by Pete Hamill
On this day, they smoke cigarettes. They make small jokes. They munch on tacos prepared by a flat-faced, pig-tailed Indian woman whose stand is parked by the roadside. They sip soda. And some of them gaze across the arid scrub and sandy chaparral at the blurred white buildings of the U.S. town of San Ysidro. They wait patiently and do not hide. And if you pull over, and buy a soda from the woman, and speak some Spanish, they will talk.
“I tried last night,” says the young man named Jeronimo Vasquez, who wears a Chicago Bears T-shirt under a denim jacket. “But it was too dangerous, too many helicopters last night, too much light….” He looks out at the open stretch of gnarled land, past the light towers, at the distant white buildings. “Maybe tonight we will go to Zapata Canyon….” He is from Oaxaca, he says, deep in the hungry Mexican south. He has been to the United States three times, working in the fields; it is now Tuesday, and he starts a job near Stockton on the following Monday, picker’s work arranged by his cousin. “I have much time. …”
Abruptly, he turns away to watch some action. Two young men are running across the dried scrub on the U.S. side, kicking up little clouds of white dust, while a Border Patrol car goes after them. The young men dodge, circle, running the broken field, and suddenly stand very still as the car draws close. They are immediately added to the cold statistics of border apprehensions. But they are really mere sacrifices; over on the left, three other men run low and hunched, like infantrymen in a fire fight. “Corre, corre,” Jeronimo Vasquez whispers. “Run, run.…” They do. And when they vanish into some distant scrub, he clenches a fist like a triumphant sports fan. He is not alone. All the others cheer, as does the woman selling tacos, and on the steep hill above the road, a man stands before a tar-paper shack, waves a Mexican flag, and shouts: “Goll” And everyone laughs.
We’ve all read articles about the 1,950-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico, seen documentaries, heard the bellowing rhetoric of the C-Span politicians enraged at the border’s weakness; but until you stand beside it, the border is an abstraction. Up close, you see immediately that the border is at once a concrete place with holes in the fence, and a game, a joke, an affront, a wish, a mere line etched by a draftsman on a map. No wonder George Bush gave up on interdiction as a tactic in the War on Drugs; there are literally hundreds of Ho Chi Minh trails leading into the United States from the south (and others from Canada, of course, and the sea). On some parts of the Mexican border there is one border patrolman for every twenty-six miles; it doesn’t require a smuggling genius to figure out how to get twenty tons of cocaine to a Los Angeles warehouse. To fill in the gaps, to guard all the other U.S. borders, would require millions of armed guards, many billions of dollars. And somehow, Jeronimo Vasquez would still appear on a Monday morning in Stockton.
Those young men beside the ruined fence — not the narcotraficantes — are the most typical members of the peaceful invasion. Nobody knows how many come across each year, although in 1988 920,000 were stopped, arrested, and sent back to Mexico by the border wardens. Thousands more make it. Some are described by the outnumbered and overwhelmed immigration police as OTMs (Other Than Mexican, which is to say, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans fleeing the war zones, and South Americans and Asians fleeing poverty). Some, like Jeronimo Vasquez, are seasonal migrants; they come for a few months, earn money, and return to families in Mexico; others come to stay.
“When you see a woman crossing,” says Jeronimo Vasquez, “you know she’s going to stay. It means she has a husband on the other side, maybe even children. She’s not going back. Most of the women are from Salvador, not so many Mexicans. …”
Tijuana is one of their major staging grounds. In 1940 it was a town of seventeen thousand citizens, many of whom were employed in providing pleasure for visiting Americans. The clenched, bluenosed forces of American puritanism gave the town its function. In 1915 California banned horse racing; dance halls and prostitution were made illegal in 1917; and in 1920 Prohibition became the law of the land. So thousands of Americans began crossing the border to do what they could not do at home: shoot crap, bet on horses, get drunk, and get laid.
Movie stars came down from Hollywood with people to whom they weren’t married. Gangsters traveled from as far away as Chicago and New York. Women with money had abortions at the Paris Clinic. Sailors arrived from San Diego to lose their virgin status, get their first doses of the clap, and too often to spend nights in the Tijuana jail. The Casino of Agua Caliente was erected in 1928, a glorious architectural mixture of the Alhambra and a Florentine villa, complete with gambling, drinking, a nightclub, big bands, tennis, golf, a swimming pool, and fancy restaurants. Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey were among the clients, and a Mexican teenager named Margarita Cansino did a dance act with her father in its nightclub before changing her name to Rita Hayworth. The casino was closed in 1935 by the Mexican president, and only one of its old towers still remains. But sin did not depart with the gamblers or the end of Prohibition. The town boomed during the war, and thousands of Americans still remember the bizarre sex shows and rampant prostitution of the era and the availability of something called marijuana. Today the run-down cantinas and whorehouses of the Zona Norte are like a living museum of Tijuana’s gaudy past.
“It’s very dangerous here for women,” Jeronimo Vasquez said. “The coyotes tell them they will take them across, for money. If they don’t have enough money, they talk them into becoming putas for a week or a month. And they never get out. …”
Although commercial sex and good marijuana are still available in Tijuana, sin, alas, is no longer the city’s major industry. Today the population is more than one million. City and suburbs are crowded with maquiladora plants, assembling foreign goods for export to the United States. These factories pay the highest wages in Mexico (although still quite low by U.S. standards) and attract workers from all over the republic. Among permanent residents, unemployment is very low.
But it’s said that at any given time, one third of the people in Tijuana are transients, waiting to cross to el otro lado. A whole subculture that feeds off this traffic can be seen around the Tijuana bus station: coyotes (guides) who for a fee will bring them across; enganchadores (labor contractors) who promise jobs; roominghouse operators; hustlers; crooked cops prepared to extort money from the non-Mexicans. The prospective migrants are not simply field hands, making the hazardous passage to the valleys of California to do work that even the most poverty-ravaged Americans will not do. Mexico is also experiencing a “skill drain.” As soon as a young Mexican acquires a skill or craft — carpentry, wood finishing, auto repair — he has the option of departing for the north. The bags held by some of the young men with Jeronimo Vasquez contained tools. And since the economic collapse of 1982 hammered every citizen of Mexico, millions have exercised the option. The destinations of these young skilled Mexicans aren’t limited to the sweatshops of Los Angeles or the broiling fields of the Imperial Valley; increasingly the migrants settle in the cities of the North and East. In New York, I’ve met Mexicans from as far away as Chiapas, the impoverished state that borders Guatemala.
Such men are more likely to stay permanently in the United States than are the migrant agricultural laborers like Jeronimo Vasquez. The skilled workers and craftsmen buy documents that make them seem legal. They establish families. They learn English. They pay taxes and use services. Many of them applied for amnesty under the terms of the Simpson-Rodino Act; the new arrivals are not eligible, but they are still coming.
I’m one of those who believe this is a good thing. The energy of the Mexican immigrant, his capacity for work, has become essential to this country. While Mexicans, legal and illegal, work in fields, wash dishes, grind away in sweatshops, clean bedpans, and mow lawns (and fix transmissions, polish wood, build bookcases), millions of American citizens would rather sit on stoops and wait for welfare checks. If every Mexican in this country went home next week, Americans would starve. The lettuce on yo
ur plate in that restaurant got there because a Mexican bent low in the sun and pulled it from the earth. Nothing, in fact, is more bizarre than the stereotype of the “lazy” Mexican, leaning against the wall with his sombrero pulled over his face. I’ve been traveling to Mexico for more than thirty years; the only such Mexicans I’ve ever seen turned out to be suffering from malnutrition.
But the great migration from Mexico is certainly altering the United States, just as the migration of Eastern European Jews and southern Italians changed the nation at the beginning of the century and the arrival of Irish Catholics changed it a half century earlier. Every immigrant brings with him an entire culture, a dense mixture of beliefs, assumptions, and nostalgias about family, manhood, sex, laughter, music, food, religion. His myths are not American myths. In this respect, the Mexican immigrant is no different from the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Jews. The ideological descendants of the Know-Nothings and other “nativist” types are, of course, alarmed. They worry about the Browning of America. They talk about the high birthrate of the Latino arrivals, their supposed refusal to learn English, their divided loyalties.
Much of this is racist nonsense, based on the assumption that Mexicans are inherently “inferior” to people who look like Michael J. Fox. But it also ignores the wider context. The Mexican migration to the United States is another part of the vast demographic tide that has swept most of the world in this century: the journey from the countryside to the city, from field to factory, from south to north — and from illiteracy to the book. But there is one huge irony attached to the Mexican migration. These people are moving in the largest numbers into precisely those states that the United States took at gunpoint in the Mexican War of 1846-48: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, and Utah, along with parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma. In a way, those young men crossing into San Ysidro and Chula Vista each night are entering the lost provinces of Old Mexico, and some Mexican intellectuals even refer sardonically to this great movement as La Reconquista — the Reconquest. It certainly is a wonderful turn on the old doctrine of manifest destiny, which John L. O’Sullivan, the New York journalist who coined the phrase in 1845, said wasour right “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
The yearly multiplying millions of Mexico will continue moving north unless one of two things happens: the U.S. economy totally collapses, or the Mexican economy expands dramatically. Since neither is likely to happen, the United States of the twenty-first century is certain to be browner, and speak more Spanish, and continue to see its own culture transformed. The Know-Nothings are, of course, enraged at this great demographic shift and are demanding that Washington seal the borders. As always with fanatics and paranoids, they have no sense of irony. They were probably among those flag-waving patriots who were filled with a sense of triumph when free men danced on the moral ruins of the Berlin Wall last November; they see no inconsistency in the demand for a new Great Wall, between us and Mexico.
The addled talk goes on, and in the hills of Tijuana, young men like Jeronimo Vasquez continue to wait for the chance to sprint across the midnight scrub in pursuit of the golden promise of the other side. Corre, hombre, corre.…
ESQUIRE,
February 1990
PART IV
OUT THERE
The work, and my own curiosity, carried me to many places. I’ve paid rent in Rome and Barcelona and Dublin. I’ve written pieces from hotel rooms in Paris and Belfast, Brussels and Managua, Helsinki and Havana and East Berlin. I’ve been to Saigon and Panama, to Vienna and Tangier. Over the years, pages of my passports grew lacy with the rubber-stamped graffiti of visas and departures. I wanted it that way; the world was out there and I wanted to see it. In 1967, on a long, comical diplomatic journey with Lyndon Baines Johnson to Asia, we stopped for fuel in the middle of the Pacific and I wrote a story in twenty minutes just to get the dateline into my resume: Pago Pago. It was a long way from Brooklyn.
For almost ten years, Vietnam was the foreign place above all others for most Americans. I spent very little time there, but the presence of the war informed almost everything I wrote. After 1973 -the ominous year of Watergate and OPEC and the beginning of the steady decline of the American economy — the war was lost. It should have been the task of statesmen to arrange its conclusion with some dignity. They could not bring it off.
There were other wars too: a long, grieving drizzle of a war in Northern Ireland; a dirty little war in Nicaragua; the horrendous civil war in Lebanon. In Belfast and Beirut, the killing was entangled with the dark certainties of religion. In Nicaragua, a similar impulse was in play: adepts of the Marxist faith fought against the hired acolytes of the anti-Communist faith, Sandinista against Contra, sometimes brother against brother. The warring creeds were everywhere in those places, each driven by visions of Utopia, each prepared to kill or die to bring them into existence. In all three parts of the world, the common result was more human misery. On my visits, I tried to understand the aims of the various players, but most often I found myself in agreement with E. M. Forster’s famous remark: “I do not believe in belief.”
In 1989, the Cold War finally ended in a kind of mutual exhaustion. Mikhail Gorbachev still claimed to believe in the socialist ideal; but he was also a man of sanity, lucidity, and common sense. More than any other public figure on the planet, he acknowledged, at last, that something had to change. In a major way. He knew that the Soviet Union was a gigantic, bankrupt lie, sick with poverty, corruption, and the memory of terror. Only terror could keep it going. The Americans had suffered, too, in the long ideological struggle with the Communists. More than a hundred thousand Americans had been killed in Korea and Vietnam. American cities were a shambles. The United States had been transformed from the largest creditor nation in the world to the world’s largest debtor. Ideologues on both sides resisted change, but after Vietnam, most Americans wanted nothing to do with dying over abstractions. Gorbachev made it possible for everybody to surrender the chilly certitudes of belief. Of all the public men of my time, only he changed the world.
I saw some of the great change in the streets and squares of Prague in 1989. Those defiant days and boisterous nights made up the most thrilling story I’d ever covered. In a matter of days, the brave men and women of Civic Action, led by a writer named Vaclav Havel, brought down the Communist regime. They did it by speaking truth to power. They did it with cartoons and jokes and music. They did it by placing their bodies in the line of fire and daring their opponents to shoot. The Communists did not shoot. They did not shoot because Mikhail Gorbachev had made clear that he would not maintain Czech communism with Russian tanks. At the end, the Czech Communists looked like archbishops who had ceased to believe in God.
The world soon learned that the end of the Cold War did not bring an end to man’s invincible capacity for folly. From Bosnia to the Persian Gulf, human beings still killed each other over belief. But nations no longer wave hydrogen bombs at each other. Missiles are no longer aimed at the homes of distant strangers. In a lot of places, from South Africa to South America, human beings are free at last. No small thing. And I’m glad I had a ticket to the show.
VIETNAM, VIETNAM
Sometimes, in odd places, it all comes back. You are walking a summer beach, stepping around oiled bodies, hearing only the steady growl of the sea. Suddenly, from over the horizon, you hear the phwuk-phwuk-phwuk of rotor blades and for a frozen instant you prepare to fall to the sand. Then the Coast Guard chopper moves by, its pilot peering down at the swimmers, but your mind is stained with old images. Or you are strolling the sidewalks of a northern city, heading toward the theater or a parking lot or some dismal appointment, eyes glazed by the anonymous motion of the street. A door opens, an odor drifts from a restaurant; it’s ngoc nam sauce, surely, and yes, the sign tells you this is a Vietnamese restaurant, and you hurry on, pursued by a ghost. Don’t come back, the ghost whispers: I’ll be c
rouched against the wall, grinning, my teeth stained black from betel root.
Vietnam.
Ten years have passed since the North Vietnamese T-54 tanks rolled down Thong Nhut Boulevard in Saigon to breach the gates of the presidential palace. Ten years since the last eleven marines climbed into a CH-53 helicopter on the roof of the United States Embassy and flew away from the ruined country, while thousands of compromised Vietnamese pleaded in vain for evacuation and thousands of others took to the sea. Ten years since the end of the war.
Across those ten years, a sort of institutionalized amnesia became the order of the day, as if by tribal consent we had decided as Americans to deal with Vietnam by forgetting it. Vietnam belonged to the parents, lovers, wives, and children of the 58,022 dead, to the maimed men hidden away in veterans’ hospitals, to the bearded young man you would see from time to time in any American town, with a leg gone as permanently as his youth. Vietnam? That was in another country, man, and besides, the wench was dead.
There was no large-scale congressional inquiry into the war, no major attempt to divine its bitter lessons. We had the assorted felonies of Watergate to entertain us, the injured economy to distract us, the Iranian hostage crisis to infuriate us. The war had shaken American society to its core, eroding authority, splitting families, setting generation against generation, forcing citizens to define basic beliefs.
During the war, thousands of draft-age Americans refused to serve in the armed forces, and left in unprecedented numbers for exile in Canada or Sweden, some never to return. Demonstrations grew in sound and fury, at first exuberant, then bitter, as protests increasingly ended with tear gas, mass arrests, violence, even death. Four were killed at Kent State in 1970 as Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia. Two died at Jackson State. There were others, their brains scrambled on acid, ruined with speed. Kids toppled over in crowded fields as the chants rose: Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today? Some walked off rooftops in the Haight or on the Lower East Side, while others chanted, Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, the N.L.R is gonna win. The roads of America in those years seemed crowded with the young — guitar armies in advance and retreat, all of them hating the war, some of them hating America. And when they paused, stopped, turned down the volume on the Stones or the Dead, and looked at the news, they could see veterans home from ‘Nam, bearded and wild, unlike the neat, proud, dusty members of the American Legion, and they were hurling their medals over the White House fence. They could see body bags arriving at military airports. They could see the war going on and on and on.