Big Dreams (68 page)

A diapered baby, towheaded and joyous, all innocence and vapors, cried out at the sky and the birds and the swimmers.

In the end, I thought, when all the redwoods had been logged and the rivers were just a trickle, when the fish were but a memory and the earth had been leached of all its minerals, when the farms were dust and all the prisons had been built, when every last bit of recalcitrant flesh had been toned and tanned and corrected, when the realtors had completed their subdividing and the wilderness was no more, maybe California would be reduced, simply, to this—this light, this air, this feeling on the skin.

W
HEN I CAME
to the dusty boneyard of San Ysidro in the last days of September, I believed that I had reached the end of California. Ahead lay the border and beyond it lay Tijuana and Mexico.

I had always imagined the line between the countries as a highly charged zone protected by a high fence and patrolled by hardcore Border Patrol agents in mirrored sunglasses and polished leather boots. It had never occurred to me that the border did not exist, that it was a useful fiction.

San Ysidro was a shadowy, abstract place where ordinary suburban life mingled with the abrupt and secretive transactions that governed illegal immigration. It had a curious doubleness. I would go by a schoolyard and see children playing, and then look up to find the sky filled with ravens and vultures.

The two largest buildings in town were a K mart and a blood bank. Sometimes men and women from Tijuana went through the port of entry, sold some blood, and indulged themselves in a shopping spree at a new mall, loading up on cut-rate Reeboks at a factory-outlet store. They might top off the visit with a meal at a Denny’s restaurant, where the food never differed from its picture on the laminated menu.

The San Ysidro port of entry was the busiest border crossing in the world. About 43 million people passed through it every year. They passed through on foot, in buses and in vans, and in cars and on bicycles. They were the legal travelers.

Nobody knew how many people entered the state illegally each day. The Border Patrol caught about 1,500 illegal aliens every twenty-four hours, but another 5,000 or so probably slipped over
la frontera
and eluded capture.

In its San Diego sector, the Border Patrol was understaffed and underfunded. The dispatches from its chief patrol agent had the plaintive tone of somebody who feels misunderstood and misrepresented and wants badly to correct all that.

In San Ysidro, it was easy for illegal aliens to vanish. They crossed the border in clothes meant to disguise them as Californians, wearing jeans, L.A. Dodgers caps, and bogus sweatshirts from the Hard Rock Cafe, and they blended smoothly into the town’s mostly Hispanic population.

San Ysidro had safe houses where a migrant could hide out. It had dealers who sold phony documents. A trolley ran straight to San Diego, and there was little chance that you’d be pulled from it unless you had the bad luck to meet with a rare INS sweep.

At the port of entry, criminals and would-be criminals were always hanging around the pay phones. They had a cottage industry
that earned them and their less-visible partners millions. They performed such valuable services as laundering money, steering drugs in profitable directions, and arranging rides to Los Angeles or farther.

Drivers were always circling in San Ysidro, going slowly, stopping, maybe looking for something or someone, their movements a curious echo of the dark birds wheeling in the sky above them.

I did find a chainlink fence at the border. It ran for about fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean to Otay Mesa, another port of entry, where the industrial parks seemed to double almost daily to keep pace with the
maquiladoras
on the Mexican side. In most spots, the fence was trampled or had fallen down, or had been snipped with shears or simply torn. It presented no obstacle.

All along its length, I saw the trash left behind by travelers—gum wrappers, diapers, syringes, soda cans, and even the comic book
novelas
that often featured cautionary tales about the perils of a journey to
El Norte
.

San Ysidro made me uncomfortable. Nothing about it was ever absolute. A man who had glanced at you the right way yesterday might glance at you the wrong way tomorrow. A car might pull from a curb to tail you for a few blocks before dropping back. Was it a cop? A case of mistaken identity? Somebody fucking with your mind? Paranoia was the border’s stock-in-trade.

The border, I learned, was also a dumping ground. Stolen pesticides were dumped there and carried deeper into Mexico for resale. A quart of Rally from the San Joaquin could fetch up to sixty dollars, while Roundup fetched fifty by the quart. It was fruitless to speculate on how or where the pesticides were applied. There were few environmental controls and fewer still that could not be got around with a bribe.

Maquiladoras
dumped their toxic wastes in toxic cemeteries—pits in the ground that were swiftly covered over. The contaminated chemical drums were then hauled to wretchedly poor
colonias
and sold as reservoirs for drinking water. Otay Mesa was a vision of
rusting trucks, cars, and motorcycles that had been dumped hastily in the heat of an escape from a Border Patrol pinch.

Still, oddly, there was the fact of ordinary life in San Ysidro. Commuters to San Diego bought tract houses and tried to shut their eyes to the illegals who dashed across their yards or stopped for a drink of water from their garden hoses. Everybody understood the deal and did their best not to stand in its way. That was how it went along the border, all the way to Arizona.

A
LL DAY IN SAN YSIDRO
, every day, I watched people crossing illegally into California. The numbers were preposterous, and the means of entry were various, bold, and sometimes stagy. Illegal immigration had been boiled down and refined over the years until it was nothing more than an elaborate game of cat and mouse that was often conducted in broad daylight at a cost to taxpayers of untold billions.

On Dairy Mart Road one afternoon, a country road, I had to slam on my brakes when seven teenagers sprinted in front of me out of a dry creekbed concealed by bamboo and sagebrush. They seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, dropped from the clouds and set to running full speed upon the desert earth.

There were four girls and three boys, all about sixteen. Each of them carried a plastic grocery sack or a balled-up towel that held their most treasured belongings. A mirror, a comb, an electric hair dryer. I remembered Luis Martinez in the Alexander Valley and how proud he was of his battered suitcase.

As quickly as they had appeared, they disappeared into the brush on the other side of the road. They ran without apparent fear, never panting nervously or looking back over their shoulders. Instead, they had the high-spirited, athletic grace of people doing laps around a track.

They had nothing to lose, really. In the unlikely event that they met with a Border Patrol agent, they would just be processed and
returned to Tijuana, where they could mount a new try in the morning.

Monument Road off Dairy Mart Road afforded me even more amazing scenes. Against a concrete levee of the Tijuana River, a dribble of raw sewage that was posted
Peligroso!
and marked with a skull and crossbones, people who were preparing to cross began to gather in the early evening. They ripped up the shrubbery to build small fires against the autumn chill and bought beer, cigarettes, tacos, and tamales from venders circulating among them with carts and coolers. The terrain before them was rugged and potholed, an expanse of hard ground and crusty arroyos dotted with vegetation.

The smugglers known as
coyotes
moved among the travelers to solicit business, promising a safe trip for a specified price. I could see the coyotes collecting customers and drilling them as a team, standing in front of ten or twenty migrants, pointing out landmarks, and discussing strategies in the way of coaches giving chalk talks.

There were hundreds of routes into the state—easy routes, taxing routes, even brazen routes.

At the levee, for instance, everyone was out in the open, their purpose announced to all and sundry, but the run to California was short and the runners were many, so
la migra
never caught more than a third of them. At the embankment, you were gambling on the odds.

The floodlights of the Border Patrol came on at dusk to shine on the playing field. Agents riding all-terrain vehicles motored over the concrete and through the vegetation. Helicopters from the naval station at Imperial Beach, just north of San Ysidro, were poised overhead, their chopper blades roaring. Beacons slashed at the sky.

I thought of tired commuters in their backyards lighting the charcoal in their grills—a barbecue in Vietnam. I could see them flipping on the TV and could hear an ESPN commentator saying, “Rodriguez feints to the right, then goes left and darts by Agent Whipple. Yes, yes, Rodriguez is going to go all the way, he’s going to make it to California.…”

Soon after dark, there was a frantic scurrying of shapes and forms, and human beings took off singly or in groups. Every possible emotion was on view. I saw terrified old men, befuddled Indians from the interior, young mothers clutching infants to their breasts, and little girls in freshly laundered communion dresses.

Many teenagers like those on Dairy Mart Road broke headlong and hellbent toward the future, sometimes acting on an impulse. Staggering tequila drunks fell down in the river slime.

The agents assigned to chase the migrant horde had a hapless job. They were often faked out or jostled or led astray by decoys. They would manage to corner three migrants only to see six more slide by them, inches away. They were like men trying to contain a flood tide by improvising a dike from a few old bricks held together with chewing gum.

So insistent was the action that it seemed at times as if Mexicans must be engaged in an unconscious effort to reclaim the territory they had surrendered long ago. They were everywhere.

In Imperial Beach, I watched some agents arrest four young men as they wandered up the sand from Tijuana, carefree in their bathing suits and affecting the air of American lads on holiday. I watched a train go by San Ysidro and saw migrants spreadeagled and plastered to the tops of boxcars.

At the port of entry, I watched an acrobatic fellow clamber over the hoods of cars and squeeze between them in a blatant and successful dive toward dollars.

On Interstate 5, I watched couples dart past the hurtling traffic. The freeway was a deathtrap, and people were frequently killed as they crossed it—112 illegals in the last three years. The Border Patrol had done a recent tally of migrants stranded on traffic islands per twenty-four hours and had counted 650 on an average weekday and twice as many on weekends.

I saw a boy of about eight emerge from the bushes along I-5 on yet another afternoon. He had thin, black hair, and his cheeks were dirty and streaked with tears. He was feral-looking, an ugly child
and all alone. His T-shirt bore a picture of Snoopy and was stained with grass, as though he’d been crawling under barriers.

I wondered why he had crossed. Maybe he’d got cut off from his family and was searching for them. Maybe a teacher had scolded him. Maybe his old man had whacked him once too often.

He ran by the rushing cars and barely missed being hit. His eyes were wild and frantic. A Hispanic man approached him with a look of concern, but when the boy asked a question, the man shoved him away, not wanting to be implicated. The boy was obviously in trouble. He would be unlucky for certain.

All at once, the boy seemed to know that, admitting to himself how furiously lost he was, and he sat down in a motel parking lot and began crying in earnest.

O
N A NIGHT WHEN THE MOON WAS FULL
above San Ysidro, I rode with Joe Nuñez, a Border Patrol veteran, as he scoured Otay Mesa near Brown Field Airport for illegal immigrants. He drove a Chevy Blazer that had dents in it from the rocks that truants had flung at it. In the San Diego sector, the agency spent about fifty thousand dollars a year just replacing the windshields in its vehicles.

Nuñez was a relaxed and good-humored fellow. Boredom was his main enemy on the job. Night after night, he went through the same routine, making one arrest after another, but nothing ever changed. There were always new people to arrest. Only once in eleven years had he endured a dangerous incident, when a migrant had tried to stab another agent with a knife. Nuñez had wrestled it away.

“The knife was made of wood,” he told me, as if the essence of his work could be summed up in such illusions.

Sometimes Nuñez became so bored that he considered applying for a transfer to an investigative unit in the
barrios
of Los Angeles. He never let himself dwell on whether or not the chaos at the border was intentional. That was a forbidden subject and could cause mental depression.

The migrants that Nuñez caught around Brown Field Station were usually from Mexico or Central America. He had taken a few Chinese once and had also nabbed some Yugoslavs.

OTMs—Other Than Mexican—were not uncommon in the San Diego sector. Over the past year, agents had netted 347 Colombians; 266 Brazilians; 53 South Koreans; 20 Indians; 16 Turks; 11 Filipinos; 7 Canadians; 3 Israelis; and one person apiece from Nigeria, Somalia, Gambia, Algeria, and France.

We had not been on the mesa for more than five minutes before Nuñez spotted some prey.