How scared should people on the border be?
The news here on the border with Mexico travels fast. Most of it is, in fact, “fake news” – conjecture and unverifiable gossip exchanged over “el Feisbuk,” which is what people here in the Rio Grande Valley call the social network. Instead of snapshots and emojis, it now disseminates warnings. People are frightened, and frightened people repeat things that frighten them more:
Stay at home tomorrow. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting raids in the kitchens.
Don’t send your kids to school on Wednesday. The border patrol is looking for kids with no papers. Don’t drive down 802 on Fridays anymore. There’s a checkpoint at the grocery store. They arrested 100 people last night at 10. Who knows? Some of it might be true. You can’t drive much farther south in Texas than Brownsville, a city separated from its Mexican neighbor by an iron fence, like an exclusive country club or drug dealer’s hacienda. It’s a border town, and one that has been suspiciously quiet while its future is bandied about in Washington by a president who equates “making America great again” to “getting the Mexicans out.”
Much of the Rio Grande Valley abuts the fence, which stretches some 650 miles and was built in 2006 for $7 billion. The fence has done little to deter smuggling. Drug cartels, being crafty criminals, get around it in any number of ways: tunnels, light aircraft, homemade submarines, even T-shirt cannons fired over the fence.
Smugglers of humans have adapted as well, using similar techniques (minus the T-shirt cannons). The main effect of making it harder to get across the border has been to create a greater need for coyotes – people, many of whom have ties to the cartels, who will help you cross for pay. This means even more trauma for migrants, including robbery, rape, ransoming and murder.
Many of those who make it across end up staying here, on the border, because there’s another checkpoint an hour and a half north, at Sarita.
There are two border towns in every border town. There’s the one I’ve recently discovered, which is deeply involved in local schools, has air conditioning and Wi-Fi, and drives comfortably appointed tanks that pass as cars. It has Snapchat for the kids who do their homework, all the cable in the world and so, so much food.
In this town, every Sunday is reason enough for barbecue, guacamole and limes picked fresh from the tree, squeezed right into your beer.
Then there is the other border town, where I was raised back in the 1970s. It lives directly behind the first. It avoids eye contact. It cooks in the kitchens and manicures your St. Augustine grass and is paid – not much – by the hour. Those people – not your criminals or rapists or “bad hombres” – are waiting and waiting to take a swipe at that golden lie of the “American dream” they endured thousands of treacherous miles worthy of a Tolkien novel to reach.
And while they wait, they work. Any work. They struggle through tertiary economies – reselling clothes, furniture or appliances at roadside stands, making tamales or tortillas in garages, setting up hair salons in living rooms (men’s cuts $7), cleaning houses and offices and schools, mowing, cutting, picking. They always work. The work is compulsory.
These two towns have lived side by side peacefully for generations. It’s like a tide meeting a shore, a pattern repeated naturally, with a telescoping logic: There’s the border in the border town, then the border town in Texas, then Texas in the United States, then the United States in the world. Now invert it: There’s the world, there’s America, there’s Texas, there’s the border town and finally, within the town, there’s still another world, waiting to get in.
Before I moved back to Brownsville in January, I’d spent 23 years in Seattle. Throughout last year’s election, I watched the news with the eyes of a West Coast liberal. As the veneer of social decorum paled and then vanished, we sat around being entertained by progressive news shows. Even after the confounding results of the election, we felt reassured and validated in our perception of the world, our ability to call out hypocrisy in institutions and governments, lawyers and hedge fund managers.
Then I came home. Now I see, up close, the impact that election could have on people I know who are very much in danger of losing everything.
They were burning the sugar cane when I came back. Slow-moving trucks with loud speakers drove around the fields calling out in Spanish that if anyone was hiding in there, it was best to get out: The fields were about to burn. It wasn’t a trick. No one was going to arrest you. Just get out.
The border was making a humanist accommodation. I wasn’t certain why, but this put a knot in my throat. I felt something akin to pride.
Lately there have been images on the evening news of gendarmes in ICE jackets knocking on doors, terrified children crying, portly Latin men in handcuffs, Border Patrol agents hydrating migrants in dirty ball caps before escorting them away for processing – the stuff of nightmares for the vulnerable.
Conversely, there are stories about the parasites on the side of “the peoples.” The immigration “lawyers” who convince non-English speakers to pay thousands of dollars earned $5 an hour for a sheet of paper with official-looking letterhead on it, convincing them that it will be enough “papeles” to ward off the most insistent of warrant knocks. A new kind of frontier snake oil.
When I first came back, I wanted to accompany my father on a trip across the border into Matamoros for a pharmacy run – his Medicare covered only so much of his prescriptions, and he could get triple the amount for the same price there, and I wanted to (cough cough) refill some of my own scripts.
Dad took a step back and looked at me: “¡Hombre, estas pendejo! ¡Te secuestraran en cuanto te vean!” You’re a goddamned idiot, he said. They’ll kidnap you the minute they see you.
He thinks I look like a “bolillo.” A white guy. Which is funny, because when my friends on the West Coast looked at me, I could tell they were envisioning a big floppy hat and crisscrossed bandoleers and fantastic revolvers.
What frustrates me most about this border town is how passively it awaits its sentence from the bolillos from afar. Marches and demonstrations, “Days Without an Immigrant,” they happen only in faraway cities. Not here. It bewildered me at first, and then I understood: Oh, yeah. Probably not the smartest thing for people here to do, drawing attention to themselves right at the border.
Like America, this place is split in two. One half is barbecuing. The other is in danger of losing everything
“Terrified of deportation? Let’s march and make ourselves known!”
Civil disobedience is the stuff of privilege, as alt-right keyboard cowboys love to point out on bulletin boards, because the people who really have something to lose don’t want to be publicly marked. Reports of people apprehended for immigration violations pollinate the news daily: a father arrested right after dropping his daughter off at school; a battered woman arrested in the courthouse where she had gone to seek protection from her violent boyfriend; an immigrant kept in a detention center despite having a brain tumor.
But is all this really a result of the new political climate? Or are we just hearing about it more, thanks to the hysteria propagated on el Feisbuk?
The Trump administration has said that the government will stop exempting “classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” But no new laws have been passed. If you ask the Border Patrol and ICE, they say there have been no changes in policy down here at the border, or none that they’re willing to admit.
Some of the stock images we see on the news are from long before the last election, or instances in which warrants are being served after months of investigation. ICE does not actually have crack detectives who drink coffee outside a suspect’s mother’s house, waiting until he comes home for Christmas to nab him.
It might be months before the aftershocks of the new administration’s ministrations finally reach the frontier and we see the actual effect of its new policies.
But will the president’s dream of a new and bigger wall change anything down here? Very likely not. Tunnels will be dug deeper. Cannons aimed higher. Ladders built taller. Coyotes will charge more. And most of the people building the wall will be Hispanic. In fact, dozens of the companies bidding for the contract are owned by Hispanics. Racism and self-loathing aside, ethics are the stuff of the comfortable: Down here, work is work. The Guardian quoted a Puerto Rican businessman who voiced a fairly universal attitude toward the $25 billion project:
“I think the wall is a waste of time and money,” said Patrick Balcazar, the owner of San Diego Project Management. “For environmental reasons, it’s dumb. From an economic point of view, it’s dumb.” But he said: “If you want to put up a wall, I’m going to put up the best wall I can and I’m going to pay my people. My goal is to build a wall so I can make enough money so we can turn this thing around and tear down the wall again.”
Or quicker to the point: “We don’t see it as politics,” said Jorge Diaz, who manages De la Fuente Construction. “We just see it as work.”
For once, I’d like to hear something good come out of this part of the world, just to shake things up. The only news to come out of South Texas is framed in the superlative, and not positively: extraordinary poverty, profound rates of illiteracy, generations-deep nepotism, off-the-charts diabetes, casual civil-rights abuses, untreated wastewater in the Rio Grande, the mythical crossover border violence and the mosquitoes.
Lots to be proud of, really, when you reverse it, and consider them obstacles to overcome that make people, or a place, who they are. Perhaps that’s why the Rio Grande Valley has so many proud sons and daughters.
I’m a citizen, born in Brownsville; I have no personal reason to worry. But I do, now, carry my passport and another form of ID with me when I leave the house, as if this were Eastern Europe in the buildup to World War II. Why tempt fate? Down here, it used to be that your command of English could see you waltz through a traffic stop. There were times in the ‘80s when I was a teenager and my friends and I could hardly speak from drinking, and we’d still be allowed back across the border after a night in Matamoros. But those days are gone.
Now, whenever I see any uniformed personnel, I quietly activate my civil, American posture and prepare to level my voice out and stand guard over my father and his status as a naturalized citizen, if the need arises.
Which, again, is mealy-mouthed, knee-jerk liberal posturing, because in reality, his 71 years of experience here, his own adaptation to his environment, will see him through what’s next, as will this border, which has lived through wars and political mood swings and buffoons and bloviates before, without the help of el Feisbuk, or people like me.
Domingo Martinez is the author of the memoirs ‘The Boy Kings of Texas’ and ‘My Heart Is a Drunken Compass.’