GO TO JAIL, AFTER EIGHT TIMES, GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL
In the temporary detention center at the Laredo North Border Patrol Station, a Mexican kid slumps in a chair at a processing desk. He’s going to jail for at least three months, because this is the eighth time he’s been caught illegally entering the United States, and the system’s patience has finally been exhausted.
Border Patrol Agent One runs a hand shyly over his new haircut, which is nearly a buzz.
“That, see, I don’t understand that haircut,” says Agent Two, wearing a huge cowboy hat.
“At least he’s got hair,” says Agent Three, and Agent Two blushes, acknowledging it: Yes, yes, it’s true. Under this hat, I’m bald.
I point to my own head.
We all laugh at my hairline.
Then I look over at the kid. He’s sitting there expressionless, a small cat among large dogs. And now he’s got to endure this balding talk, this nervous braying laughter, before he can get to the next enjoyable step (being processed), and on to the part where he gets sent off to a foreign jail.
My heart goes out to him.
Sort of.
Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day. I’ve just spent mine driving around in a “marked caged unit” with Agent Three, aka Dan Garibay: visiting the muddy clearings where illegal aliens change into dry clothes after they cross, inspecting fence-cuts, driving past safe houses, hearing agents talk about tracking groups of illegals for eleven straight hours. I’ve learned that it’s now more profitable to traffic in humans than in drugs; that MS-13, a Salvadoran gang, is in a death struggle with the more traditional Mexican Mafia; that Border Patrol agents in Laredo are routinely shadowed by spies from the smuggling cartels who, in turn, are shadowed by a newly formed countersurveillance unit.
My relation to this Mexican kid, then, is something like that of a plumber’s apprentice to a leak.
Dan’s third-generation Mexican American, a funny, reasonable guy who seems to be constantly considering and reconsidering the moral implications of his job. He’s got nothing against illegal aliens, understands why they do what they do, has compassionate feelings toward them, and seems committed to catching them in a way that keeps them safe and leaves their dignity intact. But the law is the law, and why should those who break the law be privileged over those who’ve played by the rules?
So I find myself thinking, re this silent (sullen? unrepentant?) kid, this member of Wascals Who Insist on Trying to Elude My New Friend Dan: Dude, what did you expect? Seven times? Who doesn’t learn after seven times? Do you value your freedom so lightly? Do you have a wife, kids? Do you realize you are now going to miss the next three months of their—
Then, imagining that he has kids, who look like little Mexican versions of my kids back when they were toddlers, I (finally) experience a little heart-pang as I flash on what I’d be thinking if I were him: Laugh it up, you balding bastards, I’m dying here, can’t you tell I’m a decent person, oh Jesus, please let me go, just this one last time, they’re so cute and will never be this age again, please please, I’ve made a terrible mistake.
And what will you do if we let you go? I ask him in my mind. Will you try to get in here again? Next time, you could be looking at five years.
He hesitates, averts his eyes.
Seriously? I say. My God, is it worth it? Are things really that bad where you live?
And he just looks at me, as if to say: Would I keep trying if it didn’t make sense to keep trying, if the possible reward didn’t justify possibly getting caught? Do I look stupid?
He doesn’t look stupid. He looks handsome and sad and ashamed.
But mostly what he looks is: busted.
Busted, and waiting to pay the price.
HUSTLING FOR SCHOOLBOOKS
I cross the bridge into Nuevo Laredo (“the most dangerous city in North America,” according to Dan) with an African American long-haul truck driver from Kentucky who’s wearing a cowboy hat and a shirt with a flag sewn on the back. For thirteen years now, whenever he drives this route, he’s parked on the U.S. side and saved a few bucks by getting a cheap hotel on the Mexican side. He’s divorced, but his wife’s a good lady: She’s kept him on her insurance, she’s a nurse, a good nurse, not a slut like most nurses, who like to fuck the young doctors in the rooms where they keep the towels. Do I know about this? Am I aware of this phenomenon?
In the most dangerous city in North America, a guy’s getting his shoes shined with an air of 1950s satisfaction, a row of old people are fingering their pants legs on a bench, a toddler’s doing a happy skipping dance along the lip of a fountain.
Not so bad, I think, a town like any other—
Do I want a girl? A boy? A boy from Boy’s Town?
A young guy’s fallen in beside me: Hector.
“No, man, I’m married,” I say. “Happily married.”
“Isn’t it the case!” he says. “When a man goes with another woman, the wife will give him such a…how is it called?”
He mimes slapping himself.
“Slap,” I say.
“Your woman will gave you such a slop,” he says, shaking his head at the memory of the last time his wife gave him a slop.
Hector advises me: Stay in the shopping area. Do not err to the left or right of the bridge. Avoid the police. Two gangs are fighting for the town, each with its own cops. The cops see you have money, they’ll plant drugs on you, take your money, possibly kill you.
Times are hard, he tells me, fewer tourists are coming all the time. His daughter just started first grade, but they haven’t been able to afford the books yet. He didn’t see his family last night, not having the five bucks necessary for the bus ticket to León.
I give him ten bucks.
He accepts with surprise, gratitude, some disappointment maybe: It’s too little money, too early in the night.
He tells me nostalgically about the first time he sneaked into the United States, with his uncle, in 1989, in a little boat. His dream is to go over again soon and join his brother in New Orleans, making fifteen dollars an hour doing post-Katrina work. He knows about the location of the new checkpoint, on Highway 83, which I visited with Dan earlier today, and how to circumvent it: Get dropped off before the checkpoint, walk a couple of miles around it, get picked up on the other side.
“Not easy,” I say.
“Yes, easy,” he says.
And even easier if he had an American to help him. Do I have a car? Is my car parked in Laredo? If I drive him through the checkpoint, they won’t even stop us.
Ha, ha, ha! I think. Hi, Dan! I can explain!
A muscular scowling guy, face heavily tattooed, strolls past, with henchmen. Hector, distracted/alarmed, trips on an exposed pipe.
“He doesn’t like me,” he says. “Because I am with you, in his area.”
His area? I think. The street comes alive with creepiness. This is the town that killed its own police chief, on his first day in Office, for pledging to end the drug trade.
“I should probably head back,” I say.
“I think so,” says Hector.
Soon the bridge is in sight. Suddenly, he’s nervous, abashed.
Maybe I could give him a little something?
I remind him of the ten dollars.
“That was for my children,” he says. “I am asking now for me. So I can buy a hot dog.”
Over the next few seconds I (1) am annoyed at his nerve, (2) castigate myself for being so tight-sphinctered over—what is it, two bucks?—and (3) hand over the money, smiling warmly to hide the fact that (1) and (2) ever occurred to me.
Hector steps away, buys a hot dog from a vendor, disappears down a side street, raising the hot dog in gratitude.
I cross the bridge.
Easy for me, I think. Impossible for you.
Back in the United States, the facades are nicer, the traffic lighter. My nation appears in that moment as a very clean, anxiety-clenched fist, in the grip of which I
feel comfortable and happy, and like myself again.
THE ALL-AMERICAN MEXICAN CITY, OR THE ALL-MEXICAN AMERICAN CITY, WHATEVER
Maybe you’ve heard some variant of the following:
I have nothing against [Mexicans/immigrants/these people], but nowadays you go to [NAME OF CITY] and all you hear is Spanish. It’s as if [these people/the Mexicans/ the foreigners] expect [me/us Americans] to [speak Spanish/adapt to THEIR culture/kowtow to THEM!], whereas the burden ought to be on [them/the newcomers/the Mexicans] to ASSIMILATE, right? Someday soon you’re going to find whole American cities full of people speaking only Spanish!
Note to speaker of the above: such a city already exists. Welcome to the Friday-night party that is Laredo.
At Shirley Field, Laredo Martin High is kicking the crap out of Carrizo Springs High before a huge hometown crowd that is virtually all Hispanic and dressed in school-color red. The majorettes conclude their bit, march crisply into the stands, per instructions, with swift precise turns, trying not to crack up. A Mexican American princess (UP UP AND AWAY! reads her T-shirt) searches the crowd, rendered confident and in love with the world by virtue of her beauty, assisted in her search by a heavier, less elated girl.
Show of hands, I think: Anybody here can’t afford schoolbooks? Ha ha, no way, the crowd roars in my mind, are you joking? We have SUVs and PlayStations and plenty to eat, we roam the earth expecting respect and receiving it, for we are the American Middle Class, and we shall live out the full measure of our days amidst happiness and plenty.
I leave the game early, have dinner at Taco Palenque, a kind of Taco Bell on glamour pills, tonight inexplicably overrun by gorgeous Mexican American women in tight designer jeans, with glittered eyelids and balletic hairstyles à la Princess Leia. As has been the case all night, only Spanish is being spoken, unless English is needed, in which case English is delivered: gladly, genially, and unaccented.
Tonight, America seems like a happy miracle, a Land o’ Plenty where a new ethnicity is being created, an ethnicity that transcends the Anglo/Hispanic distinction, and the primary mascot of this ethnicity is Affluence, accompanied by its beautiful sidekicks Civility, Humor, Kindness, and Relative Absence of Fear. Tonight, America seems like the for-centuries-dreamed-of rescuer of the Little Guy, the place that takes a guy like Hector and puts some pounds on him, sets him on his feet, puts a spring in his step, and ends, forever, his flinching hustle for two-dollar hot dogs.
But first he has to get here.
AMONG THE MENNONITES
The east Texas countryside rolls by: ranches, ranches, elaborate memorials for car-accident-killed Mexican American boys, woven into barbed-wire fences, featuring silk roses and, in at least one case, the small plastic figure of a professional wrestler. It’s been unusually rainy, and treetops jut eerily up from a temporary lake, in which it seems hobbits should be fishing from little bark boats.
In Roma, the World Birding Center overlooks a small Mexican village, from which I can hear the ringing of someone’s old-fashioned phone.
I’m driving from Laredo to Brownsville to meet with some Mennonites who work with the Mexican American poor in the Rio Grande Valley. Many of the poor are, presumably, undocumented immigrants. I’m feeling a little funny about meeting these Mennonites, because I’m not sure I agree with what they do. If there’s a law, and they, even inadvertently, help the undocumented circumvent the law, doesn’t this just encourage further lawbreaking, which, in turn, reinforces this system of law-circumvention, which, in turn, strengthens the illegal smuggling cartels, thus ratcheting up the cycle of high profits, violence, and chaos that Dan Garibay described?
Egads, I think, I am become Lou Dobbs.
Later that afternoon, I’m standing in a circle of pretty young women, Teach for America workers, at a Mennonite church social in San Juan. It’s muddy and sunny, the music’s about to start, across the two-lane is a tract-house neighborhood à la Spielberg, nearby is a movable free-range-chicken shed and an organic garden and a donkey named Pierre, rescued from a neglectful owner by the pastor of the church, John Garland.
John looks more like a guitarist in an indie-rock band than he does a pastor, and his wife, Abby, looks more like the beautiful vocalist in that band than she does a high-school teacher/pastor’s wife. John has started a model organic farm here at the church. The idea is to help underprivileged workers access the “intellectual capital” of their work; immigrants are often expert organic farmers who, if they happen to be undocumented, get stuck working for other people, underpaid, or cheated of their pay.
Around them, John and Abby have gathered a group of similarly well-educated, young, politically engaged volunteers working with the poor in small towns across the Rio Grande Valley.
What have they seen?
You name it: blond Spanish-only speakers; mothers who call the school to say they’ve been deported but will be sneaking back in time for parent-teacher conferences; families in which the kids speak only English and the parents speak only Spanish; families in which the parents speak English but the kids—recent arrivals—can’t; kids who came over illegally as babies and are now fully acculturated American teenagers—excellent straight-A students who, because they’re undocumented, can’t get financial aid for college, which means, given their family economics, no college for them at all.
So what do they do?
“They go to work,” Abby says.
John has told me that although their mission involves “reaching out to those in need”—some of whom, in this area especially, may indeed be undocumented—they don’t have a clue if people have documents or not. Still, remembering my Lou Dobbs moment, I ask John and Abby if they ever have doubts about working with the undocumented, since technically it’s against the law.
John looks at me thoughtfully from behind his glasses.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Just the other day, these two guys walked up here and said, ‘Hey, man, we just crossed the river, we’re really thirsty, we need some water.’ And I looked them over and said: ‘Sorry, friend, you’ll have to take it up the road.’”
Abby nods.
So this is interesting. They are, yes, Christians, and yet they understand that the law forbids—
Then they both crack up.
“Yeah, see that big cross on the front of the church?” says Abby. “That’s actually what it means: Take it up the road.”
“The thing is, when you read the Bible?” John says. “One thing it’s not is wishy-washy about our responsibility toward people in need. Yes, there’s the law, and we should respect it, but there’s also a higher law.”
In Abby’s opinion, the problem with this immigration debate is the level of abstraction at which it’s conducted. If you talk about undocumented workers or illegal aliens, it’s easy to make mistakes. Whereas if you say: This is Valerie, Valerie is my student, whom I love, then whatever you do will make sense, coming, as it does, from the heart, with a real person in mind.
A STORY TOO SAD TO INVENT
Because of the way Lupe Aguilar’s past has been described to me, I expect him to be mean and wiry and street-scarred, but no: He’s white-haired, gentle, and articulate, with a quality of patient abiding that makes me instantly crave his approval. After church, at the head of a long familial table in a Mexican restaurant, he tells me he used to: (1) run wild (his wife’s sitting across the table, and her eyebrows go up, indicating: Oh yes he did), (2) shepherd groups of recently arrived Mexicans into a hotel room, take his fee, then rat them out to the Border Patrol, (3) own bars, party, and fight (a guy he offended once put three slugs in his back). Then he experienced a religious conversion and is now a Mennonite pastor who shelters the homeless—in his house, in trailers behind his house, in the kitchen of his church (as we enter, a smiling, timid family just arrived from Veracruz rises as one, exclaims mucho gusto as one, sits as one), or in the church itself (in the Sunday-school rooms, in the sanctuary, beside the altar), with a disregard for his personal space th
at I find impossible to imagine. Would I let strangers sleep in my home, at my work, would I let a constant flow of Unknown Quantities stream past my kids?
No, I would not.
And this isn’t just my paranoia; Lupe says people he’s helped have stolen from him (he’s lost three cars this way), insulted him, made indecent proposals to his wife and daughters. He’s not a big favorite of the neighbors, either, some of whom consider him a lawbreaker. But he feels doing this work is his duty. Once, back in his early days as a Christian, a young Mennonite volunteer overheard him use the word wetback and referred him to Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). Reading this, Lupe says, he was “changed forever.” His goal in life is now “to be humble and meek like Jesus,” and you see this desire working through him, in the things he does and the way he attempts to deflect credit (“Jesus is the doer!”).
To illustrate the way the current system of illegality creates secrecy and chaos, which in turn brings down worlds of shit, mostly on the poor, he tells me the following story:
Once upon a time, a young couple left Mexico and came north. Trying to avoid the Border Patrol, they crossed the river in a remote area, where they were set upon by “border bandits” who stole their shoes and money and raped the woman in front of the man. She became pregnant. Having become Christians, and after much soul-searching, the couple decided to keep the baby. But the woman’s water broke at five months, and the baby died ten minutes after its birth. The couple couldn’t afford a coffin, so Lupe called in a favor from a funeral director; the funeral home allowed a brief (twenty-minute) ceremony and donated a small cardboard box for the burial. The Mennonites acquired a small plot from the county and drove out in their own cars to bury the baby. At the grave, Lupe had to pry the dead baby out of the grieving mother’s arms. The woman was a mess but, being undocumented, was too afraid to seek psychological help. In her heart, she blamed the man for not defending her, blamed herself for not being able to carry the baby to full-term, blamed God for not helping them. The man, for his part, couldn’t make peace with the way he’d failed to protect her. In the end, the pain proved too much, and the couple separated.
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