THE STORIES David Spener CCllaannddeessttiinnee CCrroossssiinnggss:: TThhee SSttoorriieess © 2010 by David Spener, Ph.D. Department of Sociology and Anthropology Trinity University San Antonio, Texas U.S.A. Published electronically by the author at http://www.trinity.edu/clandestinecrossings as a companion to the book Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border (Cornell University Press, 2009). Direct correspondence to [email protected]. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 It Was a Lot of Money, but It Was Worth It 6 Chapter 2 El Carpintero 32 Chapter 3 Divided Lives 36 Chapter 4 Se batalla mucho 78 Chapter 5 You Can Cross Any Time You Want 108 Chapter 6 From Matamoros to Houston 128 Chapter 7 I Helped Them Because I Had Suffered, Too 157 Chapter 8 Criminal Enterprise or Christian Charity? 176 Chapter 9 Sandra, in San Antonio, on Her Way to Seattle 198 Bilingual Glossary of Migration-Related Terms 215 Entre tu pueblo y mi pueblo Between your people and my people, hay un punto y una raya. there are a dot and a dash. La raya dice “No hay paso,” The dash says, “No Crossing,” y el punto “Vía cerrada.” and the dot, “Road Closed.” Y así entre todos los pueblos And that’s how it is between all the raya y punto, punto y raya. peoples: Dash and dot, dash and dot. Con tantas rayas y puntos With so many dashes and dots, el mapa es un telegrama. the map is a telegram. Caminando por el mundo Walking through this world, se ven ríos y montañas you’ll see rivers and mountains. se ven selvas y desiertos You’ll see jungles and deserts, pero ni puntos ni rayas. but no dots or dashes. Porque estas cosas no existen Because these things don’t exist, sino que fueron trazadas but instead were drawn para que mi hambre y la tuya so that my hunger and yours estén siempre separadas. are forever kept separate. Verses from “El punto y la raya,” by Aníbal Nazca. Introduction The nine stories presented in these pages are based on in-depth interviews that I conducted with undocumented Mexican migrants and their coyotes* in the U.S. state of Texas and the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Nuevo León, and San Luis Potosí [see Map 1]. They represent the kinds of “nuts and bolts” accounts of border crossings that I collected from informants between 1998 and 2006 that, in turn, formed the basis for the analysis contained in the book Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border, published by Cornell University Press in 2009.† Each story here relates individual informants’ experiences in considerably more detail than space limitations permitted in that volume. Aside from the intrinsic interest they hold for me personally, I have published these stories electronically for two reasons. First, I want to make them as widely available as possible to researchers, journalists, activists, teachers, students, and others who are interested in gaining deeper knowledge about the ways in which Mexican migrants crossed the border at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the kinds of things that happened to them when they did. Many myths about clandestine border- crossing persist, often fueled by sensational reports in the press. It is my hope that the detailed accounts provided here will promote a more realistic understanding of the process of undocumented migration on the part of contributors to public debates about this pressing social problem. Second, I convinced the scores of people I interviewed to share their stories with me so that English-speakers in the United States could hear about what crossing the border had been like for them and why they had to do it. Thus, retelling their stories in English as they were told to me in Spanish fulfills an important commitment I made to the migrants and coyotes that I met in the field. I contacted the migrants and coyotes interviewed for my study using a snowball method, working outward from members of my network of friends and acquaintances in Austin and San Antonio, Texas. The informants I contacted in this manner hailed from the Mexican states of *Coyote is one of the colloquial terms used by Mexicans to refer to persons that help undocumented migrants enter the United States. For other such colloquialisms, see the “Bilingual Glossary of Migration-Related Terms” on page 215. †Readers may order the book on-line from the Cornell University Press catalog, http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5488. 1 Map 1. Mexican States Texas 2 INTRODUCTION Coahuila, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz. Several of the people I interviewed in Texas subsequently referred me to friends and family in their hometowns in Mexico, leading me to make trips to interview informants in a variety of towns and cities in Guanajuato, Nuevo León, and San Luis Potosí. The migrants and coyotes that I interviewed staged the bulk of their crossings of the Mexico-U.S. border into South Texas, across the stretch of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo del Norte running approximately 600 miles from the Amistad Reservoir Dam near the international bridge connecting Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila with Del Rio, Texas to Boca Chica, where the river enters the Gulf of Mexico, a few miles below the twin cities of Matamoros, Tamaulipas and Brownsville, Texas. Because they were bound for points well into the interior of the United States, the main challenge migrants faced was not crossing the river, but moving through the heavily patrolled South Texas brush country undetected, past the final immigration checkpoints staffed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security authorities on the highways leading away from the border [see Map 2]. The vast majority of border crossings described in these pages were made after the 1997 launching of the Border Patrol’s Operation Rio Grande, which greatly increased surveillance of the international boundary by U.S. authorities in South Texas, but before the construction of massive walls along many stretches of the border with Northeast Mexico that began in 2008. They also took place before the current wave of violent gun battles involving rival drug trafficking gangs in Mexico that arose after incoming President Felipe Calderón launched a military campaign against organized crime in 2006, leaving 28,000 dead by the time of this writing. I should also note that the migrants whose stories appear in this collection hailed from non-indigenous, mestizo communities in Mexico that had been sending young men to work in the United States for many decades. In recent years, a growing number of women and children had also entered the migrant stream. Many members of these communities resided more or less permanently north of the border, while many others had returned to Mexico after one or more sojourns in the United State. This meant that members of these communities who wished to emigrate, could frequently count on guidance as well as financial and material assistance from their paisanos to make the trip. As a consequence, many of the residents of the communities I visited enjoyed considerable advantages as they migrated north relative to those departing from other communities in Mexico whose migration began much more recently in response to repeated economic crises and civil unrest in the latter years of the twentieth century. 3 CLANDESTINE CROSSINGS: THE STORIES Thus, these stories should be understood as illustrating only a handful of many different migration streams flowing from Mexico in the contemporary period, each with its own unique characteristics in addition to those it Map 2. South Texas Border Region shares with streams emanating from other communities whose members tend to stage their crossings along other stretches of the border with the United States. 4 INTRODUCTION Publication of these stories has been made possible by generous financial support of my research and writing from Trinity University and the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the many friends, colleagues, and family members without whose advice, assistance, and understanding I would never have been able to complete this work. Finally, I thank the many women and men who took the time to tell me about how they made it across the heavily-guarded border that divides our two nations. I hope one day to be able to walk with them freely back and forth across it, without fear, and in the light of day. 5 CHAPTER 1 It Was a Lot of Money, But It Was Worth It Álvaro was from a small town in the foothills of the eastern sierra of the central altiplano region of the state of San Luis Potosí. He went to the United States for the first time in 1999, when he was just sixteen years old. He had gone with some friends from home, crossing the Río Bravo near the two Laredos and hiking through the brush on the Texas side to the small town of Encinal, where they were picked up by friends and driven to San Antonio. Álvaro had worked in San Antonio for about a year before he was turned over to the immigration authorities and deported for having tried to get a Texas driver’s license without possessing the proper documentation. He went back to his hometown in Mexico for a month before returning to San Antonio following the same route. This next sojourn lasted for four years, during which he married a U.S. citizen, had a daughter, and learned a skilled construction trade. It ended suddenly when he was picked up by the Border Patrol at the entrance to a construction site where he was working.