THE LAST WORD
Norton, W.P.
THE LAST WORD W.P. Norton Border Crossing On this typical, sweltering morning in the best-known of West Texas border towns, thousands will cross the Bridge of the Americas, a monster concrete...
...There are jobs in El Paso, mostly for domestics and petty laborers...
...A few minutes before, I was standing on the main street in El Paso's West Side, with its watered lawns, palm trees, neighborhoods of stucco houses and strip malls...
...I don't feel like driving all the way downtown when the colonia is just a few minutes from here...
...The van deposits two heavy-set men from the U.S...
...And here is Puerta de Anapra, with its un-paved streets, wooden shacks, church, and Dona Manuela's vending stand...
...The one my friend and I are driving to is called Puerta de Anapra...
...She decides to cross back over from the bridge downtown...
...They ask what our business is...
...Here, the word is colonia...
...The rive&the Mexicans have always called Rio Bravo is shallow enough to walk or wade across from downtown El Paso—except in the summer, when its deep, rushing waters carry a brackish discharge from the sewers, and an occasional corpse...
...The sun is higher and hotter now, and my friend has business in El Paso...
...A sharp wind blows sand and old newspapers helter-skelter as Dona Manuela sells cigarettes, gum, soap, and other necessities from her ancient stand...
...Now are you going to help us find the colonia or not...
...Dona Manuela has lived here since the colonia was first settled fifteen years ago, when a group of peasants seized a few acres of desert land, pirated some water pipes and electrical wires, and put up the few ramshackle dwellings that have since grown into a community of more than 300 families...
...Shopping and visiting relatives are the other magnets...
...We know that as American citizens we have the legal right to cross over anywhere we want...
...A high barbed-wire fence called the Tortilla Curtain lines both banks...
...Already nervous, I begin to sweat: I have not only forgotten my cigarettes, but my identification, too...
...This road does lead there, doesn't it...
...Norton Border Crossing On this typical, sweltering morning in the best-known of West Texas border towns, thousands will cross the Bridge of the Americas, a monster concrete span that overarches the Rio Grande...
...We're trying to get to a colonia called Puerta de Anapra, and we think it's down this road a little further...
...Neither do some things the Americans do want—drugs, cheap Mexican goods, and thousands of maids and service workers who cross over mojado, or wetback...
...In Brazil they're called favelas...
...the lanchews and mulas are already doing brisk business, and we can see the occasional migra van patroling the length of the Tortilla Curtain...
...It's a good 70 degrees in early spring, and acrid white smoke curls skyward from the burning of tires and garbage, blanketing the desert valley that cradles El Paso and its Siamese twin, Ciudad Juarez...
...Options are more limited on the Juarez side: hawking gum and cigarettes from street stands, selling vegetables, handicrafts, or wristwatches at market, or working in one of the hundreds of maquila-doras, or assembly plants...
...the dumping grounds of nearby industrial parks...
...It's like going from, say, downtown Milwaukee, to the driest, deadest part of the Mojave Desert in a quarter of an hour...
...If they build the industrial park, or the new bridge, Dona Manuela and the rest will have to move on...
...Unemployment is officially 3 per cent, but little more than half the population actually has anything resembling a full-time job...
...Norton, formerly a sports writer on an El Paso newspaper, is an intern at The Progressive...
...THE LAST WORD W.P...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service, the migra, both sporting mirrored sunglasses...
...But the shorter route is south from El Paso's prosperous West Side, at an unofficial crossing point where the border is marked only by a handful of medium-sized white stones...
...There's nothing to be afraid of," my friend says as she pulls to a stop...
...Look," my friend says...
...Nonplused, the migra man says we can drive downtown and cross there...
...A consortium of business groups headed by Juarez mayor Jaime Bermudez is interested in establishing a new industrial park for the expanding maquila industry...
...On the Juarez embankment a huge mural, big enough to see from the air, shows a Mexican's walnut-brown, Indian-blooded face surrounded by painted symbols of the America every immigrant imagines: dollar bills, automobiles, a shiny jet airplane...
...Two Harvard architecture students are being brought in to draw up the plans, and Juarez officials are discussing the possibility of building a third crossing point near Puerta de Anapra...
...the South Africans have another name: townships...
...But the men drive off a ways and park, watching as I heave a few of the dinosaur-egg rocks off the road and get back in the car...
...We have a right to cross anywhere we like...
...The joke is that the deadly pollutants "don't carry green cards...
...Our border agent shrugs, gets back into the van, and says we can do whatever we want—but that he and his buddy might bust us both, confiscate the car, and take us downtown for interrogation and a stripsearch...
...Nobody knows how many people cross over illegally, but there are many mulas— mules—who charge a dollar to carry people from the Mexican side on their backs, or lancheros pulling passengers across on whatever will float...
...The poverty, pollution, and malnutrition in Juarez will grow, driving many more across the border, beyond El Paso, to places like Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston...
...But the barrier has many holes, and the mojados shrug and take a chance on getting picked up...
...Before we can cross, a black four-wheel-drive van appears out of the desert and rolls up close behind us...
...The most they can legally do is detain us, take us downtown, and hold us a few hours for interrogation and a strip search...
...Juarez is the northernmost rail terminus in all Mexico, and many who head north are forced to gather in the big cities, survive on miserable pay, and live in hardscrabble shanty communities...
...There will be more jobs in the maquis, and the promise of work will attract more people from the interior and beyond...
...To get there, you can drive west from the Bridge of the Americas in downtown Juarez down twisting dirt roads through W.P...
...Proclaims the mural, We Are All Americans...
...We're American journalists," she says...
...She may not be here much longer...
Vol. 53 • October 1989 • No. 10
