It’s early morning on an unseasonably hot February day in Reynosa, Mexico, and a group of six young deportees step out of a white U.S. immigration van. The young men, all Mexicans between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, walk toward the reception center on the Mexican side of the Hidalgo International Bridge. They’re originally from places farther south in Mexico, but the U.S. immigration authorities drop them right over the border. The van turns around and heads back into Texas.
“Excuse me,” one deportee asks a man on the street. “Where are we?”
It’s not yet eight a.m., but the roads are already packed with cars, and the walkways of the bridge, this international no-man’s-land, hum in both directions. Beggars and hawkers appeal to the passersby: a man missing a leg and an arm balances on crutches, holding out his hat in hopes of spare change, a woman with a baby and a toddler sits on the ground, her back against the railing, peddling packets of gum.
The border is punctuated by small cities like Reynosa: last stops and transit zones, places of free trade, the mutual territory of the businessman, the migrant, the coyote, and the narco. Most of the time Reynosa appears orderly enough, but beneath the surface, it roils. In the past decade, violence and crime in Reynosa’s state, Tamaulipas—and throughout Mexico—have been on a swell, catching up to the reputation of its upriver neighbor, Ciudad Juárez, once infamous for having one of the highest murder and kidnapping rates in Mexico.
By now, the migrants know all about the perils of the border. You move people, you move drugs, and more often than ever, you move them in tandem. The face of the coyote is changing: no longer just a guide trying to make a buck while navigating people north but often a drug smuggler, too, or at least working for one—and almost always working with permission from the narco-traffickers to move through their territory.
A Good Samaritan with a pickup drives the deported men to a nearby migrant shelter, run by a group of Catholic nuns and international volunteers. They rest in the truck, holding their bags of provisions. The truck pulls into the migrant shelter and they unload.
Last night Reynosa had several shoot-outs. When the Zeta and Gulf cartels splintered in 2010, Reynosa became a turf war battleground, leading to a major spike in homicides and other crime. Los malos, everyone calls them, the bad guys, shorthand for the narcos—but you avoid saying narcos here out loud. Even journalists and police, when they talk among themselves, tend to refer to them as los malos. As with Salvador’s la violencia, the violence, shorthand is safer.
Migrants aren’t just wrapped up in the currents of the drug trade; they’ve also become its targets. In the past several years, the cartels, whose supply has reduced due to intercartel wars and international crackdowns, have realized that migrants are lucrative marks. To reach the United States, Central American migrants have to move through more than six hundred miles of Mexico. That makes them potential drug mules. They often carry large sums of cash and have family waiting for them across the border who could pay a ransom. They flee the violence of the Northern Triangle only to pass through another unconventional war zone.
In August 2010 Los Zetas pulled seventy-two migrants from one of the northbound buses, shot them, then buried the corpses in and around the city of San Fernando. Dozens of suitcases arrived at the Reynosa bus terminal with no one to claim them.
The next year, in 2011, authorities uncovered 193 more bodies, often mutilated, scattered among forty-seven clandestine graves in and around San Fernando. In 2012 the corpses of forty-nine people were uncovered in the adjacent state of Nuevo León. The majority of the dead, many of whose remains have yet to be identified, were migrants heading north.
A few miles from the adult shelter, and less than a quarter-mile from the border, is a locked facility for migrant youth. Today it’s home to six Mexican boys waiting for their families to pick them up or send bus fare to bring them home, as well as sixteen Central Americans, all of whom have been nabbed by Mexican authorities and await being sent home via plane to Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. The unlucky ones, they’d say. Today is music class, and an energetic older man strums the guitar with gusto, encouraging everyone to sing along—the girls on one side of the room, the boys on the other. Occasionally, a few chime in or shake a maraca.
All but one say that for sure they’ll be back.
“I’m not worried,” a boy with a backward cap says with the bravado of a high school football player predicting a Friday-night win. He sports long basketball shorts and soccer sandals and spreads his arms back over the rim of his chair. “I’ll make it there.”
They slap cards on the table. They peel tangerines and organize the rinds into piles, then rocket the seeds through their tongues so that they ricochet off the floor.
“I’ll go home, see my family a little, rest up, then come back again,” a boy from Santa Ana, El Salvador, announces.
“How do you get refugee status in the United States?” one of the boys asks the table.
“You need a lawyer,” another replies.
“Money,” another says, rubbing his fingers against his thumb. “Those lawyers cost a lot.”
They discuss the merits of turning themselves in at the border versus making an all-out run for it.
“Safer to turn yourself in” and try to get status, one says, than to risk the Texas desert. But then again—you’re more likely to be deported if you’re caught.
The music teacher picks up the guitar and starts again. “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he croons with gusto, ducking his head in front of the boys who aren’t participating. The backward-hat boy shakes a maraca and sings. Then, at the chorus, they all join in, with mocking enthusiasm: “Canta, no llores”—sing, don’t cry. The sound of their voices echoes out the window to the too warm day.