Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  *

  In 1919 my great-grandfather León Talamantes gave up the loom he used to make wool blankets to sell at the market in Tepechitlán and came to Juárez for the first time. He was twenty-one years old, newly married, and on his way to the U.S., where he would eventually find work with the Santa Fe Railway. I didn’t know what it was he did for the railway company, whether he ever went as far as New York, or Chicago. I wondered if he saw those endless miles of stockyards that I read about in books like The Jungle.

  León was a tall and slender man, born in 1894 in the same town as I was, Tepechitlán. It was rumored that León’s father, my great-great-grandfather (whose name no one alive remembers), conceived him at the age of one hundred and died shortly after, leaving León as an only child to care for his mother. León became an orphan by the time he was ten in 1905 and worked as a servant for a wealthy older gentleman who never married. The great-great-grandfather whose name no one remembers was born in the late eighteenth century on the same mountain that houses La Loma. I found the church records of León’s crossings online on an ancestry site. It was simple, all I had to do was type in my debit card and pay about thirty-eight dollars to see León’s name on an official immigration bust card with his age, his height, his hair color, date(s) of crossing, and occupation—laborer.

  León must have grown tired of life on the mountain. I wondered what he knew about the U.S. I wondered who was the first one to plant the idea in him that it was possible to go, that it was doable. He was the first to leave. Hundreds of years after the colonization of our town in the early 1500s, thousands of years after its settlement by its indigenous Huichol people, León left his beloved mountain for something else. I didn’t know what “else” meant to him, but he went out there to look for it.

  He too took off his clothes and waited to be deloused, to be cleaned of all “impurities.” He crossed five times, but after the fifth, he never crossed again and instead went back to becoming a weaver in Tepechitlán. Five times he was sprayed with the latest chemical agent. I imagine his skinny frame standing naked before a white Texas Ranger looking him up and down, curling his lips, leaning his barrel chest forward to get a closer look at him, stamping his card before giving him the go-ahead to cross.

  13.

  Even after the practice of delousing stopped, the general policy behind the idea that immigrants were inherently diseased until proven innocent, and thus needed to be screened, continued until the present day. I too had to go through the process of seeing a doctor certified by immigration to check me for diseases—one of which was tuberculosis—and to make sure I was vaccinated before I got my green card, well before attending my immigration interview. Even after all those years of trying to get my papers, all that money spent on lawyers, all the endless paperwork, it never occurred to me that something that was once dormant inside my lungs could hold me back, could be reason enough for my denial.

  We had only recently immigrated to the States when I was exposed to tuberculosis. Amá took me to a doctor who took a picture of my lungs, and I was told to keep my distance from other children for six months just in case. In case what? I thought.

  The pills were large, and I could feel them edging down my throat, scratching parts of myself I didn’t know were on the inside. They said it was in my lungs, but I couldn’t feel anything. I had heard of tuberculosis before at school and church and thought I would start spitting out blood, but the blood never came. All I knew of TB was that famous people in history got it and it made me feel special. At church, I would hear the preacher talk about other ancient diseases like leprosy, and I would imagine myself among those banished, and being cured by the touch of Christ and allowed to return.

  I liked the attention, even if it was only in my head; Amá told me never to tell anyone about the pills I was taking or why, just as she told me never to tell anyone I didn’t have papers. She said people wouldn’t understand. I barely understood myself. She took me again to the doctor, who told her I could stop taking the pills but that it would live inside me forever. I translated for her, and the word “forever” felt so much more permanent when I said it than when I simply heard the doctor say it—“Siempre.” She nodded at the doctor as if I was not even there, as if she could understand him perfectly well, which was the sign of a good translator—to disappear in the maelstrom of conversation.

  *

  Just like my grandfather and great-grandfather before him, the U.S. also believed that I, along with every other immigrant, was diseased until proven innocent and had to undergo a physical, or “screening,” before my immigration interview. I was more nervous about my immigration physical than I was about the interview because I was afraid they would find what was inside me. Lying in my interview was always an option, but I would never be able to hide what was inside my chest, inside my blood. I had gone so many years without thinking about the TB that I forgot it was there, silent, just beneath my breastbone. I wasn’t contagious, I didn’t actually have it, but it showed up in tests nonetheless.

  They ran their tests and afterward handed me a sealed envelope with the doctor’s name signed over the seal, covered in tape to ensure that it wouldn’t be tampered with. The doctor was not allowed to tell me what was inside, especially if there was anything in there that would flag me.

  She could have written anything about me in the envelope, and there was nothing I could do, I was merely the messenger, but also the subject. She could have said anything about me that would exclude me from becoming a legal permanent resident of the United States:

  Have you EVER violated (or attempted or conspired to violate) any controlled substance law or regulation . . . ?

  Have you EVER engaged in prostitution?

  Do you intend to engage in illegal gambling?

  Do you intend to engage in any activity whose purpose includes opposing, controlling, or overthrowing the U.S. government . . . ?

  Have you EVER been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party . . . ?

  Have you received public assistance in the United States from any source? . . . Are you likely to receive public assistance in the future in the United States from any source . . . ?5

  Although none of those questions necessarily had to do with my body, I worried she could have said something that was easy to misinterpret, or even written her results illegibly and thus voided my admittance. Whatever was inside my chest was now on display inside that envelope which I could not open. I would have to wait until immigration received it to find out if I’d passed the test or not.

  I mailed the envelope to my lawyer, who assured me that the process was just a formality, that unless I had an active case of tuberculosis, or syphilis, or leprosy, I didn’t have anything to worry about. He also assured me that those were old rules that were put in place many years ago and were just never changed. It was strange to see that the U.S. still feared the spread of communism. The legacy of that law is what persisted. It assumed that the U.S. was clean, not to be soiled by the ilk of the world.

  14.

  We had been doing this for a long time, moving back and forth. My family’s roots felt like a sinewy thread that got thinner and thinner with each successive generation that stayed in the United States. I wondered what my children would think of Mexico. What it would mean to them, born in the U.S.? Would they feel that rope tugging at them like I did? Would they too spend their lives trying to help someone cross, still trying to get somewhere? I wondered when we’d ever get there.

  I was always jealous of friends who were second- or third-generation immigrants because they could share their past with others. They all had vivid stories to tell about how their grandparents came and stayed to make a new life for themselves. And how their parents grew up speaking English and had American jobs like working at McDonald’s, or a carwash. I had vivid stories, too, of León, and Amá Julia, and Jesús before he died in the desert, but I never spoke of them. I couldn’t share my lineage with others; I felt like I alwa
ys had to stop at 1993 because for many years, I couldn’t talk about what happened before 1993—before our crossing. I couldn’t give myself permission to have a past.

  But I did have a past. We were still doing the same thing. I could track my family as far back as the 1700s, on the mountain where the house of La Loma was built. My past was one that moved back and forth.

  And there we were, at the same border town where León was deloused. The same border town where Tío Miguel was deloused. The same border town where Apá was deported in 2003.

  Apá would be opening his mouth for a physical, following the flashlight in the doctor’s hand side to side, squeezing his large fist for a blood test, shaking his head to the list of diseases on a piece of paper. One hundred years after León’s first crossings, we were still trying to cross, still moving in maddening helplessness, a revolving door without an exit.

  When I thought of the past, I thought of one of my favorite lines of poetry, by Robert Hass—“All the new thinking is about loss / In this it resembles all the old thinking.” I thought about what I had lost, what I continued to lose, and I realized it was the same thing we had been losing for centuries, the ability to say “enough.”

  15.

  Rubi and I continued waiting in the blue chairs of the immigration clinic after Apá’s name was called. After a surprisingly short amount of time, he reappeared with his sleeves rolled up and Band-Aids on his arms. They gave him vaccines which he already had but couldn’t prove, they asked if he could raise his hands above his head, open his mouth, stick out his tongue, and touch his feet. They drew blood, and he was done. We waited for a few hours in another lobby for his results. Still, we touched only our own bodies and the handles of the doors we needed to open.

  At last they called our name.

  “Do you take a credit card?” I asked.

  “Of course.” The woman smiled.

  “But it’s a card from a U.S. bank, is that okay?” I asked again.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” she said, and let out a quick laugh.

  I gave her the card. It was $481, U.S. I put the receipt in my pocket, and she handed us a dark plastic envelope with my father’s name on the front. “Don’t even think of opening it, or else it’s no good,” she said through the small holes in the thick bulletproof glass, waving the next person to the window.

  It was similar to the envelope I had received, and I wanted to look inside. I wanted to know what they could have possibly gathered in the short time that they saw him. We were simply messengers taking that package from one building to another, and we paid $481 to do so, to convince them that Apá wasn’t contagious.

  To say that the whole enterprise was a scam would trivialize it as petty theft. It was much more than that. It was an entire industry distilled in a few city blocks. There were hundreds, even thousands, of people moving between the embassy, the clinics, the hotels, and the mall across the street every day. They were all doing the same thing we were doing. They were paying into a system that was central to the engine of America—immigrants paying for immigration. In a way, I didn’t see how this was different than paying a coyote to cross; both seemed just as corrupt. Besides, in the end both would cost just as much.

  No—he wasn’t sprayed with Zyklon-B. They didn’t make him take off his clothes and stand in line. The guards didn’t take pictures of the women standing naked with their hands over their bodies. The vaccines didn’t make his mouth taste like the citrus trees of the Central Valley. But we walked away from the clinic feeling like something similar had been done to us; we felt dirtier than when we had entered. Our hands had a thin layer of grime, and I wanted to go back to the hotel to take a shower and wash away the shame.

  16.

  The first time I read Edward Said, I wanted to take a vase and break it into many pieces. The idea of the “other” was a Western invention. And so, in order to define itself, it needed to define what it was not. I was that idea of not.

  When I showed up on paper, when I saw my real name finally authenticated by a government body, it was only by agreeing to their rules, by allowing myself to be screened for filth and disease. I should have ripped open that envelope and burned it—not that it would have helped, but it would have made me feel a little better.

  [Third Movement as Migration and Imagination]

  We had to start again, from zero. All we could carry with us to the U.S. was a change of clothes. Amá wanted to bring her pictures too, but she couldn’t. We let the dogs off their leash and let them run away; no one would take them anyways. They were already skinny and mean. They would do just fine by themselves.

  We left the remainder of our things locked in a room because there still existed the slim possibility that we would return. It was easier for my father to leave if he knew he still had a bed stored away somewhere in Tepechitlán. Maybe that way it didn’t really seem like forever.

  In my backpack was a pair of jeans, a shirt, and an extra pair of clean underwear.

  And so began our migration to the north.

  It was Palm Sunday when we boarded our train in Guadalajara and passed through Nayarit, Sinaloa, then Sonora, before finally stopping in Tijuana—the beginning of Holy Week, the end of those forty days of fasting. We didn’t give up anything for Lent. We didn’t need to, since that was all we were doing. Soon we would be entering America, and there would be plenty more to give up there.

  One by one we all got sick on the train. They say my grandfather Jesús went mad on the train. Something about the wind, something about the speed.

  It was the end of Holy Week when we arrived at a relative’s house in Tijuana. We ate at last. We drank coffee and talked around the dinner table. Amá didn’t send me away to play with the other children like she always did. There was nothing she didn’t want me to know. After many arguments and indecisions about how exactly to proceed, Apá banged his fist on the table, and Amá went to sleep in the other room. Nobody really slept.

  I knew what we were doing. They didn’t have to say that it was a game and I was supposed to run whenever they ran. They told me what we were doing, and I understood. I knew what they meant when they said “el otro lado,” the other side. Maybe they should have hid it from me. Maybe they should have told me that it was a game we were playing, that none of it was real—the guns, the agents roving on foot with their large flashlights. We waited weeks for just the right time, but when would there ever be a good time for a family of seven to cross the border, and Amá waddling behind with her large belly?

  Yes, they should have told me it was all make-believe.

  17.

  If all went well at Apá’s interview, he would be able to cross almost immediately, but until then, for the next few days, all we could do was wait. We went to the mall across the street for breakfast at the food court, where they served better eggs, beans, and cheese with a decent salsa—the only food around that almost looked home-cooked. We spent the day walking around, window-shopping, trying on clothes we wouldn’t buy. The merchandise was just as expensive as in the U.S.—all the same brands. There was a children’s beauty salon. It was decorated in bright pink and purple. There were little girls sitting in high chairs wearing princess dresses and getting their very own mani-pedis. There was the Liverpool store, with guards at every corner. I saw well-to-do Mexicans looking at clothes, spraying on perfumes, and eating ice cream as they paraded down the aisles. They had everything they needed in Mexico; there was no need for them to go north.

  Every day before Apá’s interview was the same: wake up, cross the street to the mall for breakfast, walk through the stores for a few hours, and head back to the hotel before going back for dinner. We went to every restaurant in the food court.

  We were tired of waiting. We couldn’t bear the food at the food court anymore. We arrived on a Wednesday, and by Sunday, we decided to stay and eat at the continental breakfast bar in the hotel because at least fresh fruit and cereal felt different. We still stayed away from the eggs. We wat
ched movie after movie in our rooms. Apá taught us how to play Conquian, an old card game that didn’t use tens, nines, or eights. We didn’t play for money, just for the satisfaction of beating each other. Rubi and I played by ourselves, or I played with Apá, or we all played together. It got old quick.

  *

  When we weren’t watching movies that were dubbed into Spanish and always lagged behind the actor’s mouth a little, we prepared for my father’s interview. I sat across the bed from my dad and pretended to be the interviewer.

  “—Good morning, Mr. Hernandez, how are you doing?”

  “—When was the last time you were in the U.S.?”

  “—What was the reason for your departure?”

  “—Do you understand the gravity of your crime?”

  “—How many years had you lived in the U.S.?”

  “—Do you have a family, and where are they?”

  “—Are any of them permanent residents or citizens?”

  It went on like that for hours. We simply wanted to ensure he remembered exact dates and times of arrivals, departures, and residences, so that there wouldn’t be any discrepancies in their records. All he needed to do was state the facts. We were afraid that any stumbling could be misinterpreted as a lie. I repeated his timeline to him over and over, as if he hadn’t lived it himself, and asked him to say it back. I could tell that he was starting to get annoyed. I still wasn’t sure if I would be able to enter with him or not. What could I add to his case?

  In the background was a black-and-white movie from Mexico’s golden age of cinema. My father loved those movies. They romanticized the ranchero, the vaquero, the hombre my father always thought himself to be. They provided all that was good in the world for him, as well as all that was bad. The women like María Felix and Dolores del Río always had long and gloomy faces; their sad eyes always looked slightly away as they sang atop a balcony dimly lit by the moon. The men like Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante were well built, handsome, and they too could sing. They would break into song for any reason. Their songs were an extension of this general sadness. They too looked away from the camera. Tequila was always on the table.