June 6, in the Year of Lord 2015
We drive up over the train tracks, passing four Border Patrol agents on horseback and a sign—WARNING: ENTERING BORDER PATROL FREE FIRE ZONE. More agents are in SUVs along the fence on either side of the vigil, one every fifty or so yards. Just one federale is on the other side of the fence. We’re here on the fifth anniversary of the death of Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, a fifteen-year-old Mexican boy killed for allegedly throwing rocks, shot twice by Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa, Jr., the two bullets fired from American soil, tearing over the Rio Grande, hitting and settling into Sergio’s back flesh and skull bone under the Paso del Norte bridge in Juárez. Our Border Patrol shoots brass rounds. Sometimes they shoot through the steel fence. Last week an American judge ruled that Sergio’s family has no right to sue his killer in our courts. Our constitution, the judge said, does not apply to foreigners on foreign soil. Because the bullets crossed twenty feet over an imaginary line called the border, it is as if they came from nowhere.
In a few years the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this case on appeal, but will decide to return it to lower courts, in part over concerns about the implications for modern warfare. Justice Breyer will ask the attorneys for Sergio’s family, Are we, in deciding for you, deciding as well that anyone who suffers a drone strike can come to New York and bring a law case?… What words do we write so that this opinion doesn’t affect a drone strike?
Today the Border Patrol has warned us that they don’t want to see anyone hanging on the fence from the American side and they definitely don’t want to see us passing anything through the fence. Here by Anapra at the southeastern corner of New Mexico, away from the big cities, there is no wall. There is only a chain-link fence. But it is enough to pry wide-open the wound of la Frontera. Last year Shena Gutierrez, whose husband was also shot by Border Patrol, was manhandled and arrested at this vigil. Today she speaks to a hundred or so people gathered on both sides of the fence, shouts against complacency. Some Mexican media are up on ladders, hanging over the fence to snap her photo. Sergio’s mother, Maria Guadalupe, takes the bullhorn on the Mexican side and weeps into it, says over and over that she cannot understand how her son was shot in the back. Through the fence, through a heart made of paper doves stuck into the chain links, I watch her fill the bullhorn with tears. Shot in his back, she says. In his back.
As Father Peter from Casa Tabor leads the crowd in prayer, I walk to the vigil’s edge, talk to three boys on the Mexican side, hanging on the fence in front of a truck draped in a banner: WHO PROFITS FROM WAR. They are not much younger than Sergio was when he died. We do some high fives through the fence. They ask if I want to take their picture. I tell them it will be hard to get their faces through the chain links. I take a picture and show them how something imaginary made manifest with steel can make everything blurry. Through the fence the littlest boy hands me a rock, innocently maybe, or maybe to see what happens when a white man throws it. In solidarity until the final consequences, someone shouts into the bullhorn. Then the bullhorn is held up to a woman playing a wood flute and we disperse to the electronically amplified sound of wind through reed.
We cross over and head to Santa Margarita, me and Bemis and two volunteers he’s brought to help with a NADA training tomorrow. Bemis is in high spirits, despite the lingering somberness of the vigil. Interest from pastoral workers across a lot of parishes in south Juárez has grown, he says. The needles are taking root. The training’s gonna be packed. Also, Bemis has left The Ruined of Chaparral and has himself a new bachelor pad. We clunk through Juárez at an unusually relaxed pace.
Today is the weekly church clinic and about fifteen people get needled. I talk for a while with Alfonso Garcia, a doctor who visits the clinic regularly, to give people pills when the needles aren’t enough. He has a goatee down past his chest and runs his hand through it and then rubs the ostrich skin of his boots and then back to the goatee. He’s never been needled but he doesn’t see any harm in it. He mimes popping pills to show me how he thinks people really get healed. But then he also keeps saying, Faith before medicine. He says, This is why the church is good for a clinic. You go to God first. From the air in front of him he grabs a fistful of faith and with the other hand he grabs something else. I ask him what’s in that other hand. He smiles and mimes popping more pills.
We stay the night with Josefina, a Santa Margarita parishioner and one of Bemis’s NADA students. She lives not far from the chapel with her husband and their children and their children’s children, an overfull house stuffed more tonight. Over dinner there is much debate about what does and does not require invocation of the divine. About ten of us are eating Josefina’s enchiladas, all folks connected in some way to the NADA clinic at Santa Margarita. I guess I started the commotion when I asked Sister Maria Esther what the needles have got to do with her faith. She tells a long story about a priest once destroying her cabinet of herbal remedies, storming in and ripping the flowers apart and smashing drawers and shouting different stuff about blasphemy. She thinks the priests get jealous when people come to the nuns for healing. Even though Reiki is now banned, she still practices it occasionally, along with the needles Bemis taught her and those herbal remedies she learned working for years with the indigenous Tarahumara. She’ll try anything when people are sick. The problem with Reiki, she says, is that too many people were claiming it could make them levitate, and levitation scares the Church. She doesn’t think anyone has such silly ideas about the needles. Carli, one of the American volunteers, says of course these old priests who have had for so many centuries the power of healing in their hands, in their hands alone, would be scared if suddenly anyone could call on the divine energy of the universe and channel it through his own hands and use it to heal. And how much more threatening is it, she suggests, when all these new healers are women. All the women laugh and agree that the problem is men. But not everyone agrees with Carli when she doubles down and says acupuncture is the same as Reiki, that the invocation of divine energy is the same, but that it is simply less threatening because it is channeled through a tool, a needle, rather than the hands of women. This gets Sister Maria Esther stirred up. God is not in the needles, she says. Even Bemis tries to steer Carli clear of the woo-woo but Carli is New Age through and through, says she’s not even talking about God because there is no God but just the divine feminine force that breathes life into the universe, and that statement dampens the conversation to murmurs.
But everyone needs to get on the same page about the issue. Juárez has a new bishop and in the morning Bemis will meet with him to lay out his plan for introducing NADA to chapel clinics throughout Juárez. Too much talk about the outlawed Reiki and/or no-God-but-just-the-divine-feminine-force-that-breathes-life-into-the-universe might scare the bishop off the whole thing.
June 7, in the Year of Our Lord 2015
Down the stairs in early morning I creep-stomp, trying to both announce myself and keep from startling any sleepers. The staircase is a rickety spiral ladder that drops right into Josefina’s bedroom. Josefina’s daughter is down there alone, changing in front of a gun locker. I sort of avert my eyes and make a guttural apology noise but she says it’s alright, she’s almost done. Both she and her brother are in their twenties and have joined the municipal police in the last year. As The Violence ebbed in Juárez, the police force, gutted by murder and corruption, needed repopulation. They are good jobs in the sense that the money is decent, better than at the maquiladoras. But the money is only good because the chances are still high that you will be killed or pressed into service by cartels. She smiles at me. Pulls a bulletproof vest over her head and buttons up her uniform. She takes an assault rifle out of the locker, inspects the gun, wipes it down, and shoulders it. She kisses her kid on the head and leaves to do god knows what for the day. The rest of us go to mass.
Hundreds of parishioners cram into the Virgin de Luz chapel to catch a glimpse of the new bishop, José Guadalupe Torres Campos. When we
arrive at 8:00 a.m., it is standing room only and even then most of the standing spots are outside. Josefina is having none of that and sneaks our group inside by herding us behind the swinging incense into the bishop’s procession. I find myself walking in stride with the guy, him with his dazzled staff and vestments and towering miter, me in my Nirvana T-shirt.
Most everyone here has come for an audience with Bishop Campos. At a potluck after mass he is swamped with people crowding for kisses and blessings. Bemis ends up getting less than five minutes with the guy, just long enough to say a few words and offer up a gift: something called guerrilla prayer flags—a string of rags in the Tibetan tradition, each rag with a different symbol, a lotus petal or the Virgin Mary or the yin-yang of the I Ching or the logo of Bemis’s American acupuncture clinic, Crossroads. The logo is a crucifix with a highway cutting it in half. The gift is a whole cultural/religious mishmash. The bishop is confused as he inspects the flags. They are about as woo-woo a gift as one could present a bishop. I realize, not for the first time, that Bemis is more conflicted about the woo-woo than he lets on. Sometimes he wants his needles to be nothing more than wrenches or scalpels, utilitarian objects in a rational, physical, and scientific vocation. But then he throws his acupuncture logo on some prayer flags alongside all the symbols of the world’s faiths and presents it to the bishop and it’s clear his aspirations are of the metaphysical variety. One might easily see this meeting with the bishop as less of an audience and more of a challenge. But Bishop Campos smiles and folds up the rags and passes them off before blessing us and dismissing us and sitting down to a bowl of steaming menudo.
As we head to Santa Margarita, Bemis tells me he’s surprised the bishop seemed to have no idea about the NADA clinics. He’d supposedly been briefed about the gringo giving away acupuncture training in the chapels but clearly knew nothing about it. This is either good or bad, that the highest church official in the city is oblivious of the needles seeping into his parishes. Bemis will go back and forth on the issue all day. Do you think I surprised him, man? Do you think he just doesn’t care? Or what? Should I maybe, like, not have said anything? Bemis tends to have that stoner-esque amazement toward a lot of things others might worry about. He’s gonna keep doing what he does regardless—no reason to fret. But there’s no harm in being amazed. One time he drove to Juárez, drove all day around the city and on the highway back home, with a wheel falling off his Ford clunker, the car shaking ever more violently the faster it went, the lips of his passengers starting to bleed from nervous biting and also accidental biting from the quakes of the wheel, loose on its axle. But all day Bemis never worried, just went on remarking to his passengers how wild it was that his car had become the shaking kind.
At Santa Margarita, Carli gets all the nuns and pastoral workers, all women save Rudolpho, the mechanic/butcher/massage therapist, doing some mild calisthenics in the chapel courtyard, a kind of lazy yoga to prepare their spirits for needle lessons. I sit in the chapel and talk to a stream of NADA patients, lots of maquiladora workers, young and old, suffering from insomnia, headaches, kidney failure, osteoporosis, vertigo, and gobs of hypertension. Bemis says lots of people want to give me testimonials and I can hardly keep track of them all. Testimonials are a big part of alternative medicine, like they are a big part of religion, there not being any kind of definitive science to trot out. Almost all of the several dozen patients I talk to discuss the needles in terms of faith. They all say variations of I waited to try because I didn’t believe. Now I believe.
At day’s end the students are ready to experiment with new points they’ve learned, ready to stick each other in the forehead and hands and feet. They’re moving beyond NADA now, for reasons unclear, no longer concerned only with the labyrinthine fetal voodoo dolls hanging like bats from the head’s flanks. Bemis has outfitted the chapel with zero-gravity chairs, sort of reclining lawn chairs, in which to needle people. They circle up the recliners, in front of pews by the altar, in the wake of the life-size crucified Jesus, loinclothed and rippling with muscles, hanging in the sacristy and observing us rather sullenly. I’m recruited as one of a dozen test patients. After a year of chasing needles, I finally recline with the others, submit my flesh to steel—a new Communion without blood or wine or crumbs. It feels like art, somehow, us all collapsed into a painting or performance but also outside it gazing in, staring at one another in the circle, each without our shoes or socks, pants rolled up, needles sticking out of foreheads and feet and ears, each meditating on his or her own anxieties but also watching the others in the circle meditate on their anxieties, and illness and pain and depression and despair. It is the first time in a long time that I’ve been comfortable in a church. The recliners are an improvement on pews. But the steel tingles a bit, in the skin, and it is easy to imagine it catching the frequency of angst broadcast by all the other steel, in all the other skin. It is easy to imagine the needles as receivers and broadcasters of pain, a network that, if spread wide enough, may in some equitable and tolerable proportion disperse the pain. For many of us, that means we must feel more. Be less comfortable. It is easy to imagine that Rudolpho and his children will have a peaceful life, that he will one day get a shop in which to butcher hogs and the dark red stain in the dirt outside the front door of his house will fade, easy to imagine that all the dark red stains will fade or be obliterated by a fresh coat of peach paint. It is easy to imagine that Josefina’s daughter and son will never have to witness the decapitations of their colleagues on the Juárez police force. Easy to imagine that at El Pastor’s asylum Elisabeth will get needled enough and get well enough that she walks out of the asylum and finds her children and moves again to California, where she will live out her life on the beach, watching her babies swim out beyond the white breakers, swim back to shore, grown and full of vigor. It is easy to imagine El Pastor building on the outskirts of Juárez a Rome of such splendor that no one in the place wants for anything or suffers from anything. It is easy to imagine that El Diario will go the vanishing way of so many newspapers, not because their reporters keep turning up assassinated but because they will have nothing to report beyond relative happiness and deaths of old age. It is easy to imagine that name after name on Sister Betty’s wall of the disappeared will themselves disappear, the scrolls rolling up on themselves without the weight of mournful ink to make them unfurl. It is easy to imagine that the needles will spill out of this chapel and into the streets and into all the labyrinthine inlets of side-intelligencers so that everyone in the city becomes a little less anxious, easy to imagine that the needles will spill even farther, that there will be such demand that even the big steel wall prying open the wound of la Frontera will need to be torn down to make enough needles. Ah, but who will slave in that factory? It is easy to imagine the Catholic Church in a hundred years, all the priests placing a wafer on tongues followed by all the nuns slipping needles into ears, Sisters Maria Rosario and Maria Esther of Santa Margarita becoming the patron saints of the needling nuns. It is easy to imagine that, given enough time, all of the world’s religions and superstitions and pseudosciences will blend into one practice, easy to imagine that this is finally and only what is really human—unreasonable faith—that as our bodies evaporate into the cloud of information that now besieges the ever-wobbling earth, one small pocket of something still like the old humanity will be left, a tribe whose practice includes sitting still and quiet in a warehouse chapel in the wake of a crucified man, with needles in their ears. It is easy to imagine every labyrinth unfurling into a straight path, easy to imagine the human ear flattening, evolving to become nothing but a platform for our new network of dispersing pain in tolerable and equitable proportions. A simple steel implement—pew pew, pew pew—in the hands of a desert tribe crawling to the edges of the earth and over them, moving ear by flattened ear, in search of ever more flesh to remind that it is flesh, that it must feel its portion too. It is easy to imagine.
Bemis and his volunteers cross back over the bor
der but I stay this night at the house of an acquaintance who lives in one of the many gated communities in north-central Juárez, the relative middle-class colonias. These areas of the city seem a world away from the impoverished colonias just a mile or two south. They are no different from most neighborhoods just across the border in El Paso, apart from ubiquitous tall steel walls that encircle the blocks, with big gates and guards. We go to a store and to a bustling mercado for dinner and stop at a street vendor for chili-lime raspados. In this neighborhood are professional acupuncture clinics where an individual treatment costs five hundred pesos, the fancy kind of spas where most acupuncture happens in America too. This is a good neighborhood. Tonight the streets are run by strolling families, the children testing in all directions the outer bounds of their parents’ pull and bouncing back again, disorderly orbits of raspado-stained satellites. This is the Juárez where it is easy to imagine that because the murders have ebbed, everything will be just fine.
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