The Weight of Shadows (24 page)

Shortly after learning about Tlatelolco, about the enduring Latin American tradition of student massacres, my mom and dad took me to the National Museum of Mexican Art on Nineteenth Street, where we went every few months when I was growing up. It was their way of not only immersing me in representations of our culture and ourselves, but of exposing me to histories and contexts that were often missing in the lessons I learned in school. Each visit they would let me pick something from the gift shop. That time, or some time close to it, I chose a small rectangular refrigerator magnet we kept on our fridge for over a decade. I didn't think much about it at the time. The image on it was of Remedios Varo's painting
Fenómeno
, which she completed in 1962, one year before her death and six years before Tlatelolco. The painting is of a man and his shadow, except the shadow walks upright filling the three-dimensional space of the man while he is confined to the flat parameters of the shadow world.

Much has been written about Varo and her work, most of it centering on the role Freudian symbolism, alchemy, and mysticism played in her painting. She developed a complex network of symbols, a kind of post–World War II allegorical style where the Christian iconography of the High Renaissance was not discarded but destabilized and redeployed. Interpretations of her works abound, and many rest on the primacy of her personal anxieties or resistance to the rigid subordination of women in Parisian Surrealist circles. Many interpretations begin and end there, in the personal psychology of a female agent moving through European intellectual circles commenting insularly, without considering the influence of broader realities on her being. She experienced the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in her late twenties and the outbreak of World War II less than a decade after that, and she landed in Mexico in 1941 during a burgeoning student movement on the steady march toward the Cold War.

Whatever the intended meaning, the production of
Fenómeno
in the early sixties in Mexico is remarkable. It serves as a kind of spirit photograph, a depiction of the zeitgeist. It communicates a central phenomenon that would occur throughout Latin America in the following decades: the murder and disappearance of large swaths of the population by the state.

After the desert I go to Agua Prieta, Sonora, to work at a migrant resource center run by a faith-based organization called Frontera de Cristo, staffed mostly by locals and a few volunteers from abroad. Agua Prieta, a town just on the other side of the border of Douglas, Arizona, reminds me of Gary, Indiana, which I'd driven through a few times, always on the way to someplace else. On my first day, a minister with the organization, a white man with wispy blond hair and a calm face, took me to see the plaza, a large empty square in the middle of town, with a few benches and trees but not a soul anywhere. He explained things would probably be slow at the center because people captured in the Tucson sector were being transported hundreds of miles along the border and dumped elsewhere, a practice called lateral repatriation. Often people were repatriated in areas with active cartel warring, like Nuevo Laredo, where the Zetas massacred seventy-two migrants in August 2010. I stay in the Frontera de Cristo trailer in Douglas with another volunteer, and I'm provided a girl's bicycle, small and purple, to ride from the trailer park down the Pan-American Highway and across the border to the resource center.

One morning we ride into downtown Douglas a few hours before our shift to hang out in the public library. Half of Douglas looks like an old-timey tourist trap, and the main strip approaching the border is a concentration of fast-food restaurants and big-box stores. In the library, I pull several books about Latin American art off the shelves and flip
through them while drinking my morning coffee. A few minutes later, I come across the familiar image of a long upright shadow—three-dimensional and walking—trailed by a flattened man cast on a few brick steps, as though
he
were the shadow:
Fenómeno
. Seeing it gives me a chill because of the association to forced disappearances it has come to have for me, and because it appears here, like this, now.

For the next few days I can't stop thinking about the painting as I sit in the mostly empty resource center and walk down desolate streets where people struggle to make their lives despite the conditions imposed by the wall and the logic of the states that erected the barrier. One afternoon when I walk into the center—which is really just a narrow hallway with a desk, refrigerator, and small area for donated clothes at the far end—there's a young man in his early twenties who looks like my uncle Pablo sitting in one of the plastic chairs along the wall. He has a square, athletic build and jet-black hair and eyes. Next to him sits a young woman, around the same age, with a long black braid that has the intensity and shine of obsidian. She's wearing overalls and looks to be in the last trimester of pregnancy.

I sit next to them and introduce myself. Angela, the young woman, tells me they're from Oaxaca and had been caught and released that same morning after signing some papers. The area around the actual port of entry, about fifty feet from the migrant center, is a concentration of activity. Adrian, the young man, stands and walks to the doorway of the center and looks out onto a wall of unknown faces, a few cars idling and circling, men waiting to see what comes across the line. Many towns across the border have illicit economies that revolve around kidnapping and extorting migrants, and that's part of the reason the center is in operation, but things have been quiet in Agua Prieta for some
time. I walk over and stand with Adrian, looking out onto the clogged street. He nods over at a pickup truck in the middle of the intersection. Standing on the bed of the truck, with his hands on a turret-mounted machine gun, is a federal cop in black tactical gear, black balaclava, and navy fatigues.

I ask Adrian a question I already know the answer to.

“Porque no hay ni como, mano,” he answers, walking back to Angela, slipping his hand underneath her overalls and resting his hand on her rounded belly.

“No hay ni como.” There isn't even how. How to make a living. How to feed your infant. How to make a life.

Later Adrian shows me a money order for $250. He explains that when they were booked, the folded bills he kept in his shoe were taken, and when they repatriated they were given this money order. He asks if I could go with them to cash it, and I ask if Angela might want to wait at the center, but before I'm even done asking the question, she's already standing beside us, both of them shaking their heads no, firmly hand in hand.

Cashing the money order becomes a task that ends several hours later with me crossing into the United States and going to a branch of my bank about a mile from the border. As I'm going through the port of entry, I pass a turnstile gate and approach a desk with an old white man behind it. He looks hostile until I present my US passport card and answer his question about where I'm going and why in a voice he didn't expect from this body. He stops me short of finishing.

“All right, all right, all right,” he says, waving me through.

My crossing takes less than three minutes, and the ease of it horrifies me. Walking toward the bank, I sweat through all my clothes, but I can't really feel the heat because my mind is cycling through Yoli and Martín, Angela and Adrian, Octavio, the group in the desert, and all the people I would never meet, all laboring to find a place in which they can exist.

When I get back it's evening, and I call to arrange a ride
and bed for the couple at a migrant shelter nearby. The later it gets, the more agitated they seem, and it pains me that there's little else I can do. I heat up some food for them—two bean burritos—and give them each an apple. I sit along the row of white plastic chairs, not knowing what to say. They ask me questions about where I live and what I do, how I'd gotten to the United States and when. A squad car is parked in front of the port of entry. We watch dusk turn to night, staring at the red and blue lights blinking on a wall just beyond the door. Angela lays her head in Adrian's lap, and he gently sweeps a few strands of hair from her face.

My shift is over before their ride comes. Adrian shakes my hand and pulls me in for a hug. Angela hugs me and kisses me on the cheek. As I unlock my small bicycle from a short fence just outside, I look back and see an image that burns itself into my memory: Angela, in her long-sleeved shirt and overalls standing the way very pregnant women do, her legs planted just wider than usual, her back slightly bowed, and Adrian standing next to her with one hand under her elbow, the other resting on the small of her back, both of them crowned in white light from the long bare bulbs just overhead.

As I ride back through the port of entry down the Pan-American Highway, it begins to rain. I think about the severity of a woman as pregnant as Angela walking through the desert, about what has to be true in the consciousness of ordinary Americans in order for this to happen, and about how the couple's journey to this place began by being dislodged and displaced from somewhere they used to know as home. The rain picks up, and the stream of water in the gutter in which I'm riding widens suddenly and nearly sweeps the tires out from under me. My first thought is to hope there isn't anyone walking in a wash right now, because surely they'll be swept away. Dogs bark in the distance as I turn off the highway toward the mobile home park. There are no streetlights so I ride the rest of the way in almost total darkness.

That night I have a dream in which I see the face of a man I'd never met. When I wake up in the trailer the following morning I don't remember anything about the dream, anything about what this man I'd conjured looked like, but for some reason I know it was the man whose sweatshirt I'd seen in the desert.

Somewhere between Arivaca and Sasabe I'd taken a long trek with another volunteer to leave gallons of water in a clearing that straddled the international line. The walk there was especially arduous. At a certain point the only way to keep going in the direction we needed to go was to descend a sheer rock face about fifteen feet into an arroyo that looked like it had just settled after the last heavy rain. The bed of the wash was covered in rocks, many of them loose, which ranged between the size of a dog and the size of a truck. For long stretches the brush was so thick we couldn't see where we were stepping, and I found myself praying we wouldn't find a rattlesnake. An hour into the hike we stopped to take a drink from our canteens, crouching into a bit of shade cast by the wall of the wash. There was a shallow puddle between us, with a loam-green film covering the submerged stones and tan water spiders gliding along the surface and, below, small oblong creatures darted along indiscernible paths, leaving small bubbles zigzagging upward in their wakes. I'd been surprised to see how green the desert was when I arrived, and I was surprised again to see so much life teeming in the small puddle. After a few minutes without speaking, my companion, having similar thoughts to mine, said it was a Eurocentric trope to mischaracterize the desert as a place of death: “The O'odham have always lived here. It's not the desert that's doing all the killing.”

We continued around a bend and saw a sheer rock face several hundred feet high in the near distance. In front of it there were a few strands of barbed wire stretched between wooden posts that were almost a story high, with enough space between them to maneuver through if you had
a partner to pull them apart. In the center of the shoddy fence was a brown sweatshirt snagged from the hood on a high barb, and from a sleeve on a diagonally lower one so that as we approached it looked like a man making his way through. Neither of us said so, but we both thought there was someone there. We were both arrested at the same moment of recognizing a human figure in the distance, and we both started to react as though it were a person, raising one of our gallons of water and quickening our step. To be visible means that we have been seen, or at least the potential to be seen by another exists, and when we are, our existence is confirmed by another's gaze. Whatever body filled that sweatshirt, and whatever life animated that body, refused to be unseen even in its absence. Although I didn't know anything about the person, any of the particularities that make an individual—their name, the place in which they originated, the circumstances under which they made their journey, the specific contours of their face, their favorite dish, whether or not they had any children, musical tastes, what they enjoyed doing in their free time, the timbre of their voice, the cadence with which they spoke, their wounds and their scars—I knew enough to know that this was no place for that person.

Many South and Central American migrants today are displaced by reverberations of the same military incursions, violence, and instability that produced the desaparecidos during the Cold War proxy wars of the second half of the twentieth century. Mexico's economy and the fate of large portions of its domestic labor force have long been dominated by the United States. Most recently NAFTA and other trade agreements implemented in the early to mid-1990s have had disastrous effects on some of Mexico's most vulnerable populations. A report published by the Carnegie Endowment found that “agricultural trade liberalization linked to NAFTA is the single most significant factor in the loss of agricultural jobs in Mexico” and that by the end of
2002, Mexican agriculture lost 1.3 million jobs. The same report found that “real wages in Mexico are lower today than when NAFTA took effect.” By the late 1990s, nearly half of all employed Mexicans were employed in the informal economy, which is vaguely defined by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development as “units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned,” which means chewing gum vendors, street musicians, shoe shiners, squeegee people, and the men and women who sell foam lizards on lengths of wire to tourists, none of whom are considered unemployed. With major job losses, no unemployment insurance (Mexico offers none), and a fall in real wages, rural households already struggling to survive were pushed completely into abject poverty. The first phase in this disappearance is to be made redundant by the economic policies agreed upon by the oligarchs of increasingly “cooperating” states. As a redundancy, one is made invisible in plain sight—that is, invisible to the civic body in which one continues to exist—someone turned into a walking shadow, with the dimensionality of a person but without the possibility of recognition. What happens to migrants in the Sonoran Desert, and long before they get to the desert, is not an accident—it's the letter and spirit of policy. By eschewing realism, one of the things
Fenómeno
prophesizes is the process of this kind of disappearance—one that begins in place, without the vacating of a body.