by Teju Cole
“It’s a race war. They just don’t like the Mexicans.”
“Is that true? Most people would hesitate to say that.”
“What else could it be?”
—
Through narrow darkness, through scrub forests and rocky cliffs, our Elder Brother brought us across, his name was I’itio. On our setting out from the other side, he turned us into ants. He brought us through narrow darkness and out at Baboquivari Peak into this land. Here we became human again, and our Elder Brother rested in a cave on Baboquivari, and there he rests till this day, helping us.
The land is a maze. You have to be guided through, right from the beginning you had to be guided. The first story in the world is about safe passage.
—
This, too, is my America: people wandering in the desert in fear of their lives. At this very moment they are there. There are people in the desert, a never-ending migration. They die out there because the policy is to let them die (the wall is strategically incomplete) to discourage others from crossing. In their thousands they have died, for the crime of wishing to be in America or the crime of wishing to return. In Tucson I go out to dinner with Roberto Bedoya, an eloquent and thoughtful man who runs the city’s arts council. “There are three ways of making a space,” he says. “Through systems, through arguments, and through poetics.”
After dinner, he drives me out to the parking lot of the Casas Adobes supermarket. Here, less than a year earlier, a young man had shot eighteen people and killed six. The U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in the head, and reported dead, but she had lived. The parking lot is quiet. What do we miss unless we are told? What do we fail to see? Roberto drives me back across the city to the lodge. In spite of the city’s lights, I can see the stars near the horizon.
If you go down from Tucson by a southwesterly route, you come to the border at Sasabe. To our right is Tohono O’odham land. The sacred peak of Baboquivari has a changing profile with each passing minute as we go down the narrow road. I am with a group of artists brought down by an organization called CultureStrike. The land is dry, covered with small hardy trees, shrubs, brown grass, and the saguaro cactus. (The saguaro, which is native to the Sonoran Desert, has always been for me a shorthand for the Southwest.) There is an element of “come and see what is being done in your name” in this journey.
At Sasabe, under the high brown wall that rises and falls with the variegated terrain, officers have set up targets for shooting practice. Their M16s shatter the air of the quiet crossing point. We present our passports, and cross the border from Sasabe into the small Mexican community of El Sasabe. There are kids playing here (the gunfire of the M16s from the American side still audible), and a pair of thin horses graze in a field. We are taken to a small bungalow to listen to Grupos Beta give a presentation. Grupos Beta is a sort of Mexican cognate of the U.S. Border Patrol: a federally funded uniformed service mandated to work along the border. But Grupos Beta does not prevent people from migrating; it aims only to help them. It provides medical help, search and rescue services, water stations on the Mexican side, and up to three days of temporary housing. And this is what they talk about during the presentation, sidestepping any questions about the drug trade. In the office is a large map of the border and the Sonoran Desert. One red dot for each death, the officer says. The map is a field of proliferating color, like something growing out of control in a petri dish.
When we return to the border point, the shooting has stopped. The wall spins away into the distance like an unspooling length of ribbon. In the grass near the inspection post, on the Mexican side, someone has planted two white crosses. The large one lists at a forty-five-degree angle. On the smaller one, I can make out the word “mujeres.” The tag of the man who takes my passport says OFFICER BAXTER. I ask him about the work of the Border Patrol. He has a ready answer: “The Mexican government doesn’t care. They are not doing their share of enforcement. They need to make their country good so that people don’t need to come over here.”
The majority of migrant deaths happen in the Tucson sector, around two hundred each year. Arizona’s legislature and its law enforcement are notorious—or, to some, admirable—for their aggression toward recent immigrants. Racial profiling is legal, and there are initiatives to expunge Mexican American studies from public high schools. This aggression is also there on the federal level. President Obama has deported people at a greater rate than any of his predecessors. The deportation rate has been kept up, even after the president offered amnesty to undocumented residents who came to the United States as children. The horror of sudden familial division is something experienced by thousands of people in the United States every month. Human rights activists in Tucson organize on several fronts.
The organization Coalición de Derechos Humanos serves as a local gathering point for some of these acts of resistance. They work on gathering information, organizing protests, documenting abuse, doing legal work, and offering direct aid to migrants. They also work in partnership with other organizations. CultureStrike, which involves creative people in immigration policy, is one. The faith-based group No More Deaths, which provides humanitarian assistance, is another. I attend a meeting of No More Deaths one evening in the basement of Tucson’s St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church. It is a welcoming group of about fifteen, most of them white, and most middle-aged or older. It feels like a classic church missions group. After a moment of silence in memory of the dead, they discuss a strategy to replenish drinking stations on the American side of the border.
At the Tucson office of Coalición de Derechos Humanos, I speak with Kat Rodriguez and Isabel Garcia, two of its leaders. Isabel is also a Pima County public defender, and has been prominent for several decades in the fight against inhumane immigration policies. She tells me about one of the men who died in the desert, a man named René Torres Carvajal, a father of five. His body was never found. Many of those most desperate to return after deportation are people whose lives are here, whose entire families are here. Kat shows me the storeroom, with a large pile of white crosses made by volunteers, for use in a memorial procession on Día de los Muertos. The crosses are marked either with the name of someone who died or “desconocida,” “desconocido,” unknown. Desconocido, desconocido, desconocida, desconocido, desconocida, desconocida, desconocido, desconocido, desconocido: to infinity, it seems.
“The visibility of groups like No More Deaths is important for our work,” Isabel says. “In 2005 two young white men were arrested for rescuing a migrant, and it was a big story. Because they look like the people who consider themselves the real Americans. We need a lot of education in this country. People have opinions, but they are ignorant of what’s going on.”
“Ignorant and maybe also desensitized?” I ask.
“People have to be desensitized,” Kat says, “to allow the kind of horrible death that happens to someone like René. If you really confronted it, it would be unbearable. If a dog died like that, there would be an uproar.”
“Our friends—the unions, the churches, the politicians—have let us down, they’re the ones who make this happen,” Isabel says. “They are afraid and don’t want to deal with root cause. They don’t want to deal with the six million jobs NAFTA took. They don’t want to think about American intervention in Central America and all the refugees that caused. We paid for that army to be persecuting its own people. And our ‘war on drugs’ is going to cause more refugees.”
I ask them to tell me about the penalties for those who are arrested.
Kat says, “Illegal entry is up to a hundred and eighty days, and they are the more fortunate ones.”
Isabel says, “It’s two to twenty years in prison for reentry: reentry is a felony. All these people are relabeled as criminals. Definition of criminal: drug dealers, violent offenders, and ‘repeat immigration offenders.’ So they sweep them up with a few actual criminals, send them to prison, and the prisons make money. Obama gives this speech in El Paso: ‘
We have to enforce the law.’ How come they don’t enforce the law on Wall Street?”
“And once you get branded as a criminal,” Kat says, “no one is going to want to defend you. The American people just think: well, they are drug barons and rapists. They don’t know ‘criminal’ more often means someone who committed immigration offenses.”
I wonder if, for the 11 million who are undocumented now, amnesty would be the answer.
“It wouldn’t be the answer,” Kat says. “It would be a start. People want to go home: those conditions have to be addressed.”
“These neoliberal trade agreements that are creating poverty have to stop,” Isabel says. “What we want is comprehensive reform. We’ve got to address root cause, and we have to recognize these people who are already working in this country. And a third thing, just as important: we have to demilitarize the border.”
“And the bodies that are found in the desert: can you tell me your role in getting those bodies identified?”
“Kat gets these calls. ‘My brother crossed here five weeks ago, can you help me find him?’ ”
“And I have to ask them difficult questions,” Kat says, nodding. “Did he have any broken bones? Birthmarks? When he laughed, did you notice metals? A silver filling? And I can feel them imagining their lost brother laughing. When I speak to people, I never use the past tense. I say, ‘What color are his eyes?’ not ‘What color were his eyes?’ ”
The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office depends on the information Coalición de Derechos Humanos provides. They have a relationship of trust with the community. The government doesn’t. Kat shows me René’s cross and tells me that his sister comes here to visit it.
“You said some of these crosses are for people of unknown gender. How come?”
“Sometimes the remains are too dispersed,” she says. “The men can be small. In the absence of a pelvis, it’s hard to tell man from woman.”
“But people keep looking.”
“Who do you know who would ever stop looking for their loved ones? Nobody would.”
As I leave, a woman in a green shirt comes into the office, and Kat says: “That is René’s sister.” A woman returning again and again to the only place she can, worrying a grief bare.
Later that day, I make a wasted visit to the Tucson Sector Border Patrol headquarters. It is a complex of new buildings on Swan Road, just outside the city. After I put in my request and after a short wait at the Public Information office, Officer Escalante comes out. “Everybody is interested in what we do here,” he says. “We get a lot of requests.”
“There’s no one I could talk to, even briefly?”
“No.”
The taxi driver who takes me back into town from Swan Road is named Al. He is jovial and bearded, and looks like Dumbledore.
“We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us. We’ve always been here. This business of trying to keep people out: in the end it’s futile.”
“What do you think the government should do?”
“I think every border in the world should be knocked down, and let people go wherever the hell they want. If people want to come here and be respectful of our ways, then we should be welcoming. It’s not poor people coming through the border. You have to pay the coyote, what, six thousand dollars? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have six thousand dollars in my pocket I can pay somebody.”
“We are talking about extremely courageous, extremely hardworking people here.”
“People say: they’re taking our jobs. Let me see: the non-English-speaking, undereducated person came here and took your job? Don’t be telling people that. It’s embarrassing.”
“In your view, what’s really going on here?”
“Our policies that have created the narco situation down there. Our policies have created the poverty.”
Citizenship is an act of the imagination. I was born American, but I also had to learn to become American. I have had to think for myself about “the systems, the arguments, and the poetics” of this complicated country. These thoughts took me deep into the history of the Black Atlantic. My understanding of American experience has mostly been from the point of view of a recent African immigrant. I tried to understand the interconnected networks of trade and atrocities that formed the histories of the cities I’ve known and visited. I’ve brooded on New York City and Lagos, but also New Orleans, Ouidah, Cape Town, Port of Spain, and Rio de Janeiro. In Tucson, witnessing the ongoing crisis in the borderlands, I have to revise my understanding of my country to include this, too.
We wander out to the intake area. It is like an emergency room’s loading bay, but simpler. Inside is a small morgue unit; outside, a larger one. Dr. Hess says, “This can take up to one hundred forty-two bodies.”
Dr. Greg Hess is the chief medical examiner for Pima County. He is about forty years old, with sandy hair and a friendly face that makes him look about ten years younger than he is. The larger morgue unit contains rows of body bags in metal shelving, stacked in a regular array like a card catalogue, five levels high.
Oh, Death.
“They are mostly John Does. It’s worse in summer. Border Patrol brings them in, and we work with the folks at Derechos Humanos to try to identify them. We do our best, whether we think the person is American or not. We try to treat them as we would our own family. We mostly fail. People cross the desert without identification, or their personal effects are scattered by coyotes or birds.”
He takes me into the property room, where unclaimed personal effects are kept. The clear plastic bag I examine has typical contents: a red comb, pesos, dollars, a bank card, a damaged birth certificate. Hess points to a locked metal cabinet. It is empty for now, set aside for next year’s unknowns. These deaths will continue.
On my way out, he shows me the anthropology department of the County Medical Examiner’s Office. There are skeletal remains on the table.
But this is not a migrant from the desert. It’s from a murder in Pima County itself. There is a bullet hole in the skull, and parts of the skeleton are charred black where someone tried to burn it. The remains of some argument.
“What happens to the unknowns,” I ask, “after every effort to identify them is exhausted?”
“Cremation, and then interment at the county cemetery.”
On the table on which I write this is the piece of iron I took from the base of the wall at Nogales more than two years ago. The officers at Tucson Airport gave me trouble (it was in my hand luggage, and came up strange and solid on the X-ray). I told them it was a memento. They took it out of the bag and examined it, puzzled. Then they let me go, with my piece of the wall.
—
Tucson’s Evergreen Mortuary and Cemetery is a good example of what Elysium might look like. Its quiet lawns and abundant shade, provided by twelve varieties of evergreens, are a tranquil setting for the beloved dead. That much green speaks of repose. But drive a little bit past the serene atmosphere of Evergreen, past some construction work, perhaps stopping to ask for directions. Leave the green behind, drive on into the dusty back section. You have come to quite a different view of the afterlife. This dusty field is the Pima County Cemetery. There is no grass here, a couple of young trees but no shade, and there are no visitors. All there is is dirt. Here and there are plastic flowers swallowed by the dust.
The headstones are sunken, overruled by dirt. There are two columbaria for urns. The wind blows trash across the graves. Some of the grave markers, particularly the older ones, have names and dates on them. Many others are simply marked JOHN DOE, JANE DOE, or UNKNOWN, though each, to someone somewhere, must once have meant the world, and more.
SECTION IV
Epilogue
Blind Spot
ONE NIGHT IN April 2011, I stayed up late, reading the final pages of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Those pages, written in late 1940 and early 1941, were about the loss of her London home in the war, her terrible nervousness about the ongoing air raids
, the unexpected death of Joyce, her love for Leonard, her engagement with literature, and, above all, her losing battle against depression. But the pages held a radiance, too, because of Woolf’s prose, the intensity of her attention to life, and the epiphanic moments that intermittently illuminated the gloom. I went to sleep in the glare of her words. It was late, around three. I slept dreamlessly. When I woke up, there was a gray veil right across the visual field of my left eye. The blindness wasn’t total—I could see around the lacelike edges of the obstruction—and there was no pain. At the bathroom sink, splashing cold water into the eye, I wondered if this was simply my subconscious at work. Was I like those highly suggestible people who, out of sympathy with something written, drift into an area of darkness?
I have always had weak eyes. From the age of eleven I wore glasses for myopia, and over the years the prescriptions got stronger. My brothers and my mother are severely myopic, as was my grandfather. Glasses, inconvenient as they are, are also an occasion for gratitude at not having to live life in an impressionistic blur. But blindness was another matter. Blindness happened in literature and films, it happened to blues musicians, to mythical figures, to those unfortunates one encounters on the streets of Lagos or on the subways of New York. I leaned over the sink and splashed cold water into my eye once again. But the gray veil remained, and, try as I might, I saw almost nothing out of my left eye.
I felt concern, not panic. Why should I suddenly lose my vision, without warning and with no apparent cause, one fine morning in my mid-thirties? There was nothing to worry about. At the beautiful and remote writers’ residency where I was staying in upstate New York, with several other people, I went down to the communal kitchen and told them what was happening. Quickly, a car was organized to take me down to hospital in the small town of Hudson, some twenty minutes away. If it is a detached retina, one of them said, which is what it looks like, you should have it looked at right away. It can be fixed, but only if it’s done quickly. And when I heard those words, which were meant to be reassuring, I worried.