Collide-a-scape

The movie El Norte has stayed with me a long time. Anyone who has seen it will likely remember one horrifying scene when the two Mayan peasants from Guatemala–a brother and sister–cross the U.S.-Mexico border through a sewer pipe. It’s 1984. California is the border battlefront. And Guatemala, torn asunder by a long civil war and a succession of brutal military dictatorships, is terrorizing the indigenous Mayan population.

Towards the end of the film, the sister says to the brother:

In our homeland there’s no place for us, they want to kill us. In Mexico, there’s only poverty. And in the north, we aren’t accepted. When are we going to find a home, maybe only in death?

If that film was made today, there would have to be at least one horrifying scene set somewhere in the remote desert of southern Arizona, where hundreds of illegal border crossers succumb every year to the harsh elements. Thus far, the most vivid rendering of this tragic (and little known) annal of American history is Luis Alberto Urrea’s book, The Devil’s Highway.

Now comes a powerful story in the September/October issue of Mother Jones, by Andi McDaniel, that will make your heart ache. It’s an understated, beautifully written piece that also showcases the best of humanity. Here’s one passage that chronicles, through a border patrol agent’s voice, how dead bodies are found all too often in the Arizona desert:

Some days, Guerrero is out on rescues, like the one I tagged along on today. Other days he stalks around like a crime detective, following trails of footsteps and bits of torn clothing on barbed wire fences, trying to find migrants whose compañeros had to leave them behind. The father or friend of the person will finally make it to a road, flag down an agent, explain where they left the person, and ask for help.

“Picture this,” Guerrero explains. “You finally make it to the point where the person is supposed to be. And now you see this set of footprints that’s walking away from that spot. They’ve told you everything—’The person is under a tree, we laid a blue shirt on top, they have an orange backpack’—and you confirm that this is the spot because you see the orange backpack and you see the blue shirt up on a tree and you see that the person started walking, and you’re like, okay, this isn’t good.

“You start seeing the person is going left and then a hard right, and then left, and then you see them kind of make a circle. And you know exactly what’s going on. And you keep walking and now you’ve found a belt. And you keep walking and you find a wallet and…shoes. I mean, you’re starting to picture this person—they’re, they’re…they’ve lost it. Their mind is gone. And they’re just aimlessly…just walking. And you know that when you get to them, they’re going to be dead.”

Guerrero’s gaze is still fixed on the road.

“And sure enough, once you find them, they have cholla [cactus] all over their mouth and hands. And they’re already on the ground, and rigor mortis has set in. They’re starting to balloon up and decompose because of the heat. And you can only imagine how much these people suffered. How much they suffered.”

Yesterday I was talking to Kevin Jones, Utah’s state archaeologist, about an unrelated article I’m working on, when he mentioned that “human remains tell a story.” What’s especially poignant about the Mother Jones piece by Andi McDaniel is that she’s telling the story about people who are trying to figure out the identity of each person that dies in the U.S. while crossing the Sonoran desert. (Many of the border crossers are found without any identification documents.) So she profiles people like Chelsey Juarez, a physical anthropologist, who says:

I believe in doing science for the people—breaking out of academia and doing work that’s useful. And even if you don’t think undocumented people should be here, you can agree that dying in a strange country, and losing touch with your family, that’s a tragedy.

In 2004, I got a small glimpse of the unseen (and sporadically reported) desperation along the rugged Arizona borderlands when I wrote this small piece on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Nothing’s changed. Yes, billions have since been spent on militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, but to what end?

As this wrenching blog post by Michael Wolcott at High Country News attests, abundant human tragedy still stalks the Arizona desert.

Here on this militarized edge, with its checkposts and spy towers and aerial surveillance, much is revealed. Old notions crumble. The might of the U.S. security state is rendered irrelevant by poor people in sneakers. The shrill debate over immigration is drowned out—by helicopter traffic and by the silence of mourning. Instead there are mere facts: a $500 million-dollar wall and triple-digit temperatures; human desperation licking at finite resources; cartels, coyotes, and luckless poor people dying on the rocks.

The spectral scenes I witnessed five years ago are similar to those that Wolcott describes today in a remote canyon outside Tucson:

Scores of cheap nylon backpacks, heaps of abandoned clothes, empty tins of chilies, sun-bleached plastic jugs, dirty socks hanging from tree branches. Dainty lace brassieres. Stick deodorants, lipsticks, plastic combs, and half-used tubes of toothpaste. A pair of blue satin panties with rose appliqués. Wads of black plastic garbage bags piled against boulders, partly buried by storm-washed gravel. A child’s tiny toy boat.

Wolcott’s guide surveys the heap of trash and says, “This has been cleaned up since the last time I was here. It was knee-deep then.”

When you view scenes like this, when you see such personal items, it’s impossible not to wonder what happened to the people who left them behind. In my head I ran through likely scenarios that, like the images of the trash, stayed with me for months afterwards.

Wolcott’s mind leaps to similarly sad musings:

I look at the packs and know that, for each one, a person has walked away. Who got lost? Who got raped? Who has been deported and is, right now, buying another backpack?

It seems that all that frantic fence-building along the U.S.-Mexican border is proving no match for determined drug cartels.

The wildlife, on the other hand, may be having a tougher time.  To document and chronicle this largely ignored story (it’s been two years since Congress, at the height of illegal immigrant hysteria, enacted the Secure Fence Act), a team of conservation photographers and biologists  have just embarked on a three week journey into the borderlands.

For a  glimpse of what may lurk ahead for this bunch, check out Jonathan Thompson’s recent account from the “narco trail.” At the very least, it will make you think twice about making a family stopover in southern Arizona’s backcountry.