The Altar Valley south of Tucson is one of those places where Latin America and the United States have stopped remembering their own names. “The border” has become an inadequate term for such Homeland Security hotspots. A better term might be el mundo nuevo, the new world.
El mundo nuevo is a place where the might of the U.S. security state is rendered impotent by poor people in sneakers. The landscape bristles with checkpoints, aerial surveillance and a $500-million-dollar wall. Add to this triple-digit temperatures, human desperation, violent drug cartels and unscrupulous coyotes — and you end up with luckless poor people dying on the rocks.
How many are dying? Nobody really knows. Homeland Security recorded 1,058 migrant deaths from 2001-2007; humanitarian groups put the number since 1994 at 5,000. Of course, many more go missing and are never accounted for. It’s a big desert, after all.
 What is clear is that 1994 was a banner year in the history of el mundo nuevo. That’s when the federal Southwest Border Strategy began to deliberately nudge traditional immigration and smuggling routes out of the cities and into remote, rugged desert areas, such as the Altar Valley. The goal, according to a 2001 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, was "to make it so difficult and costly for aliens to attempt illegal entry that fewer individuals would try."
On the border, though, “difficult” is a way of life. People have gotten used to it.
I’m in a truck bouncing along in four-wheel-drive. The woman at the wheel is with a gringo humanitarian group that leaves plastic jugs of water along the migrant trails. The jugs are dated and bear messages scrawled in Spanish with black markers: “Good Luck Amigo!” and “Be Strong!" For some reason, the jugs are often found empty, slashed with knives.
A few miles to the south, sunrise sprays the Las Guijas Mountains with dusty gold. The range is situated a night’s march north of the U.S.-Mexico line, so it has become a way station -- a place where migrants stop to get some shade, take a few deep breaths and hope the Border Patrol is somewhere else right now.
The woman says there is a place in the Las Guijas that I must see. We park the truck and head up a sandy wash. The morning air is still blessedly cool and alive with birdsong. The wash is full of footprints, all headed north. Plastic jugs dot the ground. Soon we enter a corridor of dark, scabby rock. Stunted junipers and catclaws climb the grassy slopes above the rock walls. At a shady twist in the canyon, the woman puts her hand on my arm: “We’re here,” she says. “It’s right around the corner.”
We take a few more steps. El mundo nuevo spreads out before us, and it looks like the site of an airplane crash: scores of cheap nylon backpacks, heaps of abandoned clothes, sun-bleached plastic jugs, and dirty socks hanging from tree branches. Dainty lace brassieres. Stick deodorants, plastic combs, and half-used tubes of toothpaste. A child's tiny toy boat.
The woman explains the dump this way. Just before the final push to the pick-up vehicle, the coyotes give the migrants an order: Make yourselves look like you have not crossed the desert.
So the migrants dress for success. They put on clean shirts, brush their teeth, and apply deodorant. Everything stays behind — especially the backpacks. No brown-skinned person wants to be seen in el mundo nuevo wearing a backpack.
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 arrested, sent back over the border, and is perhaps, right now, buying another backpack? Many of those backpacks, I notice, are identical, black trimmed with gray, good for night travel. The migrants in their matching packs seem like some amateur athletic team, suited up to take on the pros in an obviously rigged game. Here in el mundo nuevo it is impossible not to root for the underdog.
But really, there is no need. Though the numbers have been reduced by the current recession, a great leveling is under way that will continue with or without a Southwest Border Strategy. The migrants of the night will march on like desert beasts, driven by hunger. They do not care about borders, fences or political arguments.
Michael Wolcott is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes in Flagstaff, Arizona. |