The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  Octavio is the exclusion, and even though he’s here, he isn’t. There is an entire body of law to ensure he is never fully here.

  When I check my flip phone for the time, I have to close one eye to read the digital numbers. It’s three seventeen in the morning, and the canister of mezcal has gotten us both very drunk.

  “O, O, O, cabrón! Se me olvidó decirte.”

  Octavio slurs his words a bit, and his eyes have that too-relaxed slant. He tells me he was driving home after picking up his wife from work when he was pulled over for making a U-turn.

  “Y me dejó ir.”

  “Te dejó ir? Así nada más?”

  I don’t know if he fully appreciates how many people have been deported after minor traffic violations, how close he came to another starting over after he’d just started getting over the previous one, or how he narrowly escaped being permanently barred from the United States. If it had been a different police officer, or maybe the same one in a different mood a minute or two before or after, it might have been the boot. But when the cop asked why he’d pulled a U-turn, he told him in all earnestness that he had an emergency. When the cop asked him what the emergency was, he told him it was his wife, that she was hungry. He said the cop chuckled a little and then scolded him, saying that wasn’t an emergency, to which he’d replied, “Sir, you should see my wife.” Then the cop lost it and let him off with a warning.

  In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault poses Jeremy Bentham’s model prison as the emergent paradigm of state power:

  Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.

  Octavio raises his snifter. The last bit of mezcal swirls up the side and almost catches air.

  “Let’s go for a drink!” he yells.

  For better or worse, he has yet to become “the principle of his own subjection,” and sometimes he seems to fully let go of giving a fuck. He lived through a banking crisis, the peso crisis, urbanization, and so-called structural adjustment. Now he’s here. When he was a kid he and his family lived on a plot of land they owned without a deed, something that used to be common. But each season, the same amount of work made them less able to live, until they had to abandon their plot and move to an unincorporated area outside the closest city. He lived in a cinderblock and concrete structure he and his brother built until things became unlivable there too. He says he couldn’t just stay there and wait to die, so he decided to go north like many of the other men had. He knew a group of brothers who were planning to go to New York. He asked if he could join their group. They said yes.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Civilized Man

  It’s my second time here in Des Moines, and it’s disconcerting that the Neal Smith Federal Building is becoming familiar. Time and again I catch myself staring into the black granite walls where my reflection becomes a vague outline—no expression, no features, only a hollow black figure that shares my shape and follows me through the silence and sterility of these empty halls.

  “How can I help you?”

  My appointment is several floors up this time. A terse young woman greets me as I push through two glass doors that open into a small reception area. Posted behind her is an armed guard who silently shifts his weight from foot to foot, his hands fixed on his hips, fingertips floating centimeters from his handcuffs and gun. The office is reminiscent of a first-class airline lounge, where the layout is designed to keep those on the outside from even seeing inside.

  She points to a clipboard on the counter and asks for proof that I’m allowed to be there. The guard looks like he’s in his mid-fifties but has round, boyish features, and he’s staring at me with his hands on his belt. I open my shoulder bag with slow, deliberate movements. His deep green uniform in such close proximity references former abuses, like the “random” nature of frequent stops and the feeling of wide, forceful hands digging through your pockets. It signifies the volatile rhythm of Maglites tapping in the palms of uniformed men, the threat that at any moment you could be placed in the back of a cop car, like you’d seen done to your friend, driven to a place where no one would see or no one would care to see, only to be released a few hours later, bruised and bleeding, with a verbal warning. His uniform dredges the face of a fourteen-year-old as he’s pulled away in a backseat cage, his eyes holding an absolute zero only achievable after living through something like war.

  My upper lip starts to sweat under my moustache. I can feel my entire body become damp, and I sense every droplet of perspiration that gathers enough mass to drip down my spine. Minuscule movements become foreign, almost as though they’re on slight delay, as if it isn’t me making them. We both know everything in my possession has already been X-rayed, and I’ve just been made to walk through a metal detector downstairs. He knows a security wand has been run over the surface of my body, but he gazes blackly for too long anyway. I telegraph everything I do.

  His face is like an impermeable wall atop his green uniform. I can’t detect any hint of expression. I try but can’t tell if he’s making calculations or if he’s staring elsewhere—nowhere—lobotomized by long stretches of idle time. I wonder if he daydreams scenarios, like I do, in which he becomes a hero, and if his involve discharging his weapon since he carries one.

  The black metal butt of his handgun peaks from the holster, and I recall an occasion when a friend yelled at me for picking up his rifle, saying that his weapon was an instrument of death, that when he picked it up he became a killer, whether he killed something or not because everyone who possesses a firearm has on some level made the decision they are willing to kill. I read somewhere that homicidal ideation is incredibly common among the general population, but even before I knew this I was never alarmed when visions that ended in me killing someone would materialize rather comprehensively in my mind. These scenarios usually crept up near the edge of train platforms and were tinged with something of an uncanny sensation because they felt as though they were coming from somewhere beyond my will, making the acts seems inevitable and, in a strange way, already done. On the rare occasion I’m in very close proximity to someone wearing a gun, I imagine grabbing it. I keep my hands at my side.

  Judging others’ apprehension is never easy. He might be looking past me, past everything. His blond eyebrows are flat, his mouth flat. His eyes are unmoving pools of pale blue. It wouldn’t matter if he were someone different, someone indifferent, because in his uniform he’s the operator of an institutional function. He may not know it, but he’s guarding a kind of property called citizenship. His flat demeanor somehow feels aggressive to me. His unmoving eyes aren’t looking at me, but I can feel them gazing nonetheless. His stillness is unreadable.

  The thoughts, predilections, and motivations of the person inside the guard are in many ways irrelevant. I think some jobs are ones a moral person can’t do, and this may be one of them, even though he’s just sitting here. Gazing at his hip, at the one metal clasp that catches the neon office light and keeps his gun in place, I understand him to be an embodied reference to state violence, the same way gang colors signal not only allegiance but former violence committed by one’s gang.

  Maybe this is where the real power is most evident, in this stillness, in this inaction that nevertheless enforces the boundaries of the state. The power is doubled in my recognition of the authority he signals, in my internalization of the power he represents, my feeling that his eyes are upon me, my sitting here thinking about him sitting there. So I approach the desk slowly, move my hands slowly, sliding my summons from between the pages of a notebook, and carefully placing the single sheet of paper on the counter.

  Inside the large, nearly empty waiting room a couple—a young kid who looks Mexican and a young white woman wi
th big hoop earrings and meticulously gelled baby hair on her forehead—lean toward their lawyer, a young white man in an ill-fitting suit the color of fog. The gray washes him out, blends into his pale complexion, making him look like an overexposed photograph, one in which you can’t see anyone’s facial features but still know who they are. The lawyer leans forward awkwardly, like he’s attempting to crease his suit’s fabric as little as possible or like he hasn’t become comfortable wearing it yet. He whispers something to his young clients, which I can’t hear. The three of them sit facing me a few rows away, so I try to read the counsel’s lips. It’s useless—he’s a fast talker and his mouth barely moves. Mostly silent, the clients periodically exchange bewildered looks. One peculiar word does seem to be repeated. Each time it’s spoken it causes the couple to sink closer toward each other. The word seems to start with a hard “C,” followed immediately by an “R” that shapes the counsel’s mouth into a tense pucker, then two rapid flashes of his slightly yellowed teeth. After the last repetition, his young, brown-skinned client, who had already been looking toward the floor, runs his hands hard on the back of his buzz cut. Because I’m here for my civics interview, and because the couple is here with their lawyer, it dawns on me that they might be here for a Stokes interview, the interview that comes after a couple applying for immigration relief based on marriage fails to convince an official during their first interview that their relationship is “genuine.” Next to him, his wife, who sometimes looks nineteen and other times about twelve, delicately brings her hand just above his shoulder blades. She hesitates before placing it on his back, and in that moment the kid sinks into himself. She moves it gently in small circles.

  Counsel repeats the word, which I finally make out: Christmas.

  Christmas, I mouth, wondering why this lawyer would discuss Christmas on a summer day with his clients, and why it seemed so unsettling to them. Outside, the harsh midday sun amplifies itself on the mirrored exterior of the adjacent high-rise. It cuts through a large window behind them that frames their bodies. For a moment they’re still, and they look like posed figures in a Renaissance painting. I find myself scanning them for objects of significance. A tiny spectrum glints from a set stone on the ring finger of the young woman’s left hand. The baby-faced attorney clutches a black leather folio, as if for balance. A US flag hangs limp in the corner without the possibility of flight in the windless room. The reflection of an armed guard hovers ghostlike and watching. Sunk in the middle is the figure of a sullen man—a dark, heavy spot that affects everything around it—his brown skin making him the primary object of this scene.

  It looks so composed, for a moment I think about taking their photo, but instead I just sketch their long slender extremities on the back of a government booklet I’d been given to study. More than their semblance, I’m interested in what’s not going on around them, in the invisible relations that hold everything here in place, the still tension with which they sit and hang on their lawyer’s every word. This building houses the administrative arm of the immigration apparatus, the place where the single sheets of paper that can change everything about a person’s life are printed, signed, stamped, or examined and passed along. This is the castle of papers, the papers I’d grown up hearing so much about. But how does one apprehend, let alone capture, these muted bonds, these minute movements, these paperwork and keystroke power structures that build and sustain American empire?

  The young brown man’s presence in this office, and the fact that his new bride and attorney flank him, means they’ve probably already failed a little. It means that during their first interview they didn’t convince the interviewer theirs was a bona fide marriage, whatever that means. The young man who I believe is undocumented is now in a more precarious place than before he started because there is no turning back. Before, he was in the relative safety of contingent anonymity. The state didn’t know who he was, where he lived, or what his name was, but now he’s provided all that previously guarded information on forms he filled out himself. He has completely exposed himself, and so far it does not seem good.

  The attorney closes his eyes and nods gently. To feign concern is not part of his job—it’s a personal courtesy, an added bonus, or maybe he does care. Maybe his outward display is genuine, in which case, as an immigration attorney he’ll have to learn not to care so much, to do his best, yes, but not lose sleep over every deported individual, because there have been many, and there will continue to be many. Doctors know this: they have to steel themselves, go significantly cold in order to continue working dispassionately amid a relentless succession of sorrows. The attorney’s role is to know the complicated matrix of always-shifting immigration law—an intractable knot of specialized language—and guide them through as best he can. If the couple had to go to immigration court and could not afford his representation, they would not be granted legal counsel by the state. Their separation would be much more likely. He knows this. With the rest of his knowledge, which he exchanges for money, he’ll grant them access to the law.

  The waiting room is silent except for the faint whir of a large plasma screen mounted on the wall. Reclined in an ergonomic office chair, the armed guard watches a middle-aged man sell his grandfather’s World War II uniform on a muted episode of Pawn Stars. He stares blankly at the high-definition imagery that flashes on the monitor. I avert my eyes because the rapid succession of hyper-saturated HD color irritates my eyes.

  I scrawl “Adoration in Waiting” underneath my terrible drawing because the young couple and their lawyer bring to mind those figures transfixed in religious adoration from High Renaissance art. I’d seen such an image a few months earlier that had broken something of itself off, lodged slivers of its furtive psychology, in my mind. I’d been walking through the J. Paul Getty Museum in a sort of torpor brought on by the excesses of the sprawling grounds: the precisely manicured topiary, the reverberation of my footsteps through the hollow corridors, the ornate galleries full of private riches. It wasn’t immediately clear why the painting made such an impression, but after leaving it and winding through room upon room of opulent relics, I’d ended up back in front of it. Surrounded by luxury and light, the austerity of the painting provided a hole to sink into. I found myself sepulchered in Caspar’s sinister gaze.

  I wanted to take a photograph of the painting and its corresponding placard, so I casually turned in both directions looking for the guards who had been posted at the doorway, but they were gone. The plaque read “Adoration of the Magi.” The artist: Venetian painter Andrea Mantegna. The reliquary had emptied—I was alone—so I snapped three pictures, the last of which was a close-up of Caspar’s pale face. His head was slightly tilted downward, mouth ajar, and eyes fixed on a far-off point. He looked like a caged animal that hadn’t been fed for days, a fresh kill dangling somewhere in the distance. His look was lecherous and had such a draw that several weeks passed before I noticed the blessing bestowed by the Christ child while looking over my photographs of that day.

  Looking at it for the second time made me feel claustrophobic. I was dropped into Caspar’s perversion once again—his lust-filled eyes, his slightly open mouth. I was repulsed but nonetheless transfixed. It seemed illicit, blasphemous, that his agency commanded more of the frame than the Christ child’s. Initially I’d been drawn to it because its characters weren’t surrounded by opulence, like the other paintings lining the walls, but instead buried in total darkness. Less a celebration of divinity born, it was a dark allegory luring me toward the fissures in the characters’ inner lives.

  In the waiting room in Des Moines the scene is more ambiguous, but I can’t shake the feeling they’re somehow related. Looking at the Department of Homeland Security seal evokes a familiar repulsion, one that wells up inside me when I’m in the vicinity of this kind of power. In the museum, Caspar seemed drunk at the potential outcome of his transaction: a precious Chinese cup to secure His grace, his conspicuous adoration—he a kneeling sovereign—in exchange
for the keys to a higher kingdom. Mantegna was born on the cusp of an emerging order. In his time, Cosimo de’ Medici would have established his bank as the official lending institution of the Catholic Church, skirting the divine ban on usury with an unprecedented system of leveraged finance. Shortly thereafter, the Medici bank would guarantee a lavish papal overdraft for which they would be granted the right to collect tithes.

  Before the age of thirty, Mantegna would rise to prominence as court painter for the powerful Gonzaga family of Mantua, where he would live through the ascension of northern Italian cities as independent, international centers of commodity-based finance. He would witness the genuflection of feudal lords before bankers, the excommunication of clergy for not paying their debts, and the divine right of kings dissolve before a new logic. He and his patron, Ludovico II Gonzaga, a mercenary general, were at the vanguard of an emergent economic order that would dissolve the absolute power of kings and give way to new structures of power based on trade, finance, and capital in an economy and mode of governance growing to a new scale.

  In the waiting room there are no kings, only the Department of Homeland Security. The body of the sovereign, an easily identifiable locus of power, is absent, but the images are intrinsically linked in my mind. The old image by Mantegna, produced around 1500, reflects an empire teetering on the verge of modernity—a Europe hungry to supplant the transcendence of God with more earthly transactions. The scene in this room seems to exist on a continuum with that emergence. The four of us in this room wait seated before a disembodied authority, an authority allegedly diffused to all of us, handled through administrators and managers. The brown man might be the object of adoration in this waiting room because the state requires bodies to support it. In this North American context, Mexicans have served this purpose well. We’ve been used as disposable, malleable bodies that can be drawn in and purged according to labor demands and cyclical xenophobic trends.