The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  Hanging from the branches of the mesquites were a dozen nooses of blue twine, from which we’d tied water containers the week before (hanging them off the ground keeps the ravens from pecking holes in them). It wasn’t the disappearance of the water and food that was concerning Lois so much as the cleanliness of the site: no litter, no empty bottles, none of the signs of desperate consumption she was used to. The site had been cleared out, cleaned up, not by migrants. Lois blamed the reserve’s rangers. They had served citations on No More Deaths in the past for unlicensed activity on this protected land—littering, in other words, in the form of water containers. Water containers were sometimes slashed and the cans of food split and tipped out. As well as Border Patrol there were hostile ranchers and militias, vigilante boy-scouts armed with automatic weapons who hunted undocumented migrants and believed that to leave water for the dying was an act of treason. Some time ago No More Deaths had left a motion-activated video camera hidden in a bush to try to establish who was vandalising one of their drop sites, only to return to find it had been removed. Another camera, this one undisturbed, recorded a Border Patrol agent slashing bottles.

  In the breeze the bare ropes swung. John had brought three Sharpie markers with him, black, blue and green. On the food-tubs and the water bottles he drew hearts and flowers and messages of greeting in Spanish. There is a belief among some migrants that the food and water are set out by Border Patrol or other hostile bodies as traps, or poisoned. Neither the BP nor the militias would be able to bring themselves to draw love-hearts and flowers, John reasoned. And yet it was not only a ruse; the expression of hospitality was heartfelt. Comida + Calcetines. Food and socks. Que le vaya bien. Hope everything goes well. Nuestros corazones no tienan fronteras. Our hearts recognise no borders.

  John went on with his flower-drawings, his messages, and I thought he was right; it was something their enemies would be incapable of.

  In the church hall at the end of each weekly meeting a minute’s silence was observed for the lost.

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  I’D SEEN PHOTOS of Jim Corbett on the jackets of the few books he wrote, a toothy-smiled, knobbly-handed, sun-wrinkled scholar with big glasses and wire beard—a goatee. In his book Goatwalking, published in 1991, he advocates a form of pastoral nomadism—the leading of goats from pasture to pasture and living off their milk—as the lightest-footed way a person can live in an arid environment. “From the Alps to the Empty Quarter, Java to Baja, with the goat as a partner, human beings can support themselves in most wildland environments.” He lived much of his life in Tucson, and would often go into the desert for weeks at a time with only a small herd for company and sustenance. To goatwalk was to re-enact “the history of the prophetic faiths”; it was the desert nomadism of Arabia, and of the Chosen People. It is the animals’ cussedness and their association with anarchy—“foraging in garbage, raiding clotheslines, and butting the unwary”—that Corbett loves, as much as their self-sufficiency and loyalty. Goats, he adds, never make the mistake of thinking they’re human, but “they will allow properly behaved human beings to become fully accepted members of the herd.” That is, they will allow humans (properly behaved ones) to be goats.

  While Corbett was tending a herd in south Baja during the drought summer of 1980, the bucks climbed towards a line of cliffs in pursuit of a herd of does (goats favour high ground). Once they reached them, Corbett knew, the bucks would follow the she-goats rather than him, and the animals would be lost. The way to regain control of a herd of goats is to panic it—signalling alarm and then running so that the animals follow you. After sprinting for miles and finally bringing the herd under control, he found himself exhausted, overheated and dehydrated in the full heat of an Arizonan summer afternoon—thirty-seven degrees-plus. The only water source anywhere nearby was a small hollow fed by a spring much used by vultures, whose white droppings coated the surrounding rocks. “The greenish water smelled of carrion and seethed with putrefactive bacteria.” Knowing that it was all that lay between him and an unpleasant death, he drank about four litres, which revived him for long enough to enable him to lead the goats to fresh water. “I spent the night drinking water that took just a few seconds to go through me,” he recalled, “but nightlong diarrhoea was much better than being dead.”

  As well as a goat, he admitted that as an older man he resembled the other constant presence in his life, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, whom he calls his “daemon.” It was from Don Quixote that he learned what he calls “errantry,” a guiding principle of his life—“sallying out beyond a society’s established ways, to live according to one’s inner leadings.” When Corbett was in his late twenties, his marriage of five years ended and his ex-wife was given custody of their children. He withdrew alone to the slope of Black Bear Mountain in the Arizona–Mexico borderlands. “The first lesson is where everyone starts: despair that clears the way.” On Black Bear Mountain he taught himself Malay—“a language I’d never heard, spoken on the other side of the world by a people I’d never met.”

  After an unspecified time, he went alone—but for his copy of Don Quixote—to Sinaloa, Mexico, and from there to a boarding house in Berkeley, California, where he “considered fitting in,” but then thought better of it. He had planned to become a philosophy teacher, “but the main thing I learned from studying philosophy was that I knew nothing to teach.” It was there that the epiphany occurred: he was certain that his heart stopped. “Out of the stillness that I thought was death, love enlivened me—or something like love that doesn’t split, the way love does, into loving and being loved.” It was not death; it was something more significant. He gave away everything he didn’t need, and took to the road.

  “Disobeying the government is like failing to keep a promise,” he wrote: one should not do so lightly. When eventually he came into conflict with the state it was because he saw that the state itself was contravening or failing to uphold the law; that is, failing to keep its promise. Among those promises, mandated not only by international law but by U.S. federal law, was the obligation to provide sanctuary to refugees.

  In the early 1980s the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala were at their most grotesque: even at the time, the atrocities committed by government death-squads in both countries were well known in America. In a letter written in January 1982, Corbett recalled a story he had heard in the border town of Nogales, of a baby boy whom Guatemalan soldiers had mutilated and slowly murdered while forcing his mother to watch. In order to maintain its stance that escapees from the violence were not refugees but economic migrants, the United States government was required to deny that human-rights abuses were occurring in Central America. To make such a concession would also have rendered illegal the military assistance it was providing to the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.

  In June 1981 a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran named Santana Chirino Amaya, found to be living without papers in Los Angeles, was deported. Two months later he turned up in Amapulapa, El Salvador. He had been beheaded. Neither state-sponsored atrocity nor deportation of Central Americans fleeing those atrocities was new. In December 1980 a planeload of forty deportees was reportedly massacred on arrival in San Salvador. As a Salvadoran, it was said, you had three choices: join the left and be killed by the right; join the right and be killed by the left; or escape, knowing that flight too might mean death.

  It was not until 1981, after he and his second wife moved to Tucson, that the plight of Central American refugees entered Jim Corbett’s consciousness. In May that year, a friend of his gave a lift to a young man close to the border, who, when they were stopped at the Border Patrol checkpoint on the Nogales–Tucson highway, turned out to be a refugee from El Salvador and was detained. Hearing about the young Salvadoran, Corbett took it upon himself to look into his fate, and was told by Border Patrol that they did not divulge information about detainees. He rang a senior official in the Immigration and
Naturalisation Service and with an air of authority said, “This is Jim Corbett, here in Tucson. I need a name, A-number, and current location of a Salvadoran male you picked up” (an A-number is an “alien registration number”). As Corbett had hoped, the official assumed he was another Jim Corbett—former Mayor Corbett of Tucson—and duly divulged that the person was in Santa Cruz County Jail, in Nogales, Arizona.

  Corbett obtained a copy of the form, a G-28, that detainees needed to complete in order to designate a legal representative. On arrival at the prison he found a number of other unrepresented Salvadorans, and went out to obtain more G-28s. When he returned, the authorities, having gathered that he was not the Corbett, told him the Salvadorans had been moved, and refused to say where. A court injunction eventually allowed Corbett to bond the Salvadorans, meaning they were released from incarceration under his supervision, while rulings were awaited on their asylum claims. In the meantime, he and his wife put up twenty or more of them in their converted garage. The numbers swelled further when he began to bring Central Americans over the border himself. For each individual act of assistance, he was committing a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment. Many of those brought across the border at this time were aided by a goat-milking co-operative, “Los Cabreros Andantes,” of which Corbett was a member. They knew the Sonoran borderlands better than most. The name can be translated as “the goatherds errant,” and was a punning allusion to the archetypal caballero andante or “knight errant,” Don Quixote.

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  PICTURE A MAN standing on a volcanic spur near the Baboquivari Mountains, a few kilometres south of Tucson. His name is José Salazar Ylarregui and the year is 1851. He is a senior member of the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, responsible for surveying the newly defined border. Until then there was no line, no fence, no wall. It was war that created the line, the Mexican–American War of 1846, or rather the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that followed it. Salazar Ylarregui, jointly responsible for a hundred men in the unspeakable heat of the Sonoran, on constant guard against Apaches, made a note (maybe he pictured his superiors in their Mexico City drawing rooms): “On paper one easily draws a line with a ruler and pencil.”

  In the east, that line followed the natural barrier of the Rio Grande; to the west it travelled originally from El Paso along the Gila River to its confluence with the Colorado, thence in a straight line to San Diego Bay, placing much of today’s southern Arizona in Mexico. The Gadsden Purchase of 1854—when, following disagreement over the line drawn by Salazar Ylarregui, the United States acquired some 77,000 square kilometres of land from Mexico—caused the western section of Arizona to be repositioned further to the north. Tucson became American, and the border, rather than following the course of the Gila, followed a straight line from El Paso to the Colorado. Upon an expanse of desert where there were few natural features, and fewer names on the maps of either nation, significance was conjured.

  The process by which the border would function did not escape those tasked with making it a reality on the ground. One member of the 1851 survey, considering the newly designated borderlands, asked simply: “Is this the land we have purchased, and are to survey and keep at such cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, worthless.” Another described a “sterile waste, utterly worthless for any purpose than to constitute a barrier.”

  In the town of Nogales, which straddles the U.S.–Mexico border south of Tucson, I would see a five-metre-tall rusting blade snaking unbroken over hill after hill. The wall looked impassable, as if conceived to rebuff a military assault. But until the twentieth century it was little more than notional: a line on paper echoed by a constellation of obelisks on the ground, each one separated from its neighbours by some three kilometres of desert, or even more where conditions were harshest. Mexicans crossed it daily; the people of the border region had always circled from one area to another, according to the economic patterns of season and climate. Not until 1924 was the U.S. Border Patrol founded, and even then hundreds of kilometres continued to be realised by nothing more than the surveyors’ obelisks. In many places you could still, in principle, move back and forth unregarded, even if the towns and villages that had emerged along the border were more heavily controlled. There was no need to build a wall, it was understood, when one already existed: a “sterile waste, utterly worthless for any purpose than to constitute a barrier.”

  A year before Santana Chirino Amaya’s deportation, on 5 July 1980, a group of thirty mostly middle-class Salvadorans had been led into the desert north of the Mexican border town of Sonoyta by three paid guides—coyotes, as they are known—having already crossed Guatemala and Mexico. This happened not far from where in 1906 W. J. McGee found the near-dead Pablo Valencia, his skin dried to “shrunken rawhide.” From Sonoyta, the Salvadorans, accustomed to their homeland’s tropical conditions, were walked north overnight for fifty kilometres. Next day, as their water supplies began to dwindle and the heat of the morning increased, two of the coyotes left to “find water.” Hold pebbles in your mouth, one said: it will stave off the thirst.

  Understanding they had been abandoned, all but one of the remaining men went to find water or help. With no idea where they were, they simply walked away in the direction the vanished coyotes had taken. Nor did they return. There were ten women in the group, including three sisters aged twelve, fourteen and nineteen, travelling unchaperoned to Los Angeles where they were to meet their mother who had paid for them to be smuggled out of El Salvador. One of the older women died soon after midday. As the afternoon went on, another woman became ill. She had taken the coyotes’ advice, and one of the pebbles she had been sucking had become lodged in her throat. The remaining man, the third coyote, named Rivera, jammed a stick into her throat, as if clearing a drain. The woman coughed up blood and died.

  Rivera had been with the group for four days—across Guatemala, across Mexico, and now the Sonoran Desert. The fee, per person, for this service? Twelve hundred dollars. The surviving women reported that he raped two of the sisters, though this was not borne out by the later autopsies. The group, the living and the dead, were found by U.S. Border Patrol two days later, near-naked and huddled in the meagre shade they had formed by strewing their clothing across the branches of paloverdes. They were caked in make-up, which they had used to protect themselves against the sun. One of the surviving men, found a few kilometres away, had daubed himself with toothpaste. In the night the tablet of his face was a beacon to the Border Patrol agents. In total, thirteen of the original group were found dead, with Rivera and the three young sisters among them.

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  IT WAS JOHN FIFE who mentioned this story to me. I was introduced to him at a book launch in Tucson. He had been a keystone in the so-called Sanctuary movement, and it was to him and his church, Southside Presbyterian, that his friend Jim Corbett had turned when more room was required to accommodate the migrants the Goatherds Errant were bringing over the border. Fife was a white-haired six-footer, 80 per cent leg. He was straight-backed, but his posture was less the chest-thrusting rigidity of the man in uniform than the supple uprightness of the horserider who knows slouchers get thrown. We met again the following day at Southside Presbyterian, a compound of halls and kitchens and accommodation blocks surrounding a church. After recollecting some instance of horror or injustice—he had frequent cause—he would utter a quiet, dry, appalled chuckle. The modulations of his voice were deft, honed over a lifetime of addressing his congregation. The church we walked through to reach his office was circular, with the pews laid out concentrically. It had no pulpit, just an altar table built by a man Fife knew, a guy from the desert out near Bisbee, ironwood with the bark left on.

  Fife had dedicated much of his life to this impoverished part of the city; to his congregation, and, for more than thirty years, to the people crossing the border aga
inst the wishes of the government. National policy was an abomination, intolerable. Simply that: not to be tolerated. “Look at the failure of the church in Europe to protect Jews in the thirties and forties,” he said. There was his modern-day lesson, the lesson to which lip-service is so often paid. But he had acted on it. And then there were the older lessons. There was Numbers: “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelites, and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you.” There was Leviticus: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

  By the end of 1982 fifty Guatemalans and Salvadorans could be found sleeping on the floor of Southside Presbyterian on any night. At the church gate he placed a sign: “This is a Sanctuary for the Oppressed of Central America.” It was not a “movement” when it started. It was just a succession of actions born of uncomplicated faith. But those actions were the roots of a phenomenon that moved from Arizona to the wider United States and beyond. Sanctuaries for Central American refugees were established in places of worship and universities as far away as Germany. Border Patrol, realising what Fife was doing, threatened to indict him. “None of us wanted to go to jail for Jesus.” But there had been little turning over of pros and cons. His government was allowing people to die in the desert; or it was delivering them—“rendering” them, in modern parlance—to torture and rape and murder.

  “We learned later that they had a meeting at the Washington Justice Department about what to do about this dinky little church in south Tucson. And the conclusion of the meeting was, ‘Well, we’re not going to indict them, because that would just call attention to this issue. If we leave them alone, they’ll fade away.’