Exodus: Border-Crossers Forge a New America
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The three major Mexican border towns on this stretch of the Rio Grande–Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros–are each pumping 100,000 people a year north, people who have fashioned answers out of things as simple as braided cord.
Luis Angel Ramírez Nevárez, 24, could be a poster child for this can–do attitude. Last year, he left El Salvador and headed north. Somewhere in the Mexican state of Veracruz, he fell off the freight he had hopped, shattered a leg and mangled one arm. His forearm now looks as if the bone had decided to make a sharp turn, reconsidered, and finished up with a U–turn. In January, he arrived in New Orleans because he had heard they needed workers. He did painting and stucco, 10 hours a day, five or six days a week, for 10 bucks an hour. Things were looking up for him even with his mangled limb.
Then, as he walked to his job, he was scooped up by the Border Patrol and pitched back into Mexico. Now he waits for dark. He and a new friend are heading back to New Orleans to occupy the space left by the evacuees.
Everything else is details. The cops who may kill you when you cross, the Border Patrol that will hunt you when you climb out of the river, the five or six days of walking through scrub forest to San Antonio, the passage to New Orleans in a nation where you have no legal standing, all this seems like the flies swirling around the men. Irritants but not real obstacles. In New Orleans, they will earn at least $500 a week. They can be stopped. But not by much shy of death itself.
In America
Five days after katrina made landfall, I walked into an Italian bistro in Houston on Interstate 10. The cluster of surrounding motels had counters piled high with fliers from churches offering aid. The bistro sat 200, and every chair was taken by an evacuee. They were easy to spot with their dazed eyes, disheveled clothing, and sudden fellowship that crossed race and class lines. One black man said he'd spent 18 years as a janitor in a complex near the Superdome. Now he planned to stash the wife in some Houston rental and head back to grab what he saw as fine jobs that would sprout from the soggy ground as reconstruction got under way. But what struck me about the entire scene was the staff toiling in an open kitchen. Except for the hostess and the guy manning the cash register, the entire service crew — cooks, dishwashers, busboys, waiters — were short, dark, Indian–looking people from the Mexican south. I doubt many had papers that were in order. And so I dined amid the constant ringing of cell phones and the constant chatter of evacuees as they were fed by other evacuees from the collapse of a Latin world. One group was helpless; the other group was, probably for the first time, in control of their lives and fortunes.
The migrants started showing up a few weeks later at the Shell station at Lee Circle near the Superdome — one of the many informal hiring halls of a new city. For a few months, there were 300 or 400 a morning, a land–office business in soft drinks and snacks for the gas station. Now it's down to a hundred or so a day. No one knows how many Latin Americans have swarmed in since Katrina. One estimate guesses at least 100,000 in the Gulf region. Last October, Mayor Ray Nagin complained that his city was being overrun by Mexicans. In the 2000 census New Orleans was 3 percent Hispanic. Now one sees more brown faces than black. But then no one really knows what the current population consists of. It is a work in process, a new kind of place for a new world. And yet some things are the same: When black contractors pull into the Shell station, they seem to hire only the few blacks milling around; white contractors seem to hire only Latinos.
At the Monte de los Olivos Lutheran Church, Pastor Jesus Gonzales ministers to a flock of these newest New Orleanians. He feeds them, helps them find housing, clothes them, offers a clinic (for, among other things, the prevalent Katrina cough resulting from the mold, asbestos, and general filth of demolition work), and teaches them English. Gonzales toiled in the oil fields of west Texas and then felt the need for more meaningful work. His congregation was largely Honduran — refugees from the hurricanes of the '90s — but is now 60 percent Mexican. When Gonzales walks New Orleans he mainly sees some upscale whites walking big dogs, and Latin Americans. At Mardi Gras this year, he was stunned that half the conversations around him were in Spanish.
His congregants are making $12 to $15 an hour. Their employers keep an eye peeled for the Border Patrol — some have reconfigured their small businesses so that no one can enter without warning. One of his Mexican congregants was assigned an Arabic name by his employer and wears his new identity on a tag. Local Spanish radio issues alerts in code on Border Patrol movements. The coyotes in his church tell him that they'll take a few months off until the newly assigned National Guard units finish puttering about the border. Gonzales sees no end to the deluge of new migrants so long as there is a need for labor. And right now all the fast–food places are having trouble getting help at $10 an hour.
Out in St. Bernard Parish, destruction was close to total. In the parking lot of the parish's only open grocery store, Jesse Melendez, a 43–year–old roofing contractor, cuts a deal with a plumber. He'll get the plumber Mexicans for a finder's fee of $100 each. Melendez is a wiry man and well decorated with tattoos. He goes to Fort Worth for his illegals, because "there's a shortage, big time." Melendez is native born, Puerto Rican in ancestry, feeble in Spanish, and keen on Mexicans. "They bust ass — work hard and consistent." He pays them twice what he pays blacks. He is convinced the reason St. Bernard Parish is rising from ruin faster than New Orleans is that locals understand the care and feeding of Mexicans. In fact, that's why the grocery reopened — otherwise contractors had to drive their Mexicans out of the parish to buy food, and while off shopping they might get better offers of work.
The tens of thousands of illegals who've poured into the Gulf Coast are but a trickle compared to the numbers who will come if reconstruction is ever seriously undertaken. By early summer, only about 25 schools had reopened in New Orleans. Housing starts are running around zero. And no one of any color or political persuasion thinks the rebuilt levees are worth a damn.
We want an answer, a solution. But there is only this fact: We either find a way to make their world better or they will come to our better world. At the moment, we insist on the wrong answer to the wrong question. And so, the Border Patrol will grow.There will be a wall. Tougher laws will be passed by Congress. And the people will keep coming.
Illustration: Harry Campbell
So we got what we deserve