Later that night, as I sat in the transport van listening to the calls come out over the radio, I realized I had forgotten their names.
—
The modern-day boundary between the United States and Mexico was defined largely by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, signed after nearly two years of warfare between neighboring republics. The newly agreed-upon borderline was to begin “on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego,” and run east “following the division line between Upper and Lower California” until it reached the Colorado River at the town of Yuma. The treaty dictated that the line would then follow the course of the Gila River from its intersection with the Colorado until it reached the border of New Mexico, at which point the boundary would leave the waters of the Gila in a straight line until it intersected the Rio Grande north of El Paso, where the line would again become fluid “following the deepest channel” of the river until it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, to be forgotten in the waters of the ocean at a point “three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande.”
Article V of the treaty mandated that “in order to designate the boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground landmarks which shall show the limits of both Republics . . . the two Governments shall each appoint a commissioner and a surveyor, who . . . shall meet at the port of San Diego, and proceed to run and mark the said boundary in its whole course to the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte.” It added that “the boundary line established by this article shall be religiously respected by each of the two Republics.”
Following the ratification of the treaty, both countries appointed commissioners and surveyors to mark the new boundary. The surveying was initially carried out under the questionable supervision of John Russell Bartlett, a well-connected and adventure-hungry bookseller living in New York. After many fits and starts, the commission established the initial point of the boundary on the Pacific coast and marked it with a “substantial monument,” and made a similar determination “at the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers, where another monument was placed.” Between these two points, the commission marked the boundary with five intermediate monuments.
Several years later, in 1853, the boundary line was modified by the Treaty of La Mesilla, commonly known in the United States as the Gadsden Purchase. Instead of following the natural course of the Gila River across Arizona to the edge of New Mexico, the new agreement stipulated that a rigid and pivoting line would dip south from Yuma and run east to the Rio Grande, adding nearly thirty thousand square miles of territory to the southern edges of Arizona and New Mexico.
In the first article of the new agreement, it was stated that each government would again nominate a commissioner whose duty it would be “to survey and mark out upon the land the dividing line stipulated by this article, where it shall not have already been surveyed and established.” Over the course of three years following the treaty’s ratification, a new survey was undertaken that included many personnel from the original commission. The newly appointed commissioner, William H. Emory, brought great conviction to his work, deeming it “fortunate that two nations, which differ so much in laws, religion, customs, and physical wants, should be separated by lines.” While he regretted that the new boundary should limit the “inevitable expansive force” of the United States, he nevertheless declared with characteristic zeal that “no line traversing the continent could probably be found which is better suited to the purpose.”
In the course of their work along the international boundary, Emory’s surveying parties erected, in addition to the six still-suitable monuments previously established along California’s border with Mexico, the placement of forty-seven monuments along the newly traced line from the Colorado River to the Rio Grande, asserting, for the very first time, the entirety of a boundary that had hitherto existed only on paper and in the furious minds of politicians.
—
Agents found Martin Ubalde de la Vega and his three companions on the bombing range more than fifty miles north of the border. The four men had been in the desert for six days and had wandered in the July heat for over forty-eight hours without food or water. By the time of rescue, one of the men had already met his death. Of the survivors, one was quickly treated and discharged from the hospital, while another remained in intensive care, recently awoken from a coma, unable to remember his own name. When I arrived at the hospital asking for the third survivor, nurses explained that he was recovering from kidney failure and guided me to his room, where he lay hidden like a dark stone in white sheets.
I had been charged with watching over de la Vega until his condition was stable, at which point I would transport him to the station to be processed for deportation. I settled in a chair next to him, and after several minutes of silence, I asked him to tell me about himself. He answered timidly, as if unsure of what to say or even how to speak. He apologized for his Spanish, explaining that he knew only what they had taught him in school. He came from the jungles of Guerrero, he told me, and in his village they spoke Mixtec and farmed the green earth. He was the father of seven children, he said, five girls and two boys. His eldest daughter lived in California and he had crossed the border with plans to go there, to live with her and find work.
We spent the following hours watching telenovelas and occasionally he would turn to ask me about the women in America, wondering if they were like the ones on TV. He began to tell me about his youngest daughter, still in Mexico. She’s just turned eighteen, he said. You could marry her.
Later that afternoon, de la Vega was cleared for release. The nurse brought in his belongings—a pair of blue jeans and sneakers with holes worn through the soles. I asked what had happened to his shirt. I don’t know, he answered. I looked at the nurse and she shrugged, telling me he had come in that way. We’ve got no clothes here, she added, only hospital gowns. As we exited through the hospital lobby, I watched the way eyes fell across his shirtless body. I imagined him alone and half naked in the days to come as he was ferried through alien territory, booked and transferred between government processing centers and finally bused to the border to reenter his country.
In the parking lot I placed him in the passenger seat of my patrol vehicle and popped the trunk. At the back of the cruiser I unbuckled my gun belt, unbuttoned my uniform shirt, and removed my white V-neck. I reassembled my uniform and returned to the passenger door to offer him my undershirt.
Before leaving town, I asked him if he was hungry. You should eat something now, I told him, at the station there’s only juice and crackers. I asked what he was hungry for. What do Americans eat? he asked. I laughed. Here we eat mostly Mexican food. He looked at me unbelievingly. But we also eat hamburgers, I said. We pulled into a McDonald’s and at the drive-through window de la Vega turned to me and told me he didn’t have any money. Yo te invito, I said.
As we drove south along the open highway, I tuned in to a Mexican radio station and we listened to the sounds of norteño as he ate his meal. After finishing he sat silently next to me, watching the passing desert. Then, as if whispering to me or to someone else, he began to speak of the rains in Guerrero, of the wet and green jungle, and I wondered if he could ever have been made to imagine a place like this—a place where one of his companions would meet his death and another would be made to forget his own name, a landscape where the earth still seethed with volcanic heat.
—
As I cut for sign along the border road, I watched a Sonoran coachwhip snake try to find its way into Mexico through the pedestrian fence. The animal slithered along the length of the mesh looking for a way south, hitting its head against the rusted metal again and again until finally I guided it over to the wide opening of a wash grate. After the snake had made its way across the adjacent road, I stood for a while looking through the mesh, staring at the undulating track
s left in the dirt.
—
A woman on the south side of the pedestrian fence flagged me down as I passed her on the border road. I stopped my vehicle and went over to her. With panic in her voice she asked me if I knew about her son—he had crossed days ago, she said, or maybe it was a week ago, she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t heard anything from him, no one had, and she didn’t know if he had been caught or if he was lost somewhere in the desert or if he was even still alive. Estamos desesperados, she told me, her voice quivering, with one hand clawing at her chest and the other trembling against the fence. I don’t remember what I told her, if I took down the man’s name or if I gave her the phone number to some faraway office or hotline, but I remember thinking later about de la Vega, about his dead and delirious companions, about all the questions I should have asked the woman. I arrived home that evening and threw my gun belt and uniform across the couch. Standing alone in my empty living room, I called my mother. I’m safe, I told her, I’m home.
—
Three decades after signing the Treaty of La Mesilla, successive conventions of Mexican and United States diplomats convened in Washington, D.C., in 1882, 1884, and again in 1889, to discuss the state of the boundary between the two nations. In the years since the last boundary commission had concluded its work in 1856, settlers had been moving to the southwest in growing numbers to work on landholdings and newly discovered mines adjacent to the international border. In many places, the exact location of the boundary had become a matter of contentious debate, presenting great difficulty to government authorities on both sides of the line. In some cases, it was even charged that quarreling parties had destroyed or removed the boundary markers that had been erected at great cost to both countries in the previous decades.
During the course of these binational meetings, representatives of both countries agreed on the pressing need to determine “(a) the condition of the present boundary monuments; (b) the number of destroyed or displaced monuments; (c) the places, settled or capable of eventual settlement, where it may be advisable to set the monuments closer together along the line than at present; (d) the character of the new monuments required, whether of stone or iron; and their number, approximately, in each case.” The conventions thus called for the establishment of a new international boundary commission, which was to possess the power and authority to reposition incorrectly placed or missing monuments, “to erect new monuments on the site of former monuments when these shall have been destroyed,” and “to set new monuments at such points as may be necessary and be chosen by joint accord.”
In keeping with the trend toward consolidating a well-demarcated and enforceable line, the convention agreements stipulated “that the distance between two consecutive monuments shall never exceed 8,000 meters, and that this limit may be reduced on those parts of the line which are inhabited or capable of habitation.” In the course of their ensuing work, the commission found that most of the original markers were “but rude piles of stone . . . while the intervals between them were found to be in some cases as great as 20 or 30 miles . . . and in one instance 101 miles.” Some monuments had disappeared altogether, spirited away by wind and water or swallowed by the landscape, as if they had never existed at all.
The fulfillment of the commission’s duties ultimately led to the repair and replacement of 43 of the original boundary markers and the erection of 215 new iron monuments. The report filed by the commission boasted that the 675 miles of borderline that ran from the Pacific coast to the Rio Grande were now better established and more clearly marked than ever before, with the average distance separating the monuments a mere 2.6 miles. It thus became likely, for the first time in history, that a person crossing north or south at any point along the line would see evidence of a boundary laid out upon the earth, tiny obelisks reaching up toward the vast arc of the sky.
—
Morales and I arrested two men walking aimlessly through the desert night, far from any known trail. The men did not run but fell to their knees, their hands trembling above their heads in the pale glow from our flashlights. They followed our commands, nodding timidly. As we walked them single file to the patrol vehicle, I observed their gait—heavy and sapped of purpose.
Outside the processing center, Morales and I talked with the men while we searched their belongings. They were our age, mid-twenties, and both hailed from the same mountain village in Oaxaca. One of them wore a baseball hat with the image of a marijuana leaf embroidered on the front. You think it’s cool to wear a hat with marijuana on it? Morales asked him. The man seemed confused. I didn’t know it was a marijuana hat, he said. It’s the only kind they were selling. His companion, small and potbellied, listened in, concerned. Is that what marijuana looks like? he asked.
Morales and I rummaged through the men’s backpacks, setting aside liquids, perishable foods, and anything that might be used as a weapon. In the bag that belonged to the man with the hat, Morales uncovered a pouch of thickly cut carne seca. The man smiled. I prepared it myself, he said, standing a little straighter. Morales looked longingly at the jerky. Have some, the man offered—no se echa a perder. No thanks, Morales said.
At the bottom of the potbellied man’s backpack I discovered a bag of grasshoppers and another filled with small dried fish. The man chuckled. Comida típica de Oaxaca, he said. Try the chapulines, he suggested, pointing at the grasshoppers. I shook some into my palm and glanced at Morales before tossing them into my mouth. The Oaxacans laughed. Not bad, I said. Tastes like salt and lime. The men looked at me eagerly. See if you like the charales, they said, gesturing toward the dried fish. I took one into my mouth, grimacing from the heavy salt. I dared Morales to do the same. Fuck it, Morales said, I’m eating that jerky. For a short time we stood together with the men, laughing and eating, listening to their stories of home.
As Morales prepared to escort them into the processing center, I gathered up the items to be discarded. I was about to toss a small water bottle when the potbellied man whispered that I shouldn’t throw it away, that it held mezcal made on his family’s ranch. His father had harvested the maguey from the mountains around their village, he told me, and it had been aging for six months. It’s at its best right now, he said, take it with you. No se echa a perder.
—
Near the end of my shift, Mortenson called me into the processing room and asked me to translate for two girls who had just been brought in, nine- and ten-year-old sisters who were picked up with two women at the checkpoint. He told me to ask them basic questions: Where is your mother? In California. Who are the women who brought you here? Friends. Where are you from? Sinaloa. The girls peppered me with nervous questions in return: When could they go home? Where were the women who drove them? Could they call their mother? I tried to explain things to them, but they were too young, too bewildered, too distraught at being surrounded by men in uniform. One of the agents brought the girls a bag of Skittles, but even then they couldn’t smile, they couldn’t say thank you, they just stood there, looking at the candy with horror.
Once agents placed the girls in a holding cell, I told Mortenson I had to leave. My shift’s over, I said. He told me they still needed to interview the women who were picked up with the girls and asked me to stay and translate. I can’t help anymore, I told him, I’ve got to go home. As I drove away from the station I tried not to think of the girls, and my hands began to shake at the wheel. I wanted to call my mother, but it was too late.
—
Several hours after sundown, Morales and I met at a remote trailhead to respond to a sensor hit. We hiked slowly by starlight across stony foothills to the place where a small trail dropped down from a low mountain pass. Morales took his flashlight and crouched to the ground with his hand over the face cap, shining a muted light over a small patch of dirt on the trail. This sign is days old, he whispered. He looked up at the black outline of the mountains. I’ll bet whoever set off that senso
r is still laid up at the top of the pass.
We decided to wait for the group to come down the trail. We concealed ourselves behind a gnarled mesquite tree, Morales sitting cross-legged and me sprawled out on the desert floor, twisting my body until I found a patch of ground free from rocks. Morales smoothed a swath of earth with his hands and began to trace swirling lines as I gazed upward, transfixed by the Milky Way trailing across the sky like a cloud of glimmering dust. For over an hour the whirring of a nearby cricket and the soft pattering of kangaroo rats were the only sounds we heard. Periodically, I broke the silence to call attention to a shooting star, whispering to Morales to ask if he had seen it. Si vato, lo vi.
After another hour of silence, I reached out to touch Morales’s knee. Qué? he replied. How much longer do you want to stay here? I asked. Shit, he said, I don’t know. We were silent again. I’ll bet you there’s scouts in these hills, I finally said. They must have watched us hike in. Morales threw a stick at the patch of dirt in front of him. Maybe the sensor hit was bad, he said. We could hike up the pass. If they’re still laid up we can bust the group, and if nobody’s there we’ll check the sensor for foot sign. I shook my head. If there are scouts, the group is long gone. If there’s no scouts and the group is still up there, they’ll hear us coming before we get anywhere close. I’ve been up that trail with Mortenson, I told him. The last quarter mile is steep as hell and covered in loose shale. And if the sensor hit was bad in the first place, I said, well, then it’s an even bigger waste of time.
We walked back across the desert toward our vehicles. I paused to look up once more at the moonless night sky, and Morales continued past me. After his footsteps had grown distant, I noticed a tiny point of light drifting slowly across the black dome of the sky. Without moving my head, I called out to Morales. Come back here, I shouted into the night. I could hear him grumbling as he made his way back to where I had stopped. Qué chingados quieres? Look, I said, pointing up at the sky. I don’t see anything, he complained. It’s a satellite, I said, traveling away from the North Star. Shit, Morales finally said, I see it. Cabrón, I’ve never seen one of those before. Me neither, I said. We stood enveloped by silence as we stared at the sky, surrounded by figures hidden away in the hills and the mountains, figures gazing up at the very same stars, toward barely discernible satellites barreling through the atmosphere, small bodies tenuously tethered to their orbits at the outermost limits of the earth.
The Line Becomes a River Page 4