The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  Martín fit the incredibly narrow criteria and was granted temporary residence.

  “I always try to remember what the kid who gave me the flier looked like, but I can’t. I can’t even remember if he was white or black or a paisa or what. I think he was wearing a red jacket or maybe black—I don’t know.”

  He says he felt a second of relief that was drowned out by the fact that Yoli and I didn’t qualify. It’s estimated that around 1.3 million people applied under the agricultural worker criteria, so in total around three million of the estimated five million undocumented individuals living in the United States suddenly had temporary status. Employer sanctions were gutted, but the raids and periodic snatching of people off the street continued. The final version of the law meant the only thing employers had to do to avoid culpability was make sure their employees’ paperwork “reasonably appears on its face to be genuine,” which meant the Justice Department would only be able to prosecute if they could prove that employers were hiring undocumented workers intentionally. Other times industries like landscaping, construction, factory work, and agriculture maneuvered around any liability whatsoever by using contracted and subcontracted labor.

  On November 6, 1986, upon signing the IRCA, Ronald Reagan released a statement in which he outlined his reasons for signing the bill into law. Part of it reads:

  In 1981 this administration asked the Congress to pass a comprehensive legislative package, including employer sanctions, other measures to increase enforcement of the immigration laws, and legalization. The act provides these three essential components. The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities, which draw illegal aliens here. We have consistently supported a legalization program, which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.

  We now know these words were coming from a president whose eight years in office were among the bloodiest in the history of the Western Hemisphere. His administration continued the long-standing US tradition of making incursions into the affairs of Latin American countries, and since this was the Cold War it was in the name of anticommunism. In Guatemala, Reagan provided the right-wing government with military and economic support despite the State Department and White House being apprised of the ongoing violence under the leadership of Ríos Montt. In 1982 the US embassy in Guatemala sent cables to Washington right after a massacre in the Ixtil village of Sacuchum. One of the cables specified, “Reports of torture and strangulation (and possible incidents of rape) [suggest] the modus operandi of the extreme right.” As these cables came in, the US State Department continued publicly asserting that it could not “definitively attribute the killing to one group or another” and that the Guatemalan military was “taking care to protect innocent bystanders.” In classified memos from the very same months, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Bosworth reported that “the military continues to engage in massacres of civilians in the countryside” and said his department had recently received a “well-founded allegation of a large-scale killing of Indian men, women and children in a remote area by the army.”

  Many who survived were interned in “model villages” that were nothing more than detention camps supplied by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). After the period of open massacres ended, targeted assassinations by death squads with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency continued to torture and kill alleged dissidents into the nineties. A truth commission report published in 1999, titled “Guatemala: Memory of Silence,” estimated that two hundred thousand people were killed or disappeared and that 93 percent of the human rights violations and acts of violence registered by the commission were “attributable to actions by the State.” The commission also found that “the Army’s perception of Mayan communities” played a part in the “aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to the extermination en masse, of defenceless Mayan communities.” The US-backed Guatemalan army perpetrated

  acts such as the killing of defenceless children, often by beating them against walls . . . throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.

  Reagan supported similarly atrocious conflicts in El Salvador and, most famously, Nicaragua during his presidency.

  Although it’s impossible to say with certainty what the motivations were for legislators and the president in passing the IRCA, I feel confident thinking it had nothing to do with reducing immigration, improving lives, or helping people “step into the sunlight.” What it did do was allow the United States to reset a game board by regularizing the immigration status of the people who were already here, while leaving the policies that had made them “illegal” to begin with in place for the next wave of immigrants, so that they too would be inscribed with the same vulnerabilities.

  Maybe it had something to do with Mexico’s strategic place in Latin America during the Cold War. It feels as though part of my reality—and Martín’s and Yoli’s realities—will always remain arbitrary and unintelligible. I have a very clear memory of something that happened during the mid-1990s when my dad and I were watching TV. The local news broadcast came on. It played a clip of Ronald Reagan in Hollywood wearing a cowboy hat, putting a saddle on a horse, and then a clip of President Reagan standing at a podium in front of the Brandenburg Gate, telling Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.” The anchor announced that Reagan had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I knew what that was because one of our neighbors, an old Polish lady, suffered from it, and Yoli had explained what it meant. Martín said something like “Que se lo carge la chingada” and turned off the TV. I think I remember it still because my dad badmouthing someone suffering such misfortune wasn’t something I’d heard or thought I would ever hear. It was a long while before I understood.

  CHAPTER 3

  Biometrics

  This morning my eyes are slits and I’m grumbling to Ariel, my friend in the passenger seat, about these appointments being so sudden. A week earlier I’d received a certified letter with the Department of Homeland Security seal on it—a blue eagle holding an olive branch in one talon and thirteen arrows in the other. It was a summons to have my biometrics captured, to have my fingerprints cleared by the FBI, one step closer to being naturalized. Ariel offered to come along to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel and crashing the car I borrowed. We’d also half-joked that her whiteness would keep us both safe.

  My appointment: February 14, 2011. 210 Walnut Street. 1 p.m. Des Moines, Iowa.

  Shards of sunlight have just started creeping over the long hills along I-80 West. We made sure to leave early enough to make it on time in the event of a flat tire or some other incident. Ariel snaps photos of me driving.

  “So you’ll remember.”

  She snaps another one, squinting behind the viewfinder. “Are you excited?”

  I watch the sunrise tremble in the rearview. It takes me a moment to answer.

  “Not really.”

  It takes another moment to work out that “not really” is, in fact, precisely true.

  When I moved out of my parents’ house a few years back, my mom told me to make sure to report to Homeland Security.

  “To what?”

  “Homeland Security. En el Internet
.”

  She explained that as “lawful permanent residents” we had to report to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service—one of seven agencies that comprise the Department of Homeland Security—within ten days of moving.

  “Or what?”

  She shrugs.

  “Pues quién sabe.”

  Valentine’s Day. Along I-80, the corn and soy have long been harvested, the landscape is topped with husks and wisps of snow. What’s left is the gray geometry of agribusiness. Talk radio has been tranquilizing me with a voice at a volume so low that it no longer carries words, only textures. I feel like I’m gliding on the muted surface of a Luc Tuymans painting: colors one would expect from a drowned corpse, images stripped of their context and mediated into blasé obscurity. The monstrous actuality of the landscape concealed by its absolute banality.

  In these conditions, it’s hard to remain aware that I’m driving, that there’s a passenger in the seat next to me. I zone out, and my eyes trace a hawk detaching from a wire. It crosses in front of the car, and as I follow it my gaze becomes fixed on my hand on the steering wheel and then on the valley between my index and middle knuckle. I sink into a memory of a front yard when I was eleven. I was meeting a friend in front of his house, by his grandfather’s flagpole and the three-story evergreen that bent under its own weight.

  For a moment everything was still, and then the unmistakable buzz of some kind of projectile cut through the air incredibly close to my face. A boy yelled something too suddenly for me to understand. My eyes searched for the source and came to two small faces in the third-story window: my friend crouching and another boy giggling. Another rush of air. This one hit between the knuckles of my hand covering my face, producing a sharp burning. I ran and didn’t stop until I reached the end of the next block, where I finally registered that they’d been screaming “Border Patrol!” and shooting at me with a BB gun.

  Today it’s Valentine’s Day, and even though I’m in the process of being—at least nominally—included as a full member of US society, these points of contact with the Department of Homeland Security don’t feel like love. What do I have to do with the FBI? Ariel is saying something. I glance at her face and then back at the road, but all I can think about is the vast, amorphous power we’re moving toward. My mind can’t settle on a representation because the nature of this power seems as mysterious, complex, and ever-changing as an ecological system or metabolism. I glance at Ariel’s moving lips and at the white salt spots on the windshield. My mind cycles through images of power: the Pentagon, a baroque black-and-white etching of a scaffold, a pane of glass with thousands of fractures moving in all directions, with no discernable origin. Who exactly will be looking at my fingerprints? Where will this information go?

  We pull off the highway.

  Downtown Des Moines is one of those North American metropolises absent of pedestrians, all sharp lines and dead angles. A few homeless men stand in a park smoking.

  Ariel snaps a photo of me making a stupid face, holding the immigration document in one hand, and giving a thumbs-up with the other. Behind me, across the street, the federal building fills the rest of the photograph with its all-glass exterior. She snaps another: me kissing the iron federal seal emerging from the concrete wall, my lips hovering inches from the thirteen arrowheads in the eagle’s talons. This year, the immigration document is my only valentine, and it feels like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with a sociopath. My whereabouts, purchases, and behaviors must be known. My associations must be scrutinized, my intentions justified.

  Just inside the revolving doors are two armed guards who look bored but perk up the second Ariel and I enter the building. We’re probably the first people they’ve seen in hours. The one in front of the walk-through metal detector is shaped like a sweet potato. He furrows his brow.

  “Purse on the belt.”

  All business. He doesn’t even crack a smile for Ariel—a tall, lean girl—on Valentine’s Day. Her purse disappears into the X-ray machine. The smaller guard looks at his screen, scrunching the bridge of his nose, tracing contours, trying to detect any deviation. Nothing. She meets it on the other side.

  I’d failed to imagine this machine, these two guards. I’ve been standing in place, feeling the need to be perfectly still, suddenly aware of my entire body’s surface. My attempt to take mental inventory of my backpack is condensing tension into beads of sweat on my forehead and upper lip. I know there’s nothing of concern in my bag, but I have a shoddy memory, and there are so many small pockets tucked away.

  “Bag on the belt.”

  This time he’s talking to me, and there’s nothing to do at this point but put the bag on the belt. We’re both fixed in our roles, transacting in suspicion, guilt, and fear. I feel observed, not only by the soft-faced guard standing in front of me, but also by the juridical presence in the walls.

  Ariel smiles from the other side.

  My bag disappears, and the guard behind the machine scrunches his nose again. I can’t tell if he’s looking harder, scrunching more for me than for Ariel. The belt stops. He calls for the other guard, who’s been standing in front of me, breathing heavily, staring at my face. They look at the screen, take turns pointing, and murmur to each other.

  Ariel stands on the other side waiting, and I expel a nervous chuckle like the ones that erupt at funerals for no apparent reason. They’ve reversed my bag out of the X-ray machine. The bigger of the two guards pats and squeezes it, furrows his brow, and looks at me like I’ve done something wrong.

  “What’s in this bag?”

  Ariel is no longer smiling.

  “Uh, books.”

  His job is to suspect and intimidate. I have no idea whether or not this has anything to do with the fact that I’m brown, but he’s staring at my face, and I imagine he sees me as I see him, which is to say in the most reductive and obvious way. There’s no opportunity for meaningful communication, or any communication really, just the reception of narrow data with which to fix a type.

  What type does this man think I am?

  In a piss dive in Dallas a few years back, a big, white biker bought me a drink and showed me the World War I trench knife he carried strapped to his boot.

  “My grandpappy’s.”

  Each of his thick, knotted fingers filled the individual holes of the knuckle grips. He made a fist, and his hand became a spiked weapon pointed at my gut.

  “Skull crusher.” Holding the eleven-inch knife upright, he tapped the brass-spiked handle against his wooden stool.

  “This,” he said, fingering the spiked pommel, “this’ll crack you open.”

  His voice crackled like campfire and indicated a certain kind of life. I could feel that the absolute wrong thing to do was to get up and walk away. I could feel that the only thing to do was order both of us another round, this time a double, and sit there until we reached a kind of end.

  “That is an excellent knife.”

  I said it casually. I had to demonstrate that this was not the first time a drunk had shown me his knife, or if it was, that I had led the kind of life that would render me unmoved. I was unmoved—not because it wasn’t terrifying, but because I’d been around violence before, and because I had confidence that if I drank fast, faster than he did, I’d be fine, and because at that juncture in life I was too tired to care very much about my well-being. I ordered round after round of Wild Turkey, ordered a beer in a bottle, and placed it where I could swat it into his face if I had to.

  Eventually he slid the knife back into his boot.

  “Now let me ask you one question.” His tone shifted and he looked at my face excitedly, like a kid trying to contain his laughter as he’s about to tell a joke. Motörhead’s “Killed by Death” was blaring on the jukebox, so he leaned in and put his arm around my shoulders so I could hear him. I felt his hot breath on my earlobe. He smelled good—like tobacco, exhaust, and whiskey.

  “Are you a sand nigger or a spic?”

 
He stared at my face, and I stared at his. Deep creases that looked like scars or a river’s tributaries lined his features. Half of his long white beard was tucked into his shirt. He looked like an old fighting dog that had never managed to die. Now, right now, something is going to happen, I thought, gripping my bottle of beer and positioning it on the bar adjacent to him so that I could pivot off my stool and smash it into his face, but he erupted with laughter that quickly broke into a wet hacking fit. He slapped me on the back, laughing, turning red in the face. I loosened my grip on the bottle.

  I started laughing too because the tension had broken. I slid him my beer.

  “Take a drink, man, for God’s sake.”

  His wet gurgling fit paired well with Lemmy Kilmister’s voice and the shiny velvet Elvis that stared at us from across the room. He chugged the entire beer, and we went outside for a smoke. The broad street was completely abandoned, and as we sucked down our cigarettes a couple of coyotes flashed across the road in the distance under the streetlights.

  “So which is it?”