On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  And it’s true: four tunnels have been discovered near Mexican Nogales, leading to the basements of houses in Nogales, Arizona.

  “I don’t want to go to the United States,” Mario, another of the old men, said, and he pointed—four blocks north was the fence. “My family is here. I was born here. This is my home.”

  It was almost impossible for him to contemplate crossing, but for me, San Luis was the simplest border crossing of all—a mere stroll, there and back, no lines, no hassle, then off I went in my car, up the highway, past lush green fields and straw-hatted harvesters bent double over rows of lettuce. And onward, out of the restored and tranquil historic center of Yuma (century-old theater, museum, restaurants), east on Interstate 8, to the checkpoint ten miles away at Wellton (smiling troopers and panting sniffer dogs looking for a whiff of drugs or humans in my trunk), through the glare and heat in the harsh desert at Stoval and Aztec and Theba, to the small town of Gila Bend, and three tacos, and someone to talk to, Lorraine, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

  “I speak my language fluently, but my children aren’t interested,” she said, and pointed south. “Over the border the tribe is more traditional, and more people speak the language.”

  The Tohono O’odham Nation, half in the US, half in Mexico, divided by the border, resists with its slogan, “There is no O’odham word for wall.”

  After Gila Bend the road veers away from the border, two hundred miles through the desert of saguaro cactus and distant gray-blue mountains, looping through Tucson, then bending southerly again to the border town of Nogales—or rather towns, since there are two Nogaleses, divided by the big rusty fence.

  Back when I was driving through the Deep South, I made a detour to the border here, on a whim, and stayed for four days. I saw a simple painted sign on a wooden board, TO MEXICO, propped near the door in the fence, but it was the fence itself that fascinated me. Some masterpieces are unintentional, the result of a freakish accident or an explosive act of sheer weirdness, and the fence that divided Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Mexico, was one of them. This pitiless wall was monumental, a multimillion-dollar symbol in steel that depicts our national obsession with threat and contagion.

  In a lifetime of crossing borders, I found this fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen—more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built six months before to replace a wall made of steel plates, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams was so amazing in its defiant conceit, you either want to see more of it or run in the opposite direction—just the sort of conflicting emotions many people feel when confronted by a peculiar piece of art.

  You could, of course, also go through it, which is what I wanted to do. And there was the entryway, where Morley Avenue in the United States ended. Past the JCPenney and Kory’s Clothing, just ten steps from one country to the other, a door in the wall, the foreign country at the end of a hot, sunlit street.

  After leaving my car at a secure parking lot ($4 a day), I showed my passport to the US border guard, who asked me my plans for the other side. Business?

  “Just curiosity,” I said. When he made a disapproving squint, I added, “Don’t you go over now and then?”

  “Never been there,” he said.

  “It’s ten feet away!”

  “I’m staying here,” he said, his squint now suggesting that I should be doing the same.

  I pushed the turnstile and stepped through the narrow door—no line, no other formalities, into the state of Sonora, Mexico. I was instantly, unmistakably in a foreign land, on bumpier roads, among vaguely distressed buildings and some boarded-up shop fronts, and breathing in the mingled aromas of bakeries, taco stands, and risen dust.

  Glancing back a moment later, I could not see Arizona anymore, only the foreground of Mexico—small children chasing each other, men in sombreros conferring under a striped awning, steaming food carts.

  I treasure border crossings, and the best of them are the ones where I’ve had to walk from one country to another, savoring the equality of being a pedestrian, stepping over the theoretical line that is shown on maps, from Cambodia into Vietnam, from Pakistan into India, from Turkey into the Republic of Georgia. Usually a frontier is a river—the Mekong, the Ussuri, the Zambezi; or a mountain range—the Pyrenees, the Ruwenzoris; or a sudden alteration in topography, a bewildering landscape transformation—hilly wooded Vermont flattening into the plowed fields of Quebec. Just as often a border is a political expedient—irrational yet unremarkable—creating a seamless no-man’s-land, just a width of earth, bounded by fences.

  But this border fence was a visual marvel, something like a stockade, and, as the guard demonstrated, it calls for a decision. Do you go through or stay home? Of course, there was always a fence here. Nogalans on both sides remembered when it was a modest enclosure known casually as La Linea, the line, when the main street was more or less contiguous.

  “We had a parade every spring,” Nicolas Demetrio Kyriakis had told me on that first visit. Nicolas, from an entrepreneurial family of Greek immigrants to Mexico, was a regidor, a Nogales town councilor, and one of the advisers to Nogales’s mayor. “Floats went down the street and into Nogales, Arizona. A coronation was held on a platform on La Linea, and the Fiesta de Mayo Queen was crowned. It was beautiful—both towns celebrated.”

  That was thirty years ago. Back then Nogales, Mexico, was still a destination for servicemen from Fort Huachuca, a US Army post about twenty miles as the crow flies to the northeast. Visitors from Tucson and beyond would pop over for a break from the routine—an opportunity to buy clay pots or sombreros, drink a world-class margarita, and visit a taqueria or sample local street food. And the red-light district on Canal Street was another attraction. In the 1940s, cowboy films were made in the area. Hollywood actors crossed the border to eat and raise mild hell in La Caverna, a well-known club run by Nicolas’s cousins.

  Such was the close bond of the two border towns that when the old, elegant Hotel Olivia on the Mexican side caught fire in the 1960s, and the fire spread to other buildings, the situation becoming desperate, hoses were hoisted over the fence by the fire brigade in Arizona to help the local bomberos put it out, an act of neighborliness that was still fondly remembered by the Mexicans.

  But after 9/11, soldiers from Fort Huachuca stopped visiting, and when an American passport was required by Mexican immigration, the influx of visitors slowed to a trickle. And there was another theme: since the emphasis across America was on scrutinizing aliens, why would anyone wish to become an alien oneself? The repeated news stories of the cartels taking over were a dire warning: cross the Mexican border and risk dying like a dog.

  “Business stagnated after the bombing of the World Trade Center. Things went down,” Juan Cordero, the director of the Department of Economic Development in this part of Sonora, told me. “But it was massage parlors and bars on Canal Street, and curio shops downtown, an old-fashioned business model. Sure, we still had lots of American factories in our industrial area—thousands of people are employed there—but we have just a few tourists.”

  And yet, here I was, a tourist, savoring the satisfaction of having eased myself into another country to enjoy the difference, with the tourist’s presumption that I deserved a good time. And I had the gringo’s instant assurance that my country, and my car, was just behind the humongous wall.

  So what did I do in those four days in Nogales? I had my teeth whitened, the full limpieza y blanqueamiento, for less than what it would have cost across the fence ($54 for cleaning, $250 for whitening). I bought a set of wooden dominos. And I ate.

  Dinner at La Roca, which was just minutes from the fence, was pleasurable for my being in the hands of the sort of knowledgeable, dark-suited old waiters that have disappeared from most of the world’s restaurants. Many have worked at La Roca since it opened—its fortieth anniversary was celebrated that year. Such me
n were the stalwarts at the restaurant at my hotel, too, the Hotel Fray Marcos. At La Roca I had tortilla soup and a Mexican mélange of fresh shrimp from Guaymas, on the Sonoran coast. Elsewhere in town, even the smaller places, such as Leo’s or Zapata’s, offered plates of dried shredded beef, known as mochomos (fire ants), and fish tacos. I found the Nogalans courtly and easy to meet, and so grateful to have a visitor that as a demonstration of neighborliness I was offered a swig of bacanora, a drink made of agave, Sonora’s gift to the world of drinkable rocket fuel—much stronger than tequila.

  At Laser Tech over on Avenida Obregón, Dr. Francisco Vazquez had enlarged his dental practice recently to include a dermatology unit, and his wife (and mother of three), Martha Gonzalez-Vazquez, opened a spa with treatments that included not only massage and steam baths but “ancient rituals” inspired by the Aztecs, and for good measure hired Dr. Angel Minjares, whose specialties are theology and psychology, for “assessments.”

  Their businesses were among the approximately sixty dental practices here, mainly concentrated in a three-block area, all within easy walking distance of the border gate. Most of the patients were American retirees nipping over for the day from Tucson or nearby Green Valley.

  Gerd Roehrig, an older Tucsonian originally from Germany, was seeing Dr. Ernesto Quiroga about an implant. What would have cost him $4,500 in his hometown of Tucson was about a third of that in Nogales. Dr. Quiroga recently invested $150,000 in a 3-D scanning machine for CAT scans.

  “I guess Canal Street could now be called Root Canal Street,” I said to Juan Cordero after my treatment.

  He sighed. “People are worried. They think Nogales is dangerous. You know the expression poner salsa a los tacos?”

  Slather sauce on the tacos—exaggerate.

  Wondering about crime, I asked to meet the secretary for public safety in Sonora and was introduced to Ernesto Munro Palacio, a six-foot-three former pitcher for the Monterrey Sultans and a businessman who, since 2009, had been responsible for security in the state.

  “Prior to 2009 there was very little investment in security,” he said. “But within the past two years Sonora had invested $100 million—in helicopters, armored cars, and surveillance planes—to find the landing strips of organized crime and the marijuana farms.”

  Murders are a problem all over Mexico. But Secretary Munro said that in Nogales the murder rate had declined from 226 in 2010 to 83 in 2011. This number has continued to drop in each succeeding year, now averaging about 50 a year.

  “Ask your people if they know the name of one American who’s been killed in Sonora,” he said. “No tourist has ever been killed in Nogales.”

  I did not know it at the time, but in 2016, a gringo resident in Nogales was shot to death in the course of an armed robbery.

  The Bianchis, a retired couple from Tucson whom I met in a waiting room, were content. “We come here all the time,” Mr. Bianchi said. “I got bridgework. And, hey, people are nice.”

  On that first visit, Nogales seemed to me a border town trying to save itself, and I thought succeeding. Walking in the city, I was struck by the distinct air of foreignness mingled with a pleasing ordinariness—children at play on school playgrounds, shoppers, churchgoers—the pleasures and routines of Mexico. The visible absence of gringos gives the city a greater feel of difference, as do the brightly painted houses, the result of a plan by Nogales’s mayor, José Ángel Hernández, who created an Urban Image Department, which provided free paint for those who wish to spruce up their home. He has also created schools and sports programs to inspire idle youths, as well as teams of street cleaners and urban renewal projects.

  The streets of Nogales were as tidy as any on the American side, and full of surprises. On my way to see the boomtown that lies beyond downtown and the dental clinics, I passed a two-story sculpture of a muscular naked youth spearing a winged reptilian figure sprawling at his feet. It was an unexpected apparition beside an overpass. Officially known as The Defeat of Ignorance (La Derrota de la Ignorancia), the statue, designed by the Spanish sculptor Alfredo Just in the late 1960s, is fondly referred to by Nogalans as mono bichi—the naked guy—in a local phrase that is partly Yaqui. (Nogalans scatter their speech with Yaqui words that are incomprehensible elsewhere: buki for child, yori blanco for white man.)

  I was to discover that the neighborhoods that lie just across the fence are not representative of the town at large, which is a lesson in how to know another country—stay longer, travel deeper. Tourists usually stick close to the fence, which accounts for the density of curio shops, and now the density of dental practices. But that downtown of Nogales is misleading.

  Driving a few miles south with Juan Cordero, I saw how Nogales sprawled, with newly built and modern subdivisions near more modest ones, all comprising Nuevo Nogales. “This is the main economic engine driving Nogales,” Juan said. The majority of the thirty-two thousand people employed in the city worked in the industrial area, in factories making cell-phone components, semiconductors, air ducts for jumbo jets. Most of the names are familiar: Otis Elevator, Black and Decker, Chamberlain garage door openers, Rain Bird sprinklers, General Electric, B/E Aerospace, which makes chairs and tray tables for high-end luxury jets, and much else. Some companies, like Kimberly-Clark and Motorola, have been here since the late 1960s.

  These are skilled workers. Those without education or manufacturing skills, the so-called campesinos, look elsewhere for work, and often cross the border to find it. Many of them in the US without papers are caught, jailed for a period, and bused to the border. This, too, is a revelation from the other side of the high fence.

  Nogales is where they are dumped. Peg Bowden, a retired nurse, brought me to the Comedor, a shelter run by American Jesuits near the Mariposa gate, about a mile west of downtown Nogales. Peg told me she was so shocked by the savage attack on Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, in January 2011, that she decided to do something humane. “I needed to connect with something positive.” She joined a group of Samaritans, “a bunch of renegade senior citizens whose mission is to prevent deaths in the desert,” and she volunteered at the Comedor, working a few days a week, crossing the border from Arizona.

  As a trained nurse she was useful, treating bullet wounds, severe hypothermia, and the effects of starvation and exposure—common among border crossers. “Last week we had a girl who’d been lost in the desert for three days. She was fourteen.”

  It was another day in Nogales, another revelation for me, and by far the most melancholy. A hundred and sixty lost souls, most of them adults, and four small children, were seated on benches at communal tables, eating breakfast in an open-sided shelter at the side of the road.

  Some had been longtime residents in the US. Alejandro was a restaurant worker in North Carolina for thirteen years, Arnulfo a carpenter for eleven.

  “I spent twenty years in Napa picking strawberries,” Claudia, an older woman in a long black dress, told me. “My husband and children are there. I came to Mexico for my father’s funeral”—it was her funeral dress. She couldn’t return to the US, nor did she have a home in Mexico anymore.

  The people staying at the shelter were soft-spoken, humbled, half starved, and hopeless. A woman in her twenties, Rosalba, had spent four days in the desert. She had blistered feet, a deep wound from a cactus thorn, and a severe infection. Some had been caught making their first crossing. Others had been sent home after years in the United States.

  The saddest sight to me was María, a woman in her late forties from Oaxaca. Abandoned, with no money, no prospects, and no hope of making a living in her village, she left her three children in the care of her mother and crossed the border with four other women in the hope of finding work. She had become separated from the others, wandered in the desert for four days, was spotted by a helicopter, arrested, roughed up, jailed for a while, then dumped at the border.

  “It’s like Sophie’s Choice,” Peg Bowden said.

  María accepted her fate, and in my last gl
impse of her, she sat alone at a table, a plate of food before her, eyes tightly shut, hands together, uplifted in prayer.

  It might have been “The Migrant’s Prayer,” “La Oración del Migrante,” which had been found on a scrap of paper in the pocket of a migrant who had died in the desert, mentioned in Marc Silver’s documentary, Who Is Dayani Cristal?, about the death of an unidentified migrant.

  The prayer begins:

  Viajar, hacia Ti Señor, eso es vivir

  Partir es un poco morir . . .

  The journey toward you, Lord, is life.

  To set off is to die a little.

  To arrive is never to arrive, until one is at rest with you.

  You, Lord, experienced migration.

  And ends:

  You yourself became a migrant from heaven to earth.

  I was just a tourist. The fence had hidden all of this—the downtown, the factories, the restaurants, the residential subdivisions, the mall, the migrants, sad stories, happy stories.

  It was here for anyone to discover, and so simple. It was as illuminating to me as any foreign travel I had taken anywhere in the world. In some ways, being so near home and taking less effort, it seemed odder, freighted with greater significance, this wider world at the end of Morley Avenue, just behind the fence.

  Those four days I’d spent on the other side of the fence in Nogales were unforgettable. I vowed to return, to travel along the whole border and then to go deeper into Mexico. It was the experience of talking to the migrants that did it—their telling me where they had come from and where they were going. Now I was back.

  BIENVENIDOS MIGRANTES DEPORTADOS Y EN TRANSITO was the sign on a small building at the western edge of Nogales, a short walk from the border: Welcome Migrants, Deportees, and Those in Transit. This building was the one Peg Bowden had brought me to, known locally as El Comedor—the Eating Place—run by the Kino Border Initiative, Jesuits and volunteers, offering humanitarian aid to migrants as well as a shelter for women and children. It was more full of desperate and perplexed people than I had seen on my earlier visit.