Border Patrol Ate My Dust, The

Alarcón, Alicia, Brammer de Gonzales, Ethriam Cash

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611926088
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In 1979, Mexican President José López Portilla assured his compatriots that the prosperity of the petroleum boom would reach every corner of the Republic of Mexico. The young narrator of the first passage listens agape at the president's statements, while his work-weary parents contemplate a trip to el Norte. When the promised prosperity doesn't reach the corners of San Luis Potosí, the narrator sets out with his father to try to improve their finances. With the dream of the wealthy Hollywood that he sees on television tucked in his pocket, he, along with the other narrators in this collection of testimonials, struggles to reach the United States.

Radio personality Alicia Alarcón invited listeners who had migrated to the United States to call and share their stories. In these pages, Alarcón collects the footsteps of these travelers, through their flight and their falls. Their stories highlight the true American experience for immigrants from all over South and Central America who decide to leave their respective homelands.

These intriguing but heartbreaking passages reveal young and old, men and women, who must overcome the impossible as they hope to find a better place than the one they've left behind. These difficult and gritty stories are the stories of the successful, the ones who make it across, past the natural and the bureaucratic obstacles along the border, only to scratch together lives on the other side.

We Were Short 1,400 Quetzals

After counting all of the money, we realized that we were short 1,400 quetzals. We were not scared, because we were innocent. But in the midst of a civil war, even the innocent are guilty. Corpses appear on street corners. Their murderers go about freely, and no one dares to turn them in. We would be no exception. The victims’s families recognize those responsible, but they head for the hills before ever confronting them. To be indigenous in Guatemala is to be suspected of belonging to a guerrilla organization. Neither Juan nor I were members of any guerrilla faction; we were members of a co-op that had come up 1,400 quetzals short, and neither one of us knew who might have taken the money. The warning came that very afternoon.

“Look, if you guys don’t leave today, they’re going to kill you,” a friend told us.

“Ah, c’mon. How would you know, anyway?”

“Because they’ve already hired the hit men to kill you.”

“But why us?”

“Because they can.”

I wanted to take my wife with me. We were expecting the birth of our first child. “You go, Pascual. I’d just slow you down,” she said.

“Come with me. If you stay here, they’ll kill you.”

Juan arranged for our departure from Guatemala. It was very hard to leave our homeland behind. Even more so in a time when the landowners would keep all of our possessions. My wife was very upset. I could see how she said good-bye to everything with her eyes. She bid farewell to the mountains, to the lakes, to the cornfields, to the grass, to the reeds, to Cuchumatán, to Uspantán, and to the city of Tres Cruces. We walked for a long time, so long that I can’t even remember how many days had gone by. She nearly died on me in Oaxaca. She would throw up everything that she ate. She didn’t want to go on any farther. She would rather die there. I forced her to drink a bottle of juice each day. With help from Juan, we were able to reach Mexico City by bus, from there to Chihuahua, and from Chihuahua to Ciudad Juárez.

In Ciudad Juárez, my wife got very sick from the cold. Snow, like a mantel, had covered the entire city. I decided to take her to a place that was warmer. With the little money that I had left, we headed for Culiacán. Once there, we rented a hotel room, and on the following day, we looked for work. There was work to be found, but not a house or any place where we could stay. Nor was there any potable water. People washed and bathed in the canals. Worst of all, pigs bathed in the very same canals, and that same water was used for drinking. In Guatemala, there was war, cruelty, and intolerance, but in Mexico, there was poverty, sickness, and little hope.

“Man, your wife ain’t lookin’ so good,” Juan informed me.

“I know. But you know that we can’t stay here.”

“You want to go all the way to the United States?”

The gunmen were going to kill us back in Guatemala, but hunger would kill us here.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

We went to Mazatlán, and from there we headed for Tijuana. We found a coyote in front of the cathedral. That same night, we attempted to cross the border by passing through La Colonia Libertad. We were going to cross by crawling through some tunnels. My wife looked weaker and weaker.

“You need to hang on just a little bit longer.”

“I feel really bad, Pascual,” she said.

She looked so thin. Her breasts had disappeared. Only her belly appeared to be getting bigger and bigger all the time.

The coyote directed us to some tunnel. “You’re going to pass through here,” he said.

So that no one would get lost, he told us to grab hold of the hem of the pants leg of another person, forming a human chain. We began to crawl through the tunnel on all fours. As we moved forward, it felt as if we were stepping on top of something. There were people lying down and others half sitting. We didn’t know if they were dead or alive. It was a cold, dark place. We finally reached the other side. A car was there waiting for us, and it took us to National City. That afternoon, the coyote said, “Get the women ready. They’re going first. The Border Patrol doesn’t bother with them when going through San Clemente. The men will leave later.”

I got up from where I had been sitting and said, “What do you take us for? Fools? I don’t think so. Let me know right now if you’re going to cross us all at the same time or not. I’m not going to leave my wife in the state that she’s in.”

“If you don’t want to be separated from your wife, you’ll have to be patient. I’ll try to cross you together,” he said, lowering his voice.

We arrived in Los Angeles on the afternoon of January 28, 1981. By December 1983, my son was already a little boy. I had a job: I was operating a pushcart, but I was operating it without a license. One day, the police stopped me and took me to jail. On our trial date, they treated us as if we were dangerous criminals. There were twenty of us, all in a row, bound by a single chain. Each of us was shackled at the waist, the hands, and the ankles. The judge set us free, but the Border Patrol was there waiting for us as soon as we left the courthouse. They deported us to Mexicali. From Mexicali, I went to Tijuana to cross back over again. My wife and child were waiting for me. It was very easy to find someone to take me across. We left the same night that I arrived in Tijuana. It was terribly cold. Around two in the morning, I started to shiver, and my teeth began to chatter. I felt something was happening to me. “I’m going to freeze to death,” I thought to myself. I went up to the coyote and told him, “I’m freezing to death. I can’t take it anymore. Please, let me get some heat from your body so that I can hold out.” I looked so miserable that he gathered a bunch of trash around me and held me in his arms. We were like that for quite a while. Then, I’m not sure if I fainted or fell asleep. We crossed into San Isidro, California, at three o’clock in the afternoon. While we were walking, I was very surprised to see women’s underwear strewn about everywhere. We came to a small mountain where some men where charging people for the right to cross the river. I asked the coyote what that was about. He explained to me that we should just pay them off because that way they would protect us from the thieves. Otherwise, they themselves would “shake us down” for everything we had, including our clothes. “Around here,” he told me, “if it’s not the coyotes then it’s the thugs; or if not them, then it’s the pollos themselves. This is no man’s land. Not even the police or the Border Patrol dare come down here.”

We crossed at midnight. We walked until we reached the freeway, where we sprinted across. A car was waiting for us there. During the drive, I stared at the highway and thought about some girls who told me how Mexican immigration officers had taken them to a hotel. One of them told me how she allowed herself to be seduced by them so that she would be able to cross without any problems. It took us a day to reach Los Angeles, where my wife and child were waiting for me.

Pedro
Los Angeles, California

The Shot Hit Right Next to Me

I had hoped to finish my degree, but the war prevented me from doing so. If a person didn’t support the government, then he must have been a guerrilla sympathizer. Neutrality was an impossibility. I was one of the half million people who fled the violence in El Salvador.

On the day of my scheduled departure, I woke up very early. I embraced my father as I bid him farewell. He hid his face as he hugged me; he didn’t want me to see him cry. I knew that our parting was breaking his heart, but he understood that it was best for me to leave the country as soon as possible.

A childhood friend accompanied me on the adventure. We left with $300 in our pockets and a great deal of confidence that we would make it to the United States any way that we could. All that we knew for certain was that we would have to cross through Mexico, get to Tijuana, pass into San Diego, and not stop until we reached Los Angeles. My mother and my brother were waiting for us there.

I was twenty and Tony was eighteen. It was the first time we had ever been outside of El Salvador. We arrived at the airport. We sat down and waited for our plane to leave. We made a pact that—come what may—we would not turn back. We began to engage in meaningless chatter, when suddenly, as if we had planned it together, we both started to cry. I wanted to give him a hug; perhaps he was thinking the same thing, but we had both been taught that men do not hug each other, nor do they cry in public. We dried our tears in silence.

In Guatemala, we were preparing ourselves to board a bus to Mexico when a man approached us. I realized that he had been watching us for some time now. We were very wary of him at first, but after a while, we grew to trust him. We told him about our plans to go to the United States. He asked our ages. When we told him how old we were, we could see clearly that he was on the brink of tears.

“You’re the same age as my two sons. Did you know that? I want to help you.”

He gave us an address in Mexico City along with the name of an attorney. He told us to tell him that we were his nephews. We boarded the bus, happy that we now had somewhere to go in Mexico.

The border with Mexico was only a short distance away when seven men climbed onto our bus. They started to demand money and jewelry. I could not believe my own eyes. The shock left me speechless, but it passed when the leader of the gang fired a shot right next to me. The blast left me momentarily deaf. Metal fragments fell onto my pants. Nervously, I handed him two quetzals. Tony gave him the ring and the necklace that his mother had hung around his neck the day that we departed. We thought that the scare was over. We never imagined that a bigger one was yet to come.

At the Mexican border, another kind of assailant appeared on the scene; these wore insignia and government uniforms. They boarded our bus. They took everyone who had a Guatemalan passport off the bus and escorted us to a room. There, they threatened to send us back if we did not provide them with a certain amount of money. Thanks to the intervention of a few public officials who were traveling with us on the bus, we were saved. They also helped us with two subsequent customs inspections before reaching Mexico City.

The attempted assaults upon us continued in Mexico City. Another group of men stepped on board. They said that they were Mexican immigration officers, and they told us that we had to prove that we were Mexican citizens; otherwise, they would have to send us back to Guatemala. They arrested a number of people, but Tony and I were able to get away. We reached the Mexican capital at eleven o’clock at night. We decided to rent a room in a motel that didn’t look so bad from the outside. But there was a chilly surprise waiting for us in the room, because we had never stayed in a motel before. We came across something in the bathroom that we had never seen before. There were two knobs on the shower. We didn’t know that one was for the hot water and the other was for the cold. As a result, I took a shower in freezing cold water. It felt as if ice was being poured down my spine and a frozen mist was falling from the showerhead. After I finished, I warned my friend about how cold the water was. When he stepped out of the shower, I could see some kind of vapor emanating from his pores. He made the same comment that I did: “Hey, can you believe how cold the water is here?”

After taking our cold showers, we went out into the street to take a look around, and we laughed when we saw how red our faces were. I wanted to see the Palacio de Bellas Artes. We met some girls there who took us on the metro to the zoo in Chapultepec. They made us feel very welcome with their hospitality and amiable nature. That same day, we went to go see the friend of our “uncle.” We explained to him that we wanted to fly to Tijuana. He called the airline. He told them that we were his relatives and that we were going as tourists. He asked us for the money that we needed to purchase the tickets. In order to protect ourselves, we had hidden our money inside our down jackets. We had unsown the insides and stuffed the money in through a slit. The bills had shifted around everywhere inside. We were forced to dismantle our jackets completely in order to remove the money. There were feathers everywhere, and the attorney’s office was suddenly full of feathers. We were quite embarrassed. We told him that we were sorry, but our laughter gave us away.

That same day our new friend transferred us to a hotel. He burst out laughing when we told him about our cold showers. Then he explained how to use the faucet handles. On the following day, one of the attorney’s employees came to pick us up. He drove us to the airport. Once seated on the plane, I started to play with all of the buttons. Moving my seat back and forth, I was reading the instructions when Tony said, very annoyed, “Hey, man, cool it. People are going to think that this is the first time we’ve ever been on an airplane.” We both started cracking up.

We got excited when touching down in Tijuana. We were very close to our final destination, or so we thought. After de-boarding the plane, we had to pass through two customs inspections and then go to a waiting room where they asked the passengers their nationality. They separated the Mexicans from the others. About seventy people who had claimed not to be Mexican citizens were put to one side. Approximately fifteen immigration officers surrounded us and formed a circle; from there, people left one by one to a little room where—we were informed—they were taking every last cent of the people’s money. In my anxiety and despair, I searched my mind: if I just ran out of that circle, they couldn’t chase after me and leave all of those people behind.

With no time to lose, I took off running. They started to yell at me to come back. Tony, after seeing me, took off running, too. We ran first, then slowed to a walk. We were already nearing the exit when another couple of officers got in our way. To our relief, all they wanted to do was to check our luggage. We took a taxi to El Económico Hotel in Tijuana. We went shopping. We needed to look like “tourists,” we had been told this was the thing to do.

We were approached in the street by a coyote who recognized our “touristy” appearance. We agreed upon a price to cross the border, and he said he would come for us in the morning.

He picked us up at four o’clock in the morning. We came to a fence that we slipped through easily. We went up and down a very small mountain where we stayed for a short while. We heard footsteps nearby. The coyote told us that it was another pollo. The young man eventually went by, without ever noticing us. He was crossing all alone. We were able to reach the train station. We boarded very calmly when two immigration officers stepped on and asked everyone for their papers. Upon seeing this, our guide took off running. We were arrested by the Border Patrol. They sent us back to Tijuana. We had hardly taken a few steps into Tijuana when another guide approached us. He promised to get us across the border. On the following day, we waited for the Border Patrol guards to change shifts. Our guide gave us the sign and we started to run. The officers shouted for us to stop. But we just ran faster. They didn’t follow us. We crossed the line. A pickup truck was waiting for us farther up the road. There were already about fifteen people inside. We were packed like sardines. They covered us with an enormous rug. We looked like some kind of bundle of cargo. We thanked God that it was wintertime, because if not, we would have dehydrated. Once we passed through the San Clemente checkpoint, they allowed us to sit up. The first thing I saw was the sea gulls. It filled me with joy to see them flying around freely. Our first stop was in Santa Ana, where they began to call our families. They drove Tony and me to East LA. That’s where I first heard the word “burrito.” The coyote asked me if I wanted to eat a burrito (flour tortilla taco). “Sure,” I said, “if donkey meat is the kind of meat you all are used to eating around here, then we’ll have to give it a try.” It tasted really good.

My brother arrived an hour later. He paid the respective “customs fees,” and they allowed Tony and me to go free.

For quite a long time, I judged an entire country based on a few “bad apples” that I had come across on my journey. It wasn’t until I met a family from Michoacan that I learned not to condemn a whole nation because of a few bad Mexicans. I have very fond memories of everyone who helped us along the way.

Vladimir
Los Angeles, California

My Cousins Came over from California

I was barely twenty years old and already thinking about killing myself. I hated my life. I felt empty inside, worthless in every sense of the word. I figured that suicide was the best way to put an end to my miserable existence. I asked myself if there was anything that could inspire me to go on living, or if there was anything that could give me the courage to put an end to it once and for all. I felt as though I w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dark Angel
• My Name Is Pedro Infante and He’s … Jorge Negrete
• Some Nachos to Go
• I Saw How They Raped Her
• The Killings Were Commonplace
• All I Thought about Was Disneyland
• We Arrived at the Town of “Thank God”
• A Honeymoon on the Road
• A Discount for Telling the Truth
• The Old Smoocher
• It Scared the Tapeworms Out of Her
• Get Me Down, Before I Slap You Silly!
• He Sold Me to the Armenian
• The Girl from Nicaragua Was Washed Away by the River
• God Made Us Disappear from the Border Patrol
• We Were Short 1,400 Quetzals
• The Shot Hit Right Next to Me
• My Cousins Came over from California
• After All I Had Done for Him … and He Betrayed Me
• For the Love of My “Princess”
• She Had Just Given Birth
• Dreamers Never Lose Heart
• They’re Coming after Us
• Mine Is the Same Story as So Many Other Children
• A Pack of Tortillas Was All We Had to Eat
• Could It Be the Feathers in Our Hats?
• Everyone from the North Shows up Looking “All Fly”
• They Told Me That You Could Make a Lot of Money
• We Landed in France, Not in New York