On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  People begged me not to cross. My idea had been to drive along the border and nip over whenever convenient to the Mexican side. These dozen or so crossings were a revelation to me, putting the whole border debate into perspective, giving it a human face—or rather, many faces. It is at once more heartening and more hopeless than I had imagined. Nothing fully prepares you for the strangeness of the border experience.

  The first thing to know is that, though gringos seldom cross to any of the border cities and towns, tens of thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals cross every day, in both directions. They have visas and passports, or an ID that allows them access. Renting or buying a house on the US side is prohibitive for many, so a whole cross-border culture has developed in which American citizens of Mexican descent live in a house or an apartment—or a simple shack—in a Mexican border city, such as Juárez or Nuevo Laredo, and commute to work in El Paso or Laredo.

  It is a fairly simple matter to walk to Mexico at any point, but there is always a crush of people—all of them with documents—waiting to enter the US to work, go to school, or shop. As the man told me in Tijuana, clothes and electronics are much cheaper in the US. A busy, bilingual Walmart can be found on the American side of most border crossings. There are always discount shops on the US side, always discount pharmacies on the Mexican side, though the Boys’ Towns—Zones of Tolerance—see little roistering.

  “We used to go across all the time” was a common refrain I heard on the US side, usually by a laughing older man. And then I would sit through a sordid reminiscence of his less rational youth in a Boys’ Town bar.

  But the old American habit of crossing the border to carouse is over. The souvenir shops are empty, and so are the bars. Sombreros, ceramic skulls, and beads sit unsold and unremarked upon. During the day the Mexican towns are tranquil enough; after dark, not so much. In most there is a curfew that is strictly enforced by the police or the army (“who take no prisoners,” a man told me in Nuevo Laredo). And for all the downtown serenity—the lollygagging, the churchgoing, the taco stands, the mariachi bands, the shoe shiners in the plaza—one is urged by locals to avoid venturing out of town, even to the nearer country areas ten miles away, which they refer to as los ranchitos, where the cartel gangsters are holed up, and well armed, and predatory.

  Most people on either side of the border are reasonably content, going to work and to school, living their lives, saluting their respective flag, voting in local elections, raising children. They are settled, they stay home, they merely fantasize about the country over the fence or across the river.

  At the same time, like a rumble on a lower frequency, there is a constant skirmishing, the equivalent of a border war, as migrants—which include Pakistanis, Syrians, and Africans; desperate, criminal, opportunistic, or tragic—attempt to get to the other side, often with the help of human traffickers, nearly always cartel members, who demand large sums of money from the migrants. And there are more than twenty-one thousand Border Patrol agents who work day and night to thwart them.

  Not only men and women trying to secure the border, but twenty- or thirty-foot steel fences that run for miles. Also shorter fences, vehicle barriers, drones, helicopters, bottlenecks at bridges, checkpoints on back roads and on the interstates, sniffer dogs, and over the Texas towns of Zapata and McAllen huge white balloons, the sort deployed for antiterrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan—enormous dirigibles used for surveillance, tethered to the border, listening and watching.

  And the river, and the desert, and coils of razor wire. The notion of building a wall strikes most people on either side as laughable. The belief is: show me a thirty-foot wall, and I will show you a thirty-five-foot ladder.

  Leaving San Ysidro the next day, driving through the desert and the rubbly hills, many of them composed of smooth tumbled boulders, I thought, How on earth can anyone manage to cross this desert? It was magnificent and parched and inhospitable, much of it Native American land, sand dunes—the Imperial Dunes, like the Sahara—and the snake lairs of stony ravines, and vast stretches of twisted mesquite and disjointed cholla cactus, with drifting falcons overhead and tumbleweed down below.

  But the evidence that migrants did attempt to cross were the many flagpoles, set a few hundred yards apart, flying striped flags, indicating white wooden boxes lettered AGUA, containing plastic gallon jugs of water, placed there by Samaritans, some from humanitarian groups such as No More Deaths and the Border Angels, for migrants dying of thirst. The founder of Border Angels, Enrique Morones, has said, “This wall of Operation Gatekeeper, from 1994, has led to the death of more than 11,000 people,” on both sides of the fence.

  “Killed by the light,” in the words of Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, to my mind one of the best accounts of border crossing, of migrant tribulations and frontier culture and criminality. Most migrant deaths are caused by exposure to the elements—the desert daytime heat, the desert nighttime cold. Urrea describes in clinical detail the stages by which a person in the desert succumbs to death in the absence of water: heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope (“contraction”), heat cramps, and finally heat exhaustion—tunnel vision, hallucinations, paranoia, the vomiting of blood. “You dream of pools, seas, you dream of a lake . . . You’d pay all your money for cold water. You’d trade sex, anything, for water. Walkers who find abandoned vehicles break open the radiators and die from gulping the antifreeze.”

  The US community of Tecate hardly exists, but Mexican Tecate, hugging the fence, is a large agricultural town of nearly eighty thousand people. It is also the setting for one of my favorite short stories, “Pastor Dowe at Tecate,” by Paul Bowles. The morose American pastor in this darkly comic tale has great difficulty in his attempts to convert the locals to Christianity, and he finds their attention constantly flagging when he preaches. He discovers that they brighten when he winds up his old phonograph and plays the 1928 show tune “Crazy Rhythm.” And so he plays it over and over as he delivers his sermons. Hoping to please Pastor Dowe, some men in his congregation try to tempt him with a thirteen-year-old girl, who shows up with a live baby alligator she hugs as a doll. Tecate itself is ambiguous, more lush than the border town—it might be a town deeper in Mexico—but it is the place I associate with this masterly story.

  Tecate is also the setting of “Big Caca’s Revenge,” a short story by the American-born Hispanic writer Daniel Reveles. This is a tale of power on the border, of local toughs, and of the stereotypical bully and local cabrón, Big Caca, getting his comeuppance. A cop, Big Nalgas Machado—nalgas means “buttocks”—faces him down and makes him grovel (mocking his maxim, “We cannot make a piñata of the law”): “In less than an hour Tecate’s fattest cop became a national hero.”

  Calexico, California, about an hour farther along the border, is little more than a crossroads, surrounded by desert, with the smallness and lushness of an oasis. Mexicali, a mile away, is equally humble in appearance, but boosted by factories: Honeywell, Mitsubishi, BFGoodrich, Gulfstream, and other companies that relocated over the border to find men and women—and children in some places—who would work cheaply, some for as little as $6 a day.

  Driving south along Imperial Avenue to the border crossing, I found it hard to believe I was still in the United States—most signs were in Spanish, and many of the others bilingual, the American citizens of Calexico living in an overlap of Mexicali that was exuberantly reflected in the innovation of their spliced-together names.

  I parked on a back street and walked through a small park and up the steps of the stern gray building of US Customs and Border Protection. I strolled down the ramp and pushed through a turnstile, no one looking at my passport. Glancing through the chain-link fence on the Mexican side of the building, I saw a line of people—a long line, stretching down the stairs and through a foyer and along a passageway, hundreds, perhaps a thousand people waiting to enter the United States.

  My idea was that I would have lunch in Mexicali and hurry b
ack to Calexico, but this line of people was daunting, moving so slowly that I decided to skip lunch and just look. I was greeted (“Señor!”) by a row of beggars and panhandlers of medieval mutilation—amputees, the blind, women carrying whimpering babies, and more assertive young men (“Geeve!”)—and found a taxi. With a friendly but laconic driver named Héctor I made a tour of Mexicali, yet “Prohibido,” he said when I asked him if he could take me into any of the factories. It was soon clear as we ground through traffic that though Calexico, California, was a small town, Mexicali, on the other side of the thirty-foot fence, was a city of a million people, with an international airport, a large cathedral, a bullring, two museums, hospitals, four universities, a dental school, several public libraries, and industrial areas, sprawling in the desert of Baja, and subdivisions and colonias of one-story, three-room houses, most of them lived in by local factory workers.

  “Pimsa,” Héctor said, passing the industrial park.

  “What’s that?”

  “Jet engines.”

  Fifty years ago, the Beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (still alive at one hundred years old as I write this) took a bus here, as he writes in his travel diary Mexican Night: “Arrived at Mexicali, another dusty town, only worse, in midst of flat brown plain I saw from above at nightfall—bus station crammed with campesinos looking grim, tough & hungry, under enormous hats and ponchos, waiting for country buses and revolutions . . . I walk out into mud boulevard & vision of utter Desolation, Dung & Death in the image of crowded streets and dark people. Everywhere I walk & look, the same!”

  Ferlinghetti’s book is terrible, his observations banal, but he records a particular historical moment of moribund Mexicali. And now: GKN Aerospace, Martech Industrial (medical technology), Furukawa México, Wabash Technologies, Robert Bosch Tool, and many others, along with the necessary ancillary services—banks, trucking companies, supermarkets, fuel depots, and schools.

  And here is the great paradox of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the visible result of American companies looking for cheap labor: a few hundred yards from the industrial park, the high-tech and aerospace maquiladoras (factories) of Mexicali, past Cristóbal Colón Road, the fence, and beyond the fence, the spinach fields of Calexico—most of the fieldworkers are Mexicans on work visas. Fruit pickers here, lab technicians over there.

  In that area, and farther east, in the lettuce and broccoli fields, nearly all the workers are Mexicans who have been granted H-2A visas—temporary agricultural visas—harvesting for farmers who have proven they cannot find American field hands. Such visas are issued every year, allowing Mexicans to work for anywhere from four months to a year. How does this visa system work? First an agricultural company applies to the US Department of Labor, declaring that it does not have enough American workers to fill the available jobs in the fields. The company needs to prove that it has made an effort to find American workers. Then US Citizenship and Immigration Services reviews the application, and if it seems in order, and truthful, a certain number of H-2A visas are approved, the great majority of which are for agricultural workers. In the year I passed those broccoli fields, ninety thousand of the visas had been issued. And why? Because the agricultural cooperatives here and in the Yuma area supply 90 percent of the lettuce to America for most of the year, a $2.4-billion-a-year industry.

  I was not wrong to be warned by the long line at the border. I had slipped into Mexico in a matter of minutes; returning, it took more than two hours in a line of uncomplaining Mexicans, all of them with valid visas, to pass through the narrow border entrance, each person’s papers examined, each person photographed and briskly interrogated. Back in my car, I drove past the lettuce fields and through the desert—magnificent, inhospitable—and the rubbly hills, the thorny scrub, and flowering bushes, fifty-odd miles to Yuma.

  Just a few days after leaving Calexico, I read a news item that claimed a Border Patrol agent had discovered a 142-foot tunnel less than a mile outside the town, “the third such tunnel discovered in Calexico in the past year.”

  The tidy, good-sized town of Yuma is not on the border. I stayed the night there and set off in the morning (MEXICO NEXT EXIT) to drive the ten miles south through the lettuce fields to the border. It was clear: towns don’t get much poorer than these blighted communities at the edge of the fence—Gadsden and Somerton, Arizona—shacks, rotted trailers, shuttered shops, abandoned houses, hemmed in by the tall, rusty-ribbed border fence that is the margin of the towns here, the dead end of every street to the west, where the winding Colorado River flows south past the border.

  I stopped for a while in Gadsden, named for the American ambassador to Mexico who in 1853 negotiated the purchase (for $10 million) of the lower third of Arizona and part of New Mexico. The small town of Gadsden, at the southwest corner of the purchase, is a semiderelict community of 1,314 people, almost half of them (46 percent) living below the poverty line amid the dusty fields and the cholla cactus. The town of San Luis, just down the road, is larger and slightly better off because it is an important border crossing. Mexicans from the other side at San Luis Río Colorado shop at the Walmart Super Center and the stores on Main Street. Yet even compared to the towns over the border, it is like Gadsden and Somerton and the Cocopah Indian Reservation nearer Yuma: barely there, third-world poor, baking in the desert heat.

  Over coffee in San Luis I talked to Javier, a middle-aged man, raised in town. I asked him how the fence affected him.

  “The fence is funny,” he said. “I used to be a firefighter. One day we went to a brush fire, way over in the boonies, and started to fight it. But it was going pretty good, so we chased it. We came to a little chicken-wire fence and dragged our hoses through, still spraying but not making too much progress. Then one of the guys says, ‘Hey, this is Mexico!’”

  “What did you do?”

  “We hauled ass out of there!”

  “You’re sure you were in Mexico?”

  “Yeah. It was that chicken wire. You think this big fence at the edge of town goes all the way along the border, but it’s only a few miles here and a few miles there, and the rest is chicken wire.”

  “Easy to jump?”

  “Used to be a lot of fence jumpers. These days, not so many.”

  Nearer the border crossing itself—turn right on Urtuzuastegui Street, then proceed over the bridge—the shops on Main Street were patronized by day-trippers from Mexico, buying clothes and hats made in China, boom boxes made in Korea, bicycles made in Taiwan.

  Just a walkway, no formalities, no one on either side looking at my passport or asking my name. It was the simplest crossing I’d ever made in a long career of crossing borders, and it happened to be a lovely day, so the idea of strolling so easily into another country lifted my spirits. Now I was in San Luis Río Colorado, on the far side of the fence, a sprawling one-story town, sun-faded but solidly built, with a park, a cathedral, a Plaza Benito Juárez, and a state university. It had many shops—the usual border-town shops, hats, boots, leather goods, eyeglasses, and drugstores; and the usual businesses, dentists and doctors.

  At the east end of town was the industrial park, near enough to the fence to hear the radios crackling in Border Patrol vehicles and see the metal barbecues in the backyards of bungalows in Arizona’s Las Villas subdivision. It always amazed me to see American factories in Mexico, so near the border that a factory owner could puff a big cigar on his property in Mexico and blow smoke into the United States, flicking the ash through the fence.

  Here were Daewoo, TSE Brakes, and the Bose Flextronics factory, which employs two thousand people. The next time you clap on your expensive Bose headphones or fire up your car stereo, you had to consider that they were put together a hundred yards from Arizona by someone living in a hut in the Sonoran Desert, and longing (because the US was easily visible) for something better.

  I wandered toward the center of town and Benito Juárez Park, a large city block of palms, where some children were kicki
ng a ball and old men were conferring. I fell into conversation with the men.

  “I guess some people swim across the river,” I said to one of them, a gap-toothed man who cocked his head at me, as if preparing to deliver a witticism.

  The Colorado River, more a wadi than a trickle here, forms the border at the west side of town.

  “No swimming,” he said, and giggled and showed his gap-toothed smile. “There’s no water in the river.”

  “Then they go over the fence?”

  “Abajo,” he said with a wink. Under it. “Tuneles. They travel in tunnels. There are two or three over there.” He faced east, toward the desert. “They are two kilometers in length. They pay a coyote three thousand dollars and they go.”

  “Or the cartels?”

  He winced at the word. “Mafia, maybe.”

  Tunnels—long ones, short ones, high-tech ones, rabbit holes, rat runs—have been dug wherever the border is fenced. The longest one ever unearthed was recently discovered, running 2,600 feet—half a mile—under the border, from the bottom of an elevator shaft in a house in Tijuana to a fenced-in warehouse on the US side. These resemble the mile-long tunnel that led to El Chapo’s cell in his high-security prison, and they are designed and built by serious and experienced technicians. A year after the gap-toothed man winked and said “Tuneles,” a 600-foot tunnel was found leading from the basement of a defunct KFC restaurant in San Luis, Arizona, to a trapdoor under a bed in a house just across the border in Mexico. This one was not specifically for migrants, but rather a drug tunnel, the drugs hauled by a rope from Mexico to the US.

  “This used to be a mining area,” a man said to me farther along the border. “No more mining. But where do you think the mining engineers are digging now?”