by Jose Orduna
“Hijos de su puta madre,” my mother would have said, the María stopping halfway to her mouth, the portion she’d already dunked plopping back into her cup of coffee and spraying the front of her shirt.
Looking up at her screen she would have read “BROKEN BORDERS” and “DEADLY IMPORTS” across the bottom. She would have taken in the great Lou Dobbs sitting in front of his own large screen that also read “DEADLY IMPORTS” amid a foreboding blue smoke and a slanted caduceus—the staff carried by Hermes into the underworld, a staff entwined by two serpents, topped with open wings. This was a mistake, probably on the part of a production designer, and yet it’s apt enough: the caduceus, often erroneously used in place of the rod of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine and healing, is in fact a symbol of commerce, theft, deception, and death.
Dobbs—US flag pinned to his lapel—introduced his segment by reminding us that he’d “already reported here on the tremendous burden that illegal aliens put upon our national health care system,” before segueing into talk of the country’s “rising fears that once-eradicated diseases are now returning to this country though our open borders.” He warned portentously, “Those diseases are threatening the health of nearly every American, as well as illegal aliens themselves.”
Dr. Madeline Cosman, introduced by CNN as a medical lawyer (although according to her later obituary she was a “medieval expert”), went on to say that there are “some enormous problems with horrendous diseases that are being brought into America by illegal aliens.” The diseases mentioned by Cosman: tuberculosis, chagas disease, malaria, and leprosy.
CNN correspondent Christine Romans, sitting before the same screen—“DEADLY IMPORTS” and a slanted caduceus—explained to a baffled Dobbs how “suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than seven thousand cases of leprosy.”
She nodded emphatically as she repeated: “Leprosy.” After a solemn pause, she said with rehearsed lament: “In this country.”
The camera cut to Dobbs sitting stoically appalled, brow furrowed, mouth ever so slightly agape. He took a moment to gather himself.
“Incredible.”
As it turns out, the figures provided by Romans, based on Cosman’s expertise, were flagrantly wrong. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, there have been 7,124 new cases of leprosy reported in the United States, but this number corresponds to a thirty-year period, not a three-year period. In 2010, the number of new cases reported in the United States was only 294. And according to Health and Human Services, “Most [95 percent] of the human population is not susceptible to infection with M. leprae.”
These are the moments, I imagine, when my mom grabs her phone to call me, because even though we’re not “illegals,” she feels that these reports refer to us too because in this cultural moment, illegal—used as a noun—and the phrases illegal alien or illegal immigrant don’t conjure a white face of European descent but a brown face much like mine. And it is very hard to hide your face.
By the time Octavio walks into the bar, I’m two drinks in but ready to keep going. We order another round.
“You’re late.”
“Así trabaja el indio.” That is how the Indian works. A colloquialism.
We clink glasses.
One Friday night after a particularly grueling workweek, we’re hanging out at Octavio’s place, and he tells me how he crossed the border, something he’s referred to often but never told me about in detail. We start the evening with music and some black market Havana Club with plenty of ice. He grabs his jarana, a small guitar-shaped instrument with eight strings. The body is made of cedar; the strings are stretched guts. Nuzzling it, placing his fingers on the fretted neck, he strums it hard, almost violently. I remember meeting him in Mexico, when I was eleven. He was playing with a twelve-man band that included a man-sized harp, the first I’d ever seen up close, several percussion instruments I didn’t even know existed, like an ass’s jaw, and four or five different instruments that resembled a guitar.
Octavio takes a nip of his rum and messes with the tuning pegs, turning each one slightly back and forth. He strums a few chords while angling his ear down toward the instrument. Getting the sound he’s looking for, he smiles, takes one more nip from his cup, and then launches into “La Guacamaya,” a classic Son Jarocho that takes two people to call and respond and is usually accompanied by a harp or jarana. The song, one I learned as a child in Chicago, is from my birthplace.
He starts by plucking the strings in a delicate and complicated melody that rises and falls for a few bars before a forceful strum marks the beginning of the driving rhythm characteristic of Son Jarocho. The sound is transformed from something one would expect from an Ibero-influenced string instrument to a percussive African drive, and, abetted by the porcupine quill Octavio uses to pick, it arrives at the sound particular to Veracruz.
He starts, and we alternate verses, singing about an unfortunate macaw that has to fly away when all his dragon fruit is gone. Midway through, Octavio’s fiancée pounds on the wall from her bedroom, so we shut up.
He asks me if I ever miss Veracruz. “Not exactly,” I tell him. The truth is I don’t remember living there, but it does maintain a vague and powerful grip on me. Octavio says he misses it. It’s been more than fifteen years since he saw his mother, and although he doesn’t overtly say it, it’s clear that he’s scared he won’t ever get to see her again.
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own,” according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But when Octavio left, he wasn’t accepted anywhere. People are free to go but not arrive, making this declaration another example of the hollow rhetoric of human rights in international law. He was given a note card with a Tijuana address scribbled on it, two thousand miles from his home in Veracruz, and told to be there two days later.
“Pues le dije adiós a todos.”
Putting down the jarana, Octavio pours us another drink. They’re getting stronger, the ice cubes reduced to slivers floating in pale rum that tastes more and more like salted caramel.
A man opened the door, he recounted: “El tipo se veía de mala calaña.”
He noticed the man’s nostrils were raw, and he seemed strung out. He had scabs on his face and kept scratching a small area of his jeans, the denim there looking lighter and thinner than the rest of his pants. The man showed him to a small room with a stained mattress on the floor. They told him to stay in there and that they would get him when it was time. Every two days they brought him a liter of water and several containers of leftover carryout. Six days went by.
“Nos metieron como a seis en una cajuela.”
Six adult men were packed into the trunk of a small vehicle, a Corolla or something, and then a stranger drove them for hours on dark highways toward an unknown destination. They had been told to carry as little as possible and told that if they were at any point spotted, they were on their own. At one point, one of the men in the trunk got a calf cramp, but there wasn’t enough room for him to extend his leg, or even reach it, so another man kneaded it for him.
And then, sometime later, the car just stopped. Someone opened the trunk, and led them into total darkness. Each step for miles was taken in complete uncertainty, and each footfall landed with violent shifting. After several hours they came to an embankment with a steep gravel drop. In the distance, lights snaked down a highway and bled into the ditch on their side. They could hear the rushing sound of traffic beyond them but couldn’t pick their heads up to see the cars. It sounded like a river to Octavio, or like the sound of wind moving through the dry cornstalks he used to listen to as a child.
They hid in a thicket. One of the men put a cigarette in his mouth and struck a lighter once before the pollero slapped it away. A few moments later, one of the other men noticed someone from the group was missing. They discussed having seen him at the last stop they had made, about half an hour back.
“El pollero quería seguir, pero lo mandamos
a la chingada.”
One man decided to go back, while the others waited in silence in the brush. When the man returned, he just shook his head. “Ya no,” he said.
They ran across a twelve-lane highway, and when they reached the other side, a squadron of border patrol agents popped out from underneath a pile of garbage bags where they’d been hiding. Octavio and the other men were confronted with a wall of men in dark tactical gear and assault rifles.
A boot pressed down on the side of Octavio’s head, crushing his ear. The men were placed in the dog cage mounted on the back of the border patrol vehicle and then were taken to a booking station. Octavio could hear the pollero vomiting in the next cell, while another man attempted to tell the officers that their friend’s body was somewhere in the desert. One of the agents gave Octavio a Coca-Cola and smiled at him—told him in broken Spanish that things would turn out okay. Hours later they scanned his fingertips and had him sign some papers, most likely a voluntary departure form. He was loaded on a bus and driven for hours to a Mexican port of entry far from where he had attempted to cross. He was unloaded. An officer removed his cuffs and pointed toward the entrance of a building. It was not yet dawn, but the structures in the distance started to gain the vaguest of contours.
After my final night of work at the restaurant, after a meal of sliced duck breast in mole negro, and after several glasses of snuck tequila that retails at about fifty dollars a shot, I remembered only three things: dancing with two very tall, very attractive Russian women to a Cuban bolero, taking a deep and caustic drag of an American Spirit lit at the wrong end, and Octavio shaking my hand with a folded hundred-dollar bill in his: a hard-earned contribution toward my citizenship. “Qué esperas, cabrón?”
CHAPTER 2
Martín y Yoli
Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship.
—Ronald Reagan
When Martín became my father, he was skinny. He isn’t fat now, but there’s a photo of him from that time in which he’s bathing a black puppy in a washbasin, and in it he looks like a lanky kid. Somehow, even though he was about to have a child himself, he looks placid. His arms look relaxed, and he’s holding the wet puppy very gently. He looks present in that moment, like his mind is occupied with nothing other than kneading suds into a puppy’s back with his thumbs.
The person taking the photo, maybe Martín’s mother Estela, may have captured a moment of genuine calm, or it may just seem that way to me because I’d like to imagine they weren’t devastated by the news that they’d soon be parents; I know how I would have felt about it at his age, twenty. Or maybe the photo was taken just before anyone knew.
The puppies—two white, two black—were only a few weeks old, and they lived in a cardboard box lined with blankets. The box was in an entryway that led to the courtyard of the family home in Fortín. I remember seeing the photo for the first time when I was eight and being really drawn to three large metal tanks nestled between pots of young anthuriums. They looked like helium tanks for balloons, and my mom explained that they were filled with gas for the house, that in Fortín there was a truck that rode around town delivering them door to door, with a guy on the back shouting “Gas!” My mom said it was the same gas that came through the pipes in our place in Chicago and heated the oven, and I wondered whether those pipes were connected to tanks of gas somewhere in the basement of our apartment building. My mom said the gas came from the utility company, that there was a whole world of pipes and wires underneath the city, and that she didn’t really know exactly how it all worked, but it didn’t work like it worked in Mexico.
They always referred to Mexico. How this was different in Mexico or how that was oddly similar in Mexico, and I got some idea but never really a complete picture of what it meant. I had no recollection of it at all, just the sense that being from there affected almost every aspect of how we lived in Chicago. It had to do with why we didn’t answer the phone sometimes and why my dad wouldn’t say anything when they shorted him some hours at work, even though we really needed that money. It had to do with why they worked him thirty days in a row or more, why some people whose names I knew called themselves something different when they went to work, and why my grandparents, like most of my extended family, were complete strangers to me.
Yoli had been majoring in agronomy, with one semester left, when she found out she was pregnant and had to quit school. Her father kicked her out, and she went to live with Martín’s family. Before this she’d been interested in soil science, in how land can become depleted and lose its ability to produce food. She knew how to graft plants. There was a tree near her home that had been pink, and she added a branch of white blossoms that took. She never told anyone about it so it could be her secret to look at every time she passed. She was also athletic and got along better with her two brothers than with her three sisters. She’d grown to love basketball because her brother loved basketball, and her mother rarely let her out of the house except to play with him and to run errands. She had a broad back and muscular shoulders because in high school she’d been a swimmer, and she could do six wide-grip pull-ups in a row.
Yolanda’s mother, María, beat Yoli but none of her siblings. I didn’t know about this until well into my teens. María died young, of lung cancer, and Yoli had been the one to empty her bedpan, and she was the one who was there in her mother’s last moments of agony. Somehow I’d always known things had not been good for her. I think it was that we never really talked about my grandparents. When we did it was brief, and we would always reach a point where my mother would become agitated and clam up. We talked about María and my grandfather, Pablo, so infrequently that sometimes, embarrassed, I’d have to be reminded what their names were. There weren’t any pictures of them in our home.
By all accounts, Martín had a drinking problem. He wasn’t the type of guy who woke up shaking, reaching for a drink, but when he drank it sometimes went on for days. We’re similar in this way, and people say he was similar to his father in the same way. He had been in accounting, but by his own admission he wasn’t any good at school, probably because he liked drinking so much. His father had only been around for a brief period at the beginning of Martín’s life. He only saw him one time after that. His mother was Estela, and he called his uncle Roméo his father. He referred to him most frequently as Pa. Estela owned a restaurant, VicMar, which was a combination of her sons’ names, Victor and Martín. They started working there when they were seven and five, and before they moved into their house in Fortín, they lived in a vecindad, a kind of housing arrangement for poor families where private rooms surround a shared courtyard, kitchen, and bath. Martín was friends with Pablo, the brother with whom Yoli played basketball, and that’s how they met. But really they’d always sort of known each other, and then one day things were just different. Neither of them can say what it was really, but they started hanging out alone, without telling anyone. They listened to Silvio Rodriguez on Martín’s record player, and Yoli enjoyed being away from her family.
Martín was Yoli’s first real boyfriend.
Her nipples itched. Martín noticed that she’d been scratching them a lot lately. They were on a day trip with Victor and his girlfriend, Marta, on the coast. They all noticed that Yoli was fidgeting with her flannel shirt but thought, at first, that it was the wool. It wasn’t the wool. After she changed into a cotton T-shirt but kept fidgeting, Martín asked Yoli if she had been regular.
Regular?
They said when they found out, it was clear what they needed to do.
Martín’s aunt, Hilda, had moved to Chicago a few years before. A friend of hers from Fortín lived in Chicago and worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family. When one of their other housekeepers quit, they asked the friend if she knew anyone who wanted to fill the spot. “Someone like you,” they’d said
, meaning a Mexican, rather than a black person, not understanding that there are black Mexicans, so they sponsored Hilda’s arrival and got her a green card just like that.
We would always have a complicated relationship with Chicago, but it’s where I first remember coming into consciousness. Martín had gone to the United States before us, to get a job and save some money. He got here in the winter, and the coat he imagined would be enough wasn’t. The first steps he took outside of the airport were into negative-ten-degree cold. Before that, the coldest he’d ever experienced was around forty degrees, when he climbed with Yoli’s brothers to the peak of Citlaltépetl, where he saw snow for the first time. He didn’t know that cold could hurt inside, and he could feel on that first Chicago night that cold could very easily stop him from living. It was nighttime, and before his aunt Hilda arrived to pick him up, he felt alone in a strangely familiar way. It was a feeling he associated with Manuel, his biological father. He didn’t know when he would see his wife and baby again. When he thought about this something turned between his ribs and his heart. A man outside the airport asked him something in English, he just shook his head, No.
Martín arrived in the United States on the cusp of shifting sentiment, a flux that was consistent with history. In 1921, the US Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which restricted the flow of southern and eastern European immigrants, and in 1924 the Immigration Act restricted the flow of eastern and southern Asians. Mexicans, however, were excluded from these and weren’t really considered immigrants but laborers. The agriculture lobby had been successful in insuring that Mexicans were allowed to come and go with the seasons because they were cheap and pliant, so many of them did. Others settled. When the Great Depression hit, between four hundred thousand and two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of whom were US citizens, “left” the United States. This period, known as the Mexican Repatriation, isn’t widely known by the general public. Repatriation usually referred to the official process by which the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) returned someone to his or her country of origin or citizenship, but a relatively low number of the people expelled during this period were expelled through INS-directed removal. The administrative process of deportation was not as fully developed and institutionalized as it is today. Instead, the lives of many Mexicans and Mexican Americans were made untenable when the federal government provided support for, and turned a blind eye to, draconian state and local government initiatives like conducting arbitrary raids on Latino communities, wrongfully removing US citizens, and securing “transportation arrangements with railroads, automobiles, ships, and airlines to effectuate wholesale removal of persons out of the United States to Mexico.” Mexican and Mexican American communities were “forced to abandon, or were defrauded of, personal and real property, which often was sold by local authorities as ‘payment’ for the transportation” to Mexico.