Authors: Caroline Moorehead
When I went in search of Sister Hema, Luisa had been with her for just a day. Sister Hema was pleased that she was there, for Luisa would be able to tell me, she said, a story that she heard again and again from women who came to her refuge. Like the fair-skinned woman and her daughters, Luisa is from Guadalajara in southern Mexico, and she has stayed with the mission before. Four years ago, when she was twenty-five, she and her husband, Pedro, and their five-year-old daughter, Dolores, traveled to Tijuana in order to cross to seek work in the States. Their family at home—the two sets of grandparents, brothers, several sisters, many children—had a house in which to live, and a little land, but there was never quite enough to eat and the family kept growing. One of Pedro’s brothers had made the crossing into California earlier, and had prospered working in a factory in Houston; and the stories he sent back of his new life, and the dollars that came with them, made the young couple decide that they should follow in his steps. At night, around the table, there were long discussions about the wisdom of such an undertaking, especially with a small child, but they were adamant that they would not leave her behind, however much the grandmothers pleaded. And the day came when they packed a very small bag, with one change of clothes each, and took a bus for Tijuana.
Just down the road in the Casa del Migrante, beyond the church where the missionaries and the migrants congregate, Luisa’s husband soon learned of a route through the mountains where the Border Patrol seldom went. He discussed it with Luisa and they decided
that she and Dolores should remain with Sister Hema while he went ahead to explore the journey and find work in California. Soon, word came that he had made the crossing in less than a day, and that though he had seen the patrol, he had managed to hide in the bushes until they passed. He was in Hollywood, where his brother had found him a job in a restaurant. As for her own crossing, and that of their daughter, he urged them to wait while he raised the money to pay a
coyote
who would find them a safer and less arduous route across the mountains.
Luisa and Dolores waited. The day came when $1,700 arrived from Pedro, and with it instructions from a
coyote
network whose trustworthiness was known and tested. The route to be taken by Luisa was settled; but Dolores, said the unknown visitor who came to give her the details of their journey, was to be entrusted to a Mexican woman who had a daughter of much the same age. Dolores’s name would be substituted for hers on the legal documents held by this woman, and the two would then cross the border at San Ysidro, where San Diego meets Tijuana, perfectly normally, and Dolores would be returned to Luisa on the other side. The whole experience, says Luisa now, was terrifying: all migrants know stories of children handed over to
coyotes
in this way and never seen again, and she hesitated before letting Dolores go. But the ruse was successful. Late one night, Luisa delivered her daughter into the hands of a total stranger who came to collect her from the refuge, promising to bring her to a safe house on the California side. Luisa then set off with a
coyote
. On the way to the mountains, they collected another woman with a little girl some years older than Dolores, and two men. The party spent a few hours in a safe house just inside Mexico, and when the time was judged right by the
coyote
, set off on foot with a young boy as guide. Children are now the
coyotes’
preferred guides across the border, since if caught they are not detained by the patrol. Lor several hours, they scrambled as fast and as silently as they could over the rough terrain, dodging behind bushes and rocks, stopping briefly from time to time to rest. Pausing, lying low, stopping and starting, they took almost two days to reach the safe house on the
California side. Twice, they saw, in the distance, a Border Patrol car, but the officers did not see them. Once, they came across another party of crossers, flitting silently by in the near dark. Luisa’s group had cookies with them, and some bottles of water. The travelers did not talk to one another. It was as if each traveled alone. Two days later, Luisa was reunited with Dolores.
But California did not work out well for the family. Luisa found a job in a factory but soon realized that she was pregnant; after the birth of a little girl, she found herself pregnant again, and this time a son was born. Her husband’s job in the restaurant was followed by a better one in a factory making toy bones for dogs, but the $285 he brought home each week was not enough to feed, clothe, and house his growing family, particularly as, being illegal migrants, they lived on the very margins of American life. For a while, they sent money home. But there was never enough even for themselves. They began to run up debts, small at first, but the debts grew, making them sad and anxious.
The day I met Luisa and her three children with Sister Hema, Dolores was a leggy, darting child of nine, with fashionable American clothes and bulky, flashing sneakers, and the family was on its way home. Dolores spoke fluent, rapid English, interpreting for her mother who, in four years in Hollywood, had never found the need to learn. Luisa longed to go home: she missed her family in Guadalajara. The crossing back from California to Mexico had been easy: a bus to the border, a short walk across at San Ysidro, past the cars queuing for inspection, the border police taking no interest in their lack of papers. They were Mexicans, after all, going home. It was the next stage in their lives that would be hard. They had come back to nothing—no prospect of work, no savings. The afternoon I sat talking to Luisa under the fruit trees, with Sister Hema hovering in the background and the smaller children playing with a torn teddy bear in the courtyard, Pedro was out in Tijuana, trying to find work to pay for the bus fare south. It was his fourth day of looking, and there was nothing to be found.
• • •
NOT FAR FROM
Sister Hema and the Casa del Migrante lies Tijuana’s wide and white sandy beach. Here, even on a calm day, the Pacific breaks in slow, heavy waves over the shore, and Mexicans with their children come to paddle and picnic and, on bright autumn and winter days, to stroll and smell the strong sea air. Behind, above, along the rocks, is some of Tijuana’s most derelict housing, faded and crumbling cheap seaside hotels, a shantytown of plywood and unfaced brick, dwarfed by the enormous stadium housing the bullring. The view of sand and brushwood and rough pebbles stretches as far as the eye can see—except, that is, where it is broken by the fence, the great divide, part physical, part psychological, that separates Mexico from California.
San Diego and Tijuana could be a single city, running more or less without a break along the coast, from the far northern suburbs of San Diego’s La Jolla and Del Mar, to Tijuana’s last shantytowns to the far south. Between the two lies the fence, erected and fortified over the last twenty years to keep out the successive waves of Mexicans who have longed to make California their home. Along much of the border between the two cities, the fence is tidy, well patrolled, and floodlit. On the beach, it is rusty, a chaotic structure of iron panels and concrete poles, a curtain of ridged iron that rises straight up out of the sand. There are gaps, even holes large enough for a slim man to slip through. Far out into the sea stretches its extension, a wall of solid, circular iron railings. Two worlds, a tamed California wilderness on one side, with eucalyptus and cactus and bougainvil-lea, and horses grazing in fields; a place of impoverished Mexican families on the other. They are separated by a single, rusty, crumbling fence. It seems too small a structure, too insignificant, to mean so much.
Every day, migrants gather on Tijuana’s sandy beach. They come to look at the fence, to measure its height, to assess how far they will have to run on the other side before they reach the cover of trees, to observe the U.S. Border Patrol in its four-wheel drives
parked on the bluffs, to calculate when the tall floodlights will be least revealing. There is no mistaking those waiting to cross. Almost all are young men, traveling alone, parking their small bag or backpack on the sand as they wander up and down, looking, wondering. They test the toeholds in the fence, look through the holes at the emptiness of California, and then sit quietly, waiting for dusk. Many have made the journey before, and many will make it again.
After talking to Sister Hema, I went down to the beach. It was windy, with a faint misty sun now, and the light, still yellow and odd from the fires, was beginning to fade. On the sand, among the families with their children and their dogs, running for balls, sat silent young men, waiting. One, with the help of a friend, was testing the fence for the best place to climb; finding a gap, he slipped quickly through and, neatly, using a stick, wrote
“Passato”
“Crossed,” in tidy, clear letters in the new wet sand, before slipping back, pleased with his work. He was going to make his break as soon as dark fell, he said, when the patrol changed and the fading light made figures indistinct. He intended to run very fast, along the sand toward the trees. It was his first crossing, and he had friends waiting on the other side, on the freeway leading up to the center of San Diego.
A little higher up the sand, crouching on their heels, talking in whispers to one another, were four young Chinese men. They had nothing with them, no baggage or belongings of any kind. They looked neat and rather smart, and one wore a cotton suit. They, too, were waiting for dusk. I wanted to ask them where they had come from, why they had chosen the beach at Tijuana, what their journey from China had been like, but we had no language in common, or perhaps they did not want to talk to anyone. Perhaps they were computer programmers, who are now said to be using the Mexico-California route in growing numbers, having been smuggled from Fujian at $60,000 a head.
Somewhere toward the middle of the fence, between the sea and the rocks that rise sharply toward the houses, is a large circle made of barbed wire, like a spider’s web against the rusty iron. It is a memorial, according to a crude wooden plaque roughly tacked to it, to
those who have died in their attempts to reach California. Beyond, also fastened to the iron panels, are a number of large wooden letters, some five or six feet tall, all that is left of a slogan once written boldly by human rights activists wanting to draw attention to the fence. ALT, they read; and then there is a gap; and then again, DIA. No one on the beach that day knew what the letters stood for. But later, people told me that they once read “Alto Operacion Guardian,” “Halt Operation Gatekeeper,” “Gatekeeper” being the name given to the most determined assault on the migrants, which took place early in the 1990s.
On each letter, in the years since, an artist has carefully drawn a number of skulls, very white against the fading yellow paint; and on each skull is the name of someone who has drowned swimming around the outer perimeter toward California, tossed back onshore by the waves or sucked below by the undertow that flows dangerously along this coast. There are several Josés, and many Pedros; there is a Moise and a Jaime; but most of the skulls contain just two words: “No Identificado.”
• • •
THE STORY OF
California’s fence is the story of migration. Just as Europeans live with legends of departure, so Americans have legends of arrival. Of all U.S. residents, nearly one in ten—26 million people—is now said to be an immigrant. The fence is part of the legend. It is about a poor country looking across a border and seeing money and opportunities—all the lures that enticed the first European settlers—and wanting a share in them. It is about how, ever since anyone can remember, poor Mexicans have migrated north in search of the American dream, which for them has meant jobs in agriculture, factories, construction, and the service industries; about how they have been welcomed and discouraged by turns and have simply kept on coming, even during times of determined and brutal rejection; about how the Americans have feared being swamped and losing their own identities and livelihoods. It is the old and simple story of exclusion.
There have always been fences and walls. Clearly delineated and militarized frontiers have been known since antiquity. China began to build its Great Wall in the third century B.C., to keep out nomadic invaders, and in 120 A.D. Hadrian began his wall in Britain, from the Solway Firth to the Tyne. Medieval European cities were fortified and walled. But the idea behind the walls and fences slowly changed. With the nineteenth century, and the broad acceptance of national sovereignty, came a new vision of frontiers and border controls, with the understanding that states had the legitimate authority to dictate what took place on their own territory. To do so, they needed to control their borders. No longer were walls a means of keeping out military foes; now they blocked unwanted people from coming in, along lines that often lie like geological faults between the world’s rich and the world’s poor.
It has become fashionable, at the turn of the twenty-first century, to discuss borders as archaic and irrelevant in the new age of globalization and the Internet. Among free-market liberals, the talk is all of the “borderless” world brought about by developments in communication technology, along with world market forces; the peaceful interdependence of states, it is said, must lead to a further erosion of borders. In practice, of course, there is no peaceful interdependence of states, and the borderlessness of the world is all about trade, not about people. As economic borders come down in successive waves of economic liberalization, so geographical frontiers are actually being strengthened, to keep out trespassers. Increased freedom of exit has not been matched by increased freedom of entry: people today face formidable barriers if they try to cross from one country to another. Reconciling this paradox—how to make cross-border economic exchanges easier, while enforcing border controls for would-be immigrants—is perceived as one of the most delicate and challenging political tasks of our time, a task made harder by the image peddled everywhere of the huddled masses battering on the doors of the affluent world. The image, as it happens, is false. Most people today, as in the past, are not mobile. Somewhere between 2
and 3 percent of the world’s population can be counted as international migrants, a fact seldom cited; the proportion is no higher and no lower than at any time in the last fifty years.