Читать книгу Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions - Valeria Luiselli - Страница 6

“Why did you come to the United States?” That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.

But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

When the intake interview with a child is over, I meet with lawyers to deliver and explain my transcription and occasional notes. The lawyers then analyze the child’s responses, trying to come up with options for a viable defense against a child’s deportation and the “potential relief” he or she is likely to get. The next step is to find legal representation. Once an attorney has agreed to take on a case, the real legal battle begins. If that battle is won, the child will obtain some form of immigration relief. If it is lost, they will receive a deportation order from a judge.

I watch our own children sleep in the back seat of the car as we cross the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. I glance back now and then from the copilot’s seat at my ten-year-old stepson, visiting us from Mexico, and my five-year-old daughter. Behind the wheel, my husband concentrates on the road ahead.

It is the summer of 2014. We are waiting for our green cards to be either granted or denied and, in the meantime, we decide to go on a family road trip. We will drive from Harlem, New York, to a town in Cochise County, Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to the slightly offensive parlance of U.S. immigration law, for the three years or so that we had lived in New York we had been “nonresident aliens.” That’s the term used to describe anyone from outside the United States—“alien”—whether or not they are residents. There are “nonresident aliens,” “resident aliens,” and even “removable aliens”—that I know of. We wanted to become “resident aliens,” even though we knew what applying for green cards implied: the lawyers, the expenses, the many vaccinations and medical exams, the months of sustained uncertainty, the rather humiliating intermediate steps, such as having to wait for an “advance parole” document in order to be able to leave the country and be paroled back in, like a criminal, as well as the legal prohibition against traveling abroad, without losing immigration status, before being granted advance parole. Despite all that, we decided to apply.

When we finally sent out our applications, a few weeks before leaving for our road trip, we started feeling strange, somewhat out of place, a little circumspect—as if throwing that envelope in the blue mailbox on our street corner had changed something in us. We joked, somewhat frivolously, about the possible definitions of our new, now pending, migratory status. Were we “pending aliens,” or “writers seeking status,” or “alien writers,” or maybe “pending Mexicans”? I suppose, deeper down, we were simply asking ourselves, perhaps for the first time, that same question I now ask children at the beginning of each intake interview: “Why did you come to the United States?”

We didn’t have a clear answer. No one ever does. But the deed was done, we had filed our applications, and while we waited for an answer we were not allowed to leave the country. So, when summer arrived, we bought maps, rented a car, packed a few basics, made playlists, and left New York.

The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! The green card questionnaire has a retro kind of candor, like the grainy Cold War films we watched on VHS. The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hand, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it were written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined.

The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus.

Before the formal screening begins, the person conducting it has to fill in basic biographical information: the child’s name, age, and country of birth, the name of a sponsor in the United States, the people with whom he or she is living at the time, and a contact number and address. All these details have to be written down at the very top of the questionnaire.

A few spaces down, right before the first formal interview question, a line floats across the page like an uncomfortable silence:

Where is the child’s mother?_________father?_________

The interviewer has to write down whatever information the child can or will give to fill in those blanks—those two empty spaces that look a bit like badly stitched wounds. Too often, the spaces remain blank: all the children come without their fathers and mothers. And many of them do not even know where their parents are.

We are driving across Oklahoma in early July when we first hear about the wave of children arriving, alone and undocumented, at the border. On our long westbound drives we begin to follow the story on the radio. It’s a sad story that hits so close to home and yet seems completely unimaginable, almost unreal: tens of thousands of children from Mexico and Central America have been detained at the border. Nothing is clear in the initial coverage of the situation—which soon becomes known, more widely, as an immigration crisis, though others will advocate for the more accurate term “refugee crisis.”

Questions, speculations, and opinions flash-flood the news during the days that follow. Who are these children? What will happen to them? Where are the parents? Where will they go next? And why, why did they come to the United States?

“Why did you come to the United States?” I ask children in immigration court.

Their answers vary, but they often point to a single pull factor: reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier. Other times, the answers point to push factors—the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme violence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.

Then comes question number two in the intake questionnaire: “When did you enter the United States?” Most children don’t know the exact date. They smile and say “last year” or “a few months ago” or simply “I don’t know.” They’ve fled their towns and cities; they’ve walked and swum and hidden and run and mounted freight trains and trucks. They’ve turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers. They’ve come all this way looking for—for what, exactly? The questionnaire doesn’t make these other inquiries. But it does ask for precise details: “When did you enter the United States?”

As we drive deeper into the country, following the enormous map I take from the glove box and study from time to time, the summer heat becomes drier, the light thinner and whiter, the roads more solitary. We start hunting down any available information about the undocumented children and the situation at the border. We collect local newspapers, which pile on the floor of our car, in front of my copilot seat. We do constant, quick online searches and tune in to the radio every time we can catch a signal.

More questions, speculations, and opinions flood media coverage of the crisis: some sources elaborate lucid and complex conjectures on the origin and possible causes of the sudden surge of arrivals of unaccompanied minors, others denounce the inhumane conditions and systematic maltreatment the children must endure in detention facilities near the border, and a few others endorse the spontaneous civilian protests against them.

A caption in a web publication explains an unsettling photograph of men and women waving flags, banners, and rifles in the air: “Protesters, some exercising their open-carry rights, assemble outside of the Wolverine Center in Vassar [Michigan] that would house illegal juveniles to show their dismay for the situation.” In another photograph that we find on the web, an elderly couple holds signs saying “Illegal Is a Crime” and “Return to Senders.” They are sitting on beach chairs, wearing sunglasses. A caption explains, “Thelma and Don Christie (C) of Tucson demonstrate against the arrival of undocumented immigrants in Oracle, Arizona. July 15, 2014.” I zoom in on their faces and wonder. What passed through the minds of Thelma and Don Christie when they prepared their protest signs? Did they pencil in “protest against illegal immigrants” on their calendars, right next to “mass” and just before “bingo”? What were they thinking when they put their beach chairs inside their trunk? And what did they talk about as they drove the forty miles or so north, toward the protest in Oracle?

In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen—these menacing, coffee-colored boys and girls, with their obsidian hair and slant eyes. They will fall from the skies, on our cars, on our green lawns, on our heads, on our schools, on our Sundays. They will make a racket, they will bring their chaos, their sickness, their dirt, their brownness. They will cloud the pretty views, they will fill the future with bad omens, they will fill our tongues with barbarisms. And if they are allowed to stay here they will—eventually—reproduce!

We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.

In a diner near Roswell, New Mexico, we overhear a conversation between a waitress and a customer. As she refills his coffee, she tells him that hundreds of migrant kids will be put on private planes—rumored to have been funded by a patriotic millionaire—and deported that same day back to Honduras, or Mexico, or somewhere. The planes full of “alien” children will leave from an airport not far from the famous UFO museum, the one our children have been set on visiting. The term “alien,” which only a few weeks ago made us laugh and speculate, which we had been passing around the car as an inside family joke, is suddenly shown to us under a bleaker light. It’s strange how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic.

The next day, driving out of Roswell, we look for news on what happened with those deportees. We find no details of the exact circumstances under which they were deported, or how many there were, and if it’s true that a local millionaire financed their removal. We do, however, come across these lines in a Reuters report that read like the beginning of a cruel, absurdist story by Mikhail Bulgakov or Daniil Kharms: “Looking happy, the deported children exited the airport on an overcast and sweltering afternoon. One by one, they filed into a bus, playing with balloons they had been given.” We dwell for a while on the adjective “happy” and the strangely meticulous description of the local weather in San Pedro Sula, Honduras: “an overcast and sweltering afternoon.” But what we really cannot stop reproducing, somewhere in the dark back of our minds, is the uncanny image of the children holding those balloons.

In our long daily drives, to fill in the empty hours, we sometimes tell our children stories about the old American Southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. I tell them about Saint Patrick’s Battalion, the group of Irish Catholic soldiers who joined the U.S. Army as cannon fodder during the Mexican-American War, but later changed sides to fight along with the Mexicans. I tell them about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed after that war, in which Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Their father tells them about President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, approved by Congress in 1830, and explains how it brutally exiled Native Americans to reservations. He tells them about Geronimo, Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, and the other Chiricahua Apaches: the last inhabitants of a continent to surrender to the white-eyes, after years of battle against both the U.S. Bluecoats and the Mexican Army. Those last Chiricahua resisted for many more years after the Indian Removal Act was passed. They finally surrendered in 1886 and were “removed” to the San Carlos Reservation—in southern Arizona, toward which we are now driving. It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal” is still used to refer to the deportation of “illegal” immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the “Land of the Free.”

When we run out of stories to tell our children, we fall silent and look out at the unbroken line of the highway, perhaps trying to put together the many pieces of the story—the unimaginable story—unfolding just outside the small and protected world of our rented car. Though all of it resists a rational explanation, we talk it over and consider its many angles. We try to answer our own children’s questions about the situation as best we can. But we don’t do very well. How do you explain any of this to your own children?

The third and fourth questions on the intake questionnaire are ones that our children, too, ask many times, though in their own words: “With whom did you travel to this country?” and “Did you travel with anyone you knew?” All children travel with a paid coyote. Some of them travel also with siblings, cousins, and friends.

Sometimes, when our children fall asleep again, I look back at them, or hear them breathe, and wonder if they would survive in the hands of coyotes and what would happen to them if they were deposited at the U.S. border, left either on their own or in the custody of Border Patrol officers. Were they to find themselves alone, crossing borders and countries, would my own children survive?

The fifth and sixth questions are: “What countries did you pass through?” and “How did you travel here?” To the first one, almost everyone immediately answers “Mexico,” and some also list Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. To the question about how they traveled here, with a blend of pride and horror, most say, “I came on La Bestia,” which literally means “the beast,” and refers to the freight trains that cross Mexico, on top of which as many as half a million Central American migrants ride annually. There are no passenger services along the routes, so migrants have to ride atop the railcars or in the recesses between them.

Thousands have died or been gravely injured aboard La Bestia, either because of the frequent derailments of the old freight trains or because people fall off during the night. The most minor oversight can be fatal. Some compare La Bestia to a demon, others to a kind of vacuum that sucks distracted riders down into its metal entrails. And when the train itself is not the threat, it’s the smugglers, thieves, policemen, or soldiers who frequently threaten, blackmail, or attack the people on board. There is a saying about La Bestia: Go in alive, come out a mummy.

But, despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don’t think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along with it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half-stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.

La Bestia’s routes start either in the town of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, or in Tenosique, in the state of Tabasco—both towns near the Mexico-Guatemala border. They slowly make their way up to the U.S.-Mexico border, following either the eastern Gulf route to Reynosa, the border town near the southeasternmost tip of Texas, or the western routes that lead either to Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua, or to Nogales, in Sonora, which share borders with Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

The journey atop La Bestia’s freight trains ends at the U.S.-Mexico border. And there begins another journey: one that is not as dangerous, objectively speaking, but is equally terrifying in the children’s eyes. Once off La Bestia, and having reached the border, the coyotes’ job is usually done and the children are on their own. They try to turn themselves in to the migra, or Border Patrol, as soon as possible. They know their best bet is to be formally detained by Border Patrol officers: crossing the desert beyond the border alone is too dangerous, if not impossible. They also know that if they are not caught at this point, or if they do not surrender themselves to the law, it is unlikely that they will arrive at their final destination—the home of a relative in some city, usually far from the border. If the legal proceedings don’t begin now, their fate will be to remain undocumented, like many of their parents or adult relatives already in the United States. Life as an undocumented migrant is perhaps not worse than the life they are fleeing, but it is certainly not the life that anyone wants. So, the children who cross the border, into the desert, try to stick to the busier roads and walk openly along highways, until someone—hopefully an officer and not a vigilante—sees them.

I remember a teenager who, during an interview in court, told me of his increasing desperation when, after hours of walking the arid plains of New Mexico, the Border Patrol still hadn’t appeared. It was not until his second day of walking in the desert under the burning sun that a vehicle finally appeared on the far horizon. He stood in the middle of the road, waving his arms. And when the vehicle pulled over beside him, to his immense relief, two tall officers stepped out and detained him.

My mom always told me I was born under a lucky star, he said when he finished his story.

As soon as a child is in the custody of Border Patrol officials, he or she is placed in a detention center, commonly known as the hielera, or the “icebox.” The icebox derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody. The name also points out the fact that the detention centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat doesn’t go bad too quickly—naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs. The children are treated more like carriers of diseases than children. In July 2015, for example, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) filed a complaint after learning that in a detention center in Dilley, Texas, 250 children were mistakenly given adult-strength hepatitis A vaccinations. The children became gravely ill and had to be hospitalized.

By law, the maximum time a person can remain in the icebox is seventy-two hours, but children are often kept for longer, subject not only to the inhumane conditions and frigid temperatures but also to verbal and physical mistreatment. They sometimes have nowhere to lie down to sleep, are not allowed to use the bathrooms as frequently as they need to, and are underfed.

They only give out frozen sandwiches twice a day there, another teenager I once screened told me.

That’s all you ate? I asked.

No, not me.

What do you mean, not you?

I didn’t eat those things.

Why not?

Because they give belly-sadness.

As we drive from southwestern New Mexico toward Arizona, it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the uncomfortable irony of it: we are traveling in the direction opposite to the children whose stories we are now following so closely. As we get closer to the border and begin taking back roads, we do not see a single migrant—child or adult. We see other things, though, that indicate their ghostly presence, past or future. Along the narrow dirt road in New Mexico that goes from a ghost town called Shakespeare to another town called Animas we see a trail of flags that volunteer groups tie to trees or fences, indicating that there are tanks filled with water there for people to drink as they cross the desert. Occasionally, we are overtaken by big pickup trucks, and it’s hard not to imagine the men behind their steering wheels: big men with beards or shaved heads or abundant tattoos; vigilant, patriotic men who carry pistols and rifles by constitutional right and feel entitled to use them if they see a group of aliens walking in the desert. As we approach Animas, we also begin to see fleeting herds of Border Patrol cars like ominous white stallions racing toward the horizon.

We decide not to tell anyone in diners and gas stations that we are Mexican, just in case. But we are stopped a few times by Border Patrol officials and have to show our passports and display big smiles when we explain we are just writers and just on vacation. We have to confirm that yes, we are only writers, even if yes, we are also Mexican. Why are we there and what are we writing—they always want to know.

We are writing a Western, sir.

That’s what we tell them, that we are writing a Western. We also tell them we came to Arizona for the open skies and the silence and the emptiness—this second part, more true than the part about writing the Western, which is untrue. Handing back our passports, one official says sardonically:

So you come all the way down here for the inspiration.

We know better than to contradict anyone who carries a badge and a gun, so we just say:

Yes, sir.

Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.

We roll the windows up and keep driving. To distract ourselves from the aftertaste of the Border Patrol encounter, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle. One song that often pops up is “Straight to Hell” by the Clash. We didn’t suspect that that song would become a kind of leitmotif of our trip. Who would have known that a song partly about the post-Vietnam War “Amerasian” children and their exclusion from the American Dream would become, forty years later, a song about Central American children in the American Nightmare. Its icy lines—about no-man’s land, about a place with no asylum—give me belly-sadness.

Question seven on the questionnaire is “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?” The children seldom give details of their experiences along the journey through Mexico upon a first screening, and it’s not necessarily useful to push them for more information. What happens to them between their home countries and their arrival in the United States can’t always help their defense before an immigration judge, so the question doesn’t make up a substantial part of the interview. But, as a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else.

The numbers tell horror stories.

Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333.

Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico.

Beyond the terrifying but abstract statistics, many horror stories have recently tattooed themselves in the collective social conscience in Mexico. One specific story, though, became a turning point. On August 24, 2010, the bodies of seventy-two Central and South American migrants were found, piled up in a mass grave, at a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Some had been tortured, and all had been shot in the back of the head. Three migrants in the group had faked their deaths and, though wounded, survived. They lived to tell the complete story: members of the drug cartel Los Zetas had perpetrated the mass murder after the migrants had refused to work for them and did not have the means to pay a ransom.

I remember the dark days when this news broke out in Mexico—thousands or perhaps millions of people in front of newspapers, radios, and TV screens, all of them asking: How? Why? What did we do? Where did we go wrong, as a society, to make something like this possible? Even now, we don’t know the answer. No one does. What we do know is that, since then, hundreds of additional mass graves have been discovered. Every month, every week, they continue to be discovered. And even though the story of “Los 72”—the seventy-two men and women, girls and boys, all brutally murdered—changed the way in which both Mexican society and the rest of the world views the situation of migrants crossing Mexican territory, nothing has actually been done about it.

There are, of course, some redeeming stories in Mexico. There is the story of Las Patronas, the group of women in Veracruz who, years ago, started throwing bottled water and food to the migrants aboard La Bestia and are now a formal humanitarian group. There are also the many shelters that offer food and refuge to migrants as they travel through Mexico, the most well-known of which is Hermanos en el Camino, run by Father Alejandro Solalinde. But these stories—small oases in the no-man’s-land Mexico has become—are only exceptions. If anything, they are fleeting glints of hope in the dark and raucous nightmare where the metal wheels of La Bestia continually screech and howl.