Up Against the Wall. Peter Laufer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I told the truth, ‘I come to visit my husband. I want to stay with my husband and I want my child to grow up with his father.” Despite the valid visa, Juana María and her family were refused entry. It was obvious she was no tourist; she was an immigrant.

      “We stayed all night, like we were arrested. We didn’t go to jail because we had two little boys. But we stayed all night in one room in the airport.” A generation later the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) radically changed U.S. policy: children were torn from their migrating parents’ arms and jailed in appalling conditions.

      The immigration officer was Latino, Juana María says, and told her, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I feel so bad about what I’m doing.” She says she remembers the moment vividly when he took her cash. “He bought a ticket. The next day we flew back to Mexico on another airplane. One officer went with us into the airplane and made sure we were sitting down in the airplane. And he never gave me my money back. He bought that ticket with my money.”

      A month later Juana María was shopping for a coyote. “I didn’t want to stay in Mexico. My husband was here.” Her older brother convinced her to avoid the Tijuana crossing into San Diego, scaring her with stories of rape, robbery, abandonment and murder in the hills along la frontera, the border. She decided on a crossing from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso. She bundled up her baby, and once again accompanied by her mother-in-law, she flew from Guadalajara to Juárez. This time she didn’t tell her husband of her travel plans. “I didn’t tell him because if something happened he would have worried about me and my boy. I wanted to give him a surprise.”

      Her brother confirmed arrangements with the coyote, secured an address of a house for the rendezvous with the guide. Juana María took a cab at the Juárez airport, but when the three travelers arrived at the Juárez house, they were unable to find their contact. And they quickly realized that they had left a suitcase in the cab. “We were missing in the big city,” she says. “In the suitcase we had diapers and formula.” Luck was with the migrating trio. The taxi company insisted on buying formula for the baby; when the company found the missing baggage, it delivered to the hotel where they had booked a room.

      Juana María called her brother. He contacted the coyote and sent him to the hotel and there they made their border-crossing plans. “I was nervous, but he told me to relax.” In those pre-9/11 and pre-Trump days, Mexicans routinely crossed the bridge into El Paso to shop. The crowds were so great and the traffic so important to the local economy that immigration officers only spot-checked border crossers walking north. Juana María was told to dress like a typical Mexican housewife, carry a shopping bag, and act confident. “We looked like people from Mexico who are shopping and going back home.” They agreed to make the crossing during the noon rush hour. The coyote figured inspectors would be eating lunch and that the throngs crossing the bridge would camouflage his clients.

      The next morning a car came to the hotel for Juana María. She was dropped near the border and walked north. “We crossed, walking”—Juana María, the baby, her mother-in-law, and the coyote. “I was wearing a dress to look like a Mexican shopper. We crossed at the border and we didn’t go far. We walked for maybe ten or fifteen minutes into El Paso.” As the migrants strolled north, homeless coconspirators living on the street kept the coyote informed that the path was free of Migra (Spanish slang at the time for the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the government agency that became a unit of ICE). The coconspirators were tipped a dollar for the intelligence. “Finally, we stopped at a McDonald’s, because it was 104 degrees.”

      She ate her first American meal in the cool of the McDonald’s—a hamburger of course, and the coyote called a taxi. They drove to a house where a friend of her brother lived, and there they spent the night. The easy part of the journey was over. Now the job was to get Juana María out of the borderlands and up into the interior and onward to join her husband in California. A further masquerade was needed. She no longer had to look like a Mexican housewife; she had to look like a Mexican-American.

      That’s when they made me look like a teenager. They put me in shorts with a lot of flowers. They put me in a blouse—phosphorescent orange. And they put my hair up, like a chola!² They colored my eyes black, and red lipstick! Oh, my goodness.

      Juana María is a pretty woman, but her wardrobe is conservative and she wears only minimal makeup. She was happy to play dress-up “because I needed to look like the girls from El Paso. The teenagers in El Paso look different from the teenagers in Mexico. That’s why they changed my looks.”

      They flew to Dallas with no trouble, the baby disguised as an El Paso infant, sporting a Hawaiian shirt. Her mother-in-law was still with them, not worried in “a dress like a North American” because her hair is blonde. “I felt nervous,” Juana María admits, but more than just nervous. “I felt embarrassed to look like that, when I looked at myself in the mirror I said, ‘Oh, my God. No!’ But I needed to relax and look normal, like all the other people in the airport.”

      When they arrived at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport they waited for another brother to pick them up. “He passed me three times, and he didn’t recognize me.” Finally she said to him, “Hi, honey! I’m Juana María.” He was shocked at her appearance.

      Well, I looked like a chola! He told me, “If your husband sees you looking like that, immediately he will divorce you.” We left the airport, and the first stop was Sears to buy make-up and a dress, to wash my face and change clothes. We went to my brother’s house and then we called up my husband and I said, “Honey, I’m here!” He said, “No, you are joking.” I told him I was serious and that I had another surprise—I had his mother with me.

      The mother-in-law had told her husband she would only go as far as Ciudad Juárez, but she went across into the United States, says María Juana, on a lark. “The coyote said, ‘It’s fun. You can cross. It’s not dangerous.’ So she crossed to have one more adventure in her life. My brother paid only five hundred dollars for all three people. Very cheap.”

      The date of her arrival in El Norte³ is fixed in her mind. “I crossed the border June 24, 1990.” After a week visiting her brother, she flew to California for a reunion with her husband. It was July 1, just in time for the Fourth of July festivities at the ranch where he worked. “My husband told me I needed to buy clothes for the celebrations. I got blue jeans and a red-and-white blouse, because those are the three colors of the American flag.”

      Juana María’s parrot is chirping. Her daughter takes a break from the television to listen, eat some corn chips and make a mess on the counter trying to pour some 7-Up into a glass. Outside cattle are feeding at the trough. Her blue heelers periodically bark. Through her kitchen windows I see the bucolic California hills that surround her home. “I haven’t been back to Mexico for thirteen years.” She looks pensive when I ask her why. “Because I don’t have a Green Card and now I am worried about crossing the border. I hear a lot of bad stories. It costs $2,500 for each person.” That early year 2000 price tag looks like a bargain a generation later.

      Living without proper documentation for 13 years was nothing much more than an annoyance for Juana María. “I don’t do anything illegal. I live a good life and take care of my kids.” Immigration officers rarely show up in her rural neighborhood, and when they do patrol places she frequents in the nearby urban district, she says she’s warned and just avoids them. “When the INS⁴ is around here they say on the [Spanish language] radio station: don’t go out to Wal-Mart or Sears or whatever shopping center because the INS is around. So I don’t go there. After one or two days, they’re gone.”

      I ask Juana María what she would do if an immigration agent approached her. “If he asks me for a Green Card, I can’t do anything,” she says about СКАЧАТЬ