by Jose Orduna
I sit next to them and introduce myself. Angela, the young woman, tells me they’re from Oaxaca and had been caught and released that same morning after signing some papers. The area around the actual port of entry, about fifty feet from the migrant center, is a concentration of activity. Adrian, the young man, stands and walks to the doorway of the center and looks out onto a wall of unknown faces, a few cars idling and circling, men waiting to see what comes across the line. Many towns across the border have illicit economies that revolve around kidnapping and extorting migrants, and that’s part of the reason the center is in operation, but things have been quiet in Agua Prieta for some time. I walk over and stand with Adrian, looking out onto the clogged street. He nods over at a pickup truck in the middle of the intersection. Standing on the bed of the truck, with his hands on a turret-mounted machine gun, is a federal cop in black tactical gear, black balaclava, and navy fatigues.
I ask Adrian a question I already know the answer to.
“Porque no hay ni como, mano,” he answers, walking back to Angela, slipping his hand underneath her overalls and resting his hand on her rounded belly.
“No hay ni como.” There isn’t even how. How to make a living. How to feed your infant. How to make a life.
Later Adrian shows me a money order for $250. He explains that when they were booked, the folded bills he kept in his shoe were taken, and when they repatriated they were given this money order. He asks if I could go with them to cash it, and I ask if Angela might want to wait at the center, but before I’m even done asking the question, she’s already standing beside us, both of them shaking their heads no, firmly hand in hand.
Cashing the money order becomes a task that ends several hours later with me crossing into the United States and going to a branch of my bank about a mile from the border. As I’m going through the port of entry, I pass a turnstile gate and approach a desk with an old white man behind it. He looks hostile until I present my US passport card and answer his question about where I’m going and why in a voice he didn’t expect from this body. He stops me short of finishing.
“All right, all right, all right,” he says, waving me through.
My crossing takes less than three minutes, and the ease of it horrifies me. Walking toward the bank, I sweat through all my clothes, but I can’t really feel the heat because my mind is cycling through Yoli and Martín, Angela and Adrian, Octavio, the group in the desert, and all the people I would never meet, all laboring to find a place in which they can exist.
When I get back it’s evening, and I call to arrange a ride and bed for the couple at a migrant shelter nearby. The later it gets, the more agitated they seem, and it pains me that there’s little else I can do. I heat up some food for them—two bean burritos—and give them each an apple. I sit along the row of white plastic chairs, not knowing what to say. They ask me questions about where I live and what I do, how I’d gotten to the United States and when. A squad car is parked in front of the port of entry. We watch dusk turn to night, staring at the red and blue lights blinking on a wall just beyond the door. Angela lays her head in Adrian’s lap, and he gently sweeps a few strands of hair from her face.
My shift is over before their ride comes. Adrian shakes my hand and pulls me in for a hug. Angela hugs me and kisses me on the cheek. As I unlock my small bicycle from a short fence just outside, I look back and see an image that burns itself into my memory: Angela, in her long-sleeved shirt and overalls standing the way very pregnant women do, her legs planted just wider than usual, her back slightly bowed, and Adrian standing next to her with one hand under her elbow, the other resting on the small of her back, both of them crowned in white light from the long bare bulbs just overhead.
As I ride back through the port of entry down the Pan-American Highway, it begins to rain. I think about the severity of a woman as pregnant as Angela walking through the desert, about what has to be true in the consciousness of ordinary Americans in order for this to happen, and about how the couple’s journey to this place began by being dislodged and displaced from somewhere they used to know as home. The rain picks up, and the stream of water in the gutter in which I’m riding widens suddenly and nearly sweeps the tires out from under me. My first thought is to hope there isn’t anyone walking in a wash right now, because surely they’ll be swept away. Dogs bark in the distance as I turn off the highway toward the mobile home park. There are no streetlights so I ride the rest of the way in almost total darkness.
That night I have a dream in which I see the face of a man I’d never met. When I wake up in the trailer the following morning I don’t remember anything about the dream, anything about what this man I’d conjured looked like, but for some reason I know it was the man whose sweatshirt I’d seen in the desert.
Somewhere between Arivaca and Sasabe I’d taken a long trek with another volunteer to leave gallons of water in a clearing that straddled the international line. The walk there was especially arduous. At a certain point the only way to keep going in the direction we needed to go was to descend a sheer rock face about fifteen feet into an arroyo that looked like it had just settled after the last heavy rain. The bed of the wash was covered in rocks, many of them loose, which ranged between the size of a dog and the size of a truck. For long stretches the brush was so thick we couldn’t see where we were stepping, and I found myself praying we wouldn’t find a rattlesnake. An hour into the hike we stopped to take a drink from our canteens, crouching into a bit of shade cast by the wall of the wash. There was a shallow puddle between us, with a loam-green film covering the submerged stones and tan water spiders gliding along the surface and, below, small oblong creatures darted along indiscernible paths, leaving small bubbles zigzagging upward in their wakes. I’d been surprised to see how green the desert was when I arrived, and I was surprised again to see so much life teeming in the small puddle. After a few minutes without speaking, my companion, having similar thoughts to mine, said it was a Eurocentric trope to mischaracterize the desert as a place of death: “The O’odham have always lived here. It’s not the desert that’s doing all the killing.”
We continued around a bend and saw a sheer rock face several hundred feet high in the near distance. In front of it there were a few strands of barbed wire stretched between wooden posts that were almost a story high, with enough space between them to maneuver through if you had a partner to pull them apart. In the center of the shoddy fence was a brown sweatshirt snagged from the hood on a high barb, and from a sleeve on a diagonally lower one so that as we approached it looked like a man making his way through. Neither of us said so, but we both thought there was someone there. We were both arrested at the same moment of recognizing a human figure in the distance, and we both started to react as though it were a person, raising one of our gallons of water and quickening our step. To be visible means that we have been seen, or at least the potential to be seen by another exists, and when we are, our existence is confirmed by another’s gaze. Whatever body filled that sweatshirt, and whatever life animated that body, refused to be unseen even in its absence. Although I didn’t know anything about the person, any of the particularities that make an individual—their name, the place in which they originated, the circumstances under which they made their journey, the specific contours of their face, their favorite dish, whether or not they had any children, musical tastes, what they enjoyed doing in their free time, the timbre of their voice, the cadence with which they spoke, their wounds and their scars—I knew enough to know that this was no place for that person.
Many South and Central American migrants today are displaced by reverberations of the same military incursions, violence, and instability that produced the desaparecidos during the Cold War proxy wars of the second half of the twentieth century. Mexico’s economy and the fate of large portions of its domestic labor force have long been dominated by the United States. Most recently NAFTA and other trade agreements implemented in the early to mid-1990s have had disastrous effects on some o
f Mexico’s most vulnerable populations. A report published by the Carnegie Endowment found that “agricultural trade liberalization linked to NAFTA is the single most significant factor in the loss of agricultural jobs in Mexico” and that by the end of 2002, Mexican agriculture lost 1.3 million jobs. The same report found that “real wages in Mexico are lower today than when NAFTA took effect.” By the late 1990s, nearly half of all employed Mexicans were employed in the informal economy, which is vaguely defined by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development as “units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned,” which means chewing gum vendors, street musicians, shoe shiners, squeegee people, and the men and women who sell foam lizards on lengths of wire to tourists, none of whom are considered unemployed. With major job losses, no unemployment insurance (Mexico offers none), and a fall in real wages, rural households already struggling to survive were pushed completely into abject poverty. The first phase in this disappearance is to be made redundant by the economic policies agreed upon by the oligarchs of increasingly “cooperating” states. As a redundancy, one is made invisible in plain sight—that is, invisible to the civic body in which one continues to exist—someone turned into a walking shadow, with the dimensionality of a person but without the possibility of recognition. What happens to migrants in the Sonoran Desert, and long before they get to the desert, is not an accident—it’s the letter and spirit of policy. By eschewing realism, one of the things Fenómeno prophesizes is the process of this kind of disappearance—one that begins in place, without the vacating of a body.
When one thinks of a shadow, one typically imagines an absence—a type of nothing—but this is fundamentally wrong. In Varo’s painting, the visual space where the viewer assumes a man once was, or should be, is occupied by a shadow. The black three-dimensional figure fills the rounded contours of a body, except it is made of darkness. The darkness walks, while the image of the man is relegated to the flat world of silhouette. A shadow is not the absence of light but a relationship of light with itself and with an observer. This is why we can see shadows within shadows and the textures of objects and surfaces upon which shadows are cast. This is why shadows do not exist in totally dark rooms. Nevertheless, our association of shadows with nothingness remains.
Nothing is supposed to signify no one, no place, and no thing—not anything, not at all, no single thing—yet when we investigate what’s referred to by nothing we invariably find something. In a shadow, for example, there is always light, and it is blue—not always the same blue, because it changes depending on the distances between objects, light sources, and observers, but some light always radiates into the area alleged to be absent of it. If we think about the physical sciences, a vacuum is often synonymous with and supposed to represent a kind of nothing, but even the most sophisticated laboratory equipment and processes cannot evacuate space of everything. In fact, in the discipline of physics, a vacuum is not understood to be nothing, but rather only a space absent of particles with which photons are known to interact. Where we think there is nothing, we always find something.
A disappearance is said to have occurred when something ceases to be visible. In cases of human disappearance, this definition could not be farther from the truth. When a person disappears, the missing becomes hyper-visible, hyper-present. In Argentina the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose children were disappeared by the military junta of the 1970s, continue to visit police stations holding worn photographs and articles of clothing of their disappeared children, demanding to know where, what, how, and why. Some of the adolescent siblings of desaparecidos say when their brothers or sisters were taken they were made orphans because their parents disappeared too, psychologically and emotionally, never able to think about anything but the missing, never out of an excruciating cycle of compulsive thoughts. If their disappeared children lived at home, some of the mothers have kept guard over their rooms making sure that not one object is touched or moved, not one open book closed, not one pen capped. Ashtrays sit full for forty years. The missing do not truly disappear until those who surrounded them, those who felt deeply for them one way or another, are gone too.
One of the most common human practices across cultures through millennia is the enactment of funereal rituals that center on the body of the departed. Not everyone buries their dead, but everyone has the need to mark the passage from life to death by acknowledging the evacuation of personhood in viewing the stillness of the body, attempting to ensure happiness in the afterlife by adorning the body, granting safe passage into another world by cleansing the body, forging closure in speaking good-byes to the body, ensuring entrance to the afterlife by anointing the body, precipitating the voyage to another realm by destroying the body. Without the body, the desperate mind latches onto the most unlikely of hope against all reason. Without the body, or at the very least without the knowledge of death having occurred, it is difficult, if not impossible, for loved ones to find closure. The trauma of ambiguous loss is daily inflicted anew. It remains a gaping wound that will never close, never heal, never cease to excruciate. To this day, mothers roam the Atacama, a vast desert spanning 105,000 square kilometers, combing the arid grounds looking for fragments of their sons’ and daughters’ bones.
The total number of people who have died attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is unknowable. According to Customs and Border Protection there were 6,330 “Southwest border deaths” between October 1, 1998, and September 30, 2014, but this number is all but certainly low. The figures for any given period vary depending on the source. When asked about the discrepancies by a reporter for the Arizona Republic, Frank Amarillas, a Border Patrol spokesman for the Tucson sector, said the Border Patrol counts deaths encountered only by agents or deaths referred to them by local law enforcement officials. “We are not notified in every case,” he said. Other cases do not meet the narrow criteria for being counted by CBP. William Robbins, Border Patrol spokesman for the Yuma sector, told the Arizona Republic that in order to be counted, skeletal remains had to be recovered near the border or on a trail known to be used by migrants. Cases in which local police, private citizens, other migrants, volunteers of civil society organizations, or medical personnel are the first to come in contact with a migrant’s remains may not be included in CBP’s numbers. It is not common practice or standard operating procedure for CBP to contact local authorities to inquire about found remains.
When the truth of forced disappearances eventually breaches the armor plating of official narratives and begins to be acknowledged, numbers remain a site of contestation. By assigning a number and claiming it represents “Southwest border deaths,” CBP is staking a claim in our collective past, present, and future; in history; in individual memory, perception, and evaluation. Rather than reflecting the reality of death due to US policy, the CBP figure much more accurately represents the number of remains recovered in certain arbitrarily and inconsistently determined zones on the US side of the boundary line and, of these, only those for which CBP agents were the first responders. Nevertheless it orients our understanding of reality because it is the official figure. It comes to represent a fair estimate of death along the border. But if we shift just one metric to include estimates for migrants killed in Mexico, the actual human cost of immigration and border policy begins to look radically different. Some civil society groups estimate that the number of migrants disappeared between 2006 and 2012 in Mexico is as high as seventy thousand. If we don’t only measure the human cost in fatalities but consider that individuals fit like necessary vectors in family dyads, triads, and so on, that each of these disappearances reverberates beyond the boundaries of the individual, that each represents a missing brother, sister, son, daughter, father, mother, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, best friend, confidant, or casual lover, the cost begins to feel catastrophic. And it is. It’s not uncommon to visit the countryside in Mexico and
find all of the men of a certain age are gone, and no one can tell you where they have gone. Families wait each day anticipating communication of any kind, communication that never comes.
Loved ones of the disappeared need to know. The ambiguity becomes so unbearable that some pray simply for the knowledge, the confirmation, that their loved one is dead, but an integral part of this phenomenon is the production and maintenance of ambiguity. For decades after the fact, authorities declared there were no mass graves in Argentina, and that no one had been flown in military planes, drugged, blessed by military chaplains, and dumped into the Río de la Plata off the coast of Buenos Aires. No one had been incinerated. Pope Francis, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a leader in the Jesuit order of Argentina during the Dirty War, could do nothing, could say nothing. The military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet did not scatter the remains of anyone in the Atacama. There are no mass graves in Chile. No one was flown over the Pacific and thrown from helicopters. Jute sacks containing bodies were not dumped in lakes and rivers throughout Chile. The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States knew nothing of it. It had not trained Pinochet’s army. It had not funded them. The Sonoran Desert is not scattered with unrecovered, unidentified souls. The riverbed of the Rio Grande is not embedded with unidentified family members. There are no mass graves in the United States.
Before leaving the desert, another volunteer and I had been driving to a remote location when our truck stalled on a hill and wouldn’t start. We radioed camp, and another crew said they would drive out to get us. Within two minutes the heat inside the truck became so intense both of us had soaked through our clothes, and I was having trouble drawing breath so we had to step out. Within another minute it became apparent we needed to find shade, but it was noon, so the sun was directly overhead, and everywhere we turned there were nothing but short, thin mesquite trees, barrel cacti, and sotol. We couldn’t wait inside the car and, because of the position in which it had become stalled, there was no room to crawl under it. We sat down for a moment in the middle of a small clearing, but again the sun became so intense that my shoulders burned, even through my shirt, and I felt several moments of overwhelming panic. The urge to tear off my clothes cut through reason because it felt like I was suffocating in them, and I remembered hearing that many dead migrants were found naked because in their last moments they’d become crazed with desperation under the savagely brutal sun. I ran to the truck and emptied half a gallon of water over my head. My partner followed, dumping the other half over his. We radioed the other crew again, and they said they were about half an hour away. I remember feeling a pinprick of terror, despite having a truck full of water. Then I remembered I had a large green raincoat in my backpack. I gathered brittle, thorny branches and collected them in a tall pile, throwing the raincoat over the top, making a sort of canopy that produced just enough shade for us to crouch beneath.