The Weight of Shadows

by Jose Orduna

  A short man wearing a NASCAR cap and light blue jeans walks up to the boundary from the other side. His skin is dark brown like mine and he looks like he’s in his late forties. He surveys the scene like maybe he’s waiting for someone, but we’re the only ones there. In the background a couple of cars pitter down a street we can’t see, and Caitlin takes a photo of the lighthouse through the metal crosshatching. The man approaches us, nodding.

  “Buenas tardes.”

  “Hola. Qué tal?”

  He looks at both of us, and then at the fence, up and down theatrically. He says he’s doing okay considering and asks us what we’re doing here. Caitlin tells him we just wanted to see this thing, motioning to the wall between us. He says that down around the zona centro by Plaza de las Americas, there’s a triple boundary with giant concrete blocks, and he says everything started with Pete Wilson, “that son-of-a-bitch governor who didn’t even want to let the children of migrants go to school.” I nod, remembering Proposition 187 from my childhood, and how it was one of the moments I came to understand my family’s situation a little more accurately. The man’s voice begins to tighten, and his syllables become quick when he asks how many people have died because of this goddamn fence.

  “Toda esa pinche paisanada,” he says, hitting his consonants hard.

  He points away from the ocean and says that at the San Ysidro crossing they killed a man. I immediately recognize he’s talking about Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, who’d lived in San Diego for twenty-seven years, since he was a child, and who at the time of his killing had five children of his own. He was a taxpaying builder who was arrested and deported for shoplifting. And he had been captured trying to get back to his family. In a postmortem toxicology report he was found to have methamphetamine in his system, a fact that was widely publicized when the story broke. Two medical experts characterized the amount of methamphetamine as small, and one said it was impossible to attribute any behavior at the time of his death to the drug. Initial reports of the incident misrepresented the number of agents involved. According to a subsequent investigation by the San Diego Police Department, agents removed Anastasio’s handcuffs, and he “became violent.” The report says it was due to this violent behavior that agents were forced to use a Taser to subdue him. He died in the hospital. If it hadn’t been for Anastasio’s widow, Maria Puga, and groups of activists who supported her in her rejection of the official narrative, Anastasio’s killing would have slipped quietly into oblivion—just another junked-out criminal righteously put down. But Maria and her supporters dredged up evidence. Several witnesses presented cell phone footage of the event. One video captured by Ashley Young, a woman from Seattle who was crossing back into the United States, shows a group of about twenty agents surrounding Anastasio while he’s already hogtied and on the ground. It’s at this point that an agent can be seen using a Taser on him. In another video agents descend violently on Anastasio as he’s on the ground pleading for his life. The father and husband screams as the agents fatally injure him. Witnesses said he was offering little to no resistance.

  The man moves a bit closer to the metal boundary and lowers his voice. He says he’s going to tell us something he hasn’t told anyone except maybe one other person. He was on a hillside a while back in a rural area around midnight when a Customs and Border Protection agent picked him up. He was cuffed and roughed up, he says. The agent kicked him a few times before loading him into his Tahoe or Suburban or whatever it was. He immediately noticed the agent was alone, and this fact scared him. He was driven to another location, a desolate clearing he didn’t recognize, where the agent turned off his vehicle and got out of the car. He says that when the agent pulled him out of the backseat, he thought he was going to die. He says he was sure the agent was going to give him “ley de fuga,” a well-known phrase in Mexico that refers to a kind of extrajudicial execution and cover-up that came to be known during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. The procedure involves agents of the state setting up scenarios in which a person is killed during an escape attempt.

  The man says the agent removed his handcuffs and told him to go, but that he refused because he knew the agent was going to kill him as soon as he turned his back. He tells us he knows they would have said it was kidnappers or narcos, and that no one would have asked any questions. Add the body to the pile. Case closed. He begged and pleaded for the agent not to kill him, and eventually the officer just got back in his truck and drove away, leaving him in the wilderness to fend for himself.

  CHAPTER 9

  Passport to the New West

  I arrive by bus in Tucson late one afternoon and walk to a gas station where a volunteer will be picking me up. I signed up with a humanitarian aid group that leaves water in the desert for people attempting to cross the border, provides emergency medical treatment for those who may need it, and documents abuse suffered by people at various points in their journeys. By the time I make it there I’m dripping sweat because it’s late July, I have a fifty pound bag strapped to my back, and the sun feels like it’s a few feet away from my face. A rusted-out SUV pulls up and a young white guy with a scruffy beard rolls down his window.

  “You José?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hop in.”

  Orientation for new volunteers starts a few hours later at a space the group has arranged in a small local church and school building in Tucson. A handful of young people, mostly white, sit around smoking in the courtyard for a while. We gather in a small classroom where an attorney comes in to give us some information so that we can make informed decisions in the desert. A couple of summers back, a jury of twelve convicted a volunteer of “knowingly littering”—for leaving gallons of water for people in the 110-degree desert. We’re told that people drink cow tank water—stagnant pools that cows wade, urinate, and defecate in—out of necessity. A former volunteer tells us that Border Patrol and Wackenhut GS4, a contractor paid by the government to transport migrants, don’t often give people water or medical attention even though they know they’ve been journeying through the desert for days. We’re told that two volunteers, a young woman and man, were arrested, and that a grand jury charged them with two felonies: conspiracy to transport an “illegal immigrant” and transporting an “illegal immigrant.” The volunteers had come upon a group of migrants who’d been traveling through the desert for four days, two days without food or water during the week that turned out to be, until then, the deadliest in Arizona history. It was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit for forty straight days, and seventy-eight people were known to have died. The volunteers were arrested while evacuating three men to a medical facility in Tucson. They rejected a plea that would have seen all charges dropped for an admission of guilt, instead risking a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison and fines of up to five hundred thousand dollars. The proceedings dragged on for about a year and a half. Eventually the charges were dropped.

  A tall older man who looks like a cowboy joins us in the classroom. He takes off his beige felt hat and wipes the white hair on his sweaty forehead. He introduces himself as John Fife, a retired Presbyterian minister and cofounder of No More Deaths (NMD). In the eighties Fife also cofounded the sanctuary movement in the United States, a network that helped Central American refugees flee US-backed death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. He was arrested with others, and in 1986 Fife was found guilty of “conspiracy and two counts of aiding and abetting the illegal entry of Central American refugees into the US,” for which he served five years of probation. He tries to talk to all the volunteer groups. He tells us what he thinks this work means and that he’s glad we’re here. Leaning on the wall behind him is a large map glued to a poster board. Depicting the border region south of Tucson, it’s covered with hundreds of red dots, which he tells us represent the loss of human life. Almost six thousand deaths are marked on the map, and those are just the ones that have been counted.

  After Fife leaves, a wilderness EMT shows us how to irrigate a wound and
treat severe blisters. We learn that a moderately to severely dehydrated person needs to be given small amounts of water in intervals and that pinching someone’s skin and seeing how long it takes to return to its shape is a way to gauge how dehydrated a person may be. We’re told to ask everyone we encounter if they’re urinating or defecating blood, because that can be a sign of a severe infection from drinking contaminated water. Each gallon of water, we’re told, weighs eight and a half pounds, so it’s impossible for people to carry enough. The border is eleven miles from where we’ll be staying, a region of jagged mountains and arroyos that rise and fall in brutal configurations. It usually looks like a barren lunar landscape, but after monsoon season, which it is now, it’s lush, and the arroyos can flood in seconds and sweep away anyone who may be walking in them to avoid detection.

  Volunteers sleep in small classrooms at the church. Just before turning out the lights I see a translucent scorpion the size of a domino in the corner and crush it with one of my boots. I arrange foldout chairs in a row and manage to sleep on them. The next morning we drive sixty miles south to Arivaca with the windows down. It rained at dawn, and things are a lot more lush than I’d expected. I draw in thick air with a deep clean smell. A young woman in the car says that people think the smell is rain, but it’s really rain mixing with the waxy resin of the creosote bush that gives the desert its fresh, wide-open smell after a downpour. She points out the window at brittle-looking scrub along the road. It looks unimpressive, but it may have been the bush through which God spoke to Moses in fire, and it can live for two, sometimes three years without a drop of rain. She says one of the oldest living organisms on earth is a ring of creosote that’s been cloning itself for almost twelve thousand years in the Mojave.

  Someone else says there’s a checkpoint up ahead and that we might be asked to identify ourselves. I finger my new US passport in a Ziploc bag in my pocket. According to a 2005 report by the US Government Accountability Office, there are thirty-three “permanent” checkpoints in the Southwest border states. The number of checkpoints actually in operation is not publicly known because there are an undisclosed number of “tactical” and “temporary” ones deployed. Some news outlets report that the number is around 170. The one up ahead has “temporarily” been there for about five years, and the residents of Arivaca have to go through it whenever they need to go to a store bigger than the mercantile exchange, a small convenience store in town, or go to work, school, or anywhere other than Arivaca, really. When the Border Patrol started in 1924, it was “a handful of mounted agents patrolling desolate areas along U.S. borders.” They operated within “a reasonable distance” of the boundary line, but in 1953 the federal government defined this distance as “100 air miles” from all external borders, including coasts. That means that today the more than twenty-one thousand agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stomp around violating the Fourth Amendment on a land area on which about two-thirds of the US population lives. The ACLU reports that “Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area,” and that the area contains “New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose.” I remember that a few years ago an old friend of mine was snatched off a Greyhound bus on his way home to Chicago from Cornell University.

  When we pull up to the checkpoint, an agent looks inside the truck at everyone’s faces. He’s uninterested because we’re headed toward Arivaca instead of coming from there. He asks the group if everyone’s a citizen. We all say yes, and he waves us through.

  Within twenty-five miles of the border, CBP agents have been given the authority to enter private property (except dwellings) without a warrant.

  Arivaca is an unincorporated area of about eight hundred residents and sits twenty-three miles from Interstate 19 and eleven miles north of the border. The main street, Arivaca Road, is lined with a few small houses, some adobe structures, a small store called the Arivaca Mercantile, and La Gitana Cantina. All within about a block there are a small library, a mechanic, and a veterinarian’s office. The place looks like an outpost, and as we’re pulling into the Merc, a brick building painted an earthen brown with teal and peach accents, everything is quiet and slow-moving. A dried-out old man with a white beard, cowboy hat, and a six-shooter on each hip walks past us into the store, the sound of his jangling keys merging with the din of bugs buzzing in the brush. A man and woman on horseback ride down the main street, the horse’s hooves clopping in an even rhythm. In the distance we can see several large vehicles barreling in our direction down Arivaca Road. Three white-and-green Border Patrol trucks, one SUV and two pickups with blacked-out windows, slow as they reach the main drag. The pickups have prisoner enclosures on the beds that look like the dog cages on the back of animal control trucks. The man and woman on horseback pull off the road and stare hard at the trucks as they pass.

  We drive through Arivaca to Ruby Road. After a bit, the asphalt gives way to severe dirt terrain, so the car slows as the morning burns off and the early afternoon makes the inside of the truck feel like a dry sauna. All morning I’ve been thinking about that map—the red dots that looked like spilled blood covering thousands of miles, and the number of lives that have been ended on this political line. The figure comes from the Border Patrol’s own tabulations, which are almost certainly low because of the unstructured, sporadic, and prohibitive ways the dead are counted. Even this low estimate means that since 1998, nearly as many people have died trying to cross the southern border into the United States as there were US soldiers killed in Iraq. Whenever I’m confronted with that figure I try to imagine them embodied, in a group, taking up space and still breathing. A room wouldn’t be enough to contain the dead, nor would a warehouse—it would have to be an arena, something like a minor league baseball park packed with men, women, and children, some of whom look like they could be my aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, parents. But most likely it would be two, three, maybe four arenas, because many bodies are never recovered and so never counted. I think about how, even if all the dead were recovered, the figure wouldn’t come close to reflecting the embodied traumas of these ongoing killings. Lives aren’t units to be weighed like commodities. Each one of these people was a needed member of a family. Officially there are six thousand dead—six thousand forever-open wounds. In reality the devastation is much greater than this.

  Desert Camp, the center of operations for NMD, is on a parcel of rough, hilly land that belongs to Byrd Baylor, a children’s book author in her late eighties who lives just a couple of miles outside of Arivaca in an adobe and stone structure without electricity. The entrance to the camp is a thick utility strap stretched between two metal fence posts. A young brown-skinned woman with a buzz cut and a black-and-red, photorealistic tattoo of Frida Kahlo removes the strap and lets the trucks in. There’s a small clearing in the mesquite trees and scrub with a couple of freestanding canopy structures that serve as a kitchen, office, and meeting area, flanked by a large military surplus medical tent for anyone who may need emergency care. We’re told we can set up our tents wherever we’d like, and I find a shady spot nestled by some mesquite trees. Later one of the long-term volunteers asks me why I set up my tent in Rattlesnake Ridge.

  The beauty of the desert doesn’t hit me until dusk. Before that all I can feel is the sun, a searing orb too bright to look toward, burning me through my clothes, and all I can think is how horrific it must be to not have any way to escape it. When we’d done a little bit of walking earlier in the day, each step was arduous, with loose rock under every footfall shifting my ankles violently. Nothing was flat or smooth, and massive boulders required significant climbing at points. Within minutes it became obvious how easy it would be to succumb, even for a young person in good health. On our drive into camp I’d seen long stretches of jagged terrain with no more to make shade than waist-high mesquite trees, spr
awling clusters of nopales, and ocotillo, a succulent that resembles a cat-o’-nine-tails or a group of spindly coral fingers. It wasn’t like anything I’d imagined. The residents of Arivaca and the Tohono O’odham people live in this desert and interact with it knowingly and casually on a daily basis. The climate and terrain are harsh, but they need not be deadly. It isn’t exposure or the natural danger of this terrain that ends people’s lives. In the Border Patrol’s own articulation of their plan to militarize the border, a document titled “Border Patrol Strategic Plan 1994 and Beyond” the agency accepted “that absolute sealing of the border is unrealistic.” The plan instead was “to prioritize . . . efforts by geographic area.” The document includes a brief assessment of the environment of border areas where “illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea . . . can find themselves in mortal danger.” The plan specifies that cities split by the boundary line “are the areas of greatest risk for illegal entry,” because these “urban areas offer accessibility to roads, rail lines, airports and bus routes to the interior of the country.” The document identifies and names specific sectors that are “the locations of heaviest illegal immigration activity.” They are identified as “avenues of approach” (AA) in order from most heavily trafficked areas (AA1) to least (AA12).

  The plan’s first phase was supposed to be accomplished in fiscal year 1994–95, and the first areas to be secured were San Diego (AA1) and El Paso (AA2). The document predicted that “as a measure of control is achieved in these corridors, some illegal traffic is expected to shift to AA4 and AA3,” Arizona and South and South Central Texas respectively. This happened as predicted, and, according to the plan, in these areas the focus was on “attaining control of the urban areas first and then the rural areas.” The plan has been stuck here for approximately sixteen years—in funneling people into the “most remote, uninhabited expanses of land” through the harshest avenues of approach.