All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  Rigoberto has one more thing to share before I part: a book on the drug war by Mexican documentary photographers. My entire body shudders when he flips to an image of men grinning over the row of corpses at their feet. Something about their triumph transports me to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, where years ago I burst into tears over a photo of U.S. soldiers posing by slaughtered Viet Cong. Rigoberto’s response is much more intimate.

  “When I see the men they capture, the men responsible, the heads of the cartels, the hit men,” he says softly, “when I look at them, I see that they could be my cousin or my brother. That similarity really scares me.”

  He removes his glasses and stares at me without blinking. “It could even be me.”

  OVER HOTEL BISCUITS SMOTHERED IN POWDERED GRAVY, Susan and I decide to spend the day in Hidalgo County, which has a “hopping” border, according to Mark. On the drive out from Brownsville, we traverse roads that have flatlined into silence. The sky, meanwhile, is an ocean inverted—an all-encompassing blue. One yard showcases a row of tiny American flags flapping above the chain-link fence, along with a larger flag impaled into the stump of a tree.

  We park at the Old Hidalgo Pumphouse, where—according to the brochure—“steam-driven irrigation pumps transformed Hidalgo County into a year-round farming phenomenon.” A garden thick with huisache and anacua surrounds the complex. A World Birding Center extends beyond it, home to tropical kingfishers, Altamira orioles, and clay-colored robins, all out of reach behind the eighteen-foot border wall.

  The town of Hidalgo stretches along the banks of the Rio Grande. Earthen levees have long held its floodwaters at bay, but a few years ago some were replaced by walls that serve the dual purpose of flood control and border security. These walls are the ugliest I’ve seen: miles of concrete slabs teethed in tall steel posts that preside over the green like a cubist sentry. We find the hiking trail leading to the wall, but what should be a five-minute walk takes us nearly thirty. The trail is practically paved with objects.

  “Here’s one,” Susan says, stopping midstride and reaching for her camera. I peek over her shoulder to find a toothbrush at her feet, whole and blue. A red one missing its bristles lies a few inches away, along with a broken hair clip. “This is what the border used to be like at Brownsville. It means it’s really active.” She slides the objects into La Virgen.

  Next is a purple shirt, tangled in weeds. As she grabs one end and pulls, a Border Patrol vehicle drives by. Its back end is outfitted with a holding cell, something a dogcatcher might use. Before I can mention it, Susan says, “Whoa, look at that!” and bounds over to a Macy’s bag half hidden in a clump of grass. A pair of Wrangler Originals tumbles out, then a long-sleeved shirt, and finally a handsome belt with a buckle shaped like a Longhorn. She examines the jeans. “Size 32x30. Made in China. And … they’re still wet.”

  That’s probably why they are here, she speculates. Over the years, she has learned that the Border Patrol does not allow immigrants to bring anything wet aboard their vehicles because there is no way to dry clothes at the station (plus they can’t risk the spread of mold). Belts are also not permitted, lest they be used as weapons. Same with shoelaces. Same with hairbrushes. Same with toothbrushes.

  “Bras are often a sign of rape,” she says. “Coyotes will hang them on a tree afterward, like a trophy. Homemade flotation devices usually mean a baby has been brought across. Sometimes you find religious cards on the banks of the river and know someone left them there in thanks for a safe passage. You see caffeine pills, and it is so they can stay awake during the journey.”

  We continue down the trail. Toothbrush, toothbrush. Shoelace, shoelace. A water bottle, squished. A tennis shoe. Half of a comb. Most of a shirt. Nail clippers. Another shirt. A lacy black bra. Susan and I halt midstep. Yes: a lacy black bra. It isn’t dangling from a tree, but still. A lacy black bra.

  When this expedition began at Hope Park a few days ago, it felt like a most peculiar egg hunt. But as La Virgen began to fill, I started to see as Susan does: the objects as reliquaries, the journey as pilgrimage. But the vulnerability of this bra curled in the dirt renders the trail into a crime scene. No woman abandons her lacy black bra unless she is forced to. Unless she has surrendered the entirety of her attention.

  Scattered nearby are two pairs of panties, a wallet, a travel-size Speed Stick, a pocket-size Bible (Nuevo Testamento), two pairs of socks rolled into balls, a three-ounce tube of Colgate, a pack of Trident chewing gum, five packages of pills in various colors and sizes, and a light blue handkerchief. The relief I feel from this additional discovery—maybe a Border Patrol agent made her drop everything, as opposed to a coyote ripping off that one thing?—gives way to the dread of imagining a woman walking around without these items. Nothing here is irreplaceable, of course, but the woman who packed these items did so with care. Her bra looks almost new. Her panties are still folded. So often in our culture we are the sum of our possessions. Indeed, at times they seem the only markers of our passage through this world. What does it mean to pare them down to the essentials—and then to lose even those?

  Just ahead, a Border Patrol SUV is parked by the gate of the wall. Long slabs of wood are piled against the steel. As I draw closer, I see they are ladders. Missing half their rungs, yes, and with nails protruding all over the place—but ladders nonetheless. As I try to lift one up, the door opens and an agent steps out. I think he’s going to tell us to leave the ladders alone, but no. He has been sitting by himself for hours and wants some company.

  “They scale the wall with these?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “They bring them from Mexico and store them in the brush and then we find them and bring them over here. The city picks them up and destroys them once a week or so.”

  He chatters on while Susan documents the ladders and I study them, only half-listening until he mentions detaining a three-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old the other day, both traveling alone.

  “Alone?” we ask.

  He nods. “There was a twelve-year-old boy who was told to help them get across. He was carrying the one-and-a-half-year-old. There are a lot of kids coming without their parents now. It is just insane.”

  If I were thinking more like a reporter, I would ask the set of questions that would lead me to the not-yet-broken news story about the unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied minors8 who have just started streaming across the border from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Alas, I receive this information as a (solipsistic) memoirist and thus file it away as further evidence of a motherland forever changed.

  We bid the agent farewell and start walking along the wall. Its southern side is a mass of tangled green, beyond which runs the river. The northern side is hedged with the backyards of family homes. We pass by trampolines and wading pools, conked-out appliances and junked-out cars. We pass by an RV park crowded with campers. We pass by a generator-run, Border Patrol–operated skybox that is Soviet chic. We pass by every iteration of fence Home Depot has in stock. And we pass by so many abandoned objects, not even La Virgen can hold them all.

  A siren goes off. Commotion ensues in the near distance. We quicken our pace as a Border Patrol vehicle pulls up from behind. A Tejano agent sticks out his head and informs us that sixty bodies have been found up ahead.

  “Bodies?” I ask, envisioning a pile of corpses.

  “We got two of them. The rest went back to Mexico. Where you ladies heading?”

  Susan tells our story, then asks if we can walk down by the river.

  “Si, pero …” He looks at me.

  “Pero peligroso?” I ask. But it’s dangerous?

  “Pues, si.” He rolls up the window. Sure is.

  We hurry on until we see three Border Patrol vehicles idling by the wall. One is outfitted with the container cell I noticed earlier. A female agent steps out, walks around back, and opens the door of the cell. Susan and I freeze in place as a middle-aged woman pops out. Maybe five feet tall with s
ienna skin and curly hair, she is dressed more for a day at the office—nice slacks, a jacket, pumps—than for fording an international riverbed. Susan puts her camera down as the woman climbs aboard the adjacent vehicle. Although the windows are darkly tinted, I see her head turn sharply away from us.

  Next out is a fortyish man with an Olmec nose, wearing a white shirt and jeans. He pauses to look at Susan and me before stepping inside the awaiting vehicle. My hand instinctively rises and waves. What I mean by this is hard to articulate, but something like: You are here and I am here the way our ancestors have always been here but now you are being taken away from here while I still get to stand here and I am bearing witness to the injustice of that and I am sorry.

  I watch the man get swallowed inside the dark of the windows and search for a place to rest his gaze. At one point, he seems to be looking at me. For half a second, I wonder whether or not to wave again. He beats me to it.

  NOTES

  1. President Ronald Reagan delivered this famous line at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall during a celebration of the 750th anniversary of the city on June 12, 1987. As an idealistic junior high student, I cheered at this challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev—completely unaware that the United States had been barricading border cities like San Ysidro, California, and El Paso, Texas, since the seventies.

  2. Other U.S. presidents who condemned the world’s walls: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (“What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained opposition—clear, definite opposition—to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past”) and Richard Nixon, referencing China’s Great Wall (“What is most important is that we have an open world. As we look at this wall, we do not want walls of any kind between peoples”). Donald Trump, meanwhile, claimed, “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall,” during his announcement for a presidential bid in June 2015.

  3. Let’s contemplate word choice for a moment. “Fence” has a white-picket connotation: a neighborly gesture that preserves everyone’s privacy and keeps cocker spaniels from running away. A “wall” implies militarization: something that incites paranoia and quashes freedoms. The U.S. government hasn’t built a fence across its southern border but a wall.

  4. In December 2007, Banksy and the London-based group Pictures on Walls invited fourteen international street artists to Bethlehem to work with Palestinian artists. Anyone wishing to buy their work was informed they needed to travel there and witness Israel’s occupation firsthand before placing a bid. The project—called “Santa’s Ghetto”—raised more than $1 million for local charities and cast a critical eye on the West Bank Wall, which is expected to be upward of 400 miles long upon its completion.

  5. That is indeed Ana Teresa Fernández on the cover of this book, performing “Borrando la Frontera,” Erasing the Border. She painted this image from a photograph by her mother, Maria Teresa Fernández, who has been documenting the border wall between San Diego and Tijuana since the late 1990s. Learn more at http://anateresafernandez.com.

  6. When someone does mount an exhibition on the northern wall, the Border Patrol quickly tears it down. In his book Border Odyssey, Charles Thompson documents a 2011 visit to a shrine near Douglas, Arizona, for Carlos La Madrid, a nineteen-year-old U.S. citizen killed by a Border Patrol agent, purportedly for throwing rocks. After photographing the posters and letters hanging on the wall—one of which read TO THE BORDER PATROL WHO KILLED MY BROTHER—Thompson drove on to another segment of the wall. By the time he returned half an hour later, all of the messages had been removed.

  7. Among the losses: the Cadillac Bar. It first opened in New Orleans in the early twenties but relocated to Nuevo Laredo to take advantage of Prohibition in 1926. Thousands of U.S. citizens streamed across the border to legally chug its tequila and behold curios like Pancho Villa’s saddle. My family dined there throughout the eighties and nineties. In 2010, however, the Cadillac “temporarily closed” because narco-violence had drained its clientele. It recently reopened back across the border in San Antonio.

  8. More than 68,000 unaccompanied children were caught crossing the border between October 2013 and October 2014—so many, they overwhelmed federal facilities. That July, I visited one of the makeshift shelters that had sprung up in the Rio Grande Valley: Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen. In its first month of operation, volunteers offered showers, clothing, phone calls, a hot meal, and a place to rest to more than 3,000 families who had just been processed out of a detention center and were awaiting their court date. Whenever a new group arrived, volunteers formed a receiving line and cheered. “How do you deport a child to nowhere?” asked Ofelia de los Santos of Catholic Charities. “If Lebanon can handle hundreds of thousands of refugees, why can’t we handle 50,000 kids?”

  8

  The Chokepoint

  The first thing lead investigator Danny Davila wants to know is whether I have a weak stomach. We are sitting in his cramped office at the Brooks County sheriff’s department on a sweltering afternoon. Before I can respond, he slides a three-ring binder that he calls “the Dead Book” my way. Inside are dozens of laminated photographs of the remains of the thirty-four undocumented immigrants who have died in this county’s scrub brush this year, presumably while sidestepping Falfurrias’s nearby chokepoint.

  “This is the American Dream,” Davila says, spreading his arms wide, as if to signal beyond the cedar-paneled room, “and this is where it stops, right here.” He thumps the binder with his forefinger.

  Grasping the Dead Book with both hands, I open to a random page. A dark-skinned man wearing only yellow briefs is curled into the fetal position atop a blanket.

  “We find them naked sometimes, but it’s not because they were abused or anything. It’s just their last-ditch effort to try to cool off. They don’t know that makes it worse,” Davila explains.

  At first glance, the man seems to have been caught in a moment of quiet contemplation: his muscles are relaxed and his gaze is soft. But as I look more closely, I see that ants are swarming his eyeballs. Turning the page before the image fully registers, I scan some typewritten reports before finding the next photograph: an engorged hand roasted purple and protruding from the dirt, its fingers extending skyward. Then a face that is half skull, half meat, and a full set of teeth. Then a belly so swollen it has split like a chorizo on a grill. Every image traumatizes me further, yet I keep flipping the pages as calmly as possible to prove I can handle it. Twenty minutes ago, a rancher called in a Code 500. The thirty-fifth body of the year has been discovered. If my stomach is up to it, I can accompany Davila on the retrieval.

  BY YEAR’S END, there will be three Dead Books perched atop Davila’s desk, along with a “Missing Persons” binder full of photos and e-mails sent in by anxious families in Mexico and Central America. The year 2012 will break all records for Brooks County, with 129 bodies found somewhere along 942 square miles of ranches and roads. Not only is that body count a 200 percent increase from 2011, but it comes at a time when migration across the U.S. border is at a historic low—nearly half the rate of even four years ago. In 2012, the entire state of Arizona recovered just twenty-eight more bodies than this tiny Texas county claimed.

  So how did Brooks become a killing field for immigrants? First, there’s U.S. policy to consider. Until the early nineties, many hopeful immigrants traveled to major ports of entry like San Diego, waited until dark, and then bolted across the international line1 with the Border Patrol at their heels. In response, Customs and Border Protection began launching programs like El Paso’s “Operation Hold-the-Line” in 1993, which mobilized so many agents at traditional crossing routes that immigrants started trekking into the desert to avoid them. After 9/11, Congress sought to “secure” the Mexico border
by more than doubling the number of agents there, deploying Predator drones, and erecting the wall—all of which pushed immigrants into the most isolated (and therefore dangerous) regions of the desert for their crossings. Sparsely populated southern Arizona used to be a common transit area, but according to Davila, its recent spate of anti-immigrant legislation seems to be curbing the tide to Texas now. He’s been noticing a lot of Arizona state-issued identification cards on the bodies he’s helped recover lately, meaning that even established immigrants could be deciding to test their fate in Texas instead.

  Then there’s the weather. Texas suffered its worst-ever drought in 2011, and temperatures routinely hit triple digits here. Coyotes tend to tell their clients that they’ll need to walk only a couple of hours to avoid the chokepoint (as opposed to a couple of days) and that the trail cuts through a nice ranch (instead of foot-deep sand speckled with horse crippler cactus). Unprepared for the harsh conditions, many immigrants succumb to heat exhaustion and die when the other travelers continue on without them.

  The rise of organized crime has brought even more deaths. Ten years ago, immigrants could hire local coyotes in Mexico to walk them across the border for $1,000 apiece. Today, they usually wind up with minions of transnational networks who charge exorbitant rates to navigate the routes that offer the best chances of avoiding the Border Patrol. Their preferred terrain is often so desolate, the coyotes feel at liberty to do whatever they want with their charges. Crimes are rarely punished because border crossers are reluctant to report their coyotes’ misdeeds. Retribution is too grave. In Brooks County, the bodies of the dead are often silenced too, since so few undergo autopsies. Technically, that’s breaking Texas law, but—at $1,500 each—Brooks simply can’t afford to determine whether a border crosser died of exposure or as a result of violence. Although taxpayers spent upward of $90 billion securing the U.S.-Mexico border in the decade following 9/11, very little funneled down to local law enforcement agencies. Brooks County’s entire operating budget is just $585,000 a year, barely enough to pay its employees. Davila, after eighteen years on the job, makes only $27,000. Moreover, wild pigs and vultures usually find the bodies long before the authorities do, ravaging potential evidence.