Braceros in Murder City
EL PASO, TEXAS, AND CIUDAD JUAREZ, CHIHUAHUA
WE HAD FIRST MET PONCHO SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE AT A conference at the University of Barcelona. I’d been invited there to show The Guestworker, a documentary film I directed with Cynthia Hill about a sixty-six-year-old Mexican farmworker who made an annual trip from Mexico to North Carolina to work in farm fields as part of the guest worker program known as H2A. After the screening, Poncho, the only Mexican citizen in the audience, was the first to stand and respond. With tears streaming down his face, he spoke about the film’s resonance with the ex-Bracero workers he had worked with. He told the audience that he had interviewed people in their eighties and nineties, learning about their border crossings, the harsh conditions of their labor, and their struggle to get the retirement benefits they had earned. Their stories linked directly with the film, he said, even though they had been in the U.S. fields two generations earlier. Afterward we sat together at dinner to talk about collaborations. He invited me to work with him in Mexico.
Poncho, whose full name is Luis Alfonso Herrera Robles, grew up in Ciudad Juarez, worked in maquiladora factories as a teenager, and eventually climbed from low-paid jobs to higher education. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Barcelona and was reuniting with his grad school colleagues at the conference when I met him. Despite his success, Poncho had remained devoted to his Juarez family and the workers he had come to know in his hometown—returning to teach there even when he had other opportunities. His research focuses on labor, mostly in Juarez. In a book he wrote about the city titled La Sociedad Del Abandono (The Abandoned Society), he uses the term “societal abandonment” regarding the condition of the poor and working class. In contrast, his work has been to reach out and work with them.
Ex-Braceros gathered in Benito Juarez Park in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, for their weekly demonstration for retirement benefits.
Poncho had been present with the Braceros of Juarez every Sunday he was in town, joining them at the Benito Juarez Park and often bringing his students to help draw attention to the cause. Their plea was simple: give us the retirement benefits we earned when we went as replacement workers for GIs who left farms during World War II. As Poncho’s mentor, Professor Manuel Robles, explained, the Braceros know they may not receive payment in their lifetimes, but they demonstrate in the park every week to make a statement, not only for themselves but also on behalf of present-day workers who have not received their due.
. . .
HOPE AND I DROVE north more than a hundred miles from Seminole Canyon on Route 295, turned west onto Interstate 10, and headed toward Juarez. We were to meet Poncho at his university, where he wanted me to show my film at a conference. We were jumping past some of the border locations in order to make the scheduled date. We would return to the missed parts a few days later.
We had been on the interstate only a short distance when we noticed the traffic beginning to back up ahead of us and concrete barricades funneling vehicles into a Border Patrol inspection area. We could see dozens of Border Patrol vehicles parked along both sides of the highway. We inched ahead, knowing the drill.
As we neared the checkpoint, we caught sight of Border Patrol officers escorting five scared white college-age kids, male and female, toward the temporary patrol headquarters. The youths, who had been traveling along the interstate several hours from the border, were already in plastic handcuffs, their hands restrained behind their backs. Officers had each one by the arm as they guided them along. Drug possession was our guess. But of course they weren’t at all the stereotypical narcotrafficantes we’ve heard so much about, the implied targets of so many billions of tax dollars; they were nothing like the sinister drug lords from the Medellin Cartel. If they were, in fact, being taken in for drugs, their arrest revealed the great paradox of the “drug war.”
We go after the bad guys, we say, while so much of the demand for drugs comes from white middle-class America. Though Americans typically think “other” when we think drug trafficking, the enemy is also us. We intend to target the ones who sell the contraband to the kids, who bring it across the line by the tractor-trailer load: the drug sellers from the border who look like Hollywood’s version of crooks. Say “drug trafficking” and chances are some could picture Latinos or stereotypical low-income inner-city black neighborhoods as depicted in the HBO series The Wire.
White suburban kids may play around with drugs, but typically they finish college and get jobs. Their communities protest if the police get too aggressive around where they live. So the inner-city black and brown youth are the ones arrested, and their records build, and they bear the brunt of the domestic side of the drug war as our society abandons them. At the border we pump billions into the wall and into traffic stops as well. Yet on that day the system caught five middle-class white kids with no visible intent to cross the border. I felt sympathy for the frightened parents who would get the calls and soon head to a detention center to post bond, but I guessed from the kids’ car and clothing that the parents had money to hire good lawyers.
. . .
A FEW CAR LENGTHS beyond the office, we pulled up to a covered shelter where a Border Patrol agent asked to see my driver’s license and registration. “How are you, sir?” he said, as he looked over the documents. We exchanged the usual niceties. Then he asked, “Where are you headed today?”
I didn’t answer, but in my friendliest voice I asked a question in return. “I’m curious, sir, how much information am I required to give you at these stops? I mean, what does the law say that I have to answer when you ask where I’m going?” Without showing any emotion or surprise, he replied, “We’re just trying to make conversation and any information people give us is by mutual consent.” He said no more, but dropped the questioning, and after looking over my license for a second more, stepped back to wave us through. “Thank you and have a good afternoon!” I’d just experienced white privilege and I knew it.
Then we drove on toward Murder City, one of the world’s capitals of drug and human trafficking, where only a few days before a fifteen-year-old boy had lost his life for allegedly throwing rocks. Meanwhile, I could push back with such a question from an officer. I knew that wasn’t possible for everyone. Still, I knew it wasn’t smart to reveal we were headed to Juarez. Better to let that fact lie.
. . .
WE ENTERED THE El Paso city limits and turned southward toward the city center. Arriving early, but not really wanting to go into Juarez without getting our bearings, we parked the car and walked awhile in the deserted Saturday downtown, with no particular destination in mind. After going a few blocks we found ourselves in the spacious pedestrian area called Pioneer Square staring up at the fourteen-foot statue of Fray García de San Francisco. Without planning to, we had stumbled upon the marker for the route by which religious evangelization came to the Southwest: El Camino Real, or “the royal highway.”
The plaque below the García statue explained that the Spanish friar had arrived in El Paso in 1659 by traveling the camino from central Mexico. Hernán Cortés himself had traveled the first section of the road, from today’s Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, in 1521. After the discovery of silver in the Zacatecas Mountains, Spaniards extended a second leg northward. In 1595, Juan de Oñate, conquistador, silver baron, and husband of Cortés’s granddaughter, received authority from King Philip of Spain to extend the Camino Real for a third leg: beyond the Zacatecas Mountains through the Chihuahua Desert and into what is today part of the United States.
Oñate and his men rode their horses across the Rio Grande near today’s El Paso and became the first Spaniards to see the area.1 Near the river they came in contact with the Manso and Suma peoples whose ancestors had lived at the site for thousands of years. Oñate then followed one of the Manso/Suma trading paths farther north and west. By 1598, some three years after his arrival, Oñate had claimed all of what is now western Texas and New Mexico for Spain. Soon afterward, the king appointed him as the new province’s governor.
Sixty-one years later, in 1659, Fray Garcia, the missionary depicted in the statue, traveled the same road to the river, where he established the Manso Indian Mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe. According to the plaque in the square, his permanent mission at the Pass to the North led to the founding of the twin international cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cuidad Juarez, Chihuahua. Measured by Manso history, he was a latecomer, but the monument deemed him the founder.
The sculpture also depicts García building the mission single-handedly. His right arm is wrapped around the lintel beam bearing the mission’s name and the year it was founded. The name is intertwined with grapevines—a symbol, says the plaque, of his introduction of European agriculture to the region. It doesn’t mention the Manso crops alongside the river. It doesn’t mention that European agriculturists depended on indigenous seeds and labor for their survival. It also leaves out the likelihood that the Manso or Suma people were probably the ones who lifted the lintel and the rest of the materials to build the mission. I had now started questioning every bit of history I read and searching for the lost and the erased under every stated fact.
For decades to come, many Catholic fathers traveled northward through El Paso on their way to establish missions in all of New Spain. Many of their picturesque missions in Mexico and what is now the U.S. Southwest remain intact today, including the first mission that the Fray had built in Juarez. El Paso, the name the Spaniards gave the place, lives on despite the fact that the river is but a trickle and the ford across it long ago fell from use. Of course, calling the border city where today a major wall separates two countries “El Paso” is full of irony. El Muro, the wall, is more like it.
. . .
IN 2007 JUAN DE OÑATE, the conquistador of El Paso, made national news. A major historical controversy had arisen when the city commissioned sculptor John Sherrill Houser to create a statue of Oñate at the airport—thereby making the conqueror a symbol of today’s city. It was to be the largest bronze equestrian statue ever made. Agreeing to the deal, Houser began referring publicly to his work-in-progress as the “last conquistador.” When indigenous leaders began to get wind of the work, they protested. The Pueblo Indians took the lead. Their fight intensified when they realized the statue would be of a mounted rider rearing triumphantly on his horse as though celebrating his victory.
Native American peoples, they argued, had been using the pass across the Rio for millennia before Oñate’s arrival. But even more grievous was that Oñate’s men had killed and tortured many of the Pueblos’ ancestors. Shortly after their arrival in Acoma, Oñate’s mutinous soldiers began to prey upon the community, raping Pueblo women and enslaving and stealing from the tribe. In retaliation, the Indians rebelled and killed eleven Spanish soldiers, including Oñate’s nephew. Gregory Rodriguez, a Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote in 2007, “Onate’s response was swift and harsh, wiping out their village, killing hundreds of men, women and children and famously severing one foot of each adult male survivor.”2 The massacre was so horrific that the governor of Mexico punished Oñate, a rarity for its time. Oñate received a fine, was banished from Mexico City for four years, and exiled from the territory known as New Mexico for life.
Given this outrageous past, Native American activists and their supporters demanded that Oñate’s name be withdrawn from the statue. They picketed at the statue’s site, some of them holding signs reading, “Oñate? My foot!” Though the dedication of the statue continued as planned and the unveiling took place in August 2007, the city did finally remove Oñate’s name, calling the horseman simply The Equestrian. Underneath the statue the city placed three explanatory panels that tell a more nuanced history of conquest that includes sympathy toward those conquered. PBS’s program POV later aired an episode called “The Last Conquistador” that chronicled the controversy, noting that without the recent fight, Oñate’s atrocities would have remained buried.
Back at the central square, Fray García’s statue seemed resolute and oblivious to all the problems that would come from his arrival. He stared upward toward heaven, his lintel in his grasp, his expression showing faith and confidence that his mission would be successful.
. . .
THERE WERE A NUMBER of El Paso parking lots near the pedestrian bridge into Ciudad Juarez where attendants sit in little huts and charge a parking fee of five to eight dollars a day to guard the parked cars. After walking around downtown, we drove to within walking distance of the bridge and pulled into one of the lots where dozens of cars were parked. A Latino man about seventy years old got up from his card game at the little house and gave us a numbered ticket. He asked how long we would be gone and let us choose a spot. We got a few things out of the car and started walking across the bridge.
We joined throngs of people walking south. Most of them seemed to be heading back home after a day of work or shopping, as some carried bags from stores. We followed the sidewalk along chain-link fencing and toward the middle of the bridge. There we looked down at two concrete channels where, when there is water, the Rio Grande is divided into northern and southern branches. That day the northern canal held water, albeit a small stream hardly big enough to float a small canoe. The southern branch, the part that would have contained Mexico’s water, was bone dry. There it was in full view: the United States was taking all that remained of the water of the Rio.
It was just a few minutes after four in the afternoon; we had arrived on time. Yet, as stepped into the streets of Juarez, we realized no one was there to meet us. We stood at the end of the bridge for a few minutes, trying not to be too obvious, though as the only gringos, we might as well have had on orange jumpsuits.
A Mexican young man around twenty-five years old dressed in jeans and T-shirt and with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes approached us. Another young guy who could have been an accomplice moved with him, staying back at a distance. I could feel adrenaline kicking in. Would they ask for money? Was this a more sophisticated trap that would end up taking us somewhere we didn’t want to go? Did they want our luggage? We had been in Juarez for all of five minutes, and the violence we were warned about was already close. At least that is what my senses told me.
“Where are you trying to go?” he asked in Spanish. I didn’t know whether to answer without giving away much or to ignore him and keep walking. I decided on the former.
“We’re meeting a friend who lives here,” I replied with my best Spanish accent, conveying as much confidence and control as I could muster, though another part of me wanted to grab Hope’s hand and our bags, and turn and run like hell back toward El Paso.
“You’re at the wrong bridge,” he replied. “There’s another one that pedestrians use just around the block. I’ll take you there.”
I’d seen that ploy used before. The deal is first to get somebody out of sight in an alley and rob him, or perhaps worse. But since no one was meeting us where we stood, we decided to believe him and walk, half following him, half as if under our own volition, keeping him in front of us. We held our luggage, particularly my camera bag, a little tighter. Then he slowed up to walk with us and began talking about himself, even as I kept watching for anyone else who might be coming at us from behind.
“The other bridge is just over there,” he pointed out as we rounded a corner, assuring us that it was the place people meant when they said to meet at the bridge. We were in public after all, and the stories the young man told made him seem less threatening. He had always lived in Juarez, he said. He had been looking for work for some time. I began to drop my guard as we rounded the last turn. “There it is,” he said, pointing. I breathed in with relief when I saw the much busier pedestrian crossing.
He had done us a favor. He didn’t hold out his hand for money, but just to shake ours. He had already turned and was headed away when I called to him again, reached into my front pocket, handed him the loose twenty-peso note I had set aside. He thanked us, smiled, and disappeared into the masses of people.
Still no Poncho, so we decided to walk into a small pharmacy beside the bridge and call him. Our cellphones had become useless inside Mexico and Verizon was already sending us texts about expensive upgrade for international calls, but we declined. The pharmacist let us use the landline and even dialed the number for us. They handed Hope the receiver. No answer. We waited fifteen minutes and called again. Still nothing. I decided in my head that after waiting thirty more minutes we would head back. I knew the pharmacy would close eventually, and I felt we could not wait alone in Juarez past sunset.
Hope seemed less nervous. “Don’t worry, it will work out,” she said. Now I was the one anxious to get somewhere on time and she was telling me to relax. The half hour passed and I was ready to leave when Hope tried once more and Poncho answered. He explained that he had been delayed in taking his mother somewhere and his phone wasn’t working in that part of the city. He was already on the way. So we waited in the farmacia where complete strangers had taken us in and treated us like guests, where business went on as usual all around us, and we were starting to feel, despite my overactive imagination, safe.
. . .
PONCHO DROVE UP in his Nissan and soon we were navigating through traffic on the way to visit the Catholic service organization called Casa del Migrante. Traffic was heavy and we were moving slowly so I had my camera in my lap, occasionally taking random shots of sights in the city, particularly the cars and the overhead signs. Suddenly a black pickup whizzed out of its lane and cut in front of us not more than thirty feet away. In the back of the truck, supported by a rail welded onto the truck bed, eight federal police dressed in all black and wearing face-masks stood at the ready with automatic weapons. Almost by instinct, my hands moved to the camera and Poncho barked, “Keep the camera down!” Luckily I had not lifted it above the dash.
I had just learned all over again that the Mexican police were not there to protect and defend people. Many were corrupt and connected to gangs. Photographers had been killed in Mexico for taking photos of gang members. And the federales colluded with them in some locations. I thanked Poncho and sheepishly packed the camera away in my bag.
These men in black became numerous after President Felipe Calderón created a new drug police force as part of the war on drugs he declared in 2006. Most agree that these tough and militaristic police have done little but prey upon the citizenry, extorting money and even sending arms and trained converts to the cartels, which in turn have murdered tens of thousands. The police were always looking for reasons, like my photography, to make traffic stops so they could extort money. They had done worse, including helping create a new drug syndicate known as the Zetas, a gang that is one of the most powerful in Mexico today. The United States had backed Calderón financially and provided police training, which had helped create monsters. Taking pictures of them could have been disastrous.
“The men in green belong to the Mexican army,” Poncho explained. “They’re less corrupt than the federal police. The green-uniformed men might ask for bribes, but the ones in black would take your camera and might arrest you.” A fine was the least of the options, he said. “People are afraid to go out of their houses when they’re around. They even avoid driving at night. We all just stay in with our children.” I learned quickly that drug gangs have their territories and you stay away from those, but the federales are everywhere.
We didn’t have to be reminded that death casts a long shadow over Juarez. Even some of our Mexican friends told us to avoid the place. Most horrible was the rash of murders and disappearances of young women that became public in 1993. Their mutilated bodies turned up in ditches, empty lots, and dried-up riverbeds; some were buried in shallow graves. Between the time the story first broke and our visit, over eight hundred female bodies had been recovered in Juarez alone, with some of the victims as young as thirteen. Another three thousand women had disappeared. No group had claimed responsibility and most of the crimes remain unsolved.
Though there is disagreement about the causes of these deaths, it is irrefutable that the murders coincide with the rise of globalization and the high numbers of single women recruited for jobs in maquiladoras. Being single and childless are de facto requirements for many of the jobs. Having to travel there alone to work with no previous urban experience could be the beginning of the problem, leading to trafficking and forced prostitution as well. In 1994, as the number of NAFTA factories in Juarez rose to over four hundred, the murders increased. Most of the victims were from rural communities and had no family nearby.
Some writers caution against using the term “femicide,” noting that sexualizing the murders could unfairly put blame on the women themselves for forsaking traditional roles. It is true that women have been targets, though many men from traditional and poor families have also died in Juarez. That both male and female victims have been dark-skinned also points to race as a possible factor. Almost certainly all of this is tied to drug activity and human trafficking, which know no gender boundaries.
Regardless of the causes, advocates concentrate on demanding that the murders stop. For that Mexico needs good police protection and investigation. But the police are part of the problem.
Poncho joins many who point out that the main problem in Juarez is that the Mexican government has reneged on its responsibility to protect its people. After numerous advocacy sessions, bi-national conferences, the rise of advocacy organizations, and countless news stories, the police have yet to solve the crimes. Indeed, as I had just been reminded, some of the police have become terrorists themselves.
In his book La Sociedad del Abandono, Poncho argues that whole communities lack support from the police and have no social services. Many do not have access to schools, water, or sewer systems either. On top of that, multinational companies prey upon those desperate for jobs while giving few protections in return. Many companies pay nothing toward building the infrastructure around them. Some call it neoliberalism, meaning among other things that companies are liberated to come and go as they please, and have no obligation to give back.
And “go” is what the maquiladoras have done. Many factories built in the 1990s had pulled out by 2010 and headed for Asia. As we drove through ramshackle neighborhoods in south Juarez, Poncho, speaking in Spanish sprinkled with English, showed us many factories that were already vacated. “There’s an abandoned shell. See the neighborhoods over there, hardly anyone lives there anymore; the houses are abandoned, too.” As he said the word “abandonado” or some form of the word probably twenty times over the hour, I started to understand its finality: that abandonment begets further loss and despair. I could feel it as we drove slowly by the empty buildings, each surrounded by small houses in rows—“company houses” as they once called them in the United States—whole streets vacant and deteriorating.
After the exodus, a relative few factories stand sadly amidst the carcasses of the others. They are left mostly to their own devices. Few if any environmental regulations govern them. No pay standards or protections are required for their remaining workers. Unions are demonized and people usually are afraid to fight for their rights. They have been forced to accept wages that averaged only eighty dollars a week in 2010 as the companies tried to undercut others in the globalized marketplace. They know their employers can also leave for places where wages are even lower.
I tried to imagine a young woman with no money arriving alone and vulnerable in a city collapsing under its own weight, where pay is barely enough to buy street food. Then I imagined her suddenly losing her job. How would she find another with factories closing nearby? Unemployment had shot up from virtually zero when the factories first moved to Juarez in the 1990s to almost 20 percent by 2010. Desperate to find something to send home, would she try to go north across the great economic divide? Many such economic refugees are arrested trying to cross the border. Then they are sent back penniless. If they are lucky, they find help from a church or nongovernmental organization upon their return, maybe some guidance, some resources, and some sense of hope. But jobs are what they want. People sleep in shelters so they can do day labor for whatever people will pay.
The Virgin Mary draped with detention center bracelets left by deportees who have stayed at the Casa del Migrante in Ciudad Juarez.
. . .
WE PASSED A BEATIFIC statue of the Virgin as we drove through the gate of Casa del Migrante, a Catholic center for migrants. Most residents are deportees who have been recently held in U.S. detention centers, as our guide and Catholic priest, Fray Gerardo Árias, explained. They are dumped off at the border with no possessions or money. The Casa is all many have to turn to. When they arrive, some haven’t even been in touch with their families. Father Gerardo was gentle but grave about the migrants’ plight.
“In the U.S. they call them detention centers, but they’re actually jails for punishing criminals,” he said. “When Mexicans are deported from the U.S. as felons, they’re seen as criminals here, too. In some places where they’re deported there are no organizations to help. At least here in Juarez, we’re prepared to help them. We don’t have anyone at the border, but we’re prepared here [a few miles away] with food, clothing, and shelter.”
The inscription painted on the front of their building says, “No era de aquí y tu me acogiste.” The passage is from the book of Matthew, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” The logo painted above echoed a now familiar theme: a Mexican man in sandals, a poncho, and a broad-brimmed hat leading a donkey ridden by a woman holding her baby as they make their way through the desert.
The migrants are left off at the border on the U.S. side and they must walk southward into Mexico still wearing their prison IDs and holding their belongings in Homeland Security–issued plastic bags. Some of them are from Chiapas or Oaxaca, a thousand miles from home, and they have no one to meet them. Many have never seen Juarez before. When they get inside the country, the Mexican government allows them one call at the government migrant aid agency called Grupo Beta located just south of the entrance, but as most have no money to travel and the family is unlikely to have anything to send either, many have to stay and work to earn enough either to cross back into the United States or to go home. If they are lucky, Grupo Beta will tell them how to reach the Casa, where they can find a bed, shower, and hot meals for free. Sometimes they arrive in large groups of thirty or more, said Fray Gerardo. His organization shelters and feeds all the migrants they are able to.
None of the deportees were in their rooms in the middle of the afternoon when we arrived—every one of them had gone out in search of jobs. Still, Friar Gerardo showed us the guest rooms in their absence: large halls lined with beds, all of them clean and well made. There were separate rooms for men and women. They resembled army barracks except for the artwork adorning one of the walls—mostly pencil drawings, many striking in their artistry. I was drawn to two in particular: one showing Jesus as a migrant dressed in worker’s clothing seeking a job in the United States, and a second showing Jesus in detention, alongside the beatitudes in Spanish, including, “Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
We walked outside the dormitory to see the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe up close. Made of concrete, she stood in a grotto of rocks, her hands folded in prayer. She stands about four feet tall, and the rocks around her depict her aura of light and form a protective cave simultaneously. Encircling the rocks and the statue was a long chain made from the plastic ID bracelets from U.S. detention centers. Upon arrival at the Casa, deportees removed their plastic identification tags bearing their names and photographs and reclasped them, interlocking each one. The chain encircled the rock structure and then draped over and around the Virgin’s arms and hands. Every one of them bore an untold story of loss.
After the visit, Poncho drove us to the Ramada Hotel where he needed to get us checked in early so he could get back to his family before dark. After putting our things in our room, Hope and I had a meal beside the pool and chatted with the waiters. We sipped Bohemias with lime and watched two young children play in the water with their father. Two different weddings took place in the courtyard the same evening. Both were elaborate and long celebrations with live music, fancy clothing, mounds of food, and photography sessions outside by the pool. Inside the walls we watched as families displayed many of the best traits of Mexico: multigenerational celebrations, fiesta, food, music, and civility.
Meanwhile, outside the doors of the hotel, another world continued. While we slept in safety over two nights, the papers reported that twenty-four people died violent deaths in Juarez. We couldn’t know how many others disappeared. We heard no gunshots. No sirens blared. I began to know why only that word abandonado would do.
. . .
THE NEXT MORNING we rode with Poncho back across the bridge to El Paso to visit the decade-old Centro de los Trabajadores Agrícolas Fronterizos (The Border Farmworker Center). Poncho, along with the center’s director, Carlos Marentes, had arranged a screening of my film, Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos, for the workers housed there. When we arrived, Mr. Marentes gave us a tour of the impressive eight-thousand-square-foot El Paso center only a block north of the border. As we toured the center, dozens of workers began returning from their work in the fields. After showering, they congregated in the main meeting hall and prepared to watch the film on a large television. They would sleep that night on mats in the same room, Carlos told us. They would also eat there after the screening.
Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos is a bilingual film about indigenous Guatemalan day laborers in Jupiter, Florida. Over a hundred men watched as I stood looking on from the back of the room. A question-and-answer period followed. One man seemed to speak for the group when he told me the story of sacrifice that I had portrayed about indigenous people working in Florida was also their story. Though the film is about Guatemalans, he said, it is the story of Mexicans too. “All of us are struggling to find a living in the world,” he said.
I couldn’t help noticing that while they watched the film, the farmworkers sat under a banner that said, “Paro General (General Work Stoppage): A Day without Mexicans.” The banner had been used during a May Day celebration in 2008 when Latinos and their supporters marched in the U. S. streets calling attention to their contributions to the U.S. economy. Some groups staged an action during which every worker walked out for a day. Of course the melon crops these men harvested that day would have rotted in the field without them. Everyone seems to know this, but we have a strange way of showing it.
As we drove away from the center and headed toward the bridge to Juarez, I turned back to photograph the scene of workers starting to line up outside for their evening meal. Most had harvested U.S. cantaloupes for twelve hours that day. They would do so again the next. Forced to choose work over freedom of movement, they ate donated meals in a shelter and slept on mats on a floor away from home, all provided by a low-budget NGO.
The two centers we had visited in two days had manifested two sides of the Mexican migrant reality: a shelter for U.S. deportees in Mexico and a shelter for workers still working in the U. S. fields, a few miles from each other, but they are worlds apart, though interconnected by the United States’ fickle demand for undocumented laborers.
The next day I showed the same film to students at the University of Juarez and answered their in-depth questions about my fieldwork methodology as well as about U.S. immigration policy. It was a difficult discussion to have—particularly when it came to how to represent workers who must live in the shadows of the border wall. I struggled to explain this quandary to a group of young intellectuals who also lived its realities, and I sat mesmerized when they spoke of their lives and work at the border. I wanted to stop talking altogether and just listen. I realized I knew nothing of living on the frontera the way they did, but I was the one in the front of the room.
The next day was Sunday. We went to meet the Braceros in historic Benito Juarez Park for the first time. “We’ll help my parents serve them coffee and pan dulce,” Poncho promised. “Oh, and you should take your camera,” he said.
Notes
1. “El Paso del Norte,” http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hdelu.
2. Gregory Rodriguez, “El Paso Confronts Its Messy Past,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2007.
