore ski masks and carried assault rifles. In perfect Spanish, the men told everyone to get on their knees. They dug through the group’s backpacks and took what they found appetizing, including the group’s flour tortillas and canned tuna. They took any money that was not well hidden, and they also made off with nearly all of the group’s water. Curiously, the coyote was untouched.
The group continued its march through a parched land speckled with saguaro cacti, teddybear chollas, ocotillos, and mesquite trees. The desert plants scratched their arms and foreheads as they walked. At night the temperature fell below freezing, and they couldn’t feel their toes or fingers. They took some breaks, but Claudia found it impossible to sleep. When she began walking again, she expected to see a sparkling, beautiful American city behind every hill she climbed, but she encountered only more dirt. On one of those climbs, she felt her foot give and reached out to grab what she could—a small cactus that left her hand bristled with needles.
On the third night, the coyote instructed the migrants to split up into smaller groups and wait in the bushes until another coyote arrived for them in a pickup truck. When the truck came, forty bodies crammed onto its bed. They did not yet know it, but Border Patrol agents were watching from the sky. The truck raced along rutted dirt paths at a frighteningly high speed, and Claudia’s eyelids closed. When the driver spotted a Border Patrol truck, he pounded on the brakes. Someone shouted, “Run!” By the time Claudia opened her eyes, bodies were leaping from the flatbed like frogs. She pulled on her legs, which were stuck under another person’s body. Thirty people, including her parents, managed to flee. She heard her mother cry out her name, but she could see nothing in the dark. Finally she ran—too late.
Claudia made the reverse march across the border with dozens of others who had been gathered up by the Border Patrol that night. Most of them were dark-skinned men from the countryside, heads down, empty backpacks drooping from their shoulders, a line of defeat limping across the pavement. This southbound shuffle is a daily ritual at the Mariposa Port of Entry, a multilane inspection station linking Nogales, Arizona, to its Mexican twin, Nogales, Sonora. The Border Patrol catches around a million would-be immigrants every year and drops them off at places like Mariposa, where agents shoo them past lanes of eighteen-wheelers ferrying tomatoes and circuit boards produced in Mexico for further refinement up north.
For Claudia, it was difficult to grasp the notion that this was where nations ended and began. The American border with Mexico is among the most economically disparate intersections in the world, but the cities on either side of the port looked almost identical—a spread of humble brick and cinder-block homes dotting a blanket of brown hills. The two Nogaleses are located in an arroyo cut by a wash that runs dry most of the year. When it floods, water flows north with the immigrants, not just within the creek bed but all along the valley floor, streaming in rivulets through city streets and into city gutters, down into the trans-national storm sewer. It was no secret that entrepreneurial drug exporters had dug tunnels connecting the sewer to homes and businesses on both sides of the border. Nogales was neither the Mexico Claudia knew nor the United States she had imagined. It seemed, instead, like a third space, some vague place where she was stuck with no family and no idea of what to do next.
A rickety fleet of taxis awaited Claudia’s group half a mile from the port. Claudia had no money, but some of the men accompanying her managed to produce a few wadded bills, and they paid the eighty pesos it cost to make the five-minute trip to the Grupo Beta station. Claudia was raised in the sprawling periphery of Mexico City, and although she was getting used to these country men, they had frightened her at first. The only other woman in the group was Cristina Vaquero, who had the face of a fourteen-year-old, even though she was already twenty-two and a mother. She came from a poor village, too, down in Hidalgo, but for the last year she had been living in Bradenton, Florida, working the counter at a Wendy’s for $6 an hour. She had gone home to Hidalgo for her grandmother’s funeral and now she was stuck.
Claudia had begun life in better circumstances, but she was on a downward descent, which is not uncommon in her country. Her father used to drive packaged tamales to big retail outlets like Wal-Mart, and her mother sold used cars. Business fell off, though, and their paychecks dwindled. Claudia dropped out of school to take a job standing around at sales events in a tight dress with a sash across her chest that bore the name of whatever company had hired her that day. She hoped things would be different in Phoenix, where her brother made $700 a week building houses.
“Well, here’s another option,” the Grupo Beta lady was now suggesting. “Here on the border, there’s a lot of work, a lot of factories. They don’t pay all that much, but at least you can live comfortably. I mean, you’ll have to limit how much meat or chicken you buy. You’ll get to eat it, but not every day. And then you can eventually get a visa—I don’t know, in a year, six months? Depends on your luck.”
A fresh group of migrants streamed into the office looking glum. The lady asked for each of their names and printed them in a multicolored ledger. One of them said they had been arrested on the last part of the journey, just as they were driving out of the desert. Their driver, a woman, was chased by Border Patrol agents down Interstate 10. She jumped onto the median and stopped abruptly, ordering her passengers to hop out of the van and run. Nobody thought to look out for oncoming cars. Four of them, including the driver, were promptly hit by a tractor-trailer.
The stories continued, but Claudia was lost in her own dilemma. She exhaled heavily and got up from her chair, revealing a svelte figure in tightly molded jeans. She made her way to a black phone on the wall. She had memorized her aunt’s telephone number, but no one had answered on earlier attempts. This time, Claudia got through. “Hey Tía, I got deported!” she said in a wavering voice. She leaned her hip on the agent’s desk. “I’m here, in Nogales.” The men looked down at their feet. “Mom and Dad crossed, but I got deported.” She bit her lower lip to keep herself from crying. “No, I’m here by myself!” she replied, finally breaking down. Claudia shook her head as her aunt asked her to call back later and promised to try to track down her brother in Phoenix, who would know what to do. Then she slammed down the receiver, marched out of the office without saying a word, and lit a cigarette.
Some eighty miles north of Nogales, in the open desert west of Tucson, Paul McKenna pulled his white Chevy Tahoe to the side of the road, rolled down his window, and surveyed the hundreds of fresh footprints stamped into the dirt. McKenna was an agent of the U.S. Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Team, or BORSTAR—the highly trained U.S. counterpart to Grupos Beta—but the cooler winter temperatures on this particular morning meant fewer migrants might need rescuing, so McKenna was out looking for illegals like any other agent.
He picked up the radio to see if his partner that day, Mark Overholt, was having better luck than he was. “Bravo 14, Bravo 14, you copy direct?”
“I only cut one group that looks pretty good,” Overholt said. “But I’m not convinced. What’s your twenty?”
McKenna looked at the tangle of footprints. “I saw one group that looks pretty good,” he said, “but nothing smoking.”
Agents can spend an entire day sniffing at the vestiges of shoe soles. With careful study, patterns emerge: the cleat of turf shoes, the unmistakable stamp of Converse sneakers, the defining squiggly line—a zigzag of W’s—found on cheap tennis shoes from Kmart. McKenna might follow a trail for a few hours and then receive a radio call from another agent who had just apprehended a group of migrants a few miles over. “Check if there’s a diamond and a diamond with a flat border around the edge,” McKenna will say. The arresting agent will make his captives lift their feet, and if he locates the guilty shoe, McKenna can call off his search.
The international border—1,952 miles across four American states—has seen heavy traffic since the day in 1848 when the United States added more than half a million square miles of Mexico to its own expanding territory. But no one bothered to enforce the border until 1904, when the United States dispatched seventy-five immigration inspectors on horseback to roam the entire, mostly unmarked boundary. For decades the waves of crossers came in cycles, but since the mid-1980s, the rise in illegal immigration has been unwavering, even as that rise was met by increasingly expensive and labor-intensive efforts to quell it. It turns out that even with all of the radio communications, helicopter support, and other technology available to an advanced and wealthy nation—and even with more than 10,000 agents patrolling the border—footprints are still the best way to find people in the desert.
We drove for a while, and then Overholt checked in again. “I’m still west of those coordinates I gave you,” he said. “I saw a couple of small groups that are kind of interesting. They’re kind of going up in the hills, but I think eventually they’re going to come back into that valley there where we’ve been getting groups.” The mesquite branches scratched McKenna’s Chevy like fingernails as he powered deeper into the desert. Dust showered onto his windshield.
McKenna, who is thirty-nine, spent seven years in the Marine Corps and joined the Border Patrol in 1992. He has the deep brown skin and well-defined cheekbones of his Yaqui ancestors; both of his parents are Mexican Americans and his last name comes from an Irish great-grandfather, a blending of blood that epitomizes the region’s multiracial history. McKenna was raised in Tucson around Mexicans who worked construction with his father and who, he realized later, were in the country illegally. But he had never viewed them as criminals. He still wondered whether the United States might be better off if illegal workers were granted citizenship. “We’d earn their loyalty,” he told me. His job has forced him to live with the tension between what is legal and what is moral. “It feels good to know that you accomplished the mission, especially when you’re tracking someone,” he said. “But then, at the end, you’re also destroying someone’s dream. I don’t see how anyone can become immune to that. I don’t think anyone does. You just got to do your job sometimes, and pray that God will take care of the rest.”
As we drove across the empty desert, McKenna recalled helping an old woman who once crawled toward him on her hands and knees. She didn’t know what a desert was and had worn slip-on shoes for the journey. With every step, her toes hit the tips of her shoes and her nails dug into her flesh. McKenna sat her down and began poking through the blackened nails with a needle in order to release the blood and pus that were causing a painful throb in her feet. He looked up, but instead of finding her grimacing he found her smiling. That was the rewarding part of his job. The worst part was waiting next to a corpse while the coroner drove across the sand and dirt with a handful of paperwork and a vinyl body bag. At least 268 people died crossing the Arizona desert last year.
In fact, the heightened presence of the Border Patrol on the Arizona border has exposed a paradox in border crime. Although the rising number of agents has helped curb local crime in places like Nogales, it has also increased the demand for the services of the coyotes. This increase in demand has led to an increase in price—up to $4,000 for someone headed to Chicago—and has drawn the interest of a more serious criminal element. Mexican immigration agents estimate that as many as 90 percent of illegal border crossers are robbed by Mexican and Central American bandits as they walk onto American land. Some coyotes have taken to “stealing” a group of migrants from another coyote and releasing them only after the group’s smuggler or family members have paid a ransom. Some of these kidnappings have ended in shoot-outs and death for coyotes and immigrants alike.
The result is that patrolling the border has become increasingly dangerous. When McKenna wasn’t driving, he wore a CamelBak backpack with a water valve and a green bulletproof vest. “It’s what they call a ballistic panel,” he said of the vest, “and it does resist some rounds. But others, like the AK-47, will go right through this thing like butter.” McKenna himself carried an assault rifle. Last year, the agency logged 246 assaults against its Tucson agents alone, including rock throwings, shootings, and physical assaults. In December the Department of Homeland Security warned that human smugglers were planning to hire gang members to carry out contract-style hits on agents, but the threat was never confirmed.
Hours had passed since McKenna’s initial call. The agent had remained in the desert through lunch, though, and his persistence paid off. He communicated this fact in a whisper, because the group he found was sleeping soundly under the cover of structures they had fashioned out of broken branches. A smile spread across McKenna’s face. Many agents are amused when they find migrants in slumber. “We go pssst! They look at us, and they’re so scared,” McKenna said as we began making our way over to Overholt’s position. “Sometimes, when we come up to them, we can hear them snoring.”
By the time we arrived, though, the migrants had already awoken and spotted Overholt watching them from behind a bush. Thirteen of them now sat surrounding Overholt like a tribe at the foot of a chief. They watched us approach without expression, rubbing their bleary eyes to shake off the haze of sleep. They had traveled together from the village of Acatlán, in Guerrero, where they worked from sunup to sundown planting tomatoes and chili peppers for about $5 a day. They spoke softly and rapidly, switching between Spanish and Náhuatl, their native language.
“How do you say ‘tengo hambre’ in English?” a reed-thin young woman asked me as the agents filled out paperwork under the white sun. Many of the immigrants had never learned to write, so they signed their forms with the letter X. “I’m hungry,” I translated for her. Her husband, who never left his young bride’s side, repeated it carefully. He said to himself, “Ain han-gree.”
Enrique Enríquez, the heavily cologned coordinator of the Beta station, appeared at the doorway and asked the migrants gathered outside if they wanted to see pictures of dead people. All of them said they did. One boy unfolded himself from where he sat and said laughingly, “Let’s go so they can open our eyes, to see if we actually learn something.” Claudia and Cristina got up and joined the crowd that was shuffling inside.
Trailing protectively behind them was Ricardo Vega, who until recently had worked as a stock boy at a Safeway in California. One day, an immigration agent had stopped him on a San José street and learned that, in addition to being an illegal resident, Vega had been arrested five years before for smoking pot. Vega spent a month in an Arizona prison and then got dumped in Nogales with the others. He had a wife and three children on the West Coast, but the only signs he showed now of his life in America were a dark pair of jeans, a clean yellow corduroy jacket, and a trim haircut.
Vega, who was twenty-eight, was experiencing an existential shift as he returned to his home country after six years. “I want to try to go back because I don’t have anything in this country—my country,” he said. “But at the same time, I don’t want to do it again, because I feel so denigrated by the American authorities. Emotionally, I feel really shaken in that respect. The United States is a country with a double morality. After so much time! I’ve worked so hard! And still, I don’t have a single right.”
Inside the building, Enríquez glanced at Claudia suspiciously and asked, “Are you allowed to see photos of dead people?” Claudia pulled her chin up and replied, with all the maturity that she could muster, “Yes.” She leaned against a white column in anticipation of the presentation. On the wall opposite her, a string of black block letters spelled out Beta’s motto: “Vocation, Humanism, Loyalty!”
The photos, more than a dozen of them, were pinned to two large pieces of foam board that were propped up against two chairs. Enríquez began pointing at them and telling tales of the dead. This one ran out of water and couldn’t take the heat anymore. This one was abandoned by his guide and got lost and died alone. The bodies in the colored pictures were bloated, blackened, or gnawed beyond recognition. Their eyeballs had been covered over with masking tape. “This woman fell asleep under the sun and her eyes baked and she went blind.” His audience inhaled sharply. There was no way for them to judge the veracity of this information, but maybe that didn’t matter. The message was simple enough: Cross the desert and you die.
Taped to the middle of one of the boards was a scrawled note left behind by one unfortunate traveler, explaining how he and his thirteen companions perished:
The Collote is from Teopisca His name is pascual locality Jerusalen downtown Teopisca Chiapas my name is Arturo Gomez C. he fooled us saying he knew a lot but in the end it was negative we were 14 people none of us could take it GOODBYE
There was no question that most of the immigrants had been fooled in some way. The coyotes, too, have a captive audience, and they describe the journey as effortless. Women sometimes show up at the border wearing dresses and church shoes. Enríquez pointed to a photo of an Indian woman from Guerrero who had arrived outside Nogales set on trekking across the desert with seven young children and an infant.
Most of the people at the Beta station were from slums and villages in central and southern Mexico. A few had even come across the southern border from Central America and beyond. They knew little about Mexico’s northern border and even less about what lay beyond it. As they grew reflective, Enríquez sniffed an opportunity for indoctrination and pulled out a metal folding chair, making himself comfortable. “You come from calm regions,” he said, his long right leg folding over his left. “You come from places where people are good. Here, it’s a different situation. The border is full of people without scruples. Every day someone gets killed here in Nogales. I know things are tough for you right now, because I feel it, too. Don’t think that because I work for the government or because I’ve got a job—federal employees are the cheapest of government workers! Let me ask you, for instance, how much do you pay in rent over there?”
One voice said, “Well, in Guanajuato, a minimum of 500 pesos”—about $50 a month.
Enríquez paused indulgently. “Do you know how much we get charged here? For rent? The cheapest is 2,500 pesos. And that’s for a box—a little room, a bathroom, and kitchen.” And it was only worse on the other side. “I’ve got a visa to enter the United States and I could work, but I would be doing it illegally, because my visa is for visiting. I’m not going over there. Everyone likes to paint a rosy picture when they talk about the United States. Yes, it’s rosy, but for people who have proper documents. Why? Because people who are citizens, or have immigration papers, they’re going to earn more. Employers are going to take advantage of those of you who are illegal.”
The migrants weighed this argument against the visions they had of emulating their relatives up north, who sent back expensive electronics and thousands of dollars—$20 billion to Mexico alone last year.
We get too carried away with the success stories we hear about the United States, Enríquez insisted. We go there and pursue wayward lives. We cheat on our wives and ignore our children. And then we rent expensive cars and jewelry when we visit so that our families in Mexico will think that we have made it. We entice others to come back across the border with us, telling them lies about how good and easy it is. We tell them they can stay in our homes, but once they’re around we get tired of them eating our food.
The migrants began to look around the room.
“People ask me, ‘Hey, what do you think of the proposed fence, the wall?’ Well, it doesn’t affect me. I don’t have an opinion. And they say, ‘Well, the whole world is mad because the United States is going to put up a fence on the border.’ Well, put it up. If I don’t want someone to come into my home, I’m going to construct a fence, too. Plus, it’s not the United States’ fault that we have such poor administrators in Mexico, such bad presidents. Mexico is incredibly rich. You all know that, because you live in Chiapas. What does Chiapas lack? Chiapas has everything! It has petroleum, livestock, agriculture . . .”
A dozen migrants fished for their backpacks and left.
One young man, though, was interested in pushing the debate. “Where I come from, all the towns are abandoned. All of the youth are leaving,” he said defiantly.
“The youth are the future of Mexico, maestro,” remonstrated an older gentleman.
“But we’re the ones who want to be well dressed,” the young man said. “We want good tennis shoes. We want to give ourselves a lifestyle that we can’t afford.”
Vega, the onetime stock boy, jumped into the conversation. “It’s true that we’ve become enamored with the American dream,” he said. “But here, on the other side, the picture is very stark. There’s nothing that makes you say, ‘Okay, I’m going to stay for this.’ As Mexicans we learned to be religiously nationalistic. We all love our Mexico, right? But what does Mexico offer us? Nothing. I was a professional welder. I took a course in welding steel. It’s not a huge profession, but you do have to take some time to learn something about molecular chemistry. I worked all year in that factory and I saved 13,000 pesos, but the cheapest used car at that time was 22,000 pesos! So it’s traumatic to think that you’re going to invest one year of labor and your consumer power won’t even get you a car. We come to the United States, and in one month we’ve bought that same little car. Right? But you drive it in fear. There’s stress, which is something tremendous. A cop passes you by and you feel bad, because you think, why do I automatically slip into this feeling of guilt? You feel guilty for being there illegally. But, really, you had no option.”
The most striking thing about the people I spoke to along the border was that most of them had known exactly where they were going in the United States and what job they would take once they got there. Some even knew how much they were going to be paid. The suggestion that their employers might reject them because of their immigration status—or that the government would prosecute the employers for their illegal hires—was, they understood, beyond possibility. The decisions leading to their crossing had been made long before, in both nations, and the journey across the border was more of an obstacle course: a legal technicality devoid of much logic. It was an obstacle course predicated not so much on physical ability as on sheer luck. I met migrants who had tried crossing the border unsuccessfully four times in a row, and I met a man who had crossed with no problems every single year for the past sixteen years. In the end, the force of migration offered no answers, policy recommendations, or self-justifications. It simply was.
By the time the exchange with Ricardo Vega tired out, the sun had disappeared. He walked outside and sat on a steel bench and leaned his head against a chain-link fence. He sighed. “We’re not made of plastic,” he said. He let his mind wander to those days when he worked in America, a time that now seemed, as he sat suspended between countries, heady. “I’ve lived well,” he concluded, “but all I really had was a carpeted apartment and an old car. In reality, it’s not a lot.” He had lived for the promise of his three-year-old—“My-Only-Hope,” he had nicknamed her, because she was the only one of his children who had been born an American citizen. Before he worked at Safeway, Vega had a much better job, making sandwiches for medical students at Stanford University. He watched the Latino students who lined up at his counter and thought maybe his working life was an investment in the next generation. Then 9/11 hit, Vega said, and Stanford officials did a sweep of their employee payrolls. Vega was left without a job.
It was barely suppertime, but already the desert had turned dark. The stars across the expansive Arizona sky provided the only light, a faint glow that barely allowed Paul McKenna to see his feet. The ground itself was clouded in scrubby blue shadows, making it impossible for him to know where he was about to step. McKenna’s partner tonight, a slender, freckled twenty-eight-year-old from Pennsylvania named Julie Gallagher, peered through her night-vision goggles. “I have something straight ahead, but I’m pretty sure it’s four-legged,” she whispered. McKenna took a look and handed me the goggles. I saw dark blobs in a sea of magnetic green—a handful of sleeping cows.
Gallagher and McKenna made a graceful team. They cut off their headlights while riding on dirt roads, closed their doors with the softest of nudges, and walked without speaking. The tiniest rustle of creosote or mesquite branches made them freeze. They brought the goggles to their eyes and twisted at the waist as they swept the landscape around them. In the most ideal of circumstances, Gallagher said, they will detect a group of immigrants before the group even notices them. They will scamper up from behind and begin tapping shoulders, gently guiding bodies to the ground before the front of the group realizes what is happening. Confusion can make humans behave in remarkably obedient ways, and the whole operation gets executed elegantly. In some cases, however, an agent will approach a large group and its members will scatter in every direction. Or an agent will pull over several vans loaded with immigrants and the doors will fly open before the vehicle has stopped fully. “Imagine, just sixty, seventy people running. It’s awful,” Gallagher said. “They’re running all around you, but you can do only so much with your two hands.”
McKenna and Gallagher hid behind a cluster of bushes next to a path that migrant guides seemed to have been using lately. “I was hoping a group would come up,” McKenna whispered. “God,” Gallagher said, “that would be nice.” They waited. The night was still and unpromising. “Right now,” Gallagher said, “if there’s any aliens here . . .” She stopped and corrected herself. “The aliens that are here,” she said, laughing, “are hiding.” It was an eerie proposition, this idea that we were surrounded by bodies we couldn’t see. Especially because the agents can’t know whether an unseen body belongs to a drug runner with a high-caliber assault weapon or a man whose life dream is to pick strawberries.
Nothing happened for a long time. Gallagher suggested they call for help from a Border Patrol helicopter flying above, and the bird’s clatter grew louder as its lights inched closer. The response was unexpectedly quick. The agent in the helicopter reported that he had detected a group of twenty people several miles away. He said there was also a truck nearby, perhaps some coyotes. Maybe Gallagher and McKenna could pick them up. Gallagher put her radio down and began to run. The adrenaline had kicked in.
The agents’ own truck was parked nearly a mile away, and as they headed back to it, the desert became a confusing maze. They ran into dead ends and came upon an impassable dry creek. McKenna lit the spotlight on his rifle. They found the path we had been on earlier and fell into a steady jog. The cold air seeped into our lungs, making breathing difficult. Finally, the white hood of their SUV appeared in the distance. They threw off their equipment and climbed aboard.
McKenna drove fast, and Gallagher bounced in the passenger seat and yelped. The agents in the helicopter advised them that they were getting close. “Cut your lights, anytime,” the radio voice suggested. “There’s a road you’re coming up to now, and then there’s another road . . .” Gallagher replied, “Ten-four.” She pointed her flashlight out into the dark. When they were close enough to move in by foot, they pulled to a stop. They fumbled into their gear silently and took off at a trot. They ran blindly. Only their feet broke the night’s silence.
Then, a massive rustling of branches on their immediate left. Only bushes were in sight, but the desert became alive with humans. “Over here!” Gallagher cried, and immediately she and McKenna vanished behind the plants.
They shouted in Spanish, their rough voices muffled by the noise of the helicopter above. Their orders were frantic and rigid. “Vengan acá! Come here! Here! Come here! Put your hands on your head!”
Chaos reigned for several minutes. Some of the bodies tried running, but they could not see where they were going. Others began to give in. “Get on the ground! Put your face to the ground! Hands on your head! Hey, you!” McKenna pointed his rifle at the ground and activated its light. A dark-skinned, dust-covered man appeared crumpled under a tree. Only then could McKenna make out the identity of the trespasser. Not a terrorist, not a drug smuggler: an immigrant.
The man blinked at the ground, looking stunned, and his body shook slightly. Dust stuck to his lips.
One by one, each of the immigrants fell to the ground in surrender. Gallagher disappeared for several minutes and returned with a group of twelve men who were holding their hands up. They smelled like dirt. “Lie down!” she shouted. “Put your hands on your head! Hands on your head!” They looked at her with wide, broken eyes. There were nineteen in all, and the two who were still running—most likely the coyotes—were being tracked by the helicopter’s light and would be apprehended within minutes. No one would escape tonight. The men huddled on the ground, and for some reason—maybe out of a need to feel comforted—they positioned themselves so that all of their bodies were touching. Their faces were buried between their arms, their fingers laced behind their heads. They lay as they were told, a motionless pile of human bodies. The helicopter, with its deafening roar, loomed overhead.
In less than ten minutes, a thirty-hour attempt at a new life had been ended. The whole way they had been asked not to talk, to whisper if they had something to say, to make themselves as imperceptible and anonymous to the world as possible. Then, an explosion of noise. That is how they knew it was over.
At around 8:30 P.M. in Nogales, two large pickup trucks pulled up to the Beta station and Enríquez announced that it was time to move to a shelter. The immigrants with nowhere else to go would finally get a meal and a decent night’s sleep. The mood immediately lightened, and some thirty people zipped up their jackets, located their backpacks, and hopped on to the trucks. Claudia was among them, fantasizing about taking a shower. The Beta lady had counseled her to lie about her age so that she would not get sent to the children’s shelter, where the state would take custody and make it a nightmare for her parents to claim her.
The trucks jerked forward and began a leisurely drive through the city. The air was brisk, but the passengers observed everything with curiosity, as though they were on a tour. For a while they drove alongside the brown steel fence that separates Nogales, Sonora, from Nogales, Arizona. Near the port of entry, someone had sprayed onto it in looming white letters: “Fences built sideways make bridges.” They rode downtown on busy streets, where they watched the spectacles playing out behind glass storefronts: girls getting their hair colored, men picking out CDs, Americans shopping for rustic furniture—a flurry of business unheard of back home. They climbed up a steep hill and finally arrived at the shelter—a sagging cinder-block fortress overlooking a twinkling city.
Inside, the building had whitewashed walls and a dusty concrete floor. A main room was lined with bunk beds stacked three high for the men; a separate room housed the women and children. Near the entrance a bulletin board had been wallpapered with news articles about immigration, and a neon-orange poster advised: “All of the Services in this Shelter are ‘Free.’ Complaints with Sr. Paco.”
“Sr. Paco,” it turned out, was a mustachioed gentleman named Juan Francisco Loureiro, a local manufacturer of children’s orthopedic shoes. One evening in 1982, Loureiro and his wife, Gilda, drove by the city’s railroad station and saw a row of transients sleeping outside. Gilda was indignant. How could her cars have shelter when these human beings did not? She persuaded her husband to take the group home that very night, and the couple converted their garage into a temporary shelter. Children were strewn about the kitchen and living room. Loureiro called some friends to witness the scene, and a few days later the Loureiros and five other couples had agreed to found a permanent migrant shelter in the defunct nursing home next door.
The people who passed through the shelter’s doors were suffering in ways that shocked Loureiro. One migrant, after eating a large meal and drifting off to sleep, had awakened the entire shelter with his delirious screams for food. Others arrived with mutilated feet that had gone untreated for days, and so Loureiro recruited doctor friends to tend to their wounds. He said he was fascinated by the character of a human being who would choose to undertake such a traumatic journey, and that he had begun a sociological study of his guests. What they all had in common, every one of them, was that they had left home because they could not make a living in Mexico. “Fortunately or unfortunately,” Loureiro said, “we human beings are like little birds. We fly wherever there’s food.”
Dinner arrived. Ricardo Vega, who was loitering outside, rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Lookin’ gooood,” he said, showing off the urban English he had acquired in San José, and he walked into the shelter with an extra bounce. Dinner was a heaping Styrofoam bowl of canned tuna and mixed vegetables topped with a dollop of mayonnaise. Everyone was also entitled to a cold sandwich stuffed with cheese, chorizo, and beans.
Claudia took a sandwich and sniffed it, then attempted a little bite. There would be no shower after all. The bathrooms were broken, and she was informed that there wasn’t enough water for her to wash her face. By then, Claudia had made several phone calls and had finally gotten through to her parents, who had safely joined their son in Phoenix and were debating whether to send for Claudia through their coyote or to wire money so that she could buy a bus ticket back to central Mexico. Cristina was going to figure out her fate tomorrow; she had no money, and the number she was dialing in Hidalgo was not connecting. She thought maybe she would work in Nogales until she could afford to go home.
The guests congregated by the shelter’s front door. The sandwiches were settling into the pits of their stomachs, making them drowsy and contemplative. Loureiro took a chair and joined in the conversation, which had taken a solemn turn. “They kill your spirits,” a man in a red baseball cap said, recounting his arrest by the Border Patrol that morning. “You’re feeling just fine, and then they take you, and you feel like nothing exists anymore.”
Loureiro asked them if it was even worth it. Was it worth risking dying, or losing your children along the way, or leaving them behind altogether?
The answer was clear. “In one year in the United States, I managed to put up a little store,” the baseball-capped migrant said. “In Mexico, I could never have done that. With that, I can feed my son.” There was silence. There was nothing else to say. A woman who had been turned back with two teenage sons and a six-year-old daughter watched her girl dance around the room. She lifted her glasses and wiped her wet nose. A man squatting across from her sighed deeply and dabbed at his eyes.
And with that, it was time for bed. Bodies distributed themselves accordingly, pulled off their weathered shoes, and flexed their toes. The younger men, convinced their only choice was to try the journey again tomorrow, had long ago disappeared into wool blankets and were engaged in a chorus of snores. The rest hoped perhaps that better answers would somehow materialize with the light of a new day. For now, their eyelids closed under the weight of uncertainty, and they indulged in dreams.
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| SEE ALSO: Border patrols; Human smugglers; Illegal aliens; Mexican-American Border Region | ||||||||
| Response: December 2006, page 6 | ||||||||
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