On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  “Any jumpers lately?”

  “A few days ago, on my shift, forty guys were caught—more than usual,” he said. “I personally have caught about twenty. I estimate about a hundred a week jump in this sector”—he meant this stretch that abuts the town of Nogales, Arizona—“but it used to be thousands.”

  “How do you catch them?”

  “It’s tough—catching them is really tough,” he said. “They run. They’re young, some are carrying bundles of drugs. They watch the fence carefully before they jump.” He gestured to the hill of multicolored huts and bungalows that looms over the Mexican town. “We’re being watched right now from over there.”

  The Border Patrol had a demanding job, driving day and night along the bumpy service road that paralleled the frontier, doing sentry duty at checkpoints, engaging in foot chases with desperate migrants. But perhaps the pressure of the job had taken a toll, because for years the officers also had a reputation for vindictiveness: shooting at unarmed fence jumpers, sometimes killing them; roughing up suspects; separating children from their weeping mothers; and harassing the humanitarian organizations that offered medical treatment to wounded migrants. I’d heard that they also vandalized the efforts of the Samaritans of No Más Muertes, the ones who set water stations in the desert for desperately thirsty migrants.

  From Nogales I drove east, past Tombstone and the horse country of Bisbee, through the dry rocky hills and pretty pastels of low woodland, to the border town of Douglas—hot, flat, horizontal, on a grid of streets—which faced another rusty fence and the Mexican town of Agua Prieta.

  In Nogales, Peg Bowden had given me the name of an activist nun based in Douglas, Sister Judy Bourg, whom I had hoped to meet. A member of the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame, Sister Judy and her companions—both nuns and lay people—placed water bottles and food in the desert for migrants. They also participated in the Healing Our Borders vigil, a weekly ritual that has been observed for the past seventeen years. By carrying crosses that bear the names of the dead, the participants in the ritual honor the thousands of migrants who have died crossing the border. Many of the crosses have no names, but are marked DESCONOCIDO—Unknown. In a public statement, Sister Judy had said, “It’s prayer, not protest.”

  Though Sister Judy was not in Douglas that day, I met a border activist who was—Mark Adams, a friend of hers, who also took part in the vigils. “Let’s take a walk,” he said soon after we met, and we strolled across the frontier, past the border guards, to the little town of Agua Prieta, with friendly nods and greetings from the immigration officers on both sides.

  Douglas had prospered as a town with one local industry, the smelting firm and foundry of Phelps Dodge. But that was gone. The industries were just over the border in Agua Prieta now, twenty-five factories in the small dusty town, making everything from Velcro to seat belts and window blinds.

  “The fence doesn’t define us,” Mark Adams said. After eighteen years on the border heading Frontera de Cristo and its outreach programs (health, education, cultural), he said he’d seen more similarities on the border than differences. Neither the US nor the Mexican government provided services here, so the work of welfare was left to missionaries, as in the third world. Mark said, “It’s simple, really. Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God.”

  It was Mark’s contention that Mexican immigration is “net zero,” neither a surplus nor a deficit—a wash. The growth now was from Central America, thousands of people fleeing violence. And what the US authorities call Special Interest Aliens—Africans, Indians, Pakistanis—who crowd the detention cells up and down the border.

  A concert would be held the following day, Mark told me, half the choir on the Mexican side of the fence, the other half in the US, singing together, an event, he said, to promote unity, growth, and peace. Perhaps it was working; side by side, Douglas (a town that had lost its industries) and Agua Prieta (a town that had gained many factories) stood out as the safest and most serene towns I saw in the whole of my traverse of the border.

  On the back road from Douglas to Las Cruces I passed through the small ranching town of Animas (pop. 237), a suggestive name and a place conspicuously mentioned in Valeria Luiselli’s short but passionate nonfiction book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. “As we approach Animas, we also begin to see fleeting herds of Border Patrol cars like ominous white stallions racing toward the horizon.”

  Luiselli and her family feel intimidated by this presence of authority, though in the book the Luisellis don’t appear to get very close to the border, nor do they see that such vehicles are a feature of the whole frontier. (I had seen Border Patrol vehicles searching for migrants as far as eighty miles north of the border, such as at a checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas.) Animas is forty miles from the nearest border town, Antelope Wells. Along much of the border is an unpaved service road, specifically for the use of these vehicles and closed to the public. Luiselli seems surprised that the border is patrolled by officialdom, usually armed, often in vehicles. But most national boundaries are guarded this way, including the border between Luiselli’s native Mexico and Guatemala, notorious for the ferocity of policing on both sides.

  She writes that in the summer of 2014 the Luisellis—Valeria, her husband, and two children, Mexican nationals—took a road trip from New York City to the Southwest. For the three previous years, the family had lived in the city, awaiting green cards as “nonresident aliens” (a designation Valeria objected to, but standard in many countries: I carried an Alien Identity Card for years in Britain). That road trip, and Luiselli’s work as a volunteer interpreter at an immigration court in New York City, helping migrants navigate the bureaucratic twists and turns—the anfractuosities in the system—resulted in Tell Me How It Ends.

  The family trip is briefly sketched. They pass through New Mexico and Arizona but don’t cross the border, which seems odd, since as Mexican citizens, with valid passports and US visas, it would have been a simple back-and-forth, and they would have seen (as I did) the good relations, the outreach, and the spirited, twinned communities (south of where they were in Animas) of Douglas and Agua Prieta. Now and then, the Luisellis, stopped by Border Patrol officials, smile, show their papers, and move on. Within a few pages, the trip is over and they are back home in New York. Soon, all but Valeria have green cards. Awaiting her green card, preoccupied with her status as a migrant, Valeria is motivated to become a volunteer translator at the immigration court. Her experience working with undocumented migrants—most of them children—is what informs her short but powerful (and occasionally contradictory) book.

  The forty questions of the title are from the “intake questionnaire” used in the court, questions that Luiselli was employed to ask, noting the answers. Most of the questions are simple and direct, such as “Why did you come to the United States?” and “When did you enter the United States?” and “Did you go to school in your country?”

  But there are questions that evoke painful memories, like “Did anything happen on your trip to the US that scared you or hurt you?”

  These elicit horror stories. Luiselli writes that so many of the women and girls who get to the border are raped on the way (she says 80 percent of them are sexually assaulted), they begin taking contraceptive pills before they set out. She mentions that in this inquisition, the majority of her cases have arrived from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—fleeing violence, with stories of privation, of gang brutality, of becoming lost in the desert, of abandonment and victimization. The migrants come in search of parents and relatives, for refuge, to be safe, to find a life—and some discover the streets of New York City are just as dangerous as those of Tegucigalpa.

  On their trip through Mexico, in vans or riding the Beast, migrants are brutalized, abducted, or forced to work on Mexican farms, as virtual slaves. In the past decade, 120,000 migrants have disappeared en route, murdered or dead and lost, succumbing to thirst or starvation.

  Luiselli emphasiz
es an anomaly I discovered in Nogales, that Mexican child migrants are an exception from the child asylum seekers from Central American countries. Young Mexicans are treated differently, with less sympathy or patience, than all others. If they cannot prove they are victims of trafficking or persecution, they can be seized and immediately, forcibly deported (“voluntary return,” in the official euphemism) without any formal immigration proceedings.

  The book achieves greater power, and some of its muddle, because Luiselli herself is living a migration story of her own, desiring—like the children—to live in the United States. “Why did you come?” is a pretty simple question for an underprivileged child fleeing endangerment or hunger or a broken family. But what about an articulate, intelligent, well-off, widely traveled university-educated, prizewinning writer from a good family in Mexico—someone like the privileged Valeria Luiselli? She is clearly pained by this knowledge, and says she doesn’t have the answer. Here she describes the process of a foreigner’s contemplating residence in the US:

  “Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting. I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete.”

  In a word, home, the place you left behind—from the heights of the imperial city now looking like wreckage, a place you never want to see again.

  “And once you’re here,” she writes, “you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society.”

  This is eloquent but tentative, self-deceiving, and hedging the bet. She speaks about “staying” and not taking the next step, what should be the triumph of a migrant, becoming an American citizen. Her sidestepping the word “citizenship” is telling, and I think shows how nebulous some migrants regard this desire for transformation. Even for this bright woman the commitment is vaguely expressed. And her saying “to stay is an end in itself and not a means” is not entirely true, since migrants I met—many Mexicans—wished only to get a job, save some money, and return home. And you could probably say the same about the large number of British writers, Irish musicians, Nigerian novelists, Indian techies, French intellectuals, Russian hockey players, and Brazilian surfers who come to the States—like the despised Mexican—for the space and spontaneity of a convenient and roomy country, and an opportunity to enrich themselves.

  On my way to El Paso, I stopped in Las Cruces and talked to Molly Molloy, a librarian at the University of New Mexico. Born in swampy southwestern Louisiana, she said she was happier here in the high desert, and she made it her mission to keep a chronicle, detailing crimes and murders on the border.

  “It was always gritty and dangerous, but not like it is now,” she told me over a meal in the township of Mesilla—as Mexican-looking a town as any in Mexico, with an old plaza and a nineteenth-century church, and of course Mesilla had been an important Mexican pueblo that was swallowed by the Gadsden Purchase. “The standard story is that in Juárez it was one cartel fighting another. But that’s not the truth.”

  In her scrupulously maintained database of statistics and eyewitness accounts of violence in Juárez, Molly had concluded that the murder rate rose when, in 2008, eight thousand Mexican federal troops were sent to the city. Within days, the murders, abductions, and lynchings increased, reaching their peak in 2010. “It was a kind of terror,” Molly said. “The troops were responsible for most of the killings. The murders declined when the troops left.”

  She remembered, like most people, when a border crossing had been a fairly casual affair, but that ended with Operation Hold the Line in 1993 in the El Paso sector.

  “The idea was to put a huge number of Border Patrol agents in urban areas,” Molly said. “They closed the border crossings to pedestrians without papers”—the shoppers, the cross-border workers, the part-timers—“and this stimulated illegal immigration.”

  And President Clinton’s success in concluding the NAFTA accord meant that American manufacturing slid into Mexico, crossing the border but not descending very far. In fact, it seemed to be a rule that these companies were determined to stay within hailing distance of the United States, a few minutes’ drive for their products to be shipped over the border. Most American factories in Mexico were visible from the US. And, of course, NAFTA went into effect in January 1994 with Clintonian fanfare about creating jobs. But the majority of jobs were created in Mexico.

  “The first effect of NAFTA was the emigration of people from southern Mexico who had lost their livelihoods, both farmers and small manufacturers,” Molly said, echoing what I had heard in Nogales. “Some of those people ended up in the maquiladoras, and others tried to cross any way they could.”

  During our dinner in Mesilla, Molly became more and more dispirited as she described the mayhem on the border, the bad government in Mexico, and the desperation of migrants.

  “I don’t go there now, I don’t cross,” she said. “It’s—what’s the word?—it’s so cruel.”

  On my way to El Paso the next day, I passed through a checkpoint and stopped to allow a Border Patrol officer to ask me questions, and for his dog, straining on its leash, to sniff the perimeter of my car.

  “How’s business?” I asked the man.

  “We’ve got eight on the bench inside,” he said, tugging at the leash.

  “Did you find them in vehicles?”

  “Some from trucks and cars. Some from the fields. We get ten or twelve a day.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “We process them according to various protocols. You’re good to go,” he said with a hint of impatience.

  “One more question?”

  “You can head on out now, sir,” he said, his dog seeming to pick up his agitation and slavering at me.

  From the window of my motel just off the interstate on the western outskirts of El Paso, I saw a garage advertising oil changes, no appointment necessary. While waiting for my car to be serviced, I wandered over to a used car lot to kill time.

  “This car is perfect for you,” I heard, a salesman’s tone of encouragement. “You need this car.”

  This was José, a man of about fifty, who was soon accompanied by a colleague, Luis. When I convinced them that I did not need another car, and that the oil in mine was being changed next door, we talked about the border.

  “Juárez was always richer than El Paso,” José said. “And much bigger. Juárez made El Paso rich. But it’s all different now.”

  “There were ten murders the other day in Juárez,” Luis said casually.

  With a shrug and a yawn, José said, “It’s getting worse.”

  “Cartel killings?” I said.

  “Government killings. The PRI. They’re behind it all.” He meant the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the entrenched ruling party of Mexico, which was defeated a year later by Andrés Obrador’s National Regeneration Movement, MORENA.

  And after listing the horrors of Ciudad Juárez, each man told me that he lived across the border, in various colonias of the city. Juárez might be dangerous, but housing was much cheaper than in El Paso, food was a bargain, and commuting from one city to the other every day was very simple. Thousands of Mexicans, all with visas or US passports, crossed the border daily to work or shop in El Paso.

  Luis, with American nationality and a valid passport, had lived and worked in various border states. He had the confrontational manner of a tease, the familiarity of a salesman, and a certainty he put down to his intransigence. “I can’t help it. I’m stubborn. God made me that way. Ha!”

  “Give me an example,” I said.

  “Sure. The other day in Ju
árez I’m in traffic. I look at my cell phone and—beep!—a policeman pull me over. ‘You’re talking on your cell phone.’ I say, ‘Not talking. Looking!’ He say to me, ‘Give me ten dollars.’ I say, ‘What for?’ ‘Talking on phone! Ten dollars! Or I take your license.’ I say, ‘I not give you ten dollars. Not even five dollars.’ He say, ‘Give me your license!’ I give him my license—Arizona license. I say, ‘Now I go online and get another one.’”

  This was indeed an illustration of stubbornness, because to get a duplicate license he would have to pay $25.

  “I refuse to give the police a mordida.” A bribe.

  “Mexican police,” José said. “Always problems.”

  “You’re lucky,” Luis said. “You’re a gringo. You can tell them anything.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  Luis became animated, shortening his neck, gesticulating. “You have to be an actor with the Mexican police. He say, ‘Give me money.’ You say, ‘I’m a German. I don’t speak English.’ Play dumb! Be a great actor! Tell them bullshit stories. Get a Golden Globe! Then the police can’t touch you.”

  “You’re the only gringo who’s come over the bridge today,” said Julián Cardona, a lean and sardonic journalist in Ciudad Juárez, who’d been quoted (in More or Less Dead by Alice Driver) as saying, “The level of sadism [in Mexico] is overwhelming, and it is largely a reflection of the impunity in the country.”

  Julián, in his mid-fifties, proved to be an astute observer of life in Juárez, where he has spent his whole working life reporting on its excesses. The excesses have included many beheadings, bodies strung up on telephone poles, and corpses dumped in the streets.

  I may have been the only gringo who crossed the bridge to Juárez that day, but there were thousands of Mexicans hurrying to the US side, who then returned to Mexico when their work was done. Many children in Nogales, Mexico, go to school in Nogales, Arizona. “Yes, I speak English,” I often heard along the border. “I was educated over the border.”