by Bill Barich
The only people who appear to be anxious are the Central Americans. They have already crossed the border into Mexico illegally, and they are fearful that the Mexican border patrol may sweep through La Libertad and toss them into a Tijuana jail, where they are often beaten up before being sent home. The Central Americans are also tired and are probably suffering from some minor illness. They have travelled a great distance to reach the soccer field (in many instances, more than two thousand miles, through jungles, swamps, and highlands), escaping sometimes from war and oppression but more frequently from outmoded agricultural practices that have stripped their homelands bare and made subsistence farming impossible. Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans—they worry that someone is out to harm them, while they simultaneously cast about, in a shy way, for help.
Because of their uncertainty, Central Americans generally employ a coyote. They pay between five hundred and seven hundred dollars to be smuggled into the United States, whereas a Mexican seldom pays more than three hundred dollars. The money is paid half in advance and half on completion of the journey, so that the customers will have a slight measure of control over their guides, whose unscrupulousness is legendary. Coyotes will lead a migrant across, stick him in a safe house, and then refuse to release him until his relatives in the United States cough up a ransom. This could be construed as kidnapping, but coyotes think of themselves as above the law.
In their book of etiquette, the health and safety of their pollitos, or chicks, comes last. They’ll desert them under pressure from the Border Patrol, perhaps leaving them locked inside a van, where, sick from the stench of sweat and urine, the chicks run the risk of suffocation. In the hierarchy of illegal immigration, coyotes occupy an odd niche between the vaguely heroic and the decidedly villainous, and this gives them a mythic stature on which they capitalize, outfitting themselves in fancy sweatshirts and high-top sneakers in the Air Jordan mode.
As an alternative to hiring a coyote, it is possible to latch onto a border veteran who’ll take pity on you and let you tag along, charging a reasonable fee. One afternoon at La Libertad, I met a young Mexican man, Omar, who regularly makes a little ready cash this way. He was about to return to the United States with five new friends, having completed a girl-chasing expedition to Tijuana.
At the age of twenty-one, Omar knew the border intimately. He had crossed it for the first time at fourteen, going to Yakima, Washington, to join his parents, who worked the orchards there. He had hoped for a factory job, but he wound up picking apples, and he was still picking them every summer. In his Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt, sipping from a cold Tecate, he looked supremely undaunted by the mission ahead and might have been preparing himself for a trip to the corner store. His car was parked on a street in San Ysidro. It had California plates, and so, he felt, was not likely to be stopped by inquisitive agents.
The route Omar planned to follow zigzagged up and down hills, traversing rough country that offered ideal habitat for scorpions, lizards, tarantulas, and rattlesnakes. If you hiked it by day, it wasn’t too intimidating, he said, but after dark you could get lost, or take a fall, or trip on a root or over a boulder and sprain your ankle. On summer nights, the heat could be horrendous, and people became dehydrated and suffered from exhaustion. There were also bandits who ambushed migrants, knocking them over the head with a stick and stealing their grubstake. (They often have lots of money with them, since they deal strictly in cash.) If the Border Patrol wasn’t out in force, it took about half an hour to reach San Ysidro, but if agents were in the canyon you could get pinned down for a long time, curled under a bush in a fetal ball. This didn’t happen much, though, because the canyon was hard duty, and agents preferred to avoid it if they could.
For people who don’t have the stamina for such a crossing, there are places on the border where success depends on other factors—cunning, bravado, even speed of foot. To cross from the Tijuana River levee, for example, a a migrant needs only good timing and a little luck. San Ysidro is about five hundred yards away, and though the Border Patrol tries to clog the buffer zone with agents in jeeps and on all-terrain motorcycles, the men can’t grab everyone running past. Instead, it’s a matter of random selection.
At the levee, immigration has the look of a futuristic sporting event that might have been dreamed up for a cable TV network. Many Tijuanans drop by just to entertain themselves and be part of the scene. There is always a hint of danger, mainly because of all the drug dealers and junkies. Teen-agers in heavy-metal T-shirts, high from sniffing glue, strut around listening to old Led Zep tapes on their boom boxes, and every now and then one of them takes off for the States in a goofy glide.
If you walk west from the levee for about a mile, you come to a wooded hillside where migrants also meet. It is a much more tranquil place, except on chilly evenings, when people uproot and burn the surrounding vegetation to keep warm. Technically, they’re on American soil when they do this, having crawled through holes in the border fence, but if agents make a move toward them they jump back into Mexico.
A fellow called Miguel told me this one evening while he was eating his dinner, a ham sandwich he’d bought from a vender. The vender, too, was talkative. He reminisced about his years in Santa Ana, California, where he had worked in construction until he got strung out on cocaine. His life was much simpler now, he said. Some weeks, he made as much as seventy dollars selling his wares on and around the levee, keeping the sandwiches and drinks in an Igloo cooler that his wife toted around, even though she was pregnant and had already suffered two miscarriages.
Miguel was slender and sensitive. He had a gap between his front teeth, and he fretted that, at thirty-seven, he was beginning to lose his looks. A roofer by trade, he had hooked up with two Guatemalans from Coban, first-timers, and was taking them across, planning to leave that night at eleven o’clock, when the Border Patrol changed shifts and everyone was distracted. Miguel spoke English with a German accent. An American Army colonel from Wisconsin—an archeology buff who’d stopped in Miguel’s village to study the ruins—had taught it to him long ago. The colonel had urged Miguel to visit him in the Midwest, but Miguel was too busy exploring the United States, living in Los Angeles, Palmdale, Chicago, Phoenix, Tucson, and Houston. He had been caught only once, in New Orleans. It was his dream to make it to San Francisco someday.
In Canyon Zapata, there are usually about a hundred people on the soccer field at twilight. That’s when Manuela begins to put away her supplies and utensils. She is concerned that somebody might try to rob her, and often she lingers at her table until one of her brothers comes to escort her out. While she douses her fire, the coyotes brief their customers, sketching maps on the ground and sending scouts to check on the whereabouts of agents. As night approaches, people move tentatively forward—ten steps, a pause, then ten more steps, as if they were inching themselves into a body of water. In a few minutes, they will have vanished from sight, and Manuela will be back in her house, cooking dinner for her family. The next day will be the same for her. Every day is the same for Manuela—except Sunday, when she observes the Sabbath by staying at home and attending to her Bible studies.
* * *
One of the busiest Border Patrol stations in the San Diego Sector is Brown Field, on Otay Mesa. Named for an airport nearby, the station resembles a small-town firehouse in need of paint and refurbishing. The agents assigned to Brown Field frequently have the demeanor of firemen, in fact, because their work is routine, with long, dull periods during which they perform a repetitive chore—apprehending migrants and returning them to Mexico. Their ranks are composed of Army vets, former cops, wanna-be cops, and many ordinary guys who are athletic, don’t mind wearing a uniform, and enjoy working outdoors. When agents complain, it isn’t about government policy but, rather, about how badly they’re paid and how their wives must struggle to make ends meet. Boredom is their worst enemy, and sometimes they combat it by competing to see who can bring in the most prisoners in a day,
a week, or a month.
From Brown Field Station an agent can look across a highway to the part of Otay Mesa that drops off to the southwest, toward Tijuana. The mesa is huge, and most of it is still raw desert, but it won’t be for long. Its history follows a common pattern of land and water grabs in Southern California, where the model for real-estate transactions appears to be the deal that John Huston pulled off in “Chinatown”—diverting the rivers of the West to L.A. Just before the turn of the century, the mesa had a saloon and a racetrack, but they died a natural death, and some settlers from Germany began dry-farming barley.
Irrigation water became available in the Otay area around 1950, and the farmers diversified and put in vegetable crops and citrus orchards, like those in Imperial Valley, to the north. They couldn’t beat the prices of Mexican growers, though, and the mesa languished until the late nineteen-sixties, when a combine of speculators bought up property and lobbied to have the local zoning changed from agricultural to industrial and commercial.
The obvious appeal of the mesa was its strategic position, directly across the border from what American business interests refer to as Mexico’s “inexhaustible pool of cheap labor.” It was such thinking that helped to create an agreement in 1942 that, as a war-emergency measure, allowed farm workers to enter the States legally, so they could harvest crops that might otherwise have rotted in the fields. The agreement saved California farmers from terrible losses, but it also reinforced a notion already prevalent among rural Mexicans that there would always be work up north. (So many Mexicans came in as braceros that in 1954 the government, in an initiative called Operation Wetback, ordered them to leave the country or face being deported. According to government records, more than a million Mexicans left, but no one knows how many returned.) California agriculture still depends on “cheap labor,” and so do the maquiladoras springing up on Otay Mesa—one plant in Tijuana, for tedious piecework, and one in the United States, for the final assembly of products, and for corporate offices.
Among corporations that operate maquiladoras, the underlying assumption is that poor Mexicans will be delighted with humdrum jobs that pay a fraction of what an American worker would earn for doing the same thing, but this hasn’t proved to be true. The turnover rate at most plants is very high, and so is the rate of absenteeism, with employees often going home for the weekend and not returning until the following Wednesday.
Industry journals address these problems in an oblique way, suggesting, for instance, that “task oriented” Americans have trouble understanding “relationship oriented” Hispanics, but it is more usual for the advice columns to provide cross-cultural tips, such as when to give a co-worker el abrazo, the friendly Latin hug—on holidays, of course, but also at funerals and at “any other moment of happiness or sadness.” The journals are not as forthcoming about the environmental impact of maquiladoras, although Twin Plant News did report in a recent issue that American corporations had been caught dumping about half a million tons of toxic waste at “clandestine ‘toxic cemeteries’” all along the border.
It can be instructive to visit both sides of Otay Mesa. On the American side, you see bright new industrial parks bearing triumphant corporate logos—Sony, Sanyo, Hughes Aircraft. The Golden Arches are in place. Truckloads of desert-hardy trees and shrubs go by, destined to form the instant landscaping on Maquiladora Street or Pacific Rim Boulevard. Everything’s clean.
Drive through the Otay Mesa port of entry, and you’re in another world. (The port, which opened in 1985, purportedly to ease the traffic at San Ysidro, has been a tremendous boon to development.) The buildings in the Zona Industrial are drab, the roads are miserably paved, and the air reeks of chemicals and diesel fumes. Most maquila workers are young women from the interior, and on their lunch break they leave the plants to eat at carts and flirt with men. This appears to be a moment of happiness, but it fades as soon as the women, whose wages of fifty dollars a week barely cover their housing and transportation costs, must go back inside.
The maquiladoras pose no difficulties for the Border Patrol. They have stringent hiring policies, and almost all the employees live in and around Tijuana. At Brown Field Station, the foremost duty of agents remains the capture of migrants. They use a variety of high-tech gear to assist them, and it adds a considerably to the annual budget of the I.N.S. There are electronic sensors buried on the border, and whenever anybody passes by one a blip flashes on a computer screen at headquarters. There is an infrared telescope that rests on a pickup truck, and it is deployed at a different spot each night, somewhere between San Ysidro and the mesa. When you look through it, you can pick out people moving in the dark. They’re an eerie green against the dull-red glow of fields and earth. The agent manning the scope pinpoints the location of migrants on a grid and relays it, and then a copter may be called in to throw a search beam on the spot.
In spite of the high-tech equipment, most Border Patrol tracking is done on foot or in a vehicle, often a Chevy Blazer painted a sort of grayish camouflage color. The Blazers are sometimes so dented they look as if they’d been driven off a cliff, and some of them actually have been, because agents seldom pursue migrants over established roads. Instead, they have to motor through mud, marshes, sand, and loose gravel.
As for the mesa, it is as hard as a cast-iron skillet, even after a rain, and a ride across it at top speed is a serious challenge to the human spine. The shock absorbers in most of the Border Partrol’s vehicles are ancient, and you bounce around so vigorously that you may bang your head on the roof. Agents also sustain injuries while they’re running, jumping fences, and wrestling with migrants. Coyotes do them damage by pitching rocks and chunks of concrete at them from fleeing vans. One agent got hit in an ear and went deaf. Another agent took such a solid crack to his forehead that it exposed the frontal lobe of his brain.
These “rockings” are a major nuisance. In the San Diego Sector, the Border Patrol spends about forty thousand dollars a year replacing its vehicles’ windshields and side windows. At the same time, however, agents are spared other types of violence, which is a bit strange, given the potentially explosive climate on the border. There are theories to explain this. One theory has it that most migrants are simple folk, who wouldn’t know which end of a weapon to hold if you stuck it in their hands. Another theory has it that the criminals who do have weapons control their impulse toward violence, because they don’t want to incur the wrath of the United States government and upset the subtle balances of a system that works so beautifully to their advantage.
* * *
Joe Nunez is assigned to Brown Field Station, and in his eleven years as an agent he has been involved in only one threatening incident when a migrant pulled a knife and tried to stab Nunez’s partner. Nunez gets excited when he tells about battling for the knife (which, it turned out, was made of wood), but he is really an easygoing type, who likes a beer and a barbecue and doesn’t let himself become hung up on the most salient metaphysical issue of this job–that is, whether or not the chaos at the border is intentional.
Sometimes it troubles Joe that the job isn’t more stimulating, and he thinks about transferring to an investigative unit in L.A., because the thrills at Brown Field are few and far between. Nunez caught some Chinese once, and once he caught some Yugoslavs, but then O.T.M.s (migrants who are Other Than Mexican) are common in the San Diego Sector: in fiscal year 1988, its agents arrested (among others) three hundred and forty-seven Colombians, two hundred and sixty-six Brazilians, fifty-three South Koreans, twenty Indians, sixteen Turks, eleven Filipinos, seven Canadians, three Israelis, and one person apiece from Nigeria, Somalia, Gambia, Algeria, and France.
One night, when the moon was almost full, Nunez let me ride with him on patrol. In minutes, he noticed five people at the edge of the highway, moving stealthily forward. He shut off the Blazer’s headlights, downshifted into first, and crept up on them. They were so preoccupied with the speeding cars and the unfamiliar turf that they didn�
�t see him until he was about ten yards away. Then one of them shouted, and they all spun on their heels and ran, but when Nunez ordered them to halt they complied, slumping to their knees and putting their hands on their heads, as if they had practiced the drill. There were three migrant men, a migrant woman, and a coyote, all in their early twenties. Nunez called for a Border Patrol van to collect them. Then he frisked everyone and found a handkerchief tied to one man’s leg, hidden under his trousers. The man reacted as if the handkerchief held precious gems. In it were ten crumpled dollar bills.
The mood of the apprehended was sombre. They seemed to be kicking themselves for getting caught. When hundreds were crossing the mesa, why had fate selected them to be pulled aside? Nunez made small talk with them, speaking in Spanish. This was always an awkward time—the dead time before a van arrived—and during it all pretense fell away, and the weirdness of the situation became manifest. Some agents joked about it, while others scolded their captives for breaking the law. Some agents knew what it was like to be poor and so were sympathetic, while others concealed their emotions behind the symbols of office. There were agents who were inquisitive, and there were agents who were rude and made racist remarks.