CHAPTER 12
Epilogue
PERILOUS TERRAIN
After weeks of planning I am finally able to arrange for José’s mom, Paulina, and his two cousins to speak by phone with members of the Border Patrol’s Public Information Office and its Search, Trauma, and Rescue team (BORSTAR). The hope is that if Manny and Felipe can remember enough about the crossing and where they left José, we can retrace their steps in the desert and narrow down a survey area to look for him. I am the first person to phone in. I strike up a conversation with several agents who are participating on the conference call:
Jason: Just to give you guys a warning, everyone is holding out that he is still alive. So they are gonna have questions. Some of Paulina’s questions are gonna be like, “Is it possible that he is in detention somewhere and he just hasn’t been identified with his proper name?” These are things that I have tried to reassure her are highly unlikely after so much time has passed, but she is still going to ask.
Agent: We will do our best. Uh, I’m not sure if we would be able to answer a whole lot of questions. We are going to try and gather as much information as we can to be able to assess the situation to see if it’s possible to conduct a search for some human remains of this young man.
Paulina, Manny, and Felipe call in. Thirteen-year-old Felipe is the first to be interviewed, and it doesn’t go well. He is unable to provide many specific details that would be of use and is also understandably a bit nervous during the process. After less than five minutes one of the BORSTAR agents starts to get audibly frustrated:
Felipe: We crossed under a puente. Then we climbed a hill. We climbed up this entire hill and then passed a fenced. From there we started walking north.
BORSTAR Agent: Could you see Nogales?
Felipe: Yes, we could see Nogales from the hill.
BORSTAR Agent: Was it east or west?
Felipe: I don’t know. We could see the city, though. From there we kept walking for like an hour, and then we found a small house that was under construction. We went inside for a little bit and then kept walking again. . . . We were in Tucson because we passed a ranch where they had horses. We passed that and got to the road. It was just me and Manny because José stayed behind.
BORSTAR Agent: No, no, no. What I want to know is when you crossed because I can’t . . . [annoyed]. When you say “this house” or “this puente,” you were in Mexico, right? Look, I don’t know Mexico. I only know what is in the United States, so I need to know at what point in your trip you crossed from Mexico to the United States. Am I clear? How did you know you crossed the border?
Felipe: There was a fence that we crossed. It was a barbed wire fence. The coyote said that we had passed into the United States. . . . We crossed the border between Mexico and the United States during the day. We crossed the border more or less around 5 P.M. in the afternoon.
BORSTAR Agent: How was the terrain near the fence?
Felipe: It was an area full of mountains. There was a hill where the fence was. We climbed it and in the middle of the hill we crossed the fence. Then we kept walking uphill. There were a lot of trees . . .
The interview drags on for over an hour. Manny and Felipe have conflicting accounts regarding how many days they spent in the desert, and their memory of details such as landmarks and the cardinal directions they walked are vague at best. This is not surprising given their age, unfamiliarity with the region, and the fact that they spent a great deal of time walking under the cover of night. They focus on telling the agents about the “large mountains with blinking antennas” and the flat and denuded area where a very sick José was last seen. After an hour of listening to them tell their stories, you can hear the aggravation in the voice of the BORSTAR agent, who isn’t getting the details he wants. Finally, Paulina gets on the line, and one of the more sympathetic agents sitting in on the call asks if she has any questions.
Paulina: I don’t have any questions. I only ask that you help me find him.
Agent: We are very sorry. I know that this is very difficult for you and your family. All I can tell you is that we are going to analyze the testimonies of these guys and communicate with Mr. De León about possibilities of how we might proceed in this case. I know that this is not something that is going to really help you in this moment, but unfortunately the reality is that this is a big area. Uh, well, it’s a very difficult terrain, so we need to talk here and see what we can do.
Paulina: I don’t think that José would have gone back to Mexico from the desert, because he spent like a month there. The last day in Nogales he called us to tell us that he was going to leave. He was really happy because he was finally getting out of there and was going to be with us. [cries] There were other calls he made that day. He has a girlfriend in Ecuador. She got a call on her cell phone that was a lot of numbers. She checked the call and it said that it was from a different country.
Agent: Was this before or after he crossed?
Paulina: This was later. At the end of the month there was another phone call. My sister answered it there in Ecuador, and she is sure that it was José because he called out her name and then hung up the phone.
BORSTAR Agent: So you think he might have gone back to Mexico and at one point called Ecuador?
Paulina: Yes.
BORSTAR Agent: [in a condescending voice] Ma’am, let me get this straight. You guys are saying that in the best case, after all of this, after they left him in the desert, you think that he has made some phone calls saying that . . .
Paulina: Yes. Yes, I think . . . [ten seconds of uncomfortable silence]
Before the BORSTAR agent can say anything else, one of his colleagues cuts him off and then hits the mute button. We wait quietly for almost a minute before they come back on the line. One of the agents quickly tells us that they will see what they can do, and then the call ends. Twelve days later I receive the following email:
Dear Mr. De Leon,
I would like to personally thank you for contacting us regarding the disappearance of José Tacuri. We appreciate your patience and the facilitation that you provided with the interviews of Manny and Felipe.
After spending many hours and days analyzing the provided information and conducting interviews of our own, it became apparent that the circumstances in this particular case would not sufficiently provide for any additional Border Patrol searches for José. However, we fully understand his family’s wish may be to continue to search for José through a different means. As such, I would like to share with you our perceptions of where José may have crossed and traveled. It is likely that he crossed the international boundary east of Sycamore Canyon, south of the Atascosa Mountain range. The “antennas” referenced in the interviews are most likely to be those on Atascosa Peak. José likely separated from his cousins on the west side of the Atascosa Mountains, probably northwest of Atascosa Peak. His cousins then continued their journey northward, eventually being apprehended somewhere east of Moyza Ranch Road and south of Arivaca Road.
We in the Tucson Sector strongly sympathize with his mother and family during this difficult time. José’s story is a tragic and sobering reminder of the dangers faced by so many undocumented migrants who undertake the journey to enter the United States through rough and perilous terrain.
REMAINS
The fate of the poor here in Ecuador is to migrate. My sister migrated. She left for her kids because life here was very hard. There was nothing. She left so that she could send money so that her kids could have chances in life, more possibilities. But she never wanted to leave them.
—Lucia (José’s aunt)
I think that this trip we make really changes us. It makes you think more about who you are. It changes how you are. If you were rebellious before, a guy who didn’t work hard, you start the crossing and you start thinking about changing those things. Going through something like this changes a person. It makes you into a better person. That’s my opinion.
—Christian
In 1891, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published an illustration by American artist Frederic Remington titled “Dying of Thirst in the Desert.” The image, which accompanied an article on unauthorized Chinese immigration, depicted a coolie with a hat and canteen writhing in pain on the barren Sonoran Desert floor.1 More than a hundred years later this image is a poignant reminder that as long as there have been desperate people who can’t make a living wage in their home country and a need for cheap labor in the United States, migrants have been willing to cross the border regardless of the cost.
The factors that make people leave their homes and families to risk life and limb in the desert for the chance to scrub toilets for minimum wage are relatively obvious: global economic inequality, political instability, war, famine, government corruption, drug cartel violence, unregulated capitalism, consumer demands for cheap goods and services. It is an endless list of political economic issues that defy simple policy solutions. Would a new guest worker program solve America’s border problems? Could policing the workforce and penalizing those who employ the undocumented stop the migration flow? What about equalizing the trade relationships between the United States and our neighbors to the south so that people have fewer reasons to leave home? Perhaps more foreign investment in economic development in Latin America and less spending on the Border War? All of these suggestions have been put forth time and again with few results.
In the end, it comes down to the United States’ need for cheap labor that can easily be controlled with the threat of deportation and the duplicitous stance that we don’t want undocumented laborers in our country. The American public has to first recognize and resolve this fundamental socioeconomic conundrum before any serious immigration policy reform can take place. This book, however, was never about solving our problem of illegal immigration. There is no easy solution. My goal has been to shine a light on the inhumane and hypocritical way that we police our borders and show the devastating impact that our boundary enforcement system has on people’s lives. I have tried to demystify the strategy known as Prevention Through Deterrence and show how a strategic network of heterogeneous actors are at work every day to produce complex forms of violence. By looking behind the curtain of this federal policy we can see the marionette strings that connect the hands of Border Patrol strategists to venomous animals, life-threatening temperatures, and “hostile terrain.” If this book does anything, I hope that it makes visible the effects of US border enforcement practices designed to be hidden and draws more attention to the violent logic on which the entire immigration security paradigm is based.
In some ways, though, this book is also a testimony given by survivors of the Sonoran Desert hybrid collectif and an obituary for those who succumb to it. The words, stories, and images that the undocumented people in the preceding pages have allowed me to share are their public declarations that their lives are worth noting, valuing, and preserving.2 They are lives worth grieving for. As Judith Butler notes, rather than viewing grief as private and apolitical, we should conceive of it as public and as facilitating “a sense of political community of a complex order.”3 If we can publicly grieve for Maricela, José, and the thousands of others who suffer and die as the result of a cruel border policy and a globalized economy that continuously pushes and pulls people to seek work in the United States, we might better understand how our worlds are intertwined and the ethical responsibility we have to one another as humans.
When I was kid growing up in McAllen, Texas, in the 1980s, I remember seeing desperate people wade across the Rio Grande from neighboring Reynosa, Mexico, in broad daylight. Prevention Through Deterrence brought this brazen practice to a screeching halt in the early 1990s as migrants were systematically funneled toward Arizona. As security has ramped up in the Sonoran Desert over the past five years, the Rio Grande has once again been breached. Undocumented migrants are now walking for days across the desolate ranchlands of South Texas to evade Border Patrol. This sector has become the busiest crossing corridor in the nation.4 As this book goes to press, Central Americans, many of them children fleeing a combination of poverty and violence, are joining this mass exodus of people in record numbers. To arrive at the border, these migrants often ride the limb- and life-taking freight trains known as la bestia to get across Mexico. The number of adults and kids who have died or gone missing on this new route is unknown, but the discovery of a slew of mass graves of unidentified people in northern Mexico and in various county cemeteries in Texas suggests this is the new killing field.5
The US federal government has responded to this unsightly mob of Central American migrants by putting political and economic pressure on the Mexican government to stop people from riding on the tops of trains.6 Migrants may now have to walk a thousand miles across a Mexican minefield where assault, robbery, murder, rape, and extortion are virtually guaranteed.7 The United States has extended its southern border to the geopolitical boundary with Guatemala and incorporated Mexico’s hostile terrain into the hybrid collectif.
On November 20, 2014, President Obama announced an executive action to temporarily halt the deportation of a large subpopulation of undocumented immigrants who met special conditions. These conditions included people who arrived in the United States before 2010 and have at least one child who is a US citizen or legal resident, or those who came to the country before the age of sixteen. This much needed action has provided temporary relief for an estimated 5 million people currently in the United States. Unfortunately, none of the main actors in this book, nor another 6–7 million undocumented people who don’t qualify, will benefit from this stopgap measure. In essence, Obama has provided a federal Band-Aid for some of those already on US soil. This executive action, however, does nothing to change the way the border is policed. It does not stop the hybrid collectif. It does nothing to slow down the flow of undocumented migration.
Every single day down on la linea you can find Lucho, Memo, Christian, Maricela, and José. These are people searching for a better life or looking to repair a family fragmented by transnational migration. For those caught in the complicated and far-reaching web of this social process, there is no “happy ending.” Memo and Lucho continue to struggle each day to make ends meet while remaining under the radar of immigration enforcement. Memo keeps telling me that as soon as he has enough money, he is going to go back to Mexico to see his ailing mother. It has been almost twenty years since she kissed his face. These days, though, this family reunion is mostly fantasy. While writing this conclusion, I got a call from Memo, who told me that he had fallen on hard times. Work opportunities had dried up, and he had suddenly taken to soliciting day labor in front of his local Home Depot store. For the first time in our six years of friendship, he asked me for money to buy groceries. Despite these setbacks, he is still an optimist. He keeps promising that after he goes to see his mother, he will take another camera with him when he crosses back through the desert. Lucho, on the other hand, is doing his best to never return to the Arizona wilderness. He spends a great deal of time looking over his shoulder.
Christian has been trying to save money in hopes of getting tourist visas so that he can bring his aging parents to visit him in New York. He hasn’t seen them in more than a decade. More importantly, he wants them to bring his thirteen-year-old son, whom he has never held in his arms. Christian has also had a rough go of it recently. In the fall of 2014, he was standing on a fifteen-foot ladder removing asbestos from a building when he slipped and fell through a series of wooden scaffoldings. He lay on the ground unconscious for ten minutes. His coworkers were convinced he was dead. Because many people at the job site lacked papers and were afraid to call 911, Christian was driven to a free clinic where he was given some bandages, painkillers, and an ice pack. When I saw him four months after the fall, he was still limping and suffering from internal pain that had not yet been diagnosed by a doctor. Having gained some mobility in his legs, he was hoping to pick up part-time work doing light cleaning in office buildings at night.
Maricela’s three children are slowly adjusting to life without their mom and are now being supported by remittances that Christian sends as often as humanly possible. Every day Vanessa does her best to fill the void left in their hearts by Mari’s absence.
José’s girlfriend, Tamara, is busy raising their infant daughter, and she maintains her promise to wait for him. She frequently emails me to ask if I have any news about his whereabouts. Tamara wants to one day migrate to New York like her mother so that she can earn American dollars to send back to Cuenca to support her child.
Gustavo and Paulina are still holding out hope that their son is alive. I frequently speak with Paulina by phone about new contacts she has made with pasadores who might know the route that José took. I promised her and Gustavo that I would continue to help them search for their son, which means I spend a lot of time on the phone talking to coyotes and trying to find people who were traveling in José’s group. On sporadic visits to Arizona over the past year, Mike Wells, Bob Kee, and I have stumbled around the Sonoran Desert in the Atascosa Mountains looking for any sign of José. He has not appeared.
During the course of writing this book I discovered a poem by O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda (1995) titled “The Floods of 1993 and Others.” There is one stanza that I now find myself reading over and over again:
Remains.
His ashes are now at the bottom of the hill.
The rain has washed them down,
mixing them back into the dirt from where he came.
He screamed those silent screams.
You thought you heard them in between his laughter.
It was a confused message. Like many messages from adolescents.
A fifteen-year-old can’t be expected to understand them all.
The ashes have found their way to the four directions by now.
Mixed with clouds that bring rain.
Or perhaps they have made their way to the Gila River when it flows in Pima country.
Surely some have made their way to the big rivers, floating on down to Mexico, becoming part of the sandy, warm beach where you smile at the crabs that run sideways.
Wherever José may be, perhaps he is warm and smiling.