The Weight of Shadows (19 page)

The lighthouse just beyond the boundary seems like a cruel joke, a cliché symbol of finding your way home from open sea behind tons of metal that have destroyed countless homes. There's nothing ambiguous about my place here anymore, at least not officially. Officially I'm an American standing in front of a wall that's here to “protect” me from people who are not a threat to my safety or well-being. This new position is disorienting because it injures as it brings me into the fold. I'm no longer subject to the cruel and unusual punishment of being uprooted, expelled, and barred from returning for menial crimes. But it's also impossible for me not to be overwhelmed by the situation of approximately 11.5 million people, among whom friends like Octavio count themselves. Any contact with law enforcement could lead to indefinite detention and eventual expulsion, perhaps for life. Days become a walk along a dire edge, particularly for people who face added levels of structural vulnerability, like undocumented women who are often not able to report domestic abuse, sexual assault, and rape out of fear of making contact with law enforcement. Like undocumented LGBTQ populations that have been excluded from heteronormative, family-based immigration relief. Like people who have been convicted of crimes for whom almost no one advocates and who are frequently offered up as sacrificial populations for liberal reform. Since I've become a citizen, these realities that have always been very present for me have become acute. Being a brown graduate student and instructor at a primarily white institution of higher education means that in addition to the aggressive forms of racism I experience, there's a layer of mundane, casual, almost ambient racism that hangs in the halls and offices I move through. It's as though there's a piercingly high frequency going at all times that only some can hear, and when it finally knocks you off kilter, people then call you crazy. Even though my situation isn't as dire as it could be, isn't as dire as it once was, and isn't anywhere near
feeling the full weight empire can bring to bear, it feels as though I'm in a kind of indefinite, never-ending battle, and the territory being ruined is me, us.

Across the political spectrum one would easily find many who know that friendship is an inane metaphor to use for the relationship between states, and I agree, but maybe the terms of this cynicism betray a deeper naïveté, one that implies an idealized form of friendship that can produce a genuine or authentic connection with another. When it happens, maybe it feels as Aristotle characterized it, one soul occupying two bodies. Two people share not only a deep and abiding concern for the other, but as the unification would suggest, a harmony of interests. We often feel this apparent union to be inherently virtuous if it's genuinely enacted, and we assume that the psychological goodness we feel radiates over the horizon of self to interpersonal relationships, and beyond into the public and political spheres. But sometimes friendship goes bad or gets stale, and sometimes it was rotten to begin with—rotten for the friends, rotten for one of them, or good for the friends and rotten for those around them. Whatever its associated feelings, it's a bounded ethical relationship. These feelings of union drive exclusion and the privileging of some over others.

In the realm of the personal, encountering strangers is still possible. I encounter people I don't properly know, and in whom I don't immediately recognize myself, people whose experience is inaccessible to understanding through my own subjectivity. I even sometimes feel as though I've encountered aspects of the foreign within the boundaries of myself. States, on the other hand, have no strangers. The existence and operations of organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are evidence that the nations of the world are bound in inextricable ways. The idea that countries have control over their territory and domestic affairs to the exclusion
of external powers is a fiction, a particularly brutal one for so-called developing countries who have been continually “known” by affluent states from colonialism to globalism.

Friendship
is
inane, not because we haven't been virtuous enough as a nation to achieve it, but because its metaphorical application distorts reality. It's inane to imagine the psychological constructs, motivations, impulses, and tendencies of the individual are analogous to the operations of a state.

A short man wearing a NASCAR cap and light blue jeans walks up to the boundary from the other side. His skin is dark brown like mine and he looks like he's in his late forties. He surveys the scene like maybe he's waiting for someone, but we're the only ones there. In the background a couple of cars pitter down a street we can't see, and Caitlin takes a photo of the lighthouse through the metal crosshatching. The man approaches us, nodding.

“Buenas tardes.”

“Hola. Qué tal?”

He looks at both of us, and then at the fence, up and down theatrically. He says he's doing okay considering and asks us what we're doing here. Caitlin tells him we just wanted to see this thing, motioning to the wall between us. He says that down around the zona centro by Plaza de las Americas, there's a triple boundary with giant concrete blocks, and he says everything started with Pete Wilson, “that son-of-a-bitch governor who didn't even want to let the children of migrants go to school.” I nod, remembering Proposition 187 from my childhood, and how it was one of the moments I came to understand my family's situation a little more accurately. The man's voice begins to tighten, and his syllables become quick when he asks how many people have died because of this goddamn fence.

“Toda esa pinche paisanada,” he says, hitting his consonants hard.

He points away from the ocean and says that at the San Ysidro crossing they killed a man. I immediately recognize he's talking about Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, who'd lived in San Diego for twenty-seven years, since he was a child, and who at the time of his killing had five children of his own. He was a taxpaying builder who was arrested and deported for shoplifting. And he had been captured trying to get back to his family. In a postmortem toxicology report he was found to have methamphetamine in his system, a fact that was widely publicized when the story broke. Two medical experts characterized the amount of methamphetamine as small, and one said it was impossible to attribute any behavior at the time of his death to the drug. Initial reports of the incident misrepresented the number of agents involved. According to a subsequent investigation by the San Diego Police Department, agents removed Anastasio's handcuffs, and he “became violent.” The report says it was due to this violent behavior that agents were forced to use a Taser to subdue him. He died in the hospital. If it hadn't been for Anastasio's widow, Maria Puga, and groups of activists who supported her in her rejection of the official narrative, Anastasio's killing would have slipped quietly into oblivion—just another junked-out criminal righteously put down. But Maria and her supporters dredged up evidence. Several witnesses presented cell phone footage of the event. One video captured by Ashley Young, a woman from Seattle who was crossing back into the United States, shows a group of about twenty agents surrounding Anastasio while he's already hogtied and on the ground. It's at this point that an agent can be seen using a Taser on him. In another video agents descend violently on Anastasio as he's on the ground pleading for his life. The father and husband screams as the agents fatally
injure him. Witnesses said he was offering little to no resistance.

The man moves a bit closer to the metal boundary and lowers his voice. He says he's going to tell us something he hasn't told anyone except maybe one other person. He was on a hillside a while back in a rural area around midnight when a Customs and Border Protection agent picked him up. He was cuffed and roughed up, he says. The agent kicked him a few times before loading him into his Tahoe or Suburban or whatever it was. He immediately noticed the agent was alone, and this fact scared him. He was driven to another location, a desolate clearing he didn't recognize, where the agent turned off his vehicle and got out of the car. He says that when the agent pulled him out of the backseat, he thought he was going to die. He says he was sure the agent was going to give him “ley de fuga,” a well-known phrase in Mexico that refers to a kind of extrajudicial execution and cover-up that came to be known during Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship. The procedure involves agents of the state setting up scenarios in which a person is killed during an escape attempt.

The man says the agent removed his handcuffs and told him to go, but that he refused because he knew the agent was going to kill him as soon as he turned his back. He tells us he knows they would have said it was kidnappers or narcos, and that no one would have asked any questions. Add the body to the pile. Case closed. He begged and pleaded for the agent not to kill him, and eventually the officer just got back in his truck and drove away, leaving him in the wilderness to fend for himself.

I arrive by bus in Tucson late one afternoon and walk to a gas station where a volunteer will be picking me up. I signed up with a humanitarian aid group that leaves water in the desert for people attempting to cross the border, provides emergency medical treatment for those who may need it, and documents abuse suffered by people at various points in their journeys. By the time I make it there I'm dripping sweat because it's late July, I have a fifty pound bag strapped to my back, and the sun feels like it's a few feet away from my face. A rusted-out SUV pulls up and a young white guy with a scruffy beard rolls down his window.

“You José?”

“Yeah.”

“Hop in.”

Orientation for new volunteers starts a few hours later at a space the group has arranged in a small local church and school building in Tucson. A handful of young people, mostly white, sit around smoking in the courtyard for a while. We gather in a small classroom where an attorney comes in to give us some information so that we can make informed decisions in the desert. A couple of summers back, a jury of twelve convicted a volunteer of “knowingly littering”—for
leaving gallons of water for people in the 110-degree desert. We're told that people drink cow tank water—stagnant pools that cows wade, urinate, and defecate in—out of necessity. A former volunteer tells us that Border Patrol and Wackenhut GS4, a contractor paid by the government to transport migrants, don't often give people water or medical attention even though they know they've been journeying through the desert for days. We're told that two volunteers, a young woman and man, were arrested, and that a grand jury charged them with two felonies: conspiracy to transport an “illegal immigrant” and transporting an “illegal immigrant.” The volunteers had come upon a group of migrants who'd been traveling through the desert for four days, two days without food or water during the week that turned out to be, until then, the deadliest in Arizona history. It was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit for forty straight days, and seventy-eight people were known to have died. The volunteers were arrested while evacuating three men to a medical facility in Tucson. They rejected a plea that would have seen all charges dropped for an admission of guilt, instead risking a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison and fines of up to five hundred thousand dollars. The proceedings dragged on for about a year and a half. Eventually the charges were dropped.

A tall older man who looks like a cowboy joins us in the classroom. He takes off his beige felt hat and wipes the white hair on his sweaty forehead. He introduces himself as John Fife, a retired Presbyterian minister and cofounder of No More Deaths (NMD). In the eighties Fife also cofounded the sanctuary movement in the United States, a network that helped Central American refugees flee US-backed death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. He was arrested with others, and in 1986 Fife was found guilty of “conspiracy and two counts of aiding and abetting the illegal entry of Central American refugees into the US,” for which he served five years of probation. He tries to talk to all the volunteer groups. He tells us what he thinks this work means and that
he's glad we're here. Leaning on the wall behind him is a large map glued to a poster board. Depicting the border region south of Tucson, it's covered with hundreds of red dots, which he tells us represent the loss of human life. Almost six thousand deaths are marked on the map, and those are just the ones that have been counted.

After Fife leaves, a wilderness EMT shows us how to irrigate a wound and treat severe blisters. We learn that a moderately to severely dehydrated person needs to be given small amounts of water in intervals and that pinching someone's skin and seeing how long it takes to return to its shape is a way to gauge how dehydrated a person may be. We're told to ask everyone we encounter if they're urinating or defecating blood, because that can be a sign of a severe infection from drinking contaminated water. Each gallon of water, we're told, weighs eight and a half pounds, so it's impossible for people to carry enough. The border is eleven miles from where we'll be staying, a region of jagged mountains and arroyos that rise and fall in brutal configurations. It usually looks like a barren lunar landscape, but after monsoon season, which it is now, it's lush, and the arroyos can flood in seconds and sweep away anyone who may be walking in them to avoid detection.

Volunteers sleep in small classrooms at the church. Just before turning out the lights I see a translucent scorpion the size of a domino in the corner and crush it with one of my boots. I arrange foldout chairs in a row and manage to sleep on them. The next morning we drive sixty miles south to Arivaca with the windows down. It rained at dawn, and things are a lot more lush than I'd expected. I draw in thick air with a deep clean smell. A young woman in the car says that people think the smell is rain, but it's really rain mixing with the waxy resin of the creosote bush that gives the desert its fresh, wide-open smell after a downpour. She points out the window at brittle-looking scrub along the road. It looks
unimpressive, but it may have been the bush through which God spoke to Moses in fire, and it can live for two, sometimes three years without a drop of rain. She says one of the oldest living organisms on earth is a ring of creosote that's been cloning itself for almost twelve thousand years in the Mojave.