Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (40 page)

*

I found Eduardo, the Woodpecker, at home in Ahuacatlán. His friends Jesús, Conce, Tiberio, and Plácido had left for another season in Idaho. But having just gotten married and been offered a job at the local savings bank, he had had little desire to join them.

Over his lunch break, and later at night, in the candlelit cantina when the electricity was out, he told me of what had happened after we parted company in Phoenix. Plácido picked them up, as planned, but everyone was so tired that in Nevada, somehow, they made a wrong turn.
“We got further and further from the highway, until the road turned to dirt and we were all alone!”
said Eduardo, laughing. Because the road they were on was outside everyone’s memory of the route, and because they carried no maps, it turned into a twenty-eight-hour detour. When finally they arrived at Edwards’s,
“we were so tired that we were worthless. We were ashamed to tell him what happened, so we just said we were sick.”

Irrigation was the main duty of the Woodpecker and the other newcomers. They would walk the ditches morning, noon, and night, placing short plastic tubes between the irrigation ditch and a row of potatoes. A quick suck on one end of the tube would start the siphon action; when the field was saturated, they would pick up the tubes and move on.

A better offer, for the Woodpecker and Victor, came from a farmer down the road, and halfway through the season they moved onto his ranch. He was so impressed with them that he wrangled temporary visas for them for the next season—like gold! When the Woodpecker got married and changed his mind about going, he passed on the visa to Victor’s father (and Hilario’s brother) Cornelio, who decided he could make much more money by parking his truck and going north again than by staying home and hauling bricks all season. So father and son went north together, crossing the border on a bus—legally, in style.

During the season Tiberio was caught by the sheriff in Black- foot, Idaho, said the Woodpecker, and deported after being beaten;

Victor was caught and deported twice. Plácido was picked up for driving under the influence, and put up $500 bail to get out. Feeling certain he would be deported if he showed up in court, however, he forfeited the money. Lately he had been talking of bringing his family with him next year.

*

Evangélica and Jesús moved into the home of Jesús’s parents upon their return to Ahuacatlán. (This, according to Jesús’s mom, helped to appease her own parents, who had been implying that Jesús’s family was responsible for seeing them married.) Two months later Evangélica gave birth to their six-pound, ten-ounce daughter, Nidia, in the hospital at Jalpan. But three months after that, Jesús left again for Idaho. Evangélica, uncomfortable living alone with his parents, moved down the street to the home of her sister and brother-in-law.

Evangélica had Nidia in her arms when I visited. She was as shy as ever, but obviously proud of her baby. The men’s opinion about Evangélica was that she had been no fun at all in Idaho, complaining all the time, disagreeing with everything. Jesús, it was said, hadn’t
wanted
to take her back north. Evangélica, however, with no apparent animosity, told me that she was the one who had wanted to stay home. It wasn’t that she was mad at Jesús, she explained to my surprise, but that “there was nothing to do there” in Idaho, “no other girls,” and it was “very cold.” The only good surprise had been the television in the trailer—she hadn’t known TV—but the shows were all in English.

She worked, as previously, as a nurse in the “county seat,” a forty-five-minute bus ride away. Her sister took care of the child when she was gone. I was baffled by her apparent lack of resentment toward Jesús, until I asked others in Ahuacatlán about it.
“You are surprised by what happened to her,”
said Hilario’s wife, Lupe, to me.
“But she, Teodoro, was not. When a girl does something like that, she knows the risks. She can’t expect any special treatment.”
In Ahuacatlán, in other words, it happened all the time.

*

Arnulfo Resendiz was not a major character in this story. A quiet, simple, smiling, round-faced man, he lives in the
rancho
of Huajales, just down the road from Ahuacatlán. On his way home every day, on a wobbly old bicycle with broken spokes, he is greeted by Fastidio (“Nuisance”), a very thin, ordinary dog that he keeps and loves very much. Fastidio submits to other dogs the way Mexican dogs submit to humans—he rolls over on his back, puts his tail between his legs, sometimes pees. But, despite constant vulnerability to attack, he is good natured and full of energy. In many ways Fastidio resembles his owner.

Arnulfo had been traveling with the group from Quirambal when they joined us on the border at Sonoita. Instead of staying with them in Phoenix, he decided to try his luck in Idaho with us, and was in the Cadillac when we were arrested in Utah. Deported with all the rest, he rejoined the men from Quirambal—including Genaro, the leader—in Phoenix, and went to Florida with them, via
coyote.
There they found Emilio and Máximo and the others at work in La Belle, and joined them in the already crowded trailer home. But they were too late to find work and so, borrowing more money, they headed up to Michigan to pick cucumbers.

I talked with Arnulfo in the
huarachería,
where he was assembling sandals with Tiberio’s brother (the owner), and three others. His co-workers were laughing as Arnulfo related his travels, especially the last part: at the wheel of a pickup truck in northern Michigan, he turned the wrong way onto a one-way street. He was arrested, then taken by the INS to Detroit, Denver, and Ciudad Juárez. At this point, he admitted sheepishly, he finally gave up.

“
I was arrested and beaten by the judiciales in Sonoita, deported by La Migra in Utah, and then deported by La Migra in Detroit. All this before I ever found a job! What reason did I have to stay any longer? There was no one left to deport me!”

The others around the
huaracheria,
all seated on short stools, howled, bent over with laughter. Arnulfo’s bad luck had been spectacular. But he was more embarrassed than depressed. It was, after all, a gamble. There was something quixotic about the whole enterprise: you went to try your luck, and if things didn’t work out, well, what the hell. People might find it funny, but you weren’t a laughingstock: all were babes in the woods in the United States. It was a country that could make you feel kind of foolish. What else to do but pay off your debts and try again next year—which, Arnulfo assured me, was his plan exactly.

Americans in the Southwest have been aware for years of the unofficial immigration of Mexican nationals, across river and desert. Only in the past decade, with Mexico’s economy in shambles and its population expanding rapidly, have Americans—in particular those who live in other parts of the country—grown worried about the larger numbers of immigrants. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has alerted us to a silent invasion of an army of the poor, and passed along the latest statistics: 1.7 million people were caught sneaking over the border in 1986, up 50 percent from the year before. Up to 6 million are estimated to be in the States already. Often they are mentioned in the same breath as drugs that are smuggled across, or terrorists that might try to be. What crosses the border is dangerous; the Southwest is our “exposed flank.” There is a nagging fear that we’ve gone to sleep with the back door unlocked.

In Mexico the migration is less imagined and more concrete. It’s something people from the poorest and most remote corners of the republic have participated in for years—at least as far back as 1848, when the United States, through the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired nearly half of their country, stranding many Mexican nationals in a foreign land. Then, as now, migration has been recognized to be a two-way street, of people leaving home for a while, working, and then mainly returning home. The relatively fast pace of American industrialization, coupled with Mexico’s economic and demographic crises, accelerated the movement north. Today, if you are among the majority of Mexicans—those with very little money—working in the United States is not merely something you hear about, but something you might consider. It is one of life’s few options.

Migration, to Mexicans, is about taking a chance. Need and ambition combine to propel people north: those who go are usually those most inclined to “pick themselves up by their own bootstraps,” those with the greatest hope, energy, and expectations of life. Often they think twice, because the proposition is risky: though you may make some money, you might also suffer the insult of deportation, get hurt or robbed, or, worse yet, find no work. Generally, to go means to leave behind a family—and to a Mexican family is everything. And then there’s the social pressure against leaving: “
How many men desert their country in search of dollars?”
asked a recent newspaper editorial.

Emigrants know, of course, that crossing the border is illegal; but crossing does not hang on their hearts as a crime. They realize that Americans with money—
important
Americans—are eager to hire them, as long as that fact isn’t broadcast over the radio. Moreover, they realize that the jobs they do are generally scorned, even by poorer Americans. These seem enough to put a conscience to rest.

If the country as a whole didn’t want them, Mexicans further appreciate, America would make it illegal to give them jobs. But until recently, while it was illegal for them to
be
in the States, it wasn’t illegal to hire them. For thirty-five years our immigration law contained a fundamental hypocrisy:

8 USCS § 1324: Any person ... who brings into ... the United States ... or attempts to transport or move, within the United States ... or willfully or knowingly conceals, harbors, or shields from detection ... any alien ... not duly admitted by an immigration officer .. . shall be guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $2,000 or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years, or both ...

Provided however, That for the purposes of this section, employment (including the usual and normal practices incident to employment) shall not be deemed constitute harboring.
(italics added)

That key final sentence explains why, until May 1987, it was a felony to lend a Mexican $5, but not one to pay him $200 a week; why you could go to jail for offering one a ride hitchhiking but not for driving her home after she cleaned your house. It is why, after working and traveling with Mexicans for a year (in 1984-1985), I might qualify as a serial lawbreaker, while the farmer who hired some to harvest his crops merely saved a small fortune.

Employers can now be penalized for hiring the undocumented. Whether that means they will stop doing so or whether, as many observers predict, it will simply force the worker to keep an even lower profile remains to be seen. What is certain is that any law that treats only the U.S. symptoms of Mexican maladies is not likely to change the situation much.

Mexicans, in other words, will keep coming. The country’s 1984 population was expected to grow by nearly one-half by the year 2000—the same year that Mexico City, with 30 million people, would possibly be the world’s largest city—and to have doubled by 2025. Today half of all Mexicans are sixteen years of age or younger. Already the country cannot employ 40 percent of its adult workers. Mexican experts quoted in
The New York Times
say wage disparities make increased migration “almost inevitable.”

The future may be of concern, but to date Mexican immigration has hardly been a disaster. Through that “back door” we left unlocked appear to have passed mainly a good supply of hardworking cleaning ladies and lawn men. Mexican labor, according to just about everyone, benefits American business, and therefore it also benefits the American consumer and overseas consumers of American goods. (As residents will tell you, the economy of the state of California—and several others—would likely grind to a halt were all Mexican nationals to disappear tomorrow.)

Like most previous waves of immigration, Mexican immigration leaves some citizens worried that there are becoming too many of “them,” and not enough of “us,” that we as a nation may drown in the tide of foreignness. But if there is any truism about immigration to America, it is that “they” soon become “us”; and that for two hundred years our strength and vigor have been due precisely to the energy and aspiration of immigrants. This is as true today as it was in the early 1920s, or during the previous century. “The United States,” wrote Nathan Glazer in 1985, “remains the permanently unfinished country.”

I was not selective about the Mexicans I chose to include in this story—no chapter was censored that included ones I met who were less desirable. These are the guys. They’re not perfect, but the majority would make good neighbors; I’d welcome them as mine. I found the illegal immigration monster to be the sort that’s less scary up close than it is from a distance. Immigration, you could say, is America’s history book. This is the latest chapter, and I am left eager, not frightened, to see what comes next.

Born in Okinawa and raised in Colorado, Ted Conover now lives in New York City, where he is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University.
Coyotes
and
Whiteout
were named Notable Books of the Year by
The New York Times;
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing,
won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is
The Routes of Man.