Exodus: Border-Crossers Forge a New America
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At 12:25 p.m., the march steps off. I've seen flash floods roar down desert arroyos, the wall of brown water churning and tumbling. Now I see one made of human flesh. For more than two hours, la gran marcha sweeps past me. The people fill Grand Avenue from building to building. There is no space for spectators except on rooftops. The lines flooding the street are at least 60 people across. Each line takes one to two seconds to pass me and features three to four baby strollers. The water station next to me is gutted in 50 minutes flat. And still they keep coming. In two hours, I see maybe 10 whites, 1 black, and no more than 30 Mexican flags. And at least 50,000 American flags: flags fluttering from poles, flags held in hands, decorating cowboy hats, sprouting from manes of black hair on the heads of mothers pushing strollers. The signs are almost all the same: WE ARE NOT CRIMINALS, WE ARE AMERICA OR TODAY WE MARCH, TOMORROW WE VOTE. A herd of Prussians could not be more organized and on message.
When it is over, there will not be a single reported incident. Nothing but at least 200,000 people peacefully walking down the street of the city that ignores them. And I never see a single can of beer. This is the largest gathering of human beings for any reason in the history of Arizona. The state press is largely silent about the march. It was too big, now what? Deportation begins to sound like a pipe dream. After all, this is the nation that could not get 100,000 of its fellow citizens out of New Orleans and to safety.
In Mexico
Yellow dogs laze in the afternoon of the plaza. Altar, 60 miles of dirt road south of Sásabe, is home to 18,000 people and a way station for 500,000, 600,000, 800,000 souls a year who pass through on their way to El Norte. A month ago, an undercover Border Patrol agent surveyed the traffic and pegged it at 5,000 people a day. No one knows for certain and hardly anyone really wants to know. But you can go to the bank with this: Each year more Mexicans move through Altar and illegally enter the United States than our government admits illegally cross the entire 1,951–mile border. Altar is the beginning of the lie and the beginning of the pain.
Two things happen to visitors in Altar: first stunned silence and then a search for some metaphor to wrap around the dusty town. A visiting novelist, Phil Caputo, noticed the 20–odd stalls selling black daypacks, black T–shirts, and other clothing and deemed it a migrant Wal–Mart. On the east edge of the community is a boardinghouse for migrants named Éxodo, Exodus. There are dozens of such flops in town.
Here is the basic script: You get off a bus you have ridden for days from the Mexican interior, increasingly from the largely Indian states far to the south. This is the end of your security. On the bus, you had a seat, your own space. Now you enter a feral zone. With money, you can buy space in a flop ($3 a night) and get a meal of chicken, rice, beans, and tortillas (about $2.50). You stare out on an empty desert unlike any ground you have ever seen. Men with quick eyes look you over, the employees of coyotes, people smugglers. On the bus, you were a man or a woman or a child. Now you are a pollo, a chicken, and you need a pollero, a chicken herder.
You will never be safe, but for the next week or so, you will be in real peril. If you sleep in the plaza to save money, thugs will rob you in the night or, if you are a woman, have their way with you. If you cut a deal with a coyote's representative (and 80 to 90 percent do), you still must buy all that black clothing and gear, house and feed yourself. Then one day, when you are told to move, you'll get in a van with 20 to 40 other pollos and ride 60 miles of bumps and dust to la línea. Each passenger pays $25. The vans do not move with fewer than 17, prefer at least 20, and do, at a minimum, three trips a day. A friend of mine recently did the ride and counted 58 vans moving out in two hours.
Fifteen miles below the border, you will face a checkpoint set up by Grupo Beta, the Mexican border patrol that's supposed to help pollos. Early this year, a group of American reporters stood at the checkpoint and counted 1,296 people in 180 minutes. Signs there warn of venomous creatures and high desert temperatures. The officials are under an orange ramada, one with a crudely painted single word, gallo, rooster. The vans stop; their bodies are beat up but the tires, always, are excellent. You will be sitting inside, possibly on an iron bar so that dozens of pollos can be packed in. The men of Grupo Beta will count you –– everyone gets a cut in this business. The head of the state police in a town just ahead on the line is said to take in $30,000 a week.
At the moment, though you are penniless, unemployed, and frightened, you are worth a few hundred dollars, almost like an oil future. But you must get to that stash house in America before you are worth real money and worth protecting. And you must do it by force of will. In this sector of the line, the 262–mile–long Tucson Sector, a few hundred will officially die each year. Others will die and rot in the desert and go uncounted. A year ago, a woman from Zacatecas disappeared in late June. Her father came up and searched for weeks to find her body in the desert, a valley of several hundred square miles. He stumbled on three other corpses before finding the remains of his own child.
At dusk, you will go through the line with 20, 30, or more Mexicans. There will be a guide. You will carry a gallon of water and that black daypack. The temperature in summer could be 115 degrees. You will walk anywhere from 10 to 60 miles, depending on the route and what you have agreed to pay. There will be rattlesnakes, cacti, trees. And almost no sign of people. Everything will have thorns that rake your skin as you stumble through the darkness. You will keep up or be left behind. If you are a woman, you have a fair chance of being raped. And you will most likely never speak of these nights again so long as you live. You will have children and grandchildren and teach them many things. But if you are like the others who have passed this way, these nights will remain your secret.
The middle passage ends at the stash house in Tucson or Phoenix. The price from there to distant spots –– North Carolina, Los Angeles, Chicago, and so forth — is $1,700 and rising. And this price does not cover getting to the border or crossing the border or food or a place to stay. It only covers getting from the stash house to another destination in Los Estados Unidos.
Somewhere between Altar and Phoenix, new Americans are being forged in a burning desert. No one is really counting the people, no one is really recording their journeys. Soon, they and their descendants will number 30 million. And this vast silence is likely to be the savage part of their repressed history.
Illustration: Harry Campbell
So we got what we deserve