Exodus: Border-Crossers Forge a New America
Page 8 of 10
|
|
A trucker in his early 20s stands before La Santísima Muerte, his voice very soft as he speaks to her. He says, "She is just like us, except she has no flesh. She can speak to God. She has helped me many times."
Once he saw her standing by the road. She saves him when the highways are wet and saves him from wrecks and saves him from police and saves him from the many faces of death. He enters the main capilla, lights a cigarette, and leaves it burning for her. The altar is rich with candy bars and fruits and money.
He explains, "I have believed in Santa Muerte since I was 13 years old. If I tell you of her favors to me, I will never cease talking. I have a shrine to her in my house and offerings of rice, tomatoes, wine, apples, corn, and bullets."
A man of about 40 climbs down from his truck. He wears black, dark sunglasses, and a gold chain. He stands before La Santísima Muerte and softly speaks to her as he sprays her body with perfume. An expensive two–seater sports car rolls up. The occupants do not get out but sit in their machine a few feet from La Santísima Muerte, praying as the air conditioner roars. No one looks at them because everyone knows how expensive sports cars are earned here.
She first appeared during the late '90s in Tepito, the thieves' market of Mexico City, a zone of 37 blocks stuffed with contraband, whores, addicts, live sex shows, and violence. The priests were alarmed but could do nothing because La Santísima Muerte exuded tolerance. Women went to her to be safe from AIDS and to ensure their clients remained docile. Men sought protection from bullets. She spread north to the line and then spilled over into the ragged neighborhoods where migrants hid from view in the cities of America. The anthropologists pounced and concluded she had erupted from the long–dormant virus of Aztec death worship.
I think she is the saint of NAFTA. In 1994, the trade agreement first kicked in and within a year the numbers crawling through the wire began to spike. Within three years, La Santísima Muerte had entered the minds and hearts of those broken on this new notion called free trade. NAFTA crushed peasant farmers who could not compete with the torrent of cheap agricultural products flowing from American agribusinesses. Trade with China, Mexico's introduction to the global economy, swiftly wiped out traditional industries: toys, serapes, shoes, and so forth. Then the border plants, the maquiladoras where Mexicans assembled goods for American corporations, closed up shop and hightailed it to China where men and women work for one–fourth the wages of Mexicans. Juárez, the poster child of free trade, lost 72,620 jobs to China in less than three years, for example.
In Nuevo Laredo near the Rio Grande, a market stall sells statues of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Emiliano Zapata, and La Santísima Muerte–who outsells all the others combined. She touches more human behavior than the Border Patrol or Homeland Security or the DEA. She holds the whole world in her bony hand. For years, she succored the souls being displaced and hurled north, listened to their fears and hungers while politicians talked about slight adjustments in the global economy, while others spoke of guest worker programs, as some babbled about pathways to citizenship, as growing numbers rumbled about building big walls on the line, and still others explained the need for workers to perform tasks beneath the notice of native–born Americans. All this while, like the illegals themselves, she remained largely invisible to those who believed themselves to be in control. Most Holy Death is the real face of the migration, one kept safely off–camera, one never invited to be on the cable talk shows, one worshipped by men and women who scorn presidents.
Across the river in Laredo, a 4,625–bed, $100 million superjail is being built for illegal immigrants. It is part of a jail boom. Twenty years ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly INS and now ICE) did not have a single cell in Texas. By 2025, ICE will have 9,250 in Laredo alone. The more Border Patrol agents, the more apprehensions, the more detentions, and the more cells.
Most Holy Death and ICE now face off down by the river.
In America
Esperanza waits tables in Los Angeles. At night she sits and watches a video of her house in Oaxaca. The home has a tile floor, a huge sala. She has never visited this fine residence. Through family she arranged for the design and construction and then they sent her videos for her pleasure. The building is five years old. No one lives in it, and no one may ever live in it. There are similar fine homes popping up in obscure Indian villages across the Mexican south. Their owners cannot afford to visit them because the border crossing has become more difficult and more expensive. But still they pump money into their dreams and sit in various American cities staring at screens displaying their distant shelters.
The case can be made that it is absurd to build a dream house you cannot even visit, much less live in. But that is the nature of dreams — there is always a case to be made against them. This is an éxodo. The people coming north are leaving their villages forever, whether they can admit this fact to themselves or not. As long as resources decline and capital flows dislocate traditional economies, as long as over–population remains a taboo expression, as long as corrupt governments loot the poor, global trade will produce shock waves of migrants. It does not matter if the people in the villages or the officials in the various capitals recognize these facts. The forces on the ground will continue to operate as relentlessly as the hurricanes gestating in the warming oceans. Hardened borders simply deepen this fact until you wind up with a waitress in Los Angeles looking at her dream home in Oaxaca that she cannot afford to visit. Coyotes in Mexico now earn at least $10 billion a year. Expect this to double when Congress adds yet more teeth to the jaws of the border.
The tired and frightened men and women crawling through the line soon become founts of money and wire $340 a month back home on average. This is the largest transfer of wealth to the poor in the history of the Western Hemisphere and it dwarfs all the American gestures of aid and all the revolutions that have filled the plazas of Latin America with tired statues. Remittances to Mexico alone are now estimated to be $20 billion a year, a figure much greater than tourism and rivaled only by the drug trade. (After the U.S. offered migrants amnesty in 1986, families reunited and the motive for remittances ended. Were remittances to dry up today — due to amnesty or a seriously toughened border — the Mexican economy could implode.)
This is also the largest teach–in of American values in history. Some 12 million illegals are studying law enforcement without massive corruption, contract law, the joys of homeownership, the existence of real public schools with real textbooks, the pleasures of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and recently, in the marches and protests, the strong drug of dissent. Beneath the Mexican and other flags in the demonstrations, a deep shift is taking place as strangers in a new land become part of that new land. American employers have inadvertently created the most affluent and politically active generation of poor people in the history of Latin America. Sending them home would detonate the nations they have come from. The politicians all know that.
Illustration: Harry Campbell
So we got what we deserve