Читать книгу Up Against the Wall - Peter Laufer - Страница 12
ОглавлениеILLEGAL ALIEN OR CLEVER NEW AMERICAN
Let me introduce you to that friend of mine who crossed into the United States from Ciudad Juárez over to El Paso. When she recounts her migration story to me, Juana María is a bright and bubbly woman in her late thirties. Her toddler daughter is in the living room learning English from a television program when we sit down in her kitchen to talk about her trip across the border over thirteen years before. Her two boys are in school. She offers me a cup of tea.
“Do you have anything decaffeinated?” I ask.
She does. Her bi-cultural kitchen cupboards include mola, tortillas and decaffeinated mint tea. I’ve heard Juana María’s1 border crossing story often, but in bits and pieces. Today she’s taking time out of her schedule to recount it from start to finish.
It was 1990 when Juana María first came to the United States. She had waited patiently in line at the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara and applied for a tourist visa, which she received. Eight months earlier her husband had crossed into California, looking for work. A hardworking mechanic, he found a job easily—on a ranch where his pay included living quarters in an old mobile home.
She remembers all the dates precisely. “I came on May 27th in 1990. That’s the first time I came to the United States.” Juana María speaks English with a thick Mexican accent, and only rarely drops a Spanish word into the conversation. Her English vocabulary is more than adequate for her story. She’s spent the last several years studying English, working with a volunteer tutor, and her boys bring English home from school and into the household. “I flew from Guadalajara here to California.” In addition to her 3-month-old first son, she traveled north with her mother-in-law and her 13-year-old brother. She was 23. Stamped into her Mexican passport was her prized tourist visa.
When she reached the immigration officer at the airport she was asked a few key questions. “He asked, ‘How much money do you have to spend in the United States?’ I had only five hundred dollars. My mother-in-law didn’t have anything. He said, ‘That is not enough money for three people to visit the United States for two months.’” The Immigration and Naturalization Service officer asked the next crucial question, and she now knows her honest answer doomed her trip. “He asked, ‘Why are you coming here?’ And I told the truth, ‘I come to visit my husband. I want to stay with my husband and I want my child to grow up with his father.” Despite the valid visa, Juana María and her family were refused entry. It was obvious she was no tourist; she was an immigrant.
“We stayed all night, like we were arrested. We didn’t go to jail because we had two little boys. But we stayed all night in one room in the airport.” A generation later the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) radically changed U.S. policy: children were torn from their migrating parents’ arms and jailed in appalling conditions.
The immigration officer was Latino, Juana María says, and told her, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I feel so bad about what I’m doing.” She says she remembers the moment vividly when he took her cash. “He bought a ticket. The next day we flew back to Mexico on another airplane. One officer went with us into the airplane and made sure we were sitting down in the airplane. And he never gave me my money back. He bought that ticket with my money.”
A month later Juana María was shopping for a coyote. “I didn’t want to stay in Mexico. My husband was here.” Her older brother convinced her to avoid the Tijuana crossing into San Diego, scaring her with stories of rape, robbery, abandonment and murder in the hills along la frontera, the border. She decided on a crossing from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso. She bundled up her baby, and once again accompanied by her mother-in-law, she flew from Guadalajara to Juárez. This time she didn’t tell her husband of her travel plans. “I didn’t tell him because if something happened he would have worried about me and my boy. I wanted to give him a surprise.”
Her brother confirmed arrangements with the coyote, secured an address of a house for the rendezvous with the guide. Juana María took a cab at the Juárez airport, but when the three travelers arrived at the Juárez house, they were unable to find their contact. And they quickly realized that they had left a suitcase in the cab. “We were missing in the big city,” she says. “In the suitcase we had diapers and formula.” Luck was with the migrating trio. The taxi company insisted on buying formula for the baby; when the company found the missing baggage, it delivered to the hotel where they had booked a room.
Juana María called her brother. He contacted the coyote and sent him to the hotel and there they made their border-crossing plans. “I was nervous, but he told me to relax.” In those pre-9/11 and pre-Trump days, Mexicans routinely crossed the bridge into El Paso to shop. The crowds were so great and the traffic so important to the local economy that immigration officers only spot-checked border crossers walking north. Juana María was told to dress like a typical Mexican housewife, carry a shopping bag, and act confident. “We looked like people from Mexico who are shopping and going back home.” They agreed to make the crossing during the noon rush hour. The coyote figured inspectors would be eating lunch and that the throngs crossing the bridge would camouflage his clients.
The next morning a car came to the hotel for Juana María. She was dropped near the border and walked north. “We crossed, walking”—Juana María, the baby, her mother-in-law, and the coyote. “I was wearing a dress to look like a Mexican shopper. We crossed at the border and we didn’t go far. We walked for maybe ten or fifteen minutes into El Paso.” As the migrants strolled north, homeless coconspirators living on the street kept the coyote informed that the path was free of Migra (Spanish slang at the time for the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the government agency that became a unit of ICE). The coconspirators were tipped a dollar for the intelligence. “Finally, we stopped at a McDonald’s, because it was 104 degrees.”
She ate her first American meal in the cool of the McDonald’s—a hamburger of course, and the coyote called a taxi. They drove to a house where a friend of her brother lived, and there they spent the night. The easy part of the journey was over. Now the job was to get Juana María out of the borderlands and up into the interior and onward to join her husband in California. A further masquerade was needed. She no longer had to look like a Mexican housewife; she had to look like a Mexican-American.
That’s when they made me look like a teenager. They put me in shorts with a lot of flowers. They put me in a blouse—phosphorescent orange. And they put my hair up, like a chola!2 They colored my eyes black, and red lipstick! Oh, my goodness.
Juana María is a pretty woman, but her wardrobe is conservative and she wears only minimal makeup. She was happy to play dress-up “because I needed to look like the girls from El Paso. The teenagers in El Paso look different from the teenagers in Mexico. That’s why they changed my looks.”
They flew to Dallas with no trouble, the baby disguised as an El Paso infant, sporting a Hawaiian shirt. Her mother-in-law was still with them, not worried in “a dress like a North American” because her hair is blonde. “I felt nervous,” Juana María admits, but more than just nervous. “I felt embarrassed to look like that, when I looked at myself in the mirror I said, ‘Oh, my God. No!’ But I needed to relax and look normal, like all the other people in the airport.”
When they arrived at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport they waited for another brother to pick them up. “He passed me three times, and he didn’t recognize me.” Finally she said to him, “Hi, honey! I’m Juana María.” He was shocked at her appearance.
Well, I looked like a chola! He told me, “If your husband sees you looking like that, immediately he will divorce you.” We left the airport, and the first stop was Sears to buy make-up and a dress, to wash my face and change clothes. We went to my brother’s house and then we called up my husband and I said, “Honey, I’m here!” He said, “No, you are joking.” I told him I was serious and that I had another surprise—I had his mother with me.
The mother-in-law had told her husband she would only go as far as Ciudad Juárez, but she went across into the United States, says María Juana, on a lark. “The coyote said, ‘It’s fun. You can cross. It’s not dangerous.’ So she crossed to have one more adventure in her life. My brother paid only five hundred dollars for all three people. Very cheap.”
The date of her arrival in El Norte3 is fixed in her mind. “I crossed the border June 24, 1990.” After a week visiting her brother, she flew to California for a reunion with her husband. It was July 1, just in time for the Fourth of July festivities at the ranch where he worked. “My husband told me I needed to buy clothes for the celebrations. I got blue jeans and a red-and-white blouse, because those are the three colors of the American flag.”
Juana María’s parrot is chirping. Her daughter takes a break from the television to listen, eat some corn chips and make a mess on the counter trying to pour some 7-Up into a glass. Outside cattle are feeding at the trough. Her blue heelers periodically bark. Through her kitchen windows I see the bucolic California hills that surround her home. “I haven’t been back to Mexico for thirteen years.” She looks pensive when I ask her why. “Because I don’t have a Green Card and now I am worried about crossing the border. I hear a lot of bad stories. It costs $2,500 for each person.” That early year 2000 price tag looks like a bargain a generation later.
Living without proper documentation for 13 years was nothing much more than an annoyance for Juana María. “I don’t do anything illegal. I live a good life and take care of my kids.” Immigration officers rarely show up in her rural neighborhood, and when they do patrol places she frequents in the nearby urban district, she says she’s warned and just avoids them. “When the INS4 is around here they say on the [Spanish language] radio station: don’t go out to Wal-Mart or Sears or whatever shopping center because the INS is around. So I don’t go there. After one or two days, they’re gone.”
I ask Juana María what she would do if an immigration agent approached her. “If he asks me for a Green Card, I can’t do anything,” she says about this perpetual threat to her domestic tranquility.
If you don’t have the Green Card, they only arrest. They say, “You have a right to call a relative, but you’re going to jail.” If I don’t have a Green Card, they’ll deport me to my country, to Mexico. That’s what they do. They don’t ask for identification, they ask for a Green Card, or your permission to stay in the United States, like a passport. If I don’t have anything with me, they’ll arrest me, and they’ll take me out to the border.
But life was more uncertain for her when Pete Wilson was governor of California and he rallied voters to pass Proposition 187, the referendum that limited the rights of undocumented migrants and was ultimately struck down by the courts. During the anti-immigrant climate of those years in the mid-1990s, just picking the kids up at school was cause for concern. “The INS came to the schools and they arrested parents. For more than a week, we didn’t send our boy to the school, when I heard that the INS was here in my county.”
Juana María figures about 70 percent of her Latino friends in California are in the state illegally. When we talked, Juana María still held out hope for legalizing her status. Meanwhile, she and her family thrived. She worked hard at the local PTA, organizing fund-raising dinners of rich Mexican food. Her daughter was christened at the local Catholic church in a Spanish-language ceremony, followed by a block party crowded with friends and relatives, food and music. Her husband went off to work each day; she worked part time. They paid their taxes: Americans by every definition except for paperwork.
A few days after we talked at her home, it was Mexican Lunch Day at the local elementary school. Juana María brought together a group of the Latino mothers to prepare burritos. The women were lined up in the kitchen, the first ladling out the rice, the next passing out a tortilla, the third the beans. The burritos were topped off with lettuce and cream and salsa. The money raised was used to provide childcare for Latino mothers who were taking classes to earn a high school equivalency certificate.
Despite the all-American lifestyle, Juana María suffers because of her illegal status in the United States.
I feel sad because I cannot go to Mexico and come back again. I cannot visit my relatives. My friends who have Green Cards, they do that every year or every other year. I want to go to Mexico. But how can I cross? Maybe I’d be lucky, and not have any problems, like the first time. Or maybe I’d have a lot of problems.
She has reason to worry; she’s heard the horror stories. “I have friends who came two months after I came here to the United States. Two years later they went to Mexico.” The return trip was a disaster. “One of the ladies,” she says it with a combination of sadness and a matter-of-fact reporting of the news, “the coyote killed her. With a screwdriver. In Tijuana. I say no. I’m not going. I love my relatives. But my life is first, and my kids.”
Nonetheless when Juana María’s father-in-law was dying, her husband chose to take the chance on a trip back to Mexico. In just over ten years, the price of a coyote had increased fivefold. He paid the $2,500 for help crossing from Tijuana to San Diego. The costs for help crossing illegally continue to soar. As the Trump administration focused political capital and dollars on the border, coyote fees—along with the bribes to authorities and bandits on the route north—tallied as much as ten thousand dollars.
Juana-María’s husband crossed with a false Green Card—not a counterfeit, but stolen. Coyotes prowl border nightclubs, Juana María explains, looking for drunk Latinos with legitimate identification papers. They steal their Green Cards. Her husband sat down at a table with a coyote who displayed a stack of stolen Green Cards. Together they searched through the cards for a picture of a Mexican who looked enough like her husband to satisfy a border guard. He crossed the border with someone else’s Green Card. The system isn’t perfect. He crossed successfully three times. She tells me,
But the last time the officer said, “You don’t look like him!” They arrested him and sent him back to Mexico. He called me from Rosarita and said, “I am here because they caught me and sent me back to Mexico.” I called the coyote and said, “You promised me my husband would come to California safely. If my husband is not here in my house, I will not pay you anything.” The coyote went to get my husband at Rosarita and he crossed again at Tijuana with the same stolen Green Card. That day was lucky.
“Sometimes the coyotes have business with the immigration officer,” she said, “and they give him money under the table. My husband flew home from San Diego. When he was on the airplane, I sent the money by Western Union to the coyote.”
That’s Juana María’s theory, that the coyote bribed the guard. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. immigration officer jeopardizing his career and pension—not to mention risking prison time—for a cut of a $2,500 coyote fee. Hard to imagine, but certainly possible. U.S. officials along the border have been arrested for conspiring with smugglers. Corruption is not limited to the Mexican side of the border.
Crooked Cops
The Border Action Network is an Arizona-based group founded in 1999 that documents charges of abuse against the Border Patrol and other government agencies involved with securing the Mexican border. The list they post on their website of charges against Border Patrol agents gives credence to Juana María’s theory. Here are a few excerpts from that list from the era when she recounted her story:
Off-duty Border Patrol agent William Varas faces charges that he lied to authorities in July 2002 when he claimed that he fired his gun at immigrants only after they had first shot at him. Agent Matthew Hemmer was arrested in August 2000 on state charges of kidnapping, sexual assault and sexual abuse. A criminal complaint said Hemmer took an undocumented woman, then 21, to a remote location and sexually assaulted her before allowing her to return to Mexico. Agent Dennis Johnson, a former supervisor, was sentenced to seven years in prison for sexual assault and five years (concurrent) for kidnapping in connection with a September 28, 2000 incident. Johnson sexually assaulted a 23-year old El Salvadoran woman who was in custody, naked and handcuffed. Agent Charles Brown, a 23-year veteran, was arrested in November 2003 for allegedly selling classified information to a drug cartel. Brown worked in the agency’s intelligence unit.5
Juana María’s Solution
The Bush Administration’s 2004 election year proposal offering temporary worker status to Mexicans in the United States illegally was no solution to the border wars from Juana María’s point of view. Offering Green Cards is all well and good, she says, “but I feel bad that he wants to give permission for three years to work here, and then after three years you go back to your country.” She looks puzzled and disgusted by the suggestion. “You’re living your life here, you work so hard,” she points out with hurt pride, “now, go back? No. This is not an option.”
What is the solution for Juana María and the millions of other Mexicans living without documentation in the United States? “Amnesty for good persons,” she says. “So many persons come here for work, to have the best life.”
But why should someone who broke the law be given amnesty and the opportunity legally to pursue the American dream? Her answer comes immediately and without hesitation. “Because we work hard and we are important to the country, to help the country grow. And we grow too, because we have the best life.”
And the long-term solution? Should any determined Mexican who wants to come to the United States be greeted with a warm bienvenitos?
“No problem,” she agrees, “they can come.”
Does she favor an open border?
“Yes. Open the border.”
Her reasons are clear and come from personal experience.
“No business for the coyote. No people dead along the border. Then people in Mexico can come here and work, and the United States has cheap workers. That’s simple. Open the border and you have no problems. Then Mexican people can feel free to come here, like the Americans go to Mexico.”
If the border were open, where would Juana María prefer to live, Mexico or California?
“I love the life in California, but I miss my family,” she says, sounding a little dreamy.
Especially Christmas time, or New Year, when we make family parties. The traditions are so different comparing here to there. In Mexico we eat beans and cheese and tortillas, but every family is together. Here we have turkeys with everything, but I don’t feel happy. […] I mean, I feel happy because my kids have the best school, and we stay together with my husband. But I have a heart, and my heart is in Mexico.
