You Guys’ Wall:
Crossing the US-Mexico Border in 1998
Knowing I’d be driving back North to
Los Angeles later that day, I got up early in the morning and drove south from San
Diego to the border. It was a lot closer
than I’d thought it would be. The Taco
Shop Poets, a group of young Chicano poets who I’d come to San Diego to
interview, had told me that it would take about twenty-minutes to reach the
border. But in the excited state of mind
that I was in, I couldn’t measure twenty minutes. The border appeared suddenly, strangely,
inexplicably. That it was where it was
and not anywhere else seemed to me an anomaly, a random and innocuous truth
that was begging to be explained or justified by an argument that did something
more than merely appeal to the self-evident presence of the border itself. And yet here it was: The infamous San
Diego-Tijuana crossing.
The only signs on the road read like
warnings: “Last exit in the U.S.” and then again “Last Exit in the U.S.”. Another portentous sign consisted of the silhouette
of a fleeing immigrant family set against the bright yellow of U.S. traffic
signs. I’d seen deer crossing signs
before; I’d seen cow-crossing signs before; but never a fleeing-immigrant sign. The first one I saw slipped by me at 60 mph
and I wasn’t sure if I had in fact seen what I thought I had seen. A bit further down the road, I saw another
set of these hideous signs. So I
stopped, got out of the car and, feeling like a neophyte ethnographer, I
snapped a few quick shots of them.
What could these signs mean? That immigrants from Mexico are animals? Animals that freeze, like frightened deer,
like dumb, confused cows, in the headlights of oncoming gringo traffic? If these signs had been posted out of a
desire to protect immigrants from speeding traffic, than certainly some less
conspicuous image might have been more appropriate. Who were the people that voted in favor of
these signs, preferring them to other symbols?
Something that was not concern for human lives must have been the
principal motive behind those signs. But
what? Insurance companies tired of lost
profits from claims on fender-benders due to crashes with fleeing immigrants? With my suspicions getting the better of me,
the curiosity I’d felt when I first saw the signs turned into anger and this
anger, eventually, turned into embarrassment – embarrassment, essentially, at
all that I had in common with the people who were responsible for the existence
of such signs. Those people were, in
part, my people.
I drove on to where there was a split
in the road. Again, I stopped. The time had come to make up my mind. Either I turned around now to head back
North, toward where San Diego, La Jolla, Los Angeles and eventually Oakland –
where I needed to be by noon the next day – all awaited me or I continued south
toward the border. In order to see it up
close. And cross it. And then be able to say, as much to myself as
to anyone else, that having once had the opportunity to get to know the border
and the city that lay to the other side, I’d not been too poor of spirit to not
take advantage of it. With emptiness in
my stomach attributable to a mix of hunger and anxiety, I turned along the
Southern route. I would eat lunch in
Tijuana.
At the border there were signs that
were just a bit too big to qualify as obvious.
They looked as though they had been made with children in mind. The signs explained where one needed to go
if, as in my case, one had nothing to declare to the customs officers. I obeyed the signs and got in the quickly
moving line of cars I saw before me. A
Mexican customs agent pointed at my car and, with a jerk of his index finger,
indicated I was to stop the car over to the side of the road, where another
agent was waiting for me. With studied
indifference, this agent asked me to open my trunk. I did.
He looked inside, lifted the little carpet in the back that was hiding
the spare tire and, satisfying himself that the trunk contained nothing else,
he shut it and gave the rear of my car three friendly pats, as if to say
giddy-up.
In something less than two minutes,
I’d crossed the border. I was in Mexico
now. Nobody had bothered to learn my
identity nor had they inquired after my reasons for traveling to Mexico. They did not ask me if I was French, German,
Canadian or whatever else. I have to
suppose that they figured I was nothing but another gringo … one more among a
daily multitude who travel to Tijuana in search of trade and who knows what other
delicacies. As I drove away from the
border crossing, I started singing to myself that silly song by Manu Chao that
goes: “Welcome to Tijuana. Tequila,
sexo, marihuana”.
I had no idea which road to
take. It wasn’t even clear to me why I’d
come or what exactly I hoped to accomplish by going to Tijuana. Did I only wish to learn if the much-coveted
salsa of the Washington embassies and newspapers tasted somehow different South
of the border? Or was I after some other
kind of experience, one that could open my eyes and open my heart and open my
mind to the realities of the border and the emerging transnational, half-breed
culture of the borderlands? Uncertain of
what I was doing, I let myself be guided by the traffic. It was mostly heading west, along the border,
toward the sea. The road ran parallel to
the great fence that the government of the United States had constructed in
order to obstruct the passage of the undocumented, the undesirables, the
forgotten ones of Mexico. I was struck
by how close people in Mexico actually lived to the fence. For many, it was literally in their back
yard. Others, I imagined, saw it more as
their front door.
To the other side – the U.S. side –
what I had seen was very different.
There, the fence was not surrounded by streets, houses, and children on
bicycles; but, by ample, wide-open, monumental spaces. Empty spaces.
Spaces that had been set aside, it would seem, mostly in order to
celebrate the energy and intensity with which they were kept under constant
surveillance. To the American side, the
power of the state was omnipresent. It
had turned the borderland just north of the border into a no-man’s land. In its totality – watch towers, helicopters
flying overhead, INS migra pick-ups stationed every one-half mile – this
no-man’s land had the feel of a theater stage on which the state was making a
spectacle, not of its power per se, but of the paranoia such power
breeds. There – on the Northern side –
the border was fortified, militarized, fetishized. If I didn’t know any better, I would have had
to say that the United States and Mexico were still at war, still fighting over
whose land this was.
But on the Mexican side the presence
of the state was less obvious. I am
tempted to suggest that it was practically absent. But to do so would be misleading. What did reign here was public use of the
space. This was a public space,
nevertheless, that did not seem to be valued by the state, much less protected
by it. What I saw was people. Many of them amassed along the fence, as if
they meant to push it over, as if they wished to tear it down in order then to
pass, pass, pass. But pass on to
what? To the jobs that no
self-respecting, sweet-toothed ketchup eater would ever want? Yes.
To a misery somewhat less miserable than the one with which many
Mexicans in Northern Mexico were already familiar as workers in the maquiladoras
or machine shops of today’s civilizing globalization? Also.
But others would say that these people wished to tear down the fence in
order to reclaim a land that had once been theirs: Aztlán.
Having driven into town, and not
wanting to eat lunch at a restaurant for gringo tourists, I stopped at a
roadside taco shop where there were already other people eating, some on foot,
others seated. This establishment
occupied the terrace of a house that was painted in two competing shades of
blue-green. It had two pink counters and
somewhere in the vicinity of ten rickety yellow stools situated along side the
counters. Behind the counters was who I
took to be the owner of the business: a half-breed, a mestiza, approximately fifty years old, who wore a white but filthy
dress and whose swollen, drying, arthritic hands told the story of a life of
tireless manual labor. At her side there
was a young man in his twenties, also a half-breed, a mestizo, who had a strangely high-pitched voice, like that of a
girl of eleven. He, not she, was the
cook. The meat had a bad look to
it. A film of green sweat that shone
dangerously luminescent covered it. The
vegetables and guacamole were on the counter, where fruit flies and some of
their larger brethren danced incessantly.
Beneath my feet were stained paper napkins, half-toked cigarettes, empty
beer bottles and drying mud. Around me
was the everyday taco eating clientele: relatively poor people, nervous and
chattering. They studied me out of the
corners of their eyes. What was this gringo
doing eating lunch at a roadside taco shop?
I thought I could see the fence reflected in their watery eyes. Or was I only transferring onto them the
fence I carried inside, as a half-breed of Spanish and Anglo-American
descent? The fence was in them, tearing
them apart. Or was the fence in me,
tearing me apart? They were looking at
me with suspicion. Or was it me who was
looking at them with suspicion? They
were half-breeds happily at home in their half-breed world of the
borderlands. I was a different kind of
half-breed, uncomfortably not at home to either side of the border. Despite all this, or rather because of it, I
greatly enjoyed the food I was served and the conversation that I fell into
with the señora whose taco shop this was.
After placing my order – three
taquitos with red salsa and a coca-cola – the señora commented on how well I
spoke Spanish. She told me, as if she
had been pleased by her discovery: “¡Habla español!” (“You speak Spanish!”). I answered: “Lo estamos hablando los dos,
¿no?” (We’re both speaking it, aren’t
we?). Certainly, she had not expected to
receive such a disagreeable response.
Sensing that I felt offended, she sought to pardon herself. She explained to me that I did not look like
I should know how to speak Spanish and that considering my physical appearance,
she’d assumed that I was a gringo.
I was tempted to tell her that I was gringo only in part, and that my
mother was Spanish, that I had lived in Argentina as a boy, that I was married
to a Colombian, that like her and everyone else at the taco shop, I was a
half-breed. But I held my peace and
instead told her that her assumption had been correct. I was a gringo. Where then -- she wanted to know -- had I
learned to speak Spanish so well? In the
crib, I told her. And with no more
explanations I asked for the bill.
In order to return to San Diego and
from there to Los Angeles I would have to cross back over the border. This time around I had to wait in an
interminably long line. It seemed like
everyone and their grandmother had decided to leave Mexico behind and try to
cross to the other side. Several people on
the side of the road asked if they could hitch a ride over with me. I just kept smoking cigarettes and behaving
as if I were mad, like someone who understood nothing of what was being asked
of him, whether in Spanish or in English.
And little by little, I put some distance between the Mexican flag and
myself. Slowly but surely, I advanced
toward the flag of the United States of America.
I watched as the customs agents, the
agents of the migra, looked over the cars in front of me. They used mirrors to peek underneath the
cars. They used dogs to sniff at the
wheels, to sniff at the drivers, to sniff out drugs. There were about three agents per car. They all wore mirrored sunglasses: the kind
that are rounded just enough to contort the reflection of anyone who looks into
them. They bore smiles. They were armed to the teeth.
Finally it was my turn. One of the agents signaled for me to
advance. Another asked me something I
was unable to understand. I said:
“Excuse me?” And he asked me again, this
time raising his voice: “You are a citizen of what country?” I hesitated to answer. The sight of these agents, their dogs, and
guns had gotten me thinking of the fleeing-immigrant signs I’d seen earlier in
the day. Impatiently, the agent asked me
again: “What country are you from?”
Impishly, I sang out “the Great Ole U.S. of A!” He asked for documentation. I fumbled a bit in my wallet and then
presented him with my DC driver’s license.
He snatched it from me, kept it in his hand, went into his little booth,
and began typing, perhaps in an attempt to find my name among those who figured
on his little black list. “What were you
doing in Mexico?” was his next question.
“I wanted to see what you guys’ fence looked like from the other side” I
spat back at him. Irritated, he ordered
me to open the trunk. Being the
freedom-loving, independent-minded, and self-reliant American that I am, I sheepishly
obeyed his command. In the rearview
mirror I could see the dogs coming and that several other agents were already
inspecting my car, touching it, penetrating it with their gaze. I started to believe that I deserved so much
attention. In the trunk they came
across, much as the Mexican agent had before them, the spare tire. The irritable customs agent put his arm
through the window and gestured as if he were going to hand me back my driver’s
license. As I reached for it, he let it
drop, with the subtlest of contemptuous flips, onto my lap. “You’re free to go,” he informed me with
bored authority. Once again, I did as I
had been commanded to do and drove away.
Once again, I was among those who had built up a fence in order to
protect themselves from the dangers of the Hispanic world. Once again, in the home of the brave and the
land of the free.
