A lady who answered the phone said she had a daughter with that name.
Could I speak to her?
No, she’s not here, the lady said. You can try her at the health clinic.
Gotcha.
I didn’t know what to do next. I couldn’t come right out and ask the woman if she was selling babies. She would deny it and try to cover her tracks. I thought about finding some of the adopting parents or birth mothers, but they were not going to admit to something unsavory or illegal. These adoptions appeared legal—they were in the court record—but any kind of cash payments on the side would have been suspect.
I needed a way to check out the adoption lady without tipping her off. Walking around the office or driving in the car, I practiced what I would say and rehearsed my story. When I had it down, I called the clinic and asked to speak to the woman. Her name was Rebeca.
“My wife and I are thinking of adopting a baby,” I told her, “and we heard you might be able to help.”
“I’m not sure how I can help,” Rebeca said, “but I’m happy to talk with you.” She told me she also worked at a hospital in El Paso, and we could meet there.
This is going to be good, I thought.
I paced around on the day of our appointment, unable to concentrate on anything but this woman. The story was huge. I had it from a good source that she was selling babies. Court documents proved she was in the business. In my mind, she was a heavyset, rumpled, middle-aged woman. She had a slight accent, so I guessed she was born in Mexico but raised on this side. The story would make a splash in El Paso because it exposed corruption and played on the worst fears of Mexicans and Mexican Americans about how people took advantage of them. And you couldn’t go wrong with a story about babies.
I was uneasy about one thing: I never before had misrepresented myself for a story. I had lied to this woman about being married, wanting to adopt a baby, and why I wanted to meet her. In my entire life I had never told such a big lie, for a story or for any reason. I justified it to myself by rationalizing that I couldn’t get the story any other way, and that the good of protecting babies outweighed the bad of lying. I took a deep breath. I made myself relax. She was the one doing wrong, not me.
The hospital setting threw me off. I walked through the whooshing electric doors into the cool air of the lobby. Everything was spotless, efficient. I had expected to confront this woman in some shabby clinic. The hospital felt professional, legitimate. I followed the signs to her office. I knocked on the open door and started to enter.
Sitting on a tall stool was a woman in stockings and heels, a tight skirt and a white lab coat. She had thick black hair, fashionably oversized glasses, and the clearest, whitest skin I had ever seen. She was not much older than I was and looked like the kind of glamorous, skilled doctor you would see on a TV medical drama. I froze in the doorway.
She stood up, walked toward me, and shook my hand. She offered me a seat and let me talk.
“I’m not really here to adopt a baby,” I blurted out, embarrassed but already relieved. “I’m not even married.”
She laughed. “I didn’t think so,” she said.
“Am I that bad a liar?” I asked.
“We’ll see,” she said, raising a perfect eyebrow.
“I’m a reporter for the Herald-Post,” I confessed. “Someone told me you were selling babies.”
“Ask me what you want to know,” she said.
“Are you?”
“Am I selling babies?”
“Yes.”
“No,” she said.
Oddly, I was relieved. My big story had just evaporated, but I felt better. I promised myself I never again would lie to get a story.
Her clinic did help women offer babies for adoption, she explained, but there was no money involved. Come with me, and I’ll show you, she said. We got in her car and drove across the bridge to Juárez.
When we reached the other side of the bridge, a Mexican official flagged her down. Mexican customs agents never stopped me, so I wasn’t sure what was happening. I assumed the agent stopped her car because of the Mexican plates, or more likely, because she was so attractive.
“What are you bringing?” the officer asked.
“Nothing,” she said, smiling up at him. “Just some things for the clinic.”
This was the first time I heard her speak Spanish, and she was even more graceful and refined. I watched, fascinated to witness how a Mexican in her own country was treated so differently than I was.
“What’s in that box?” he asked, pointing to the backseat and a large container that I noticed for the first time.
“Preservativos,” she said, a word I didn’t know. She reached back and pulled up a handful of individually wrapped condoms. “Here,” she said, “take some. For your wife.” She pushed a bunch of condoms into his hand.
The officer looked around shyly and shoved the condoms deep into his pocket. Thank you, he said. Have a good day. He waved us into Mexico.
The clinic turned out to be a clean and pleasant place staffed by friendly people. Rebeca had a calm manner and made time to visit with everyone. She had several degrees, and was well traveled and highly regarded in her field. I wrote a story about her and the clinic and adoptions, but it was not the story I had hoped to ride to fame and glory. A different story I would write about her later would change my life, but that was still months away.
When at last I did break a major investigative story, it was by accident. I was looking into how the local court appointed defense attorneys for people who couldn’t afford them. I wondered if lawyers were getting rich off this pool of captive clients. The records were kept by hand, but they were public documents, and I was able to tally up the lawyers taking the most court-appointed fees and the judges doling out the assignments.
Making two columns on a large sheet of paper, one column for lawyers and one for judges, I quickly found a pattern: one of the top-paid defense lawyers was getting his assignments from a single judge, a well-known figure in town. This looked suspicious to me. Maybe the judge and the lawyer had a deal to split the money. I made a few calls about the pair—everybody in the legal community knew them—and I learned that the lawyer was actually the uncle of the judge, a fact I noted in passing in my story.
What I didn’t know when I wrote the story was that a judge appointing a relative, even a nephew appointing an uncle, to a role like public defender could be illegal. The judge’s political enemies quickly figured it out, however, and pounced. Now I had my big scoop, but it wasn’t the story I had intended. Everybody was patting me on the back for exposing a scandal, but I felt sick.
The reason I felt bad was because of what I had learned during my reporting. The judge had political rivals, but nobody had accused him of corruption, until now. The lawyer, the uncle of the judge, was one of the best criminal defense lawyers on the border. He didn’t need the small hourly rate he was paid by the court. In fact, every time he took a court-appointed case he lost money. So the indigent defendants were getting a great lawyer, and the lawyer was eating the costs. The judge was guaranteeing a high-quality defense for the accused, and he was saving taxpayer money.
But that’s not how my story was seen in the community. I had exposed nepotism, corruption, and venality. I got high-fives at the paper, and people started to take notice of the hired gun from Chicago. El Paso was a small town, and I ran into the judge at a reception. We noticed each other across the room but did not speak. A woman at the reception told me later, “You both looked like you had been kicked in the stomach.”
I never felt good about that piece because while the facts were accurate, it was not the whole story. The judge had indeed given public funds to his uncle, but he also had secured an excellent defense for the accused. I realized then how facts without context could be misused as a political weapon. It wasn’t enough to mention both sides of a story and pretend I was being fair. There were many more than two ways to look at any issue, and being accurat
e or even “balanced” wasn’t the same as being honest and true.
The story about the judge earned a notch on my gun, but not because I was a good shot. I felt as though we had mounted the head of a trophy buck on the newspaper’s wall, but I had hit the deer with my car. I wasn’t interested in getting more trophies that way. I had not printed a single word that wasn’t true, but I could not just fall back on being factually accurate; I also wanted to be fair.
What I really wanted to investigate was El Paso’s defining feature: the border. I was starting to see this place was not divided by the line between two countries; it was created by the line. The resulting community was an overlapping area that included both El Paso and Juárez, a unique hybrid of two cities, two countries, and two cultures. The border I was experiencing didn’t conform at all to my college theories about underdevelopment and the US exploitation of Latin America. In fact, El Paso and Juárez were deeply dependent on each other.
The main barrier to understanding the border was my high school Spanish, so I paid for night classes. The great thing about studying Spanish in El Paso was that you could go all day without speaking English, and many people did. A few older women at the paper got a kick out of my efforts to learn. One of them, Cuca, sweetly called me corazón de melón. I had no idea why she called me “cantaloupe heart,” but it felt nice, and I grinned back at her, happy as a puppy.
My first reporting trip using my beginner’s Spanish was to the coast of Mexico in search of an American professor who had disappeared mysteriously. He had driven to Mexico for a teaching assignment but never arrived. Two experienced staffers at the paper, reporter Joe Olvera and photographer Ruben Ramirez, were covering the story, and they let me ride along.
Ruben was a jovial former Marine, born in Juárez but raised in El Paso. He was solidly built and formidable, despite the boyish curly hair and wide smile. Joe was a big, dark, good-looking guy who dressed like he was from East Los Angeles in the 1940s. He had a peculiar way of wearing a wide necktie without a knot, which he alone could pull off. We packed our bags, jumped in the car, and started down Mexico’s Highway 15, a road regarded as lawless and dangerous.
After a big lunch on the first day, we stopped at the home of someone Joe or Ruben knew. I was never quite sure what was going on and just tried to keep my ears open. The man we visited was a gracious host and asked if we wanted any refreshments. A cool drink sounded good because the day was thickly hot. Then he asked, “How about a tuna?”
I looked at Joe and Ruben, and was surprised when they quickly said yes. A tuna? We just ate lunch. No, I said in Spanish, I’m full.
Come on. Go ahead. It’s just a tuna, the man said, bordering on offended.
Okay, I relented, bring on the tuna.
He served us small plates with light green fruit speckled with black seeds. The fruit was tasty, cool and fresh, but difficult to eat with all the seeds. He showed me one of the fruits before it was peeled; it was the size of a grenade, with thorns. I had seen them sitting on top of cactus plants along the road. Tuna, it dawned on me, was not a fish but the Spanish word for prickly pear. And they weren’t bad.
We arrived at a luxurious resort in Mazatlán to spend the night. The wide lobby was open to the breeze off the ocean, and women paraded around in bikinis and wispy skirts. I couldn’t believe the paper was paying for us to stay here.
Ruben and Joe suggested a swim before dinner. They pointed to a young lady behind the front desk and instructed me, Go ask her for the pool. The word in Spanish is “alverga.”
I was beginning to know them well enough to be cautious. I sensed them testing me, or sending me into trouble, or both. They smiled and raised their eyebrows a little, pointing the way with their chins. Go on, they said.
I walked up to the desk, offered my most charming smile, and asked smartly for the “alverga.”
The woman looked at me for a second and then noticed the two guys behind me, now bent over laughing hysterically. She got the joke, proudly ignored it, and pointed me to the pool, carefully pronouncing it “alberca,” not alverga, which the boys confessed, with more laughter, referred to a part of my anatomy.
Nearby was a hot dusty town called San Ignacio, where we learned that some local men had been arrested for robbing and murdering the professor. The sun was blindingly hot, and the streets were empty. The few people who would speak to us were suspicious or hostile. This was nothing like the resort in Mazatlán. I was glad I was with Ruben and Joe. They asked around until we found a man in jail who had been accused in the death of the professor. I tried to follow what the man was saying, but I missed a lot. Joe grew impatient and then annoyed with all my interruptions.
One thing I didn’t get was “tehuacanazo.” I sort of recognized the word because of the brand of sparkling water called Tehuacán. Ruben and Joe explained that the police had questioned the man for days, encouraging him to talk by shooting carbonated water up his nose. That was a tehuacanazo. To be even more encouraging, they spiced the bubbly water with chili peppers. When he still didn’t talk, they soaked rags in a dead cow baking along the road. Then they shoved the slimy rags down the man’s throat. He did confess to killing the professor, and probably to every other crime committed in San Ignacio.
I had imagined various versions of the professor’s disappearance. Maybe he had decided to go off the grid in Mexico. Maybe he had met someone and wanted to stay. Maybe he was kidnapped for ransom. In the end, it seemed he was just the victim of a random, dirty crime, a robbery that ended in murder, a life taken for a few hundred bucks and a used car. He had embarked on a great adventure—probably careful not to drink the water—and never returned home.
This was a Mexico I had never seen. It was mysterious, arbitrary, and scary. There were no rules for the bad guys, or the good guys. The only rule was power, and people accepted it as a fact of life. We drove back home and published our stories and photos over several days.
I was hooked on Mexico. Joe, with a snarl of resentment, called me on it. “Are you going to be one of those white guys who wants to be Chicano?” I didn’t argue, because I understood what he meant. Joe thought I was becoming an instant expert on Mexico and the border, even though I had just arrived and barely spoke Spanish. He had grown up on the border and had studied at the University of Texas at El Paso and Columbia University, so his expertise was earned.
I was drawn to the culture, and I enjoyed speaking Spanish. I almost felt like a different person in Spanish. Not a different person entirely, but a more relaxed and fun version of myself, more of the person I wanted to be. I loved the music and the food and found the people attractive. I wanted to know more about the culture and be part of it, to belong to a club of insiders. I had fun surprising people, showing off really, with my Spanish. Mostly, I liked how I felt about myself—lighter and more confident—when speaking Spanish. A second language allowed me to feel like a bird singing a new tune.
My great accomplice exploring Mexico was John Hopper, the photographer I had met during my job interview. John saw the border with fresh eyes and photographed daily life as if he were exploring a foreign land. Renting an apartment in South El Paso, where Anglos rarely lived, he won the confidence of store owners, young mothers, and even criminals, who posed flashing gang signs and tattoos. John never really blended in, but his photos often made the paper because our editors shared this outsider love of the community.
After work, John and I got into his car and drove across the bridge to Juárez. Like many photographers, John had a car that served as a mobile photo studio filled with camera gear, extra clothes, and bags of half-eaten fast food. When he hit the brakes, bottles and cans clanked and rolled from under the passenger seat and bumped my feet.
We had a restaurant in Juárez we liked for beef tacos with a side of grilled scallions. Another regular place had a tiled trough that ran along the floor below the bar. The trough apparently allowed male patrons to urinate without leaving their bar stools, something I never tried. St
ill, it added to the bar’s mystique, or something.
On Friday nights we visited upscale discos to meet women and dance, or at least move around stiffly while the women danced. Our Spanish improved greatly with beer, but the clubs were so loud that conversation was limited to a few shouted words and hand gestures, hopefully leading to flirting and close contact on the dance floor. Every time I started a conversation in Spanish, the Mexican women answered in English. I thought they sneered ever so slightly at my Spanish. I kept trying, though, and it became a contest to see whose second language would dominate. The women always won.
As John and I headed home one night with the windows open, the Juárez dawn felt cool after the hot day. We drove up the bridge from the Mexican side, past the flags from both countries, and down to the US side and the vast expanse of checkpoints that looked like tollbooths. Everybody had a theory about what kind of US inspector to choose: male, female, Chicano, Anglo, fat, old. You had only a second to decide because hesitation or the appearance of choosing made you look suspicious. At least that’s what we feared. We never had drugs, or a person hidden in the trunk, so we had nothing to be nervous about, but I still felt on guard, more apprehensive about reentering our own country than about the one we had just left.
“Citizenship?” the agent asked, looking down at us through John’s window.
“American,” John said.
The agent watched my face when I spoke the words. “US,” I said.
“What are you bringing from Mexico?” the agent asked.
“Nada,” John said.
I added the usual joke, “Just a hangover.”
He waved us through.
Finding the News Page 6