Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (2 page)

This is not the whole story, but I have tried to make it their story.

Ted Conover

Denver, Colorado

May 1, 1987

It’s strange to think that twenty years have passed since the journey recounted in this book. Strange because my memories—of Mexican villages, of border crossings, of my companions—remain vivid. Strange because I don’t feel twenty years older. And also strange because, despite all the attention it has received, the immigration situation not only remains unresolved but in many ways has gotten worse.

Of course, I did not expect everything to be fixed by now: the border is long, our countries’ disparity in wealth huge, and the U.S. appetite for cheap labor insatiable. But it does seem that few meaningful steps have been taken to reform the dysfunctional status quo. And, in these fast-changing times, problems that are not attended to often become bigger problems.

The border has surely become an even tougher place. With Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, the U.S. government began to increase law enforcement and to construct new and larger walls and fences along the urbanized parts of the border. Would-be migrants had to travel farther, and across more difficult terrain. There have been many consequences. A rise in the cost of crossing is one: a coyote-assisted journey from the border to Phoenix, for example, which ran about $300 when I wrote this book, has risen to $i,500-$2,000. With this kind of money at stake,
coyotes
are more likely than ever to be involved with organized crime.

The death toll taken by this gauntlet rises a little bit every year, now averaging about one migrant a day. Many, of course, die in mass tragedies that have been the focus of the latest books about the border, notably the death by exposure of fourteen in the Arizona desert in 2001 (retold by Luis Alberto Urrea in
The Devil’s Highway
) and the death by heat and suffocation of nineteen people in a Texas truck trailer in 2003 (recounted in Jorge Ramos’
Dying to Cross).
(Ruben Martinez takes as his starting point in
Crossing Over
the deaths of three brothers in the back of a smuggler’s truck loaded with twenty-seven people that rolls off the highway as it is pursued by police in California. And Sonia Nazario breaks new ground on the migrant trail of blood, sweat, and tears by focusing on the gauntlet run by Central Americans, particularly children seeking a lost parent in the United States, as they make their way north through Mexico in
Enrique’s Journey.)

Another concern of today is the recurring appearance of vigilante patrols along the U.S. side of the border, and, at the level of state government, recurring initiatives to arrest the undocumented. While these get a lot of press attention on both sides of the border, they typically die out and serve mainly to highlight the frustration of many Americans that the border remains porous.

This anxiety is not necessarily anti-immigrant; several of the 9/11 hijackers were also visa violators, and the fact that two of them received new student visas in the mail six months after perishing in the suicide attack on the Twin Towers does not bolster one’s confidence in the Department of Homeland Security (which absorbed the immigration service in the months following 9/11). Though a tiny fraction of the whole, migrants from nations besides Mexico use the southern border to sneak into the United States too. It seems only a matter of time until a terrorist is discovered to have come in via the border with Mexico.

But that is a very different subject from everyday immigration by Mexicans, with its long history and economic motivations. While much of the exotic drama of immigration takes place along the border, the larger, deeper story is perhaps to be found in the towns and cities of the interior United States and of Mexico. Since I write about that Mexican story in this book, let me say a word here about my own country: Immigration from Mexico, official and unofficial, is changing the United States in ways that were only beginning to become apparent when I did my research in the mid-1980s. Back then, nativists warned of an Anglo-Latino split along the lines of the English-Quebecois divide then so worrisome in Canada, of an America rent in two by language and other cultural differences. To be sure, there are communities, mainly in border states, with a yawning divide between Mexicans and non-Mexicans. But the fears of some sort of civil war have proven continuously unfounded. Rather, Mexican culture has been absorbed, changing mainstream America in the process. Migrants’ children tend to grow up speaking better English than Spanish, and quickly become translators for their parents. A major milestone in this shift in the American character, from my perspective, came around 1996 when salsa replaced ketchup as America’s bestselling condiment. Like bagels and stir-fry, salsa ceased to seem like ethnic food and became, simply, what we eat. And Mexican, it seems—despite the nostalgia of conservative mossbacks—is increasingly a part of who we are.

Pressing matters await official action. Today there are ten to eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States, up from five to six million when
Coyotes
was first published in 1987—a growing, semi-permanent population of unfranchised, uninsured poor people in a country where, according to the Constitution, “all men are created equal.” About one-sixth of undocumented people are under the age of 18, and among these children are a growing number whose predicament is Kafka-esque: born in Mexico or Central America, they crossed over when they were young and grew up as Americans—but without papers. My old high school in Denver, as well as many others, regularly graduates these children of the undocumented—young adults who, though as American-seeming as my own children, can’t qualify for government loans and scholarships, nor for resident tuition at many state colleges. And when the parents of these children get picked up and deported, uprooted along with them are the kids, for whom Mexico (or the countries to the south) is like a foreign country.

Studies now show that one in five Mexicans will visit or work in the United States during some part of their lives, and project that one in ten of the Mexican-born will reside here by 2010. I recently revisited a restaurant in a town in the state of Oaxaca where I hadn’t eaten since 1993, when my (American) wife and I got married there. A waiter I remembered from the time corrected me when I commented on his long, unbroken tenure: he’d left for three years recently to join the gold rush, and try his luck at a restaurant in New Jersey. But (and you will find a lot of Mexicans who feel this way), the experience hadn’t been a good one and now, he said, he was home for good. I like that aspect of being in Mexico: there, migration to the States isn’t about op-eds, political proposals that never succeed, and partisan grandstanding; it’s not about the purported constant, low-level drain on American resources or corrosion of our ideals of law and order. Rather, it’s about individuals and how things work out for them—or don’t. A cab driver I spoke to on the same trip told me he’d bought his taxi with money earned in a few seasons mowing lawns and blowing leaves in Missouri. His younger brother, on the other hand, hadn’t been so lucky; he’d recently tried to sneak across by impersonating the stuffing of the backseat of an SUV. I marveled at the ingenuity of this ruse and wondered aloud how it could fail. “When the
migra
was looking in the car,” the man told me, “I guess he moved.”

*

Immigration is something Americans feel warmly about as history but nervous about as a current event. I learned about this in microcosm when, after writing
Coyotes
, I moved from Denver to the Colorado mountain town of Aspen and tried to capture the soul of the place in my book
Whiteout.
Aspen had already had many incarnations: Ute Indian settlement, silver-mining boom- town, ranch town, early ski town, lodestone to seekers of drugs, nature, and free love. By the mid-8os, Aspen was attracting a chic Hollywood element and the ski bums and aging hippies felt outpriced and alienated. “How many Aspenites does it take to change a light bulb?” asked a local friend of mine, the writer Bruce Berger. “It takes ten—one to change the bulb, and nine to moan about how much better the old light bulb was. ”

That resonated with me because arriving in Aspen in certain ways had made me feel like a Mexican, trying to justify my recentness in the face of disapproving nativists forgetful that, just a few years before, they themselves had been new arrivals. The conservativism of those who live in “special” places and want everything to stay the way it’s always been (i.e., the way it’s been since they got there) is understandable—but also a lost cause, I think. Preserving historic architecture is one thing, but wanting the mix of people to stay the same is a backward-looking, codger’s way to live, one at odds with inevitable change and the ideals of a multicultural society.

Resistance to immigration, on a planet full of poor people, also seems linked to a fear of the claims they may make on things we already have. If these folks are not just faceless foreigners, in other words, but rather
our neighbors
, then common decency dictates that now we’re going to have to share—share roads, schools, hospitals, parks, whatever we have that’s nice. And watch as it all runs down. The larger truth, however, is that immigration is not a zero-sum game: migrants bring enterprise and vitality, and what we have to share is not a fixed amount but a growing amount. All evidence suggests that a rising tide will help us all.

Another kind of nervousness about immigration seems tied less to economic concerns than to a parochial, sometimes visceral fear of the unknown, of the stranger (particularly the young and fertile), of the dark horde. The best cure for this kind of phobia seems to me travel, a diverse range of friends, time spent in cities, and other forms of continuing self-education.

*

In the meantime, we go on with our lives. The Mexicans help to keep our economy humming, and the employment they find here in turn helps with theirs. I have moved to New York, perhaps the world’s greatest immigrant city, where there are fewer Mexican illegals than in the West but still enough that I can feel at home. I am proud that
Coyotes
remains in print, and hope it lives on a few years more. Also,
gracias a Dios,
this edition of
Coyotes
comes with a fine new subtitle, ending my longstanding discomfort over the original:
A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens.
“Illegal alien” always suggested to me not human workers but outlaws from another planet. I was sparing with the phrase in the text itself, and unhappy to have it on the cover. With this edition, that problem is at long last solved. For this and other friendly support, I would like to thank Edward Kastenmeier of Vintage Books. And for the opportunity to renew and reintroduce this story of mine, I would like to thank all of you, my readers.

Ted Conover

January 2006

SUN SLIPPED
through the cracks left by poor workmanship, providing the shack’s only light. A space around the plywood slapped across the window, a slit between the corroding sheet- metal door and its jamb, tiny arcs between crumbling cinder blocks and the corrugated tin roof: if you stood in the right places the rays hit your shoes, surrounded by cigarette butts, everything dusty on the dry dirt floor.

Alonso, squatting down to give his legs a rest, surveyed the scores of butts.
“Lots of wetbacks waited here, eh?”
I thought of the minutes of worried waiting represented by each butt, the cumulative anxiety of them all. Already, since the
coyotes
had left us here, we had waited two hours; my cigarettes, now, were gone. No one but the
coyotes
—the smugglers—knew exactly where we were. If things were going according to plan, we were somewhere near the Rio Grande, and would soon be ferried across to the United States. But, if they disbelieved the story I had invented and still suspected I was an undercover cop, then ... anything could happen.

I was an unlikely client. Blond haired and blue eyed, I was in Mexico as a journalist, researching what illegal immigration to the States means to Mexicans. It had not been my plan, when I boarded a northbound bus in central Mexico, to cross the Rio Grande this way. But then I met Alonso. He was on his way to the border. Sitting next to him I realized that, with a partner lined up, I too might sneak across the border.
“It is better to see once than to listen many times,”
a Mexican farmer had told me a week before, when I was asking him about crossing. The words echoed in my brain. Alonso and I seemed to get along. The only remaining obstacle, it seemed to me, would be to convince smugglers that they ought to take me.

Intoxicated with the possibility of experiencing a crossing, I became possessed of a crazy confidence that somehow I could make it all happen. Now, exhausted and edgy from hours of tense negotiation, breathing the close, hot air of the shack, I felt I had ignored my better judgment. I had narrowed my options to one—there was no turning back. Yet too much could still go wrong. And the wrong move, in this sort of situation, could prove fateful.

The floor of the shack, slightly larger in area than a king- size bed, was really the only thing to look at. Scattered around it, besides cigarette butts, were a couple of planks, an old washbasin, a barrel, a quart beer bottle, and other trash. The bottle caught my eye. If worse came to worst, I thought, I could grab it by the neck, knock off the bottom against a wall, and have a weapon.