The Flight of the Iguana (31 page)

On March 24, 1982, John Fife announced at a press conference that Southside Presbyterian Church (joined by a handful of congregations in other cities) would henceforth be providing sanctuary to certain undocumented Central American aliens. They were pledging themselves to support and defend the refugees, and daring the Justice Department to make arrests.

Most of America remained oblivious to these events in Tucson, but the Justice Department did respond. Within less than three years Reverend Fife and a dozen co-workers had been indicted.
During the same course of time, though, that early commitment by Southside Presbyterian Church had dovetailed with similar actions by other American congregations and grown into a national movement, now including those hundreds of churches and synagogues and Quaker meetings, all united in a new nexus of humanitarian defiance.

Of course none of this—not the indictments, not the growth of the movement, not even the prolonged
need
for such a movement—had been foreseeable in 1980. Back then, during the year that followed the desert deaths and on into summer and autumn of 1981, it was all just an extemporized effort, informal and local, conducted by a few well-meaning church folk and lawyers. But the larger need was already apparent then, as deportations continued, and as more and more refugees arrived in Tucson. Many of these were brought up through the desert by a man named Jim Corbett.

•   •   •

Jim Corbett would later be a co-defendant with John Fife in the Tucson trial. He was acquitted, thanks to an almost accidental absence of evidence against him. Because Corbett performed his own role rather solitarily, the prosecution's star witness (a middle-aged Mexican named Jesus Cruz, who had infiltrated the movement and worn a tape recorder to sanctuary meetings) had little to say about him. Corbett for his own part has talked openly about smuggling refugees but, like Fife and the other defendants, maintains that his acts are in compliance with U.S. law.

Jim Corbett is an arthritic Quaker with a degree in philosophy from Harvard and the backcountry stamina of a red wolf. Having ranched cattle for years in southern Arizona, he knows the Sonoran Desert like a cab driver knows the back roads to the airport. Beginning in 1981 and continuing until his face became infamous to the INS, Corbett's chosen role was to guide refugees across the border. Sometimes he cadged identity cards and took the people through a port of entry, the route that was precarious
but physically undemanding. More often, if the particular individuals seemed hardy, they walked the desert. Corbett was familiar with the terrain and capable of using it to advantage, traveling the washes under cover of vegetation, dodging the Border Patrol planes and eluding the agents in cruisers and on horseback, laying up at night without a fire, crossing the fence, following the natural warps of the land, then getting up to a road and out of the area inconspicuously. By one estimate, he has personally brought in seven hundred souls.

Like Reverend Fife, but in very different ways, Jim Corbett is an anomaly. He is firmly (if politely) antiliturgical, a real Quaker to his soul, suspicious of organized churches and certainly not born to found a popular religious movement. He is also an intellectual, a complex thinker and a prolific writer, who has chosen to avoid academia while spending much of his life at the hard physical labor of ranching cattle and sheep. For five years he has been one of the most visible exemplars of the sanctuary movement, making a huge contribution directly and exerting a farflung influence, yet the path that brought him to this work has been very peculiarly his own. Most other representatives of the movement trace their concept of sanctuary to a European historical basis in Roman law, medieval canon law, and English common law, and to a theological basis in Exodus, Numbers, and Isaiah. Jim Corbett is aware of those sources but he talks more personally about Buddhist ideas of stillness, the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, the anthropology of pastoral nomads in Tibet, and the practical details of goat husbandry. Most other representatives of the movement—the nuns and ministers and priests and rabbis who are now playing conspicuous roles—have come out of clerical backgrounds, especially from missionary orders and social-action ministries. Jim Corbett has come, literally, out of the desert.

For almost two decades he has had a special interest in the spiritual uses of wilderness. The Buddhist and Hindu and Taoist
traditions all include a theme, Corbett says, of the person who goes off alone into wilderness (often a desert wilderness) for some stretch of time, to strip away those aspects of misguided worldly concern that Corbett calls “the social busyness.” The Hebrews' Sinai sojourn as described in Exodus served a similar purpose, he says, though in that case it was not a lone individual but a whole community seeking purgation. During the early 1970s Corbett began to experiment with the same kind of sojourn himself. He was teaching ecology and anthropology to students from a Quaker school, and at the end of each semester he would lead those teenagers out for a two-week stay in the desert. This was not “survivalist training,” he stresses. He hoped these students would learn how to
be at home
in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.

Corbett and his students traveled light. They took sleeping bags, a little other gear, but no food. Carrying food into this landscape was unnecessary. Instead of food, they herded along a few goats.

Later Corbett would write a book-length (still unpublished) manuscript titled
Goatwalking,
an improbable gumbo of his ranching and backcountry know-how and his philosophic and political ideas.
Goatwalking
is a strange, intriguing document, the quiet manifesto of a man who combines in himself some of the more appealing aspects of Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Emiliano Zapata. It is a guidebook toward revolutionary simplicity and wildland dairying. He writes in the book that “goatwalking could be explained on a single page, as a menu. How about a quart-and-a-half of [goat's] milk, another quart of yogurt, a side dish of tumbleweed greens, some roasted mescal heart for sweets, and four or five saguaro fruits for dessert? And put some
bellota
[a type of desert acorn] in your shirt pockets for between-meal snacks. I've discovered that it's not difficult to teach people to
eat, although they may prefer starvation to tasty but taboo foods such as grubs or grasshoppers.”

But it's really much more than a desert-survival menu. Through this concept he calls “goatwalking,” Corbett aligns himself with those nomadic pastoralists—of ancient Sinai or twentieth-century Tibet or wherever—who have come to the realization that “their livestock could provide the life-support and security associated with [planted crops] while also providing the mobility necessary to escape the state.” In Corbett's usage, goatwalking is a potent synecdoche, representing exactly what the word says and also much more.

At the literal level it stands for the life of pastoral nomadism (tending and traveling with half-wild grazing animals), practiced on a wilderness landscape and, in Corbett's version, outside the purview but within the physical boundaries of the modern industrial state. The goats are allowed to go feral, habituating themselves to wilderness pasturage, and the goatwalker goes feral along with them, living on milk and wild plant foods. On a political level, this goatwalking life is recommended as what Corbett calls “the cimarron alternative.” The Spanish word
cimarrón
has entered English with two definitions, and Corbett intends them both: Besides “feral animal,” it also means “runaway slave.”

The cimarron alternative in this sense is the act of stepping beyond societal constraints and into the wilderness of a purer moral freedom. The goatwalker is a runaway slave who knows how to live off the land. Naturally, therefore, he will feel sympathy for his fellow cimarrons—and Jim Corbett's own goatwalking has always had that dimension. “During the Indochina War,” he says in
Goatwalking,
“I became a habitual criminal, frequently associated and conspired with fellow lawbreakers, and sometimes used an isolated ranch headquarters as a refuge and way-station for fugitives. Naturally enough, we occasionally speculated about the use of goatwalking as an escape technique. A small group of people who have mastered goatwalking can simply vanish, since
their life-support is mobile and is also independent of the governmentally monitored commercial system.” It was no big step from that sort of speculation to Corbett's later role in the sanctuary movement. His manuscript continues: “When a person or a group is faced with extermination, enslavement, or long-term imprisonment, going free may be a more responsible choice than attempting to resist. . . . If we are lucky, few of us will ever face political conditions that would make escape necessary for survival. . . . Maybe Latin American peasants or World War II partisans or pre-emancipation blacks might withdraw into the sierras, but the thought that anyone in today's United States might do so is absurd, isn't it? It is for those who don't know how.”

Now this may all sound quixotic or woolly to you or me—but Jim Corbett happens to be the sort of stubborn Quaker moralist who turns quixotic notions into acts.
Goatwalking
was written in the late 1970s, several years before Corbett met his first Salvadoran refugee. Then when the need arose for a desert-smart guide who would lead terrified fugitives through wilderness and across a border, circumventing the armed minions of national policy (as distinct from law), he was decidedly ready. He knew how.

And there was one other element that seems to have figured in Jim Corbett's readiness, closely related to his cimarron sensibility, closely related also to his reading of Exodus: the tradition, common among nomadic peoples inhabiting harsh landscapes, of radical hospitality. For the Bedouin this was
dakhala.
Among the tribal nomads of Tibet—whose culture was for Corbett an important paradigm—the provider of
dakhala
finds a striking equivalent in the protective host known as
bDag Po.

The Tibetan plateau is not a true desert but, with its drastically high elevations (even the valleys are above 10,000 feet), its rocky canyons, its thin air and poor soil and sudden shifts between heat and blizzard, it is certainly a land of extremity and denial. In such a place—lacking police, lacking inns and restaurants, lacking the forms of refuge that can be bought elsewhere with money
—no one goes visiting for frivolous reasons, and hospitality is limited to a high seriousness. When a
bDag Po
has offered shelter to a guest, he has also committed himself as a guardian and sponsor, guaranteeing against his own honor that the guest will be safe from danger and aided materially for the continued journey.

In an inclement land like Tibet or Arabia, the need for such human clemency is recognized as a sacred truth, because the need is always potentially mutual. Hospitality is understood vividly: as a matter of life and death. In the Sonoran Desert, where thirteen Salvadorans had already died, that's exactly how Jim Corbett came to understand it.

•   •   •

The trial began in October of 1985 and lasted until the following May. It was a long and expensive prosecution, with its full share of complex legal technicalities, its moments of true drama and melodrama, but the proceedings as they unfolded were perhaps more notable for what did
not
happen than for what did.

At the very start the presiding judge, Earl H. Carroll, issued several orders barring certain types of evidence: No testimony would be accepted concerning the political conditions or dangers in any foreign country; no testimony concerning the defendants' religious beliefs or motivations; no testimony related to the defendants' understanding of U.S. immigration laws; no evidence of the defendants' belief that those aliens they stood accused of helping were legitimate refugees. That list of exclusions covered nearly every defense that the defendants' attorneys had hoped to use. Evidence about the ninety-eight percent denial rate for Salvadoran asylum applicants was inadmissible. The 1980 Refugee Act was inadmissible.

Consequently the trial's outcome may have been virtually settled before the opening statements were made. But the trial went ahead anyway, with its other significant omissions. The chief INS investigator who had guided the undercover operation was never
called by the prosecution to testify. The ninety-one tapes of supposedly conspiratorial sanctuary conversations were never (except for one half-hour set of excerpts, carefully selected by the prosecutor) played in court. The defense attorneys themselves fought for admission of the full tapes, hoping that way to show the defendants' activities in context, but the judge supported the prosecutor's decision to keep the jury ignorant of any such context. Three unindicted sanctuary workers and one refugee all refused to testify for the prosecution, despite subpoenas, and were therefore held in contempt, sentenced to house arrest until the trial ended. Of the refugees who
did
testify, seemingly under duress, the prosecutor complained that their memories were selective: They more readily recollected the deaths of their family members, the terror and violence they had fled, than whatever incriminating words had been uttered by John Fife or Darlene Nicgorski. One refugee witness, Alejandro Rodriguez, speaking of a middle-aged woman defendant, had another recollection: “She was the only person that offered me a roof over my head when I was most in need. People told me she had a good heart. I remember her with much love.”

And finally the defendants themselves did not testify. In fact they literally presented no defense at all. On a Friday morning in the nineteenth week of the trial, with the prosecution having rested and the sanctuary lawyers now scheduled to begin calling witnesses, each of those lawyers stood up in turn and announced that the defense, too, rested its case. This seems to have been partly an act of strategy (if the defendants were forbidden to mention refugee law or religious motivations or anything else they considered significant, what value in giving the prosecution a chance to cross-examine them?) and partly an act of sheer protest.