by Joshua Davis
In 2003, eighty miles south of Phoenix, twelve migrants were sleeping beside a cattle pond. They were waiting for a smuggler to guide them farther into the United States when two men dressed in camouflage appeared. The men were carrying an automatic rifle and a pistol and opened fire, killing two of the migrants. The police later found the bodies riddled with bullets. No one was apprehended for the crime.
By 2004, when Cristian arrived at Fredi’s marine science classroom, organizations such as the Minutemen, Ranch Rescue, and American Border Patrol were scouring the state for illegal immigrants. “This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history,” wrote presidential hopeful Patrick J. Buchanan in his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “What Mexico is doing to the American Southwest has, from time immemorial, been the way one tribe has slowly conquered and colonized the lands of another.”
For Buchanan, it seemed, nothing less than the survival of the United States was at stake. Migrants who were seemingly coming to the United States to clean toilets and hammer nails were actually, from his perspective, hatching an insidious plot to recapture land Mexico lost during the 1846–48 Mexican-American War. The plot, he said, was named La Reconquista.
“La Reconquista is not to be accomplished by force of arms, as was the U.S. annexation of the Southwest and California in 1848,” he wrote. “It is to be carried out by a nonviolent invasion and cultural transformation of that huge slice of America into a Mexamerican border-land, where the dominant culture is Hispanic and Anglos will feel alienated and begin to emigrate.”
A key element in this purported plot were migrant children. Buchanan argued that families came to the United States to leech off government services. They weren’t here to work; they were here to apply for welfare. School was a thorny issue. He accepted the idea that immigrant children wanted to attend school—and might therefore want to assimilate and contribute to the country—but he argued that it was a bad idea to educate them, as it overtaxed the education system and drained resources from long-standing citizens. It was better, in Buchanan’s view, to turn them away, particularly since he believed they would never amount to much: “Millions of immigrants, but especially their children, who today survive on welfare are being inculcated with the values of a subculture of gangs, crime, drugs, and violence.”
Buchanan may have just been a pundit with lofty aspirations, but Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, agreed with Buchanan, and though just as vocal, he wields real authority. Sheriff Joe, as he’s known locally, has had jurisdiction over the city of Phoenix and the greater metropolitan area around it since he was first elected in 1992. He often wins with more than 60 percent of the vote, and that popular support has empowered him to take bold action. In his 2008 autobiography, he warned that Mexican immigrants feel that “the United States stole the territory that is now California, Arizona and Texas … and that massive immigration over the border will speed and guarantee the reconquista of these lands, returning them to Mexico.” Arpaio titled his book Joe’s Laus: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes On Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America. He felt that the federal government was not doing enough to turn back Mexicans, and he vowed to take matters into his own hands.
To Arpaio, Mexican immigrants were unlike any immigrants that had come before them. They were often disease-carrying criminals and didn’t have the same values as American citizens. “My parents, like all other immigrants exclusive of those from Mexico, held to certain hopes and truths,” he wrote in his book. Mexicans were a separate class of people. Most of the Mexicans his department apprehended were, he said, “potential” swine-flu carriers. “They’re all dirty,” he told GQ in 2009.
Indeed, advocates of a more aggressive approach to immigration argued that Mexican immigrants were a double threat. In addition to their covert plan to take over American territory, they also brought a “silent invasion” of diseases. These weren’t just people simply looking for jobs. They were parasites to be crushed. One report cited in Buchanan’s book warned that sickly immigrants “would endanger children in school and at the movies, anyone standing in range of a rogue cough or sneeze, or patrons of fast-food restaurants whose food might be prepared by an ‘invader.’” The report’s authors recommended mass deportations.
To kids like Cristian and Lorenzo, getting good grades sometimes seemed like the least of their problems.
ONE WINTER MORNING in 1996, Oscar Vazquez awoke to the smell of burning pine and oak. He was nine years old and got out of bed to see a huge fire in the backyard. A big pot of water was boiling up clouds of steam into the early-morning air of the Sierra Madre Occidental, a rugged mountain range running along the northwestern spine of Mexico. Oscar was thrilled: this meant his father was going to butcher one of the family pigs, a sure sign of an imminent party. Temosachic was a town of about a thousand people and two cars, though Oscar’s dad liked to joke that one was always broken. The roads were dirt and the people poor, but they knew how to throw a party. There’d be lots of kids, games, and carnitas tacos, his favorite.
Oscar watched as his father led the pig out of its pen. Ramiro Vazquez had a long, furrowed face and a narrow mustache that he shaved below his nose so it ran in a thin line along the top of his lip. He had once been a police officer, but he didn’t like the job. The government had given him a broken pistol that would only fire if it was aimed straight up. He eventually quit and now farmed corn. The family also had four cows, three pigs, two horses, a colt, and a mule, so the sacrifice of a pig meant something big was happening. Ramiro tied the pig’s hind legs to a fence post, bound the front legs together, and handed his young son the rope.
“Jala, hijo,” he told Oscar, ordering him to pull. Oscar hauled as hard as he could. He’d seen animals killed before, but he’d never participated. His dad took out a knife and quickly stabbed the animal. Oscar struggled to hold the pig in place as it thrashed and shook. Blood poured out on the ground. When the animal stopped moving, Oscar slowly released the rope. He wasn’t the innocent boy he had been just a few minutes ago.
He asked his father how they were going to butcher the pig. That’s when his dad told him that the pig wasn’t for carnitas. There would be no party, no kids, and no games. They were going to sell the meat to the local butcher to finance Ramiro’s journey to the United States. He was leaving the family. The falling price of corn made it hard to pay the bills, particularly when the animals ate so much of the harvest. He had to go al otro lado—“to the other side.” Oscar was in shock.
Ramiro left a week later, on a Wednesday in 1996. Manuela, Oscar’s mother, was nominally in charge, but she quickly fell into a funk. When Oscar left for school in the morning, she sat numbly by the wood-burning stove. When he came home in the afternoon, she was still there, just staring into the fire. Oscar’s older brother, Pedro, was seventeen years old but didn’t help out much around the house. He had started staying out late with his friends and sleeping late in the morning. Luz, Oscar’s sister, was fifteen years old and could do the cooking, but Ramiro’s departure effectively made young Oscar the man of the house.
It was difficult. Oscar fed the animals by himself, and when he ran out of hay, he went door-to-door, haggling with his adult neighbors to buy alfalfa with the few pesos the family had. Soon, they had to sell the cows to get by. When it rained, water poured into their home through gaping holes in the rusted roof. Oscar and his sister positioned buckets to catch the downpour.
Ramiro ended up working on a potato farm in Idaho and starting sending one hundred dollars monthly. It was enough to get by on, but Oscar missed his dad. Oscar was in fourth grade and was a standout student. He placed first in the regional academic competition and second in the much-larger state competition. He won a trophy—the first his school had ever received. The teachers showed the trophy at an assembly and even built a makeshift trophy stand out of two battered, old desks. But of course Ramiro wasn’t there to see his son’s succ
ess.
A few weeks after Oscar’s eleventh birthday, Ramiro called to say that he had been caught in an immigration raid and was being deported. Oscar didn’t know what “deported” meant. He hoped it wasn’t painful but was excited if it really meant his dad was coming home. When Ramiro finally made it back to his family in Temosachic, he explained that the immigration agents had streamed into the potato factory; Ramiro had hid behind a bunch of cardboard boxes, but one of his shoes stuck out. The agents had spotted him and sent him back to Mexico.
“It’s because I have such big feet,” he joked with Oscar.
Oscar didn’t understand what his father had done wrong. Was having big feet a crime in the United States? Either way, he was happy that these foreign “agents” had sent his dad back to him. It was nice to have him in the house again. His mother came out of her funk and everything seemed great. His dad had saved a thousand dollars and set about rebuilding their leaking roof with galvanized sheet metal. He also bought Oscar a cool red bicycle.
* * *
To Oscar, life returned to normal, but Ramiro wasn’t happy. He could make more in an hour at the potato-processing plant in Idaho than he could in an entire day in Temosachic. The financial logic was hard to ignore. After just two weeks at home, he announced that he was returning to the United States. Since there were no pigs to sell this time, he sold his mule to a neighbor. Oscar begged him not to sell the colt, but Ramiro needed the money. He took their two horses to a nearby sausage factory and got good money for them. Oscar was heartbroken and burst into tears at the news.
Ramiro took his son aside and told him another piece of terrifying news. There would be no monthly payments from the United States. His father was going to save everything he could and use the money to bring the whole family north. He didn’t want to be apart anymore, and life was better on the other side of the border.
“It will be a long, long car ride,” he told Oscar. He knew Oscar got carsick easily so he wanted his son to understand that this was going to be a challenge. Almost everyone in their small town had traveled to the United States. It was an unspoken rite of passage and it was Oscar’s turn.
Early in January 1998, Oscar boarded a bus with his mother. His sister had fallen in love with a local boy and insisted on staying behind. His brother would come later. The bus traveled north through the desert on Highway 17 until it reached Agua Prieta, a dusty border town across from Douglas, Arizona. An older relative met them there and told them to be ready to cross the next day.
Oscar was prepared to meet a grizzled criminal, but the next morning, the cousin introduced them to two nice ladies. The women handed Oscar and his mother green cards—they belonged to people who looked vaguely like them. A few hours later, they drove to the crossing station and a border agent stopped them. Oscar held his card up and smiled. The guy was dressed in green and said a long word that Oscar couldn’t understand. Then he waved them through.
They stopped at a Circle K convenience store on the outskirts of Phoenix. It was next to a freeway overpass that amazed Oscar. To an eleven-year-old boy who was accustomed to dirt roads, it looked beautiful. He marveled at the massive conrete on-ramps leading up to it. The bridge itself seemed like an impossibility. It was getting dark, and the smell of oranges was in the air. A house stood beside the store. A sprinkler shot water across the striking green lawn in the front yard. This was clearly a land where anything was possible. Oscar hoped that one day he could live in a house just like it: one with a beautiful lawn and a view of an extraordinary overpass.
* * *
Oscar wanted to explore the overpass, but his dad arrived and wrapped him in a huge hug. Ramiro took a good look at his son, then gave him some orange-flavored gummy bears to keep him occupied while Ramiro talked to the ladies in front of the Circle K. The ladies spoke in hushed tones. After a moment, Ramiro handed them an envelope with two thousand dollars in cash and they left.
Oscar’s first home in the United States did not resemble the pretty house with the lawn and the view of the overpass. The one-bedroom apartment had peeling paint, a garbage-strewn, dirt front yard, and neighbors who blasted music throughout the night. The apartment was about five hundred square feet, but they had to share it with another family. The Vazquezes took the living room while the other family took the bedroom.
Oscar’s parents enrolled him at Isaac Middle School, but like other immigrants before him, he didn’t speak English. To him, the teachers sounded as if they were saying one long word after another. He just sat quietly and said “Heer” when his name was called.
Within a few weeks, he was able to get to the right classrooms on time, though it was a short-lived victory. Oscar’s sister, Luz, refused to join the family in Phoenix, and their mother’s anxiety spiked again. Manuela knew that Luz’s uncles and cousins would look after her, but Manuela couldn’t bear the separation. She fell into another depression. She stopped eating and grew increasingly despondent. After school one day, Oscar’s dad told him that the family’s experiment in expatriate living was over. Ramiro would stay in Phoenix, but Oscar and Luz would return to Mexico.
Oscar cried all the way to the border and then got carsick. It wasn’t that he wanted to stay in the United States. He just wanted to stay somewhere. But his mother’s spirits improved the closer they got to the border.
“That’s where Mexico is,” his mother pointed out hopefully, indicating a cloud floating far away above the desert. Oscar kept crying. He didn’t stop until they crossed back into Agua Prieta and his mother bought him chips. He crammed the snack into his mouth so fast, there was no more room for sobs.
Oscar readapted to his life in the country, but the overpass stayed with him. Now that he knew things like it existed, Temosachic seemed small. He knew he’d have to work hard if he wanted to do more than farm the land. He began helping the town’s older ladies carry their groceries and killed their chickens when they wanted chicken soup. In exchange, they gave him a few pesos here and there. He enrolled in the local middle school and, based on his previous academic accomplishments, won a government scholarship. It provided money for his uniform, books, and school supplies.
Eight months after they returned, Manuela’s brothers invited the family to Matachic, a town ten miles away. It was October and the town was hosting its annual fall fair. Luz didn’t want to go—she offered to clean the house instead. It seemed odd that she’d want to miss the party, but she was an unpredictable teenager. The family shrugged it off and decided to go without her.
Oscar loved the fair, which had a miniature Ferris wheel, bumper cars, and a spinning-teacup ride. His uncles were aces at ring-around-the-bottle and kept winning dried rabbit legs, which they gave to Manuela for good luck. They seemed to think she needed it. After all, the family had just blown two thousand hard-earned dollars on their ill-fated trip to Phoenix.
The rabbit legs worked a strange kind of magic. When they got home, the house was spotless but Luz was gone. Manuela was terrified and asked Pedro to go looking for her. Pedro went to the plaza and decided to play basketball instead. It was an open secret in Temosachic that Luz had eloped with her boyfriend. Even Oscar knew the truth.
“I guess the rabbit legs worked,” Oscar told his mother.
“What do you mean?” she snapped. Her daughter was missing; she didn’t see the good fortune in that.
“Luz married Luis,” Oscar told her plainly. “She’s not your problem anymore. Plus, that means an extra plate of food for me.”
Manuela started crying. She kept crying until Luz came back a week later with her new husband. Luz was beaming. This is what happened: kids grew up, got married, and started their own lives. Pedro was almost twenty years old now and could also take care of himself. They hadn’t had enough money to send him to high school, so he worked odd jobs and supported himself. She only had to worry about Oscar, who was twelve years old now and clearly one of the brightest students in the region.
Manuela was hesitant to return to the
United States but felt there would be more opportunity for her youngest son there. Government-run schools charged tuition, and even though the fees were small, they were sometimes hard to meet. In the United States, school was free and she figured the course work would be more demanding. As it was, Oscar finished his schoolwork quickly and then had little to do. Sometimes his teachers gave him special assignments, but those weren’t particularly challenging. Though Ramiro had finished only third grade and Manuela had completed sixth, she felt that school was important. It would give Oscar the chance at a better life.
But Oscar didn’t want to go back. They had tried it once—it hadn’t worked out too well. He loved looking at the freeways and big buildings in Arizona, but he didn’t speak the language, they had lived in a crowded apartment, his mom got depressed, and the food tasted like cardboard. He told his mom that he would do fine in Mexico.
She didn’t agree and told him to pack a small bag of clothes. “It doesn’t matter how smart you are in Mexico,” she told him. “You won’t get ahead.”
On December 12, 1998, they used what was left of Oscar’s scholarship money to buy bus tickets back to Agua Prieta. Manuela initially figured that it would be just as easy to cross as it had been earlier in the year. But the nice ladies who had escorted them across before had been arrested and were now in jail. They would have to hire new “coyotes.”
Three of Ramiro’s friends had green cards and agreed to coordinate the crossing while Ramiro waited for them in Phoenix. They met Manuela and Oscar in a little plaza in Agua Prieta. Oscar didn’t like any of it: he told his mom that he wanted to go back to Temosachic. He wanted to be with his sister and her new husband. He didn’t want to cross.
Manuela just said no over and over. Oscar considered throwing a fit and crying, but he was twelve. He wasn’t a kid anymore and couldn’t resort to that. Still, he was on the verge of screaming.