The Weight of Shadows

by Jose Orduna

  For a moment it feels like I’m among family.

  We all hear a car in the distance. Some of the men who’d been lying down sit up. The other volunteer is finishing wrapping one of their feet. I tell them to put the card we gave them in their pockets and to remember they’re entitled to a phone call. Their faces change, tighten, and the man with the knot on his knee extends his hand to the other volunteer.

  “Gracias, muchacha,” he says.

  “De nada,” she answers, shaking his hand.

  Both brothers look at me, their faces communicating more than they ever could with words: the arbitrariness of why I’m helping them rather than the other way around; the meaninglessness of it; how this absence of meaning may not make the brutality worse but somehow casts it in an even harsher light; and some relief because they think it’s over, and the worst of it might be, but it might not. We shake hands. One of them pats me on the chest with his open palm after he lets go of my hand.

  “Gracias, hermano.”

  The green-and-white SUV skids to a halt on the dirt road. We hear a car door open and close. We walk toward the road and I round a bush into visibility. When I do, the agent, a tall blond white man with a flattop, takes a step back, extending one hand while the other hand reaches back toward his belt.

  “What the hell!” he yells.

  “Hi, hi, hi,” I say, putting my hands out with my palms open and turned upward. “We’re volunteers, we’re with the church.”

  “Get down! Sit down! On the ground!” He’s yelling and signaling violently with his outstretched hand, the other one still back, hovering above his gun. We sit down.

  “You—come over here,” he says, pointing at the other volunteer.

  She stands up slowly and walks toward him. They go to the back of the vehicle, and from where I’m sitting I can see the agent looking and signaling in my direction, obviously asking questions about me. After a minute or so they walk back, he stares at me with his eyebrows furrowed, looking perhaps a little confused. My beard was already three weeks long before I arrived in the desert, so now it’s a little over an inch and unruly. It curls upward on one side along my jaw line with a few ringlets by my ears and none of it stays matted down. I’m wearing expensive cargo pants my dad insisted on buying at an outdoor store before I came out, and screen-printed on my T-shirt is a photo of an old-timey man panning for gold, with a caption that reads: “I’m not a gold digger, I’m a panhandler.”

  “You—come here.” He signals for me to stand and follow.

  The three of us walk to the group of men. When we get there, the agent radios for another vehicle. He tells us to sit, and he approaches the men who are all still in a half moon under the shade of a scraggly tree. He gets uncomfortably close, towering over them as he yells, “Yo, Steven. Okay? Bway-no? Okay. Ha ha ha.” A few of the men strain to smile and nod as he says this, and a few of the others just look toward the ground.

  “See, I’m nice. I’m a nice guy. Okay? Bway-no?”

  He stands over me so that I have to crane my neck back at an extreme angle, looking almost directly up. He lowers his volume and changes his tone dramatically, like he’s trying to make small talk.

  “So, you from around here?” he asks me, ignoring the other volunteer.

  “No, I live in the Midwest.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where? I have some family out there.”

  “Iowa.”

  I don’t want to flat out refuse to answer his questions because I don’t want to anger him so that he might take his frustration out on the men, or someone else he encounters after we’ve split.

  “Oh, wow. Ha! So are you from Iowa?”

  “I lived in Illinois before that.”

  “So, is English your, uh, fir—uh, first language?”

  “I speak mostly English now, yes.”

  A voice comes over his radio, and he steps back to the vehicle for a moment. We tell the men to keep drinking water and eating. When he comes back he points at me and tells me to translate what he’s going to say. He asks the men a few questions through me and then says, “Well, if you’d only done things the right way, I wouldn’t have to slap these cuffs on you. I don’t know why so many people can’t just follow the law. It’s the law. Lah-lay. Lah-lay.” Instead of translating what he’s just said, I remind the men they don’t have to sign voluntary departure papers if they think they may qualify for some kind of immigration relief, and that someone at the number on the card can help determine if they might qualify.

  “Okay, well, you two better take off now,” he says, signaling to me and the other volunteer. “I’m nice, as you can see, but my partner who’s on his way now is crazy. I don’t care if you’re here, but he’s crazy. You better get outta here.”

  The other volunteer tells him we’re waiting for our ride and they should be arriving any minute. He shakes his head at us.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  He approaches the men and begins taking their backpacks and bags of food, tossing them into a pile. He tells them to put down the gallons of water and starts riffling through the bags.

  “Back up, then. Go over there, on the other side,” he points across the road where he wants us to move. The other volunteer starts to pick up our supplies, putting them in the medical pack one by one. She looks me in the eye as she’s doing it, communicating that I should also start picking up garbage and supplies as slowly as possible, one by one, so we can remain within eyesight longer.

  Another BP vehicle arrives, this one a pickup with a cage on the bed. The first agent approaches it. A man who looks like a caricature of police—a close-cropped haircut, aviators, and a push-broom mustache—gets out of the car. He too juts back when he sees me.

  “What the fuck! Who the fuck is that?” he says to the first agent, pointing at me.

  The first agent grabs him by the shoulder, turning him away from us. They whisper to each other for a minute, and then the newly arrived agent goes to the men. The first agent stands above us.

  “Go to the other side. Now. Now!”

  We stand in the middle of the road where we can still see the men. The agents tell them to stand. They struggle to get up. The agents grab the gallons of water and start dumping them out.

  “Come on, man,” I say.

  Both of them look at us, and then at each other.

  “Please let them take some water,” says the other volunteer calmly.

  “No, no, no. We can’t. We don’t know what’s in these.”

  “We have sealed ones. Please. They’re dehydrated,” says the other volunteer.

  They look at each other again.

  “Okay, give me the sealed ones. We’ll take them in the truck with us.”

  “Can’t they take them in the back with them? Please.”

  “No.”

  The agents make the men turn toward the tree, interlock their fingers on the backs of their heads, and spread their legs. They begin manhandling and patting them down one by one. It becomes apparent that what I’m witnessing is an act of empire-building. Here, in this zone, and on these bodies, America defines itself by what it’s not. Each rejection, each death in the desert, is a re-articulation of our foundational violence. This is America. Each passage and inscription of a human being as “illegal” is a reiteration. We are in the zone where justice reaches its vanishing point, sheds its veneer, and reveals itself fully as punishment.

  The agents have the men at the back of the pickup. The one with the mustache unlocks the cage and opens the door. The agent shoves the younger brother forward, and the young man braces himself on the frame and looks over to us.

  “Adiós, carnales.”

  Each man says good-bye before they’re shoved in. One of them pokes his fingers through small slots in a metal grate at the very back of the cage and waves them as the truck pulls away and disappears over the horizon.

  CHAPTER 10

  Disappearing Act

  When they look for me I’m not here, when th
ey find me it’s not me.

  —Manu Chao

  Yoli was thirty-three and I was thirteen, a gap wide enough to make our realities distinct in essential ways, but not wide enough to foreclose our mutual enjoyment of certain things. We enjoyed, for example, spending afternoons playing Twenty-one with the kids from the neighborhood, not just because we liked basketball, but because we enjoyed hearing those very young boys curse with virtuosity. We also enjoyed sharing music. We traded tapes and CDs, and sometimes when we were at home together we would take turns playing albums or picking radio stations. I think we liked it because it was a shortcut to learning about each other as people, about our tastes and pleasures—things that are often lost in the rigid communion between parents and their children.

  There was something alluring about hearing tracks she was into that were recorded and popular before I was born, especially tracks I wouldn’t have imagined her liking. That kind of surprise suggested there were many things I didn’t know about her, that there were parts of Yoli’s world that existed beyond me, before me.

  One day after school we were hanging out at home, something that happened less and less because she’d started working well into the evenings. A friend, who was a few years older than I was, had given me a tape he’d made, and I played it over and over on a small boom box I kept on my bed for listening to a call-in radio show about sex when I was supposed to be going to sleep. It was a mix of stuff like Jaguares, Molotov, and El Tri. I remember bringing out the boom box—the tape already in it from the previous night—and pressing play. The last third of “Que No Te Haga Bobo Jacobo” blared from the speakers. The track was about Jacobo Zabludovsky, Mexico’s first anchorman, who held the overwhelming majority of news viewers for Televisa for three decades starting in 1970, two years after the massacre of students in Tlatelolco by the state. Jacobo, as he came to be known by nearly everyone in Mexico, and by much of Latin America, was also commonly known to be a stooge for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party that had been in power since the end of the twenties and had been responsible for Tlatelolco. The PRI would go on to run the country for seven uninterrupted decades despite the massacre.

  Yoli had been chopping something for dinner, but as soon as she heard the name Jacobo she put the knife down and started following the voice on the boom box. I had no idea who Zabludovsky was at the time. I had a cursory awareness of politics because Martín and Yoli left cartoon books like Marx para Principiantes and several other Rius comic books, lying around the house. I’d flipped through them and, because I liked the cartoons and funny captions, I’d also read parts here and there, understanding very little but finding them enjoyable. I remember liking the drawings of Marx’s oversized head and beard and the way Rius mashed animation styles on the same page. But the track about Zabludovsky was the first time I got a specific glimpse of a particular political situation.

  The next track came on.

  “Me llaman el desaparecido—”

  Yoli turned from the counter and watched me bobbing my head along with the plinky guitar for a moment before going to the boom box and pressing stop.

  “Sabes de qué se trata eso?” she asked, pointing with the kitchen knife.

  I don’t remember exactly what she said. Her explanation was abridged because I was thirteen, but she didn’t completely skip the kind of information that produced a visceral reaction in my body. I had by that time already witnessed drive-by shootings and bodies being mangled in various ways: an arm broken with a baseball bat, a young man kicked unconscious while on the ground by a group, and someone shot in the throat. But this was different. I remember her repetition of el estado. El estado did this. El estado did that. My previous encounters with violence had been traumatic to see, hear, be in the midst of, but all of them were perceived as transgressions, acts that violated the order we lived in. Yoli’s explanation didn’t square with that, though. She was telling me that those who were in charge of establishing order had committed acts of extreme violence, final acts, against civilian youth, against estudiantes, she repeated. I remember feeling the pulse in my fingertips as I sat perfectly still listening to her tell me about bodies being flown out over the ocean and dumped, and about a square lined with sharpshooters opening fire into crowds of students. Folded into her explanation were suggestions that these acts of violence didn’t begin and end with what happened to bodies but included what stories were told or not told, and what stories were inscribed in official records.

  Shortly after learning about Tlatelolco, about the enduring Latin American tradition of student massacres, my mom and dad took me to the National Museum of Mexican Art on Nineteenth Street, where we went every few months when I was growing up. It was their way of not only immersing me in representations of our culture and ourselves, but of exposing me to histories and contexts that were often missing in the lessons I learned in school. Each visit they would let me pick something from the gift shop. That time, or some time close to it, I chose a small rectangular refrigerator magnet we kept on our fridge for over a decade. I didn’t think much about it at the time. The image on it was of Remedios Varo’s painting Fenómeno, which she completed in 1962, one year before her death and six years before Tlatelolco. The painting is of a man and his shadow, except the shadow walks upright filling the three-dimensional space of the man while he is confined to the flat parameters of the shadow world.

  Much has been written about Varo and her work, most of it centering on the role Freudian symbolism, alchemy, and mysticism played in her painting. She developed a complex network of symbols, a kind of post–World War II allegorical style where the Christian iconography of the High Renaissance was not discarded but destabilized and redeployed. Interpretations of her works abound, and many rest on the primacy of her personal anxieties or resistance to the rigid subordination of women in Parisian Surrealist circles. Many interpretations begin and end there, in the personal psychology of a female agent moving through European intellectual circles commenting insularly, without considering the influence of broader realities on her being. She experienced the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in her late twenties and the outbreak of World War II less than a decade after that, and she landed in Mexico in 1941 during a burgeoning student movement on the steady march toward the Cold War.

  Whatever the intended meaning, the production of Fenómeno in the early sixties in Mexico is remarkable. It serves as a kind of spirit photograph, a depiction of the zeitgeist. It communicates a central phenomenon that would occur throughout Latin America in the following decades: the murder and disappearance of large swaths of the population by the state.

  After the desert I go to Agua Prieta, Sonora, to work at a migrant resource center run by a faith-based organization called Frontera de Cristo, staffed mostly by locals and a few volunteers from abroad. Agua Prieta, a town just on the other side of the border of Douglas, Arizona, reminds me of Gary, Indiana, which I’d driven through a few times, always on the way to someplace else. On my first day, a minister with the organization, a white man with wispy blond hair and a calm face, took me to see the plaza, a large empty square in the middle of town, with a few benches and trees but not a soul anywhere. He explained things would probably be slow at the center because people captured in the Tucson sector were being transported hundreds of miles along the border and dumped elsewhere, a practice called lateral repatriation. Often people were repatriated in areas with active cartel warring, like Nuevo Laredo, where the Zetas massacred seventy-two migrants in August 2010. I stay in the Frontera de Cristo trailer in Douglas with another volunteer, and I’m provided a girl’s bicycle, small and purple, to ride from the trailer park down the Pan-American Highway and across the border to the resource center.

  One morning we ride into downtown Douglas a few hours before our shift to hang out in the public library. Half of Douglas looks like an old-timey tourist trap, and the main strip approaching the border is a concentration of fast-food restaurants and big-box stores. In the
library, I pull several books about Latin American art off the shelves and flip through them while drinking my morning coffee. A few minutes later, I come across the familiar image of a long upright shadow—three-dimensional and walking—trailed by a flattened man cast on a few brick steps, as though he were the shadow: Fenómeno. Seeing it gives me a chill because of the association to forced disappearances it has come to have for me, and because it appears here, like this, now.

  For the next few days I can’t stop thinking about the painting as I sit in the mostly empty resource center and walk down desolate streets where people struggle to make their lives despite the conditions imposed by the wall and the logic of the states that erected the barrier. One afternoon when I walk into the center—which is really just a narrow hallway with a desk, refrigerator, and small area for donated clothes at the far end—there’s a young man in his early twenties who looks like my uncle Pablo sitting in one of the plastic chairs along the wall. He has a square, athletic build and jet-black hair and eyes. Next to him sits a young woman, around the same age, with a long black braid that has the intensity and shine of obsidian. She’s wearing overalls and looks to be in the last trimester of pregnancy.