The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (4 page)

“The Speaker wants to know what we need to do for your support in the future,” Lazio said.

“Don’t bring around any more bills like this,” King said.

The bill was sponsored by Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman from Texas, a state that resents and reviles all Mexicans, although they will hire them for $3 an hour. It was cosponsored by Alan Simpson, then a Republican senator from Wyoming, which had 430,000 residents at the time and enough room for the population of a couple of countries.

One part of the bill said that “secret evidence” was allowed at immigration hearings. The phrase brought on an ancient fury in King, who had been all through this during his struggles to get a travel visa for Gerry Adams, the Catholic leader from Northern Ireland. King wanted him to speak to the American Irish. The State Department said there was “classified evidence” that Adams was a danger. They said that they owed it to the British government to keep Adams out. It took years for King to get the decision overturned, during which time his distrust became permanent. Now, on this day in Washington, King stood in the Congress of the United States and looked at the phrase “secret evidence.” He saw it as un-American. He voted no. And he would vote no on any other immigration bill of its kind.

Later, walking back to his office across the street from the Capitol, he was saying, “It comes out to be fear, I guess. The idea of a bunch of Mexicans walking around the country—it frightens them. If you ask any questions about immigration, nobody has an answer. They feel it is something so bad that you don’t have to explain it.”

Now the names have changed. Gingrich of Georgia made everybody furious. Then his moral purity was slightly marred by one girlfriend and he was out. Suddenly, about to take his place is
Robert Livingston from Louisiana, a sure antiterrorist. He wanted executions of immigrant terrorists, and if they weren’t caught with a bomb, the gas chamber still would do. Livingston is on the floor of the House, about to be voted Speaker of the House. He decides to display his dislike for President Clinton. He calls over to the Democratic side that President Clinton should resign because he is an immoral pig with a girlfriend, Monica. The Democrats rise and shriek, “You resign! You resign!” They are telling each other the news that Livingston has four girlfriends. He has them in motels. Livingston happens to glance upward. He sees two of his four girlfriends. “Motel Livingston!” people shout. “You resign! You resign!!”

“All right, I will,” he says. He walks off the floor. His chief supporters run to the back to pick a successor, Dennis Hastert. This one doesn’t know Irish without papers or a Mexican. The whip, Rick Lazio, soon is gone. He is replaced by Tommy Reynolds from New York, whose field of interest is Niagara Falls.

And nothing changes. Peter King still goes to his seat ready to oppose any and all bills. None comes up.

Motel Livingston now stalks Capitol Hill as a lobbyist for Turkey. Somebody in the House is sponsoring a resolution condemning Turkey for slaughtering Armenians in 1915, and Livingston is hired to block it. “Turkey is not for genocide,” he says. The trucks running through the border towns, carrying mufflers from Mexico and television sets from California, have superseded visions of terrorists or of most any other deaths in Congress. Money wins again.

And in Mexico a new president is worried about immigrants coming into southern Mexico from Guatemala and Honduras. For the northern border he sees a program of guest workers, and Mexican farm labor groups in the United States squall that under this, a guest worker would not be allowed to join an American labor union. “Ensured slavery!” they shout.

Once, virtually all Mexican immigrants made it into the United States safely. At El Paso, the entrance was made from the
colonias
,
the shantytowns as hideous as anything in places like Rio or Rwanda, on the edge of the city of Juárez. This was accomplished by fording the shallow brown water of the Rio Grande. Many coming from Juárez who didn’t want to come up the river so far took the “ferry,” an inner tube pulled by rope across the river, which was wide at this point. The border agents were up on the bridge between Juárez and El Paso, guarding the United States border.

The largest number took the obvious path through Tijuana. They came off the planes on Rodriguez Field, where the air was filled with the magical sound of the song of America, cars rushing, truck horns blaring, smaller and insistent car horns, all of it on U.S. Highway 35, visible from out there on the runways. You can see the American road! The road ran from the large customs and immigration border inspection station at San Ysidro, just yards away, with twin plaques marking the borders of each country. The border is marked on the roadway pavement by a twin line of small metal nipples running across the twenty-four lanes. A dozen southbound lanes go to Mexico, and another dozen lanes go up the coast to San Diego, only miles away, and on to Los Angeles, to the airports, to all of America, to New York. From Rodriguez Field, they slipped through the bushes and across the sand leading up to the highway. Usually, they gathered at 4
P.M.
, at the changing of shifts of the American border guards, whose schedule they knew as if it were a town prayer. They had only to go over a weak wire fence with barbed wire at the top, barbed wire that could be nullified by one jacket draped over it. Then the whole pack would go up and over; it could be a couple of hundred, suddenly sprinting across the border line wherever you looked, and with speedy little strides covering twelve lanes to the center divider, a step over that, and another run for life and riches across twelve more lanes to the other side. The Mexicans who made it across the highway were new Americans. They melded in with the residents of the apartments and started
walking toward San Diego as if they were heading for a store around the corner.

Frequently there was the shriek of brakes and the bare lights of emergency workers; a Mexican, crumpled like a piece of paper, was dead on the highway. Month after month, the Mexicans came off the airport runways. Night after night, Mexican after Mexican went high into the air as they were hit by a car, a trailer truck. So many that Jesus Garcia, the state of California’s transportation director, erected a twelve-foot-high heavy wire fence on the highway divider to make it impossible for anybody to get across and be killed while making their run for America.

This way of crossing a border ended with the wave of a gun. A force of nineteen thousand Border Patrol guards spread across the Southwest, from San Diego through Nogales and Douglas in Arizona and Laredo and Brownsville and Corpus Christi in Texas. The towns carry the names of famous western stories, most of which never happened or, if anything did, one shot in real life became a thousand in cheap western stories or preposterous movies.

At the crossing to San Diego, the records of combined forces showed that they turned back 524,231 Mexicans. About a million made it through. Near the end of 1999, they had for the single year stopped 182,267, which seems like a tremendous victory, except three still got through for every one stopped. Yet it still was a gamble for a Mexican to try without a professional smuggler—a coyote.

Suddenly, and from everywhere, the traffic became overwhelming. The North American Free Trade Agreement of January 1, 1994, erased duties and left customs and immigration people standing at ramparts designed to inspect and impound drugs and keep out Mexicans without papers, trying to block a flood with their feet. All border troops try to ignore being parties to the fiction that you can stop masses of people who want to move. They stand on the border as fierce defenders of the American way of life: paycheck. And
as part of the great new law enforcement industry, they understand the need for official statistics. Stop two illegals, the figure becomes five in a government press release in Washington.

This still requires a lot of plain hard, frustrating work. They’ll receive a tip that a trailer truck is coming through with illegals. Stop the truck and find sixty Mexicans huddled in back. Send them back. Away goes the truck. Acting on information and belief, agents pull over a van and find many pounds of marijuana. The driver says he has no idea how it got there. He is arrested. And as far as the eye can see there is a line of trucks waiting to cross, eighteen-wheel trailer trucks coming from Tijuana. An average of three thousand trailer trucks brush past the border booths every twenty-four hours like an armored column and head anywhere in America.

And in the southbound lanes, another three thousand trucks head from America to Mexico.

Some American unions said the safety standards of these Mexican trucks and their drivers was so low that they were a rolling threat to America. That never happened. The California Highway Patrol and the local San Diego police could not come up with any records of an uncommon number of trucks from Mexico, or trucks going there, involved in accidents on Highway 35. By May of 2000, the Senate Commerce Committee found that of the 63,000 trucks from Mexico running in the United States, 73 percent were inspected during the year and therefore rated as approved.

The common fear was that trucks from Mexico carrying cheaply produced goods would suck up the American economy.

“I don’t see anything sucked up,” Rudy Camacho, the customs agent in charge of southern California, said as he stood at the border plaza, the sound of trucks forcing him to keep his voice raised. “One can’t do without the other anymore. Twenty billion dollars a year in trade. Southern California can’t do without it. What’s it done to Mexico? It woke up a sleeping giant.”

Ray Kelly, then customs commissioner, in for a visit from Washington,
stood at the Tijuana crossing and watched the long lines of trailer trucks. Once he figured out that the ones coming from Mexico were carrying mufflers for America, thousands of mufflers, he knew the idea of stopping Mexico was over. “You get something this commonly used and if you slow it up, you’ll have auto dealers calling for your head,” he said. “What’s happened is we’ve been overwhelmed. The government agencies can’t handle the situation. We all need more people. We’re told to forget it. What they want is more roads to handle all this. We seized three hundred eighty-five thousand pounds of drugs this year. Pot. We’re burning forty thousand pounds of it tomorrow in Long Beach. I don’t care how you feel about drugs or pot, but nobody in Washington is interested in drugs anymore. Whether anybody wants to recognize it or not, we’re going to have more and more trouble stopping drugs from coming through. Who knew there would be this many trucks?” Nor a war.

The immigrants don’t have the complicated daily life of a drug carrier. The drug carriers risk millions and millions. They could lose their freedom and frequently even their lives. They have enemies when they leave and enemies when they arrive.

Immigrants have to risk danger, and more of them die crossing the border, and the prize is the chance to go to work for below minimum wage and be lonely in America.

E
DUARDO’S FATHER REMEMBERS
that a most improbable man named Chockaloo was the first to leave San Matías for the United States.

“Why go there?” he remembers asking Chockaloo.

“Trabajo.”

“You don’t even work
here,”
Daniel said.

Reluctantly, many of the men in town donated something and wished Chockaloo great luck. Some even thought he was brave. Nobody they knew had ever done this. Daniel recalls kissing him goodbye. He was off to America, facing a new life with only the clothes he was wearing, a shirt and pants.

The owner of a grocery store on the main road outside of San Matías told Daniel that Chockaloo bought several bottles of beer and drank them on the roadside while waiting for the airport van. He drank enough beer to allow him to open a bottle of tequila that he had also bought. Later, off into the sky went Chockaloo. As he had never been higher than the roof of a brickyard shack, the alcohol was the only thing that kept him on the plane.

Some months later, Chockaloo’s mother was at the money order window in the appliance store—stoves, television, sound systems—in Cholula, asking if anything had arrived for her. She got what she expected—nothing,

“Mama, Chockaloo is home!” a nephew shouted as she came back to her house. Here suddenly was her most wonderful son back in the house.

“He told everybody that the police beat him in New York and he couldn’t work,” Daniel says.

He sat on street corners and told everybody of his trip to the United States. He did not know that daily Tijuana bristled with more new, young, eager, heavily armed law enforcement agents and that no longer could you merely run across a highway. The most expensive coyotes were needed.

Chockaloo had no idea of this. He had gone through Tijuana. He thought that made him a sage. He told Eduardo that crossing the border at Tijuana was the same as walking across Calle Libre. He told Eduardo that he stood on the first street of Tijuana, at a drugstore painted blue that sold coffee, and was at the exact edge of the highway, only yards away from the United States line, and that everybody in front of the store used the outdoor pay booths to call people and tell them what they were seeing, that their car just passed through the inspection plaza, and when there would be a change of shift for the guards.

There is no way of knowing how many young people listened
to Chockaloo on the street corner, bought him a bottle of beer, and then went up to Tijuana and were terrorized by the guns of border guards and thrown back like refuse. Silvia’s uncle told her that if she wished to be eaten by animals in the desert or thrown in jail in the United States, then she should listen to Chockaloo or anybody else in town. “I will take you. If they say Tijuana, we’ll go the other way.”

The fences at Tijuana were erected by a government that doesn’t know the history of the last twenty minutes.

There was a night in Berlin in 1989 when crowds cheered in the damp night air for each sledgehammer that thudded into the Berlin Wall. And two women who took their first subway ride out of East Berlin in twenty-eight years came up the steps in West Berlin. The commercials of the West had drifted over the wall and into the taste buds of the people on the desolate streets of East Berlin.