Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  The next day I had to be patriotic. I needed to tell them that America was the safest place for me and my mother. I didn’t know how it would work; if they would detain her, take her away and keep her, make her go back and wait in Mexico, or pass on through. We were going to ask to be paroled into the country on a humanitarian basis, and ask for asylum.

  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the newly formed UN on December 10, 1948, did not foresee our specific situation, but it did foresee our suffering. It had defined our cause half a world away, half a century before. Our pain, again, might have looked different than others, but according to the declaration, we at least needed to be heard. We at least had the right to make our case, though that would change two years later, when a different man would come to occupy the White House.

  *

  Universal Declaration of Human Rights

  Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world . . .

  Now, therefore,

  The General Assembly,

  Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . .

  Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

  Article 13: (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

  Article 14: (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.1

  *

  Was our claim political? Were our bodies and our pain political? I took a shower and went to sleep. In the morning, we packed our bags and said a quick prayer. We got into a taxi and headed one more time to the border, as was our right.

  [Fifth Movement as Fracture and Surveillance]

  Everyone was a possible border agent. Everyone was out to get you with their night-vision goggles, with their floodlights, with their dogs. Everyone you touched could touch you back. You were not an apparition, even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story is a ghost. This is not a story.

  My dentist was an agent. Each teacher was an agent. Every paper I ever touched was an official paper that would be labeled and filed away for later use against me. Even my pastor was an agent, scanning the congregation with his small eyes. All anyone had to do was pick up the phone and call.

  *

  I was afraid of the doctor because forms in the hospital were official. They looked official, with their carbon copies and letterheads. They were written in the official language—English. And English could say anything it wanted. English could change its mind on you midsentence, and then change back while you weren’t looking. English could make you say things you didn’t want to, or mean to; it could make you agree to things you didn’t know you were agreeing to. English was the language of small print. Even those same forms that were translated into Spanish were still only the same English forms with Spanish masks. I was afraid that one of their questions would lead to another question that couldn’t be answered.

  No health insurance, no number.

  *

  When I was run over by a car in high school, I pleaded and mumbled to the EMTs to let me go. “I’m fine, please, I have to make it to school,” I said as I lay on the side of the road where the car tossed me. Its hood was dented to the shape of me. The EMT tried to cheer me up by saying “Relax, you’re getting out of school today, kid.” I moved my fingers in slow circles and gripped the grass tight to keep myself planted to the ground as they stabilized my neck and hoisted me on the gurney into the ambulance, bits of grass clenched in my palm. And still I begged, half conscious.

  “Please, I’m fine, I’m not hurt. I can move,” I said, and wiggled my toes, but they wouldn’t listen.

  Amá sat quietly by the side of the hospital bed, startled to her feet each time the door opened. The white woman who hit me with her car brought blueberry muffins. She said she was a devout Christian, and Amá felt compelled to pray for her nerves. We prayed for her together.

  “We’re Christian too,” we said, as if trying to make her happy. We didn’t press charges—we didn’t think we could—and the woman thanked us profusely. I didn’t know why she thanked us, if it was for not pressing charges, for praying for her, or for understanding her predicament. She was very tense and shaken by the whole situation, so Amá kept patting her shoulder, just to make her go away. She left the muffins with the price tag still on—$4.99.

  5.

  The line wrapped around for about half a mile, past small shops that sold perfume, American clothes, and cell phones. The last time Amá and I were together in Tijuana, I was five, and she was thirty-eight. I didn’t remember much of the city itself, but Amá said it didn’t change, only the names on the businesses. Everyone else was in a hurry, but no one was really moving much. They looked like they had done this before—a glazed and sedated expression on their faces. There was an air of monotony and fear, even though it is difficult to be afraid and bored at once. We took our spot at the end and began waiting.

  The man in front of me was also rolling a large suitcase, and he stepped aside for a minute to see how far the line went on. He shook his head, “chingado.” Neither of us could see the front. I could sense the frustration in him, but like me, like all of us in line, he hid it as best he could. We were the ones asking for something—an entrance. If the line took two days, a week, a month, for some of us it would still be worth waiting. Our desperation could be measured by how long each of us would be willing to wait. We could probably guess how far any person in line had traveled to get there by how long they were willing to wait.

  I noticed that not many other people had luggage, except for a small purse or bag. They looked like they were going to work. Those fortunate enough to have a SENTRI visa came and went almost daily. The checkpoint was just another small burden, an inconvenience, their morning commute to work. They would be the first to leave if the line stopped for good.

  Rubi and Amá had a worried look on their faces. “Everything will be fine, don’t worry,” Rubi said to Amá as she massaged her shoulder. I tried to look calm, but I knew I was a nervous wreck. Border agents were trained to spot that kind of behavior. They would ask the same questions over and over to see if they could trip anyone up. They looked for eye contact, tenseness, and they paid close attention to what people did with their hands, always the hands.

  Amá practiced what she would say so that her nervousness and incipient shock from the whole experience wouldn’t be misinterpreted for fraud. Just as in my immigration interview, it was the border agent’s job to assume that everything was a lie. I didn’t know how these agents could wake up in the morning and prepare themselves to deny any truth. To them, everyone was lying, everyone was trying to sneak in drugs or people to the other side. Everything we said needed to be perfect.

  I didn’t want to, but I asked her again.

  “Amá, do you remember your facts?”

  I quizzed her, I interviewed her, just like I did with Apá. Perhaps I was making her more nervous than if I just kept quiet and let things go on as fate intended. I still thought I could control the outcome of our lot; I still had the gall to think that anything I said or did could make a difference. Her eyes began to water a bit, and she looked away as she spoke. I stopped asking questions.

  6.

  While still waiting in line, I heard someone singing. An elderly woman behind us was pushing herself alongside the line of people in a wheelchair. On her lap was a child who looked like he could be her grandson. Every few feet she reached out her hand with her palm up. She pointed to the child on her lap, with his beautiful brown eyes and curly black hair. She stopped beside us and continu
ed singing.

  I had heard the song many times before; it was called “El Bayo Cara Blanca.” It was about a famous racehorse who never lost a race, and was praised like a god for making some rich while leaving many more in ruin and misery for betting against him. The song said that the horse eventually went blind, unable to race anymore, unable even to wander the fields by himself. His owner thought the only solution was to shoot him. What was the point of running, if he didn’t know when to stop running? The moral of the song, because it was one of those kinds of corridos that needed to end on a moral, was that fate was cruel, and that no one could escape what was already written in the stars for them.

  The woman on the wheelchair had no instruments, and the child was too young to sing along. I was surprised by the strength of her voice. She sounded like Chavela Vargas, with that distinctive rasp of pain at the end of each breath, making her almost break into laughter. It didn’t seem like that voice could come from such a small body, but it did.

  “Do you have any change, or anything?” I said to Rubi.

  She scrambled through her purse for some change. Everyone in line knew the song. Everyone could have sung along if they wanted to, but most of them tried to avoid her sharp glances. She looked to the crowd for anyone paying attention, for her audience. Her stare was piercing. Unlike the rest of us, she was unwaveringly present. She didn’t look bored or glazed over; she wasn’t afraid of looking straight into people’s eyes, and holding them. She wasn’t the one trying to cross.

  “I have a hundred- and a five-hundred-peso bill,” Rubi said.

  “Give her the hundred, not the five hundred,” I said.

  We knew the pesos weren’t worth much if we traded them on the other side, but out of reflex I gave her the smaller bill, worth roughly seven dollars at the time. I could have given her more, but I didn’t, unsure if we would need to stay longer in Tijuana. Rubi gave me the rolled-up bill, and I placed it on her palm. She didn’t stop her song, just nodded at me, rubbing the bill with her fingers, feeling the edges and grooves, and putting it in a small pouch around her neck.

  *

  “Ay qué rechulo animal / No mas hablar le faltaba . . .” went the song.

  Hers was an implied contract—if you stared or mouthed the lyrics to the song, you were confirming that you could see her, that you could hear her. You were doing what most people didn’t do for beggars, admit they were there. But she wasn’t a beggar; she was giving you something in return, it was a transaction. You entered an exchange in which she offered her voice for your money.

  And you validated her plea. In this way, theft was a common thing. If you heard her and sang along, either out loud or in your head, but didn’t give anything, you were stealing what wasn’t yours to keep. Temporarily—the sound. Permanently—the memory. It’s a lie we tell ourselves—that our emotions are ours, and of our making. In truth, they are given to us like small gifts wrapped inside a word. Her song would be over in minutes, but the memory wouldn’t. Hearing her meant that you entered the contract, and you would either keep it or break it. If you kept it, it was because the song she was singing brought it out of you—it was because you couldn’t deny her gift. She rescued those emotions and memories from the depths you worked so hard to bury them beneath. She knew which songs dug the deepest. “How beautifully she sings,” said my mom. “Pobre mujer, mujer sufrida.”

  Her product was nostalgia. Everyone in the line was already hurting in one way or another, and hearing that song only made it worse. For a moment, we held something inside us that was not part of that border line we were in, something outside the distance between us and the people on the other side, not part of the green-and-white immigration trucks we saw driving alongside the wall.

  “I remember that song from when I was a little girl,” Amá said with a slight smile.

  “I knew a horse like that, it never lost, until one day it did,” she said.

  Amá knew the song well, and she knew a lot about horses.

  “Amá, what’s a ‘caballo de siete cuartas de alzada’?” I asked her, hearing the words in the song.

  “It’s a kind of horse, like a quarter horse.” She looked directly at the woman, who in turn looked back.

  The line wasn’t moving—I wanted to get there already. But the woman continued her song, not caring if the line moved or not.

  It was as if her song was telling me to leave that place. To never come back. She was making me remember something that I had lost, something that I was sure to never forget again—the horse in my childhood, she was a quarter horse, she was a racing horse, she did what she naturally was born to do, despite having a small child on top of her. She wasn’t racing against anything, because she didn’t need to. We only put two horses against each other to make us think we’re the ones that make them run, that we have anything to do with their insatiable desire to get away. Apá ran after me because he had to, not because he was born to do that. He was born to run the other way.

  *

  Maybe there was pleasure in the small wound made by that woman’s cries at the same time as grief—Chavela Vargas back from the dead. The wound was not so much because we hurt for her, though we did, but because at least once we also wanted someone to hurt for us.

  The merchants stood outside their stores alongside the line, occasionally looking up uninterestedly, and back down at phones in their hands. The noise and the traffic lifted a cloud of dirt into the air.

  For everyone in the line, there were two outcomes: they made it to the other side, or they didn’t. It was as simple as that. But the old woman on the wheelchair wasn’t looking to cross. She would move up and down the line for the rest of the day, hoping that someone remembered her song. How freeing it must have been, to walk up to the line and have no intention of crossing.

  The woman’s left eye was cloudy with cataracts. Maybe she would soon be blind. Maybe people would be less compelled to give, if they knew she couldn’t tell who was listening, making eye contact, mouthing the words to her songs—who was hurting most on the inside.

  *

  In the face of the border agent at the front, I couldn’t just be the son of a farmer, the grandson of a farmer, the great-grandson of a farmer. I had to put forward what being the son of a farmer had allowed me to become—not in spite of, but because of. A code-switch, moving back and forth between languages. I needed to exercise my best English, my courteous manners, my “yes, sirs” and “no, sirs,” “yes, ma’am, no, ma’am.” I had to get them to see themselves in me. To enter into our own contract.

  It wasn’t so much a matter of conveying the grief Amá was carrying all the way from Tepechitlán. Anyone who looked at her could see something terrible had happened. It was again, as with the U visa, a matter of empathy. How easy it was to say “I am suffering,” and how much harder it was to get other people to believe her.

  Since I would initiate the conversation, I needed to strike just the right balance of casualness and respect. Maybe I would talk about “the game,” whichever game that may have been. Didn’t someone usually play on Sunday night? Maybe I would talk about how it was Monday morning, and chuckle about things that felt particularly American—say I hadn’t had my coffee either, or ask how the traffic was, coming in. These were American things to worry about. So many years I had spent trying to decipher and mimic what it was to be American. I washed it on and off my body like water, so that I wouldn’t feel dirty when someone called me a wetback.

  How do you like your steak?

  Rare. Extra rare. I like my beef still moo-ing.

  The chicken is to die for.

  Part of me hated the U.S. I hated what it had done to my family. But maybe Mexico would have done the same thing. I hated the suburbs, the college frat brothers who demanded an A for their C work in my class; I hated the evenly squared tiles in the grocery store, the way people looked at me when I left a building. And yet where else was there for me to go, for us to go? What other choice did we have, when America f
orced us to come, and a return to Mexico was no longer an option? I hated the beauty, but nonetheless there was beauty.

  There was something different about Amá, something I hadn’t seen in her before. It was as if being back on the line woke up the instincts that had allowed her to survive her crossing, five months pregnant, in 1993. Up until that point I had been leading her, telling her where we should go and what we should do, but now I realized just how different a life she’d had before me—how much more normal what we were doing had been to them back then, and how much more she knew. She had done this many times before—crossing, that is—each time unique in its own way.

  She had a dogged look on her face, her eyebrows stayed a little furrowed without breaking, and she gripped my hand a little harder. Amá was the kind of woman who would say, “Well, life is what it is” whenever I told her something tragic, but it was strange to hear her say that when it was happening to us, in that moment. Life was what it was, and she tapped into a part of her that she left behind on the border in order to keep on moving forward.

  *

  I could still hear the old woman in her wheelchair singing up ahead with her thundering voice. She began singing “Los Dos Amigos” by Los Cadetes de Linares. That song made my skin shiver every time I heard it. It was a corrido about two men robbing a train, and one of them getting caught. It was about a mother praying for her son, and her prayers being answered. It asked the basic question—was prayer even necessary, if what was going to happen would happen either way?

  More people were now walking up and down the line, selling food, novelties, and newspapers. They wore badges slung over their chest, with their picture on them, an official-looking seal stamped over their faces. The badges made it seem like there was control, like there was a vetting process for who could sell, advertise, and function at the border. It was supposed to provide some comfort to tourists, especially white tourists.