All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  As I exit the beige brick building, I notice the Guatemalan Consulate has a distinguishing feature after all. The vacant office next door retains the imprint of a sign removed long ago. WORKFORCE, it says in ghostly script.

  AT SOME POINT IN THE HIKE—after a few whiffs of white powder, perhaps—the coyotes might have separated the men from the women and the women from each other. Undoubtedly the men protested as their wives and girlfriends and sisters and daughters were led into another section of the woods, but the coyotes reasoned that men walk faster and could make better time without them. Yet the coyotes grinned when they said this, and when the wives/girlfriends/sisters/daughters soon began screaming, they laughed. This mortified the men, but what could they do? Each coyote carried a Glock in his pocket. They controlled the GPS system. They alone knew where they were, where they were going, and how to move between the two.

  The women, meanwhile, tried to dissuade them. They appealed to the coyotes’ lapsed Catholicism, their buried-but-beating belief in La Virgen de Guadalupe. They told them they were menstruating. They told them they had a rash down there—warts, a disease, anything. If they were remotely young or pretty, these tactics probably did not work. Especially not for her. Her body was so small, her hair so long.

  She must have known this was a possibility. She must have prepared as much as a woman could—sliding on tights beneath her jeans, swallowing tiny pills. She took these precautions because she heard it might happen, and a few miles into her hike to Houston, it possibly did.

  WHITE VIGILANTES HAVE BEEN TORMENTING ethnic Mexicans since the borderline was first drawn. Well into the twentieth century, lynch mobs hung Mexicans3 from trees for crimes ranging from cattle theft to suspected murder, often with the approval of local law enforcement. Vigilantes also helped U.S. military and the Texas Rangers persecute suspected sympathizers of a 1915 uprising called the Plan de San Diego. So many Mexican corpses4 were found rotting in Texas fields—some burned, some decapitated—scholars have since deemed it some of the worst state-sanctioned racial violence in U.S. history.5

  So it was disconcerting when, in April 2005, headlines announced a new breed of vigilante. Cofounded by a Vietnam veteran and a former kindergarten teacher, the Minuteman Project urged citizens to take out their shotguns and stage watch posts to “do the job our government refuses to do” along the border. Likening themselves to white Martin Luther Kings with a new civil rights agenda, they claimed to have recruited more than 1,300 volunteers nationwide (including, according to an early website, “17 American Mexicans, 5 American Armenians … 4 wheelchair-bound paraplegics, and 6 amputees”). The bulk of participants observed by the media, however, were white men over fifty. Then-president George W. Bush denounced their tactics, but they found support in right-wing Republicans like Representative Tom Tancredo and CNN anchor Lou Dobbs after (dubiously) claiming to have helped the Border Patrol thwart “thousands” of illegal crossings.

  These days, the Minuteman Project is mainly a publicity machine for its founders, but one offshoot still runs operations: the Texas Border Volunteers. Its spokesman, Mike Vickers, might be the best-known immigration critic in South Texas—or at least the one who garners the most newsprint. After a year of playing phone tag, I land an interview with him in Falfurrias, the same day I witness the recovery of the woman in the woods. When I arrive at his workplace, Las Palmas Veterinarian Hospital, his secretary says he’s still in surgery.

  “You could check out our fancy city,” she chirps, brushing away a wisp of bright blonde hair with a manicured fingernail. “You could get a frappé at McDonald’s, a mini-Blizzard at Dairy Queen, or a Red Velvet Bluebell Ice Cream at H-E-B.”

  I plop on the sofa instead. The end table features a stuffed and coiled rattlesnake baring its fangs and wearing a sign that says PROTECT YOUR DOG WITH RATTLESNAKE VACCINE. As if to prove it, a dog in a distant room howls so mournfully, it echoes off the Saltillo tiling.

  An hour later, Vickers emerges. In his early sixties with Mark Twain hair, he wears knee-high work boots over dark blue jeans and a ball cap that says TEXAS DEER ASSOCIATION. I follow him into his office, where my eyes fall upon a poster of a cartoon cowboy kicking a caricature of President Obama square in the butt, alongside the slogan DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. Fourteen sets of antlers festoon the walls, along with photos of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl beaming her way through puberty.

  “Well I was out hunting nilgai—which is really fine meat—on Saturday morning when I found this guy at 7:15 A.M., dead on the road,” he says, whipping out his digital camera and clicking through the images. He leans over to reveal a man stretched out on a county road. “His buddies left a marker on the fence. He was Salvadoran, number thirty-four this year.”

  Number thirty-four, or the one directly preceding the woman discovered earlier that afternoon. Could they have been part of the same group? Did this mean she was Salvadoran too?

  No time to ponder: Vickers is already launching into the history of the Border Volunteers. He got riled up listening to Minuteman Chris Simcox on the Bill O’Reilly show one evening, and when some frustrated folks in Goliad reached out to him, he decided to host a border watch on his property (1,000 acres in Falfurrias and 3,000 acres south of Hebbronville). Nearly 200 people showed up with their motor homes and pup tents. Initially a branch of the Minuteman Project, they seceded when the group’s “standard operating procedure” of no fewer than three monitors to a stationary post proved unsuitable for Texas’s feral terrain. Plus, they wanted to align themselves with local law enforcement.

  “It took a while for the Border Patrol to respect and trust us, but now, it is really good. We’re not going to get shot at when we call,” Vickers says, still flipping through his digital images and pausing now and then to show me the gory ones. “We report a lot of traffic they don’t see.”

  Here’s how it works. Once a month or so, Vickers reaches out to his membership, currently 300 strong. They don Gen 3 night vision equipment and camouflage hunting gear, drive out to one of fifty participating ranches, spread out over the most heavily trafficked trails, and then hunker down and wait for someone to emerge from the mesquite.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” I ask. “I thought coyotes were armed.”

  “We’ve had gun encounters, but there has never been a shot fired,” he says. “We present ourselves in large numbers.”

  Those numbers typically come from gun shows, where Vickers does the bulk of his recruiting, along with presentations at local chapters of the Rotary Club, Republican Party, and Tea Party. He says that every member undergoes a background check and vetting session with a retired naval officer to ensure no one has “a chip on their shoulder.” Members hail from as far away as Wisconsin and Florida, and he claims that a good 10 percent are Hispanic.

  “They see it in the same light as we do,” he explains. “A lot of them are first generation American citizens, and their parents came in the legal way. It angers them that these people are just stealing through.”

  Whenever the Volunteers spy a group “stealing” across the brush, they ring up the authorities to arrest them.

  “We have reported hundreds over the years,” he says. “Thousands!”

  I ask how many tend to be women.

  “We find a lot of dead women,” he says. “We suspect foul play. These people don’t accidentally get lost. The coyote just dupes people of their money. They tell them they’ll be in the brush for thirty minutes, and twelve hours later they are all cramped up and can’t walk anymore. During the last op, we rescued a woman in labor, and that night she had a baby. A lot of the women we encounter are pregnant.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that the woman in the woods might have been pregnant. I had noticed the extraordinary girth of her belly but assumed it was from intestinal bloating. Maybe that was her motivation for crossing. She wanted her child to be a U.S. citizen. According to Vickers, such is often the case. He once found a Guatemalan woman right outside his office door, utterl
y lost and heavily pregnant.

  “She was running a 108 temperature,” he says. “I brought her inside here, put her in a cold bath, and ran a cold IV.”

  Then he called the police. When I ask how he could do that, after all she had suffered through, he says, “I feel sorry for them, but you have got to draw the line. This issue has overwhelmed our country. It has broke our own county, our hospitals.”

  From his perspective, the Texas Border Volunteers are not derailing immigrants’ hard-chased dreams of a better life; they are saving them from a miserable death. “We’ll probably have a hundred dead this summer,” he says.

  At the moment, this comment feels flippant, as if he’s overselling his point. Yet of all the people I interview in the summer of 2012, Vickers’s death toll prediction is the one that is vindicated.

  AT SOME POINT IN THE HIKE, calamity struck. If not an injury, a rape. If not a rape, a raid. Men in jalapeño green materialized out of the wilderness. The travelers saw their headlights and heard their Jeeps and the coyotes yelled and everyone scattered.

  She managed to follow the coyote for a few hundred yards but then lost him in the brush. Still, she kept on, darting this way and that, beneath prickly pear and thorny mesquite and across rivers of huisache until her heart nearly burst. When she finally stopped, there was no one behind her. This must have seemed impossibly lucky—until she realized how quiet the day had grown. All around her, all she could see was mesquite and huisache, huisache and mesquite.

  Which way to Houston just a few miles away?

  She probably took out her cell phone at that point. Read the numbers; pressed its many buttons. Of course there was no signal. There probably was no battery. That LG cell phone, the same one she’d used to call her mother and her lover, the one she’d used to coordinate this journey in the first place, was as useless as those twenty-eight dollars in her pocket. Even if she could call someone, what would she say? She had no idea where she was besides Houston a few miles away.

  ONCE A BODY IS RECOVERED from Brooks County, it is typically dispatched eighty miles south to a town called Mission, where a family-owned funeral home called Elizondo Mortuary and Cremation Services processes it. In January 2013, half a year after witnessing the retrieval of the woman in the woods, I give the Elizondos a call. The daughter, Dina, agrees to meet with me.

  One of the larger cities in the Rio Grande Valley, Mission is also one of the quietest. Its downtown consists of an art pueblo–style cinema called The Border and a long strip of brightly painted fruterías, tortillerías, taquerias, and auto shops with clay tile roofing. Beyond the Best Little Warehouse in Texas, the Mission Boot Shop, the Snow Hut, and restaurants advertising BBQ, MASA, and PAN DULCE is a stretch of housing projects. Between a water tower and a glitzy First Cash Pawn Shop stands a building bedecked with a hearse, a dove, and my mother’s maiden name in floral script.

  Inside, I am greeted by the patriarch, Raul Elizondo. A sweet elder, he has a debilitating stutter. “I knew someone who was a mortician, and I thought, well, if I work with dead people, I don’t have to talk to them. They won’t know I stutter.”

  He escorts me to his daughter’s office, which has coffins pushed against the walls and a glass case full of urns shaped like angels and teardrops. Dina rises from the desk and extends her hand. Her cinnamon hair is streaked blonde, and she wears rhinestone-studded jeans and necklaces festooned with heavy silver crosses. A dozen red roses are arranged atop her desk, along with a vase of peacock feathers. Two lines on her office phone are ringing, and when she pauses to answer, her cell phone rings, too.

  “Amiga, I am always busy, but I always have time for you,” she coos to one caller. “I’ll be at Chili’s at seven if you want to go.”

  Four calls later, she flashes an apology. The funeral business is unrelenting, she says. Not one call can be missed, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, lest a potential client skip down to the next funeral home on the list. She was literally born into this work. Her father used to pick her up from school in their limousine (or hearse). All of her life, there has been a dead person in the next room and a family openly grieving. Only at this funeral home, the family tends to be thousands of miles away.

  “The wife lives over there and the husband lives over here, and they die crossing back,” she summarizes the profile of her typical client. “The desert is cruel. It has no mercy on anyone’s soul.”

  About 80 percent of her clients are undocumented immigrants, she says, so their stories are often distressing. A couple months ago, they received the remains of a ten-year-old Honduran boy and had to coordinate plans with a mother and father living three countries apart. “How could a mother let her son leave like that?” she asks, shaking her head. “She put her child with a stranger to cross all the way to Reynosa, to cross the water, to cross a field, to cross the desert. Her thing was, ‘Well, he wanted to see his dad.’ But he couldn’t defend himself at ten!”

  Then there’s the elderly lady who calls every single day, looking for her brother. “She’ll say, ‘I am so sorry to bother you,’ and we’ll say, ‘No, you are not bothering us,’ and she’ll say, ‘I just wanted to know if you’ve heard anything,’ and we’ll say no, and she’ll say, ‘Hablo mañana.’ She has done this every day for three years.”

  I ask how the Elizondos developed their relationship with Brooks County, and she says that bodies used to be dispatched north to Corpus Christi, where they underwent autopsies before being sent back to Falfurrias for burial. “We once looked at one of the bodies, and we found some ID on their belt that they had missed, and were able to send them home to their family.”

  She convinced Brooks officials to send the bodies to her in Mission instead, both as a cost-saving measure for the county and—she says—to improve the chances of identifying the bodies (albeit not their cause of death). The Elizondos have since become a sort of clearinghouse for missing immigrants. Not only do consulates send in reports of lost citizens, but families call or e-mail as well. Dina lifts up her desk calendar to show me a stack of Post-it notes beneath, each scribbled with someone’s last known details.6

  “The family will call and say, oh, they have a tattoo here and a birthmark there, and freckles, but I’m like, no. They don’t understand that the bodies have decomposed. I need clothes, I need shoe size, I need to know what kind of belt,” she says, counting each item off on her fingers. “You’ll remember details, too, like the body was wearing a certain kind of sweater, and then when you get a call from a family member saying their loved one was wearing a sweater, you’ll connect the two.”

  In addition to matching up clothing, the Elizondos also photograph teeth and send them to consulates to check against dental records, she says. Once a body has been identified, a family member based in the United States sometimes shows up and asks to see the remains.

  “We say, ‘No, don’t see him,’ and they say, ‘You don’t understand,’ and I say, ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s better to remember the way he was, because if you see him like this, it will stay with you forever.’ But they are insistent, and afterward they usually say, ‘I shouldn’t have seen him.’ It is hard. It is still hard for us. It haunts me. It is overwhelming. But it is life. What isn’t fair is death, and we all go through it.”

  I ask what it’s like to receive the bodies from Brooks County, how she manages to unzip those black bags.

  “Every day you see something different,” she acknowledges, the epitome of diplomacy. “I don’t do it very much because the smell penetrates your clothes, and I am needed here in the office to visit with the families. But when I do, I just think, what were you thinking out there? What were your last words? Did you ask for forgiveness? I also ask why. Why, why, why.”

  These are questions she especially asked in the summer of 2012, when they received upward of four bodies a day—so many, they had to buy a new cooler in October.

  “A new cooler,” I repeat.

  “Oh yes,” she says, standin
g up from her chair.

  We walk around to the warehouse out back. A massive steel construction has a sign taped to it: PLEASE REMEMBER TO PUT A TOE TAG ON THE BODIES. This newer cooler can hold up to forty-five bodies, she says, whereas the old one barely fit twelve. Some bodies stay here for months (at a rate of $50 a day) while plans are firmed with families back home. The first decision is the worst: casket or cremation. The former is prohibitively expensive. To transport bodies from Brooks County to Mission, fill out and file the paperwork, dress them in a suit if they are full-bodied (or hot-seal them in a bag if they are not), lay them in a casket, and board them on a one-way flight from McAllen to Dallas to Miami to their final Latin American destination costs about $3,600—a considerable percentage of what it cost to cross the border in the first place. Dina tries to convince families to cremate instead, but it’s a hard sell.

  “Mexicans don’t believe in cremation. Salvadorans, Hondurans, they don’t want it,” she says. “I know how they feel; I would want all of them home, too. But we have to tell them, he’s not a full body. It’s so much cheaper, and we can send ashes much faster too.”

  When we return to her office, I ask Dina about the fate of the woman found July 3, 2012. She consults her records, but no woman is listed from that day. Brooks County had no information about her either when I checked the day before; she remained unidentified, according to their records. This deeply unsettles me. If I cannot, with all of my resources and privileges, track her down, what are the chances of her family doing so?

  Sensing my upset, Dina offers in a low voice that she doesn’t see immigrants just at the endpoint of their journeys. She sometimes sees them midway, too.

  “Where I live is real secluded, and sometimes I’ll be driving and a truck will stop right in front of me, and people will run out from the bushes and into the truck. When I see them wearing an orange shirt and white socks, I pray to God that I won’t see them again here, and know that I saw them alive just a few days before. I try not to look when I see them in the street, because I don’t want to remember.”