SECTION II
2017 | I live in Tucson. People tell me they love the images they see on my various social media feeds of the mysterious, moonscape desert that surrounds the city. Many of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who follow me on social media live along both coasts, so of course it gives me great pleasure to ignite their awe for the uncontainable beauty of the Sonoran Desert, even if from afar. For me, being in this desert on any given morning or early evening means giving over to the expansive possibilities of the landscape. It has offered new perspectives when I’m stuck on a writing project—stepping out into any number of trails and parks and contemplating the day’s ebbs and flows. Whether it’s the way the light moves across the shallow valleys of Gates Pass before sunset or the way the temperature surprisingly drops ten degrees when your trail takes you into the shadowy parts sitting below Pima Canyon, the infinity of surprise that lives here is hard to deny.
But as 115–120 degrees becomes the new normal for Southern Arizona, indicating a climate change that may not be reversible in years to come, there is another thing one cannot deny—any slight carelessness on your part and the desert will kill you. That fact made itself clear on a ride-along outing with Guillermo and Stephen, two volunteers for the regional organization Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas. As soon as I climbed into their water replenishment truck, I was told that if we broke down in Arivaca—an hour and fifteen minutes south of Tucson—we would be exposed to the same conditions as the Latinx migrants we were trying to help. I stared dead-eyed behind my Ray-Bans at Guillermo—we would never be exposed to the same conditions as migrants making this trek.
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I shook off any doubt that we would not be okay. All of us engaging in humanitarian work should have it seared into our minds that we are the lucky ones. After all, we were traveling with more than a hundred gallons of water into the harshest topographies of the Southwest. At worst, in my mind’s wandering to worry, we would be sweaty and uncomfortable while changing the imaginary flat tire—but we wouldn’t die.
I made contact with the privilege I carried into different parts of the valley that surrounded the infamous border town Arivaca, though I wasn’t sure I could ever make peace with it. In this part of the country, whatever you did or whoever you were—if you were somebody’s anchor baby; a pedantic gadfly; a broke bourgeois bohemian who cared about justice and human rights and had heated conversations about immigration policy with family members during the holidays; if you still wrote diversity statements for scholarship applications, or ate nopal fries and drank aged whiskey cocktails with the liberal, latte-sipping NPR listeners in downtown Tucson, where the adobe facades were restored to look like the old pueblo—you came and faced these incongruent truths, maxing out credit cards to do the thing you did in the name of justice. If there was anything to do with your privilege, it was to risk it. And it would never be enough.
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Humane Borders maintains a system of water stations in the Sonoran Desert on routes used by migrants making the perilous journey north mostly by foot. Each station has its own name: Green Valley (Pecan Orchard), Elephant Head, Rocky Road, K-9, Cemetery Hill, Soberanes, Mauricio Farah, and Martinez Well.
Getting into the truck at Green Valley, we were promptly driven to the first water station, situated behind a pecan orchard. The orchard looked momentarily out of place and time with its trees lined up tightly, towering above a few acres covered by bright green grass, an indication of the obscene amounts of water the plants must have consumed on a daily basis. But I was thankful nonetheless for its place in the landscape and hoped it would offer some shady respite to the men, women, and children who made the orchard a part of their journey.
As soon as we got to the water station, I quietly gasped at the sight of concrete blocks, a quartet of two-by-four wood planks, and a fifty-five-gallon blue plastic barrel sitting stoutly but bravely above the desiccated arroyo. These objects in any other home improvement configuration might not have inspired such deference, but for me it was like seeing Stonehenge in real life—or rather, seeing these water stations gave me the same feeling I had when visiting Stonehenge as a high school sophomore. These artificial structures made eternal the belief of vibrant life lying beyond the little world I was trying to escape. These monuments remind me of what we are willing to confront in order to sever ourselves from fear. We are all trying to leave something behind, emerge from the rubble, and go toward something better, and there shouldn’t be any guilt or fault in that desire.
But, of course, that desire is deadly for many.
What does it mean to exist in structural conditions that erode those desires for peace and happiness? How did the wealth gap determine one’s ability to survive economic and natural catastrophes? It shouldn’t be this hard to move toward safety. I’m a beneficiary of those who have made similarly arduous journeys to safety. I have been spared the experience of crossing the desert to abandon the threat of physical and social death from my birthplace of origin. And relying on my imagination has revealed an ontological poverty. Standing at the crux where foreign agents make the draconian state out of these unceded Tohono O’odham lands makes that knowing possible.
These water stations are myth come to life, a border fable peopled with heroes and rogues, monsters and saints in search of the magical elixir. “No More Deaths” is a declaration one might encounter in a fairy tale. Only in the fabulist space might death be no more. A decade earlier, I’d hear of No More Deaths from rafa back home in Southern California who, a few years before I met him, had come back from a desert trek with our mutual friend Alan to do humanitarian work at a camp managed by No More Deaths.
Fear makes it hard to be here and the cortisol makes it feel like my innards are short-circuiting. My body is here to meet the risk; that is what it’s about, right? I will be the distraction so that somebody less privileged can make their escape. I will make space in the back seat where I sit, absorbing the bumpy impact over difficult terrain. I sit and look out the window again, my gaze falling on the peaks of the Baboquivari Range. There are so many things I do not want—an arrest, jail time, a felony. My mind rushes through the crashing waves of this dangerous futurity and I am not brave enough. I think of Scott Warren, a volunteer member of No More Deaths arrested for helping migrants to a safe house near Ajo. Warren, a lecturer at the Arizona State University School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning was arrested in January 2018 and charged with two counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy, which are felonies. Warren faced a retrial in November 2019 and could have received a prison sentence of up to ten years if not for his acquittal.
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Do migrants dream of healing elixirs photosynthesized with the cancerous UV rays of the sun? Do they spot the plastic gallon bottles situated at the base of the ocotillos that obscure vultures and other carrion birds, perched in wait?
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2018 | I go to Arivaca for lunch with A one late winter day. A is a good friend of mine who works with No More Deaths, another gender weirdo who’s been this close to receiving felony charges for illegal transport of immigrants. Through A, I’ve met other queers who I might have spotted at punk shows in Oakland or Los Angeles or standing in line at the co-op in Brooklyn. Many an anarchist punk has made their way to Tucson to work for No More Deaths—so much so that No More Deaths feels like some kind of queer rite of passage into Tucson’s radical communities, where any given Friday night sees a wild mesh-and-Day-Glo, Bay Area-style dance party fundraiser for undocumented queer and trans people, sometimes specifically to raise bail funds for queer organizers caught in the crosshairs of draconian border policy. I love A’s tales of hooking up with fellow aid workers who come through for the summers only. Sex and No More Deaths together have a very plutonian quality—the intensity of the work that takes place in the desert inspires a most unique eros.
That day the shore of the Arivaca Lake was still quiet when A and I stopped at La Gitana Cantina for a quick cold beer. Scott Warren hadn’t yet been arrested, but No More Deaths was the necessary revolution, much to the chagrin of Arizona’s conservatives. What was the alternative to letting people die in the desert?
A picks me up in their dusty, decade-old Nissan truck. We stop at the co-op in Tucson for olives, anchovies, crackers, and kombucha before jumping onto the highway and then winding through the mountain roads that spit us out three miles from the border itself. The town is Wild-West tiny with a colorful general store and a saloon jumping into my sight line. It’s too early for a round at La Gitana Cantina, but that doesn’t stop the parking lot from being packed at eleven in the morning. A parks in front of the Arivaca Humanitarian Aid office to introduce me to the lovely aid worker, whose name shall remain anonymous, who welcomes me in and speaks to me in a familiar Spanish, narrating a day in the life of the town that feels absurd after seeing fleets of border patrol trucks and wondering who might be eyeballing A. I buy a T-shirt and take a few photos of the “people-helping-people, border zone” murals that portray a Disneyesque pastoral landscape with desert wildlife hiding behind traffic cones and stop signs.
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Living in the borderlands, you count among your friends and neighbors those who want things to be different here. We use our time to stay aware, to be in service. We live here to embody the lesson that everyone should be entitled to improve upon the conditions of their life. That often means leaving behind a pressure cooker combination of corrupt governments, violence, and barren lands. Those lessons arrive differently for us. We are people connected to immigrants and migrants in deep and complex matrices—as their children, their lovers, their friends, their bosses, their customers, their neighbors, or if we are lucky, their students. Some of us will never know that direct experience of moving across harrowing terrain. We will never know the hard choices made to begin those journeys. Some of us work in networks of care that rely on a rapid response strategy that provides the most vulnerable travelers with funds, warm clothes, or a place to stay after leaving the detention centers that dot the southern Arizona landscape.
And sometimes, if you’re like Francisco “Paco” Cantú, your connection is a complicated relational dyad that will haunt the rest of your days. Cantú spent four years in the Border Patrol and distilled those experiences of tracking and arresting border crossers—and the moral injury those actions produced—in his memoir, The Line Becomes a River.6 His book was released to much fanfare, ingratiating him with the liberal media and putting him in the crosshairs of border activists, who angrily challenged him on several platforms for capitalizing on migrants’ deaths through his art-making. While some of this critique is echoed in Tucson, the reality of our lived days is that to see a border cop with some toque de Mexicanidad is a quotidian event. And it’s time to reckon with why Mexican Americans, the children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants, decide to don olive-green pants and green-and-gold-patched white shirts to police southern Mexican and Central American migrants making the journey north. Why do these inhabitants of southern Arizona divorce themselves from the recently arrived? What is gained by enacting these distances? What are the proximities they make way for? I struggle with these questions as a way to understand my own kin. I ask more questions.
Why did my Salvadoran immigrant brother, fourteen years my senior, join the Marines after barely graduating high school? Why did he become a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy? How did we happen to share the same uterus at different times? It’s time to unmake the quotidian, to learn from those who have permanently damaged themselves by carrying out our draconian and inhumane policies from the inside out. To a more privileged subject like me, this quotidian conundrum brings a sense of doom to all my other like-minded efforts: voting, calling my senators and representatives, tweeting my outrage, unleashing tiresome tirades to trolls whose worlds seem to get bigger while mine diminishes with activists and scholars dying early deaths.
I often get asked if I know Francisco Cantú—but he’s just Paco to me. Paco the well-read, soft-spoken king of the nerds who brings up Cormac and Anzaldúa in the same breath and will only discuss mezcal distillation processes if you specifically ask him about it. I get asked if I support the border patrol because I like his tweets on occasion. This is Tucson, I say. You can’t change the past. In a red state known for denying Mexican American high school students a chance to learn about their histories by banning ethnic studies curricula, it means a lot when anyone is willing to step up for the disenfranchised. You can’t change the past, and it’s hard to be the ideal advocate in Tucson, where authorities very literally made it impossible for young people to even learn about the region’s past. Living with the past is the hardest burden day in, day out, seeing the ways tensions improve between Mexican American and Indigenous communities or don’t. I don’t want to build false dichotomies, pitting one group’s past against another’s as a way to defend certain histories. Harnessing those energies for a solidarity where we center the migrant’s plight feels more important to me.
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2016 | My dad sheepishly admits that the reason he hasn’t gone back to the gym in his neighborhood is because he accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and totaled his minivan by slamming it into a light post in the gym parking lot. It must have been bad, I said. He laughs. At seventy-five he doesn’t often give me the backstory to his mistakes and any story is usually filled with omissions too painful to remember. I think of the story he shared with me over a crab dinner that he splurged on in Fisherman’s Wharf after riding the Greyhound all night to San Francisco, where I was living at the time. In the late sixties he was arrested for working without papers in San Francisco and was placed in custody for a couple of days on a fishing boat in Alameda, California, cleaning the deck until agents found him a bus going to El Paso. This was a time when being detained meant nothing more than a ride to Ciudad Júarez or Tijuana while Mexicanos on both sides of the line listened to the band Los Tigres del Norte, of San Jose, California, sing earnestly about contraband and betrayal in a transnational drug deal between lovers gone wrong. That golden age where you got back on that hill, grassy and lush, and tried it again until you got it right. And he did. My dad got that part right.
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I started thinking about the ways in which the untraceable is made evident, or how the migrants’ journey has been represented to me throughout my life as both a young reader and writer—the Los Angeles-born, eighties child of parents from El Salvador and Mexico—and as the adult child, living in the here and now. In prose, we have writer Rubén Martínez of Los Angeles who, in his nonfiction book Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, describes riding with the Chavez brothers, Indigenous members of the Purépecha tribe from the town of Cherán, Michoacán, in search of a better life. But how is a life made better if it means working in the rural Arkansas poultry industry, where people will call ICE on you at a moment’s notice? We also have Reyna Grande, rendering firsthand, without mincing words, the very particular experience of crossing over. People come north because the alternative is death. These writers portray others or themselves as desperate to reunite with family in the North, all in various pursuits of better economic stability.
For me as a reader, these voices have meant finding the language to illustrate the ways migratory traumas continue to haunt families both constituted and torn apart by inhumane border policies. But my own parents’ migration took place in the late sixties and early seventies—they were essentially crossing an imaginary wall with nary an agent in sight to police such boundaries. Or they simply overstayed their visas, as my mother did. She was a nurse in San Salvador who came to the U.S. fleeing a violent husband. She stayed in Los Angeles in the early seventies, dare I say in the heyday of border crossing, innocence on par with episodes of The Brady Bunch? Or the golden age of border law breaking, captured in that scene from Born in East L.A. where Cheech Marin’s character Lupe interrupts his own privilege as a Los Angeles-born-and-bred Chicano to find himself caught in the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of unlawful deportation. The climax of the film happens when Lupe, atop one of the many hills scattered through the borderscape of Tijuana and San Diego, summons the migrant masses with the elegance of an orchestra conductor to run down the hill and overwhelm two slack-jawed border patrol agents who have underestimated the ethnic dis-empowered other, per the usual.
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2017 | Back in the truck, I felt myself dolefully assign the landscape its benevolence, something to help muster the belief that what we were doing would make the slightest impact. It was Sunday. Of course, we all had the same thought that morning—would we encounter anyone in need of our help?
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Do migrants dream of blue barrels in the middle of the emptied ocean floor? Hiding in the brush in this harsh wilderness, dying under the weight of the sun?
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In the distance, I stopped and listened closely: an intrepid purple flag waved in the hot summer wind, its color dulled by the daily solar pounding of summer.
After surveying the water station for cleanliness, potability, visibility, and instances of possible tampering, we moved on to the next one in Arivaca proper, Elephant Head. But before heading out of the pecan orchard, Stephen asked Guillermo to stop the truck on the periphery, where he spotted empty water bottles and a spectrum of detritus left by migrants past. Plastic bottles that were empty but still intact signaled recent passage. However, there were also old, discarded backpacks that, like the people who had carried them, were now empty and succumbing to the harsh conditions of the merciless desert. These bits of human evidence made the area seem anachronistic—to travel by foot in a time saturated with every imaginable technology. This was our refugee crisis.
It was not hard to sense that specter of migrant death nearby or in my third eye. Everything in that mise-en-scène blinked like a neon sign—migrants who came through the shade of the pecan trees more likely than not found their downfall in the washes around Arivaca, eleven miles from the border itself.
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2017 | The border and the imprint of migrants’ deaths left in its hinterlands animate most experiences I have in the surrounding nature. There’s no natural encounter—passing by a saguaro or seeing a mountain range silhouette at sunset—that doesn’t have the uncanny attached to it. The beauty of the desert never exists in a vacuum for me, like art for art’s sake. This sentiment is approximated for me in the artwork of my friend Karlito Miller Espinosa who, like me, left a coastal metropole for Tucson in 2016. An artist known for his exquisitely executed murals—from New York to Kiev—he started working in conceptual registers that allowed for a more direct critique on the cultural zeitgeist in which he found himself. His three-dimensional installation pieces in Tucson are centered on cement bricks made from sand and debris collected from sites around the southern Arizona borderlands where migrant bodies have been found. Untitled (Corridor), 2018 is a work that organizes the bedlam produced by U.S. immigration policy on the border space of Arizona and Mexico into a compact, narrow corridor. Fueled by a desire to ensure a futurity, most migrants are Indigenous men and young families leaving the dead ends delivered by their native countries, where industries were sold off to the highest bidders and allowed free rein in a post-NAFTA world. Just as Mexican artists Teresa Margolles and rafa esparza comment on how violence intervenes in the daily lives of the most vulnerable in both Mexican and U.S. society, Karlito, too, offers a much-needed elegy for the migrant who comes north to labor. He brings land to art. And while the bricks themselves innovate on a page out of minimalism, to experience them against the antiseptic walls and floor of a gallery space allows for the Sonoran Desert to leave its locale and trouble the viewer who is otherwise comfortably distanced from the deadly terrains. For me, Karlito’s work troubles me through the reminder of the debt I owe to the migrants, the uncomfortable intimacies that contour the histories between us, and the circumstances that reinforce the tensions.
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I am a passenger watching the scenery of the borderlands beyond the brink of madness. We are all—at least the lot of us in the vehicle making this trip—a mere tithe to the desert to spare the living crossing through it. Every day could be marked by a colorful crucifix.
Over the next nine hours, covering nothing more than the stretch of six miles at three miles per hour, we were all mad. Or obsessed. It is this affective drive that has compelled volunteers like Guillermo and Stephen to make the same trip every two to three weeks for the last two years. No one should go through this. Everyone should run thumb and forefingers into the bullet holes of signs around the water barrels. Everyone should come close to being trampled by the cattle roaming freely. No one should risk this. Everyone should notice the wake of buzzards flying too close for comfort. No one should be separated from their families. These imperatives shouldn’t fall on the luck of the draw.
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2017 | When we arrived at Elephant Head, I noticed something that wasn’t on the first blue container: La Virgen de Guadalupe. Or, rather, a glossy sticker with her likeness.
All my twelve years’ worth of nostalgic Catholic school hackles go up at the sight of the feminine deity who made her debut on a hill in Tepeyac, Mexico. An apparition that, today, only an Indigenous man re-christened Juan Diego under similarly violent conditions could witness. As chronicled in the mid-seventeenth century tract Nican Mopohua, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was an Indigenous man born in fifteenth century Mexico, when it was still Tenochtitlan. A subject of the Aztec empire, Juan Diego was caught in the crosshairs of colonization. He was an early adopter of Catholicism, opting for baptism over complete subjugation. In 2002, Juan Diego was canonized as the holy witness to the apparition of the Virgin Mary, who appeared to him on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 and exhorted him to build a shrine to her there. Did praying to the Virgin with Indigenous features make it easier to believe? This, of course, is relevant because Tepeyac is the site of a recently destroyed shrine to Coatlicue, the mother deity in the Aztec polytheistic tradition. In 1531, just as autumn transitioned into winter, Juan Diego returned from a fourth encounter with the Virgin and opened his tunic, spilling luscious red roses onto the floor. This gesture also revealed the imprint of the Virgin Mary’s image on the cloth of his humble vestment. Roses would have been impossible to grow in the cold spell during that season.
Stephen noticed me noticing her and said it’s a way to show migrants that the water station is there to help. Stephen, a civil rights attorney for the ACLU, reminds me of the aging, white Central American solidarity folks back in Los Angeles. He reminds me of the kind of men who would teach me about the parts of the Salvadoran Civil War that my mother would omit. I nodded, affirming his assumption and hoping that non-Catholic migrants would be able to decipher the tank as a site of relief. But behind my sunglasses and smile I bit my lip and pinched the muffin top peeking over my belt to keep the flood of emotions at bay. When will the colonial encounter finally pay its debt to the migrant, the descendant of those who, under duress, chose the one god of Catholicism over the many gods and divinities of Aztec/Toltec/Mayan cosmological spirituality for the variety of supplications that emerge in a life?
I pull the soft red bandana from my back pocket and rub it over tear-streaked cheeks and sweaty brow.
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As the morning progressed and the sun’s rays intensified, I felt the perspiration pool in and around my body’s various concaves and then disappear. The desert was taking its rightful tax of moisture from me, collecting its debt like it does every day. We snacked on sweet baby peppers and threw the ends out the window. Guillermo said that it would be a few hours tops before the desert consumed our biodegradable trash. We went on like this for hours, our bodies flirting with being untraceable all while traversing Arivaca’s veins and arteries.
Time seemed to be marked by how close or far we were to a curious mountain peak known as Baboquivari, a sacred place for the Tohono O’odham nation. The creator, I’itoi, resides in a cave at the base. Baboquivari represents a genesis of sorts. Or where to return for many. Throughout our ride-along, Guillermo would stop for all of us to take in the scenery, snap photos, and stretch our legs. It felt like Baboquivari was looking out for us as we did our best to look out for others. Back in the car, rolling at our near glacial pace, Guillermo—an old punk like me who lived for a decade in a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood (like me, again) but now lives in Tucson (yep, me, too)—regaled us with a story about his dying grandmother. He had traveled from California one spring break years ago so that he and his cousins could gather to camp and pray for their Yaqui grandmother’s health. They passed a joint around as they hiked up the mountain to Baboquivari’s peak. Being young men on the precipice of adulthood, they silently competed with one another—who could walk faster? Who could carry the most gear? Who could keep up?
I was not going to let those guys know I had a flu, Guillermo said, carefully guiding our vehicle over sharp, rocky terrain, but I was dragging behind them when I felt something watching me. It was a mountain lion, and I turned around so quickly I scared it away. The rest of us in the car sighed in relief collectively. But Guillermo wasn’t going to let us off the hook. Did you know, he begins, that a mountain lion loves to eat a fresh kill? He’ll sneak up behind you, take a swipe at the base of your neck, bite down on your cerebellum, and paralyze you.
Wait. Wait. Are you basically watching yourself get eaten alive? I ask, looking out toward Baboquivari, hoping for the hundredth time that hour that we don’t break down.
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I touch the amulet in my pocket, a piece of black kyanite, moon-charged with protecting energies. That is my metaphysical response to the circumstances currently beyond my control. I want to turn my energetic GPS on so that my ancestors can find me, protect me somehow. Our guides are continually asked what happens if we encounter migrants on these trips: Stephen says simply that they are to be given food, first aid, and water.
No one mentions felony.
No one mentions the way that your right to vote or to secure gainful employment becomes jeopardized with the mere provision of water, food, and medical aid to a migrant found wandering in one of the deadliest deserts in North America. We were wanderers with maps and GPS, Havarti cheese, and herb crackers. We traveled with more than a hundred gallons of water and a full tank of gas. We traveled with the privilege of knowing our way back home.
6. Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River (Riverhead, 2018).