We Built the Wall Read online

  Surprisingly, when their new lives began in El Paso, Deisy was the one who settled in the fastest. On top of the language barrier, the twins had no friends in school and did not understand the social dynamics there. Most of their relatives were still in Mexico. But there are many Mexican students in Deisy’s school, since, as is common in cities along the border, some live on the Mexican side and cross north during the week to attend school in the United States. She likes her teachers. Despite some difficulty adjusting to the food (chicken potpie, for example), she’s been able to find the positives in their new life.

  “They ask us to tell them our story, and many people are shocked, because they don’t think things like that really happen. Things that happen in Mexico get covered in the news, but they don’t really believe it can be true. When they hear our story, they give us all their support. A lot of people think as soon as you get to the U.S. you’re free and you don’t have to do anything anymore, but at least for us we’re still searching for my mom, and we’re not going to stop until we find her. We’re still fighting from here,” she says. “We’re still protesting, marching, pressuring the government. So that in Mexico and the United States, they find out what happened to them.”

  Continuing the fight is what gives them strength to face everything else, Nitza says, and to handle all the daily challenges of life in the United States.

  “We can’t get all upset over school, or learning a new language, if we know we have a much more important fight with the government,” she says firmly, shaking her head.

  The question of justice riles Mitzi. She knows the man responsible for her mother’s kidnapping, Colonel Luján Ruiz, is in prison in Mexico City, “but not for what he did to my family, for other crimes,” she says, indignant. “We’re living for ourselves, but also in case our mom comes back some day, she’ll see that we kept going, we went ahead with our lives.”

  Since Mitzi will graduate from high school soon, I ask her where she sees herself in ten years.

  “Successful,” she replies right away. “Finishing school. I want to go to law school, probably because of what we’ve been through.”

  Nitza has been similarly inspired by the legal profession. “I want to be like Carlos, and do immigration. I want to help people who have gone through things like we have.”

  At the end of the afternoon, I ask the Alvarado sisters to tell me in one word how they feel about Mexico, and the United States. The three all describe Mexico as “violence.” For the United States, they say “peace,” “calm,” and “security.”

  Before leaving, I mention to Carlos how passionately the three Alvarado girls spoke about wanting to keep fighting for justice from this side of the border. Their approach to this fight, he says, is the most effective: pressuring the Mexican community from abroad.

  “They had never even left Juárez before, and now they’ve given major presentations in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin; their story was in the New York Times,” he says. “They’re on the cover of international reports on the disappeared. They lost two years of school, but now they’re in high school and learning English, because they want to be lawyers.” Growing emotional, Carlos pauses. “They represent the very best of Mexico. The Alvarado girls are a national treasure that Mexico has thrown in the trash.”

  Part Four

  Here We Are

  11

  Back to Life

  Life in Fabens unfolds at its own pace. Heading east on Interstate 10, El Paso’s urban rhythms, smooth paved streets, and diverse architectural styles—Tudor Revival, Classical Revival, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival—give way to a calm, quiet panorama of rural desert, with simple homes and buildings typical of far-western Texas. The air feels heavier, with a slightly misty look from the fine desert dust. Radio stations fade in and out.

  The dust, which rises up into clouds as you drive along Fabens’s dirt roads, is what I remember most viscerally when I think about my visits to the trailas here. The stories of exiles rebuilding their lives in Texas play out against a backdrop of desert silence.

  Martín Huéramo has invited me into his home for another conversation. Sitting at his dining room table, he tells me more about leaving Guadalupe, coming to Fabens and finding Saúl there, and what it’s been like trying to start a new life. Martín’s trailer home, in better condition than Saúl’s, has relatively new furniture, with photos of his children displayed throughout. Just like Fabens itself, Martín is in no rush. It is January 2014 and cold, so before we sit down, he makes sure that his electric heater is working and makes coffee. He tells me about the repairs and home improvements he and his wife have made, pointing to the walls, the floor, the windows. He can’t help but also talk about the obstacles he has encountered in the four years he has lived here. Leaving one’s home means dying a little, and coming back to life is not easy.

  Martín ran into his first challenge when he had to fill out some forms for the first time. He did not understand them since they were in English. He realized that aside from having to ask someone else what the form said, he also had to trust somebody else to tell him exactly what to write, and where. Martín asked several people about the same form, “to see if they were telling me the truth.” Then came the second blow: he could not work in the U.S. without a Social Security number, because it was against the law. But he had to support his family somehow. And he could not drive without a license, but in a place like Fabens, not having a car basically meant you couldn’t get a job, especially in Martín’s line of work. So, after years of doing everything the right way, trying to be a good citizen, he found himself in a serious dilemma.

  “Here, everything is against the law. You can’t do a lot of things, but you have to do them out of necessity,” he says, taking a sip of coffee.

  Like the others, Martín asked about how the asylum process worked as soon as he arrived. He had been a city councilman in Guadalupe, in addition to his construction work, and had been involved in social activism and politics in Guadalupe for many years. He and members of the Reyes family were militant members of the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) together. Martín was secretary of Guadalupe’s local PRD branch when Eleazar Reyes, the eldest brother in the Reyes family, was its president. When Eleazar died, Martín served as interim president. Martín worked with Saúl and Josefina Reyes to devise a strategy to defeat the conservative National Action Party (PAN), which was riding high after the electoral triumph in 2000 of President Vicente Fox, the first PAN president of Mexico after seventy-one years of PRI administrations. The PRI activists saw their allies fall in a spiral of resistance, threats, and death. In 2008, the tension reached a boiling point: police officers were assassinated, and shots fired on the municipal presidential building. One day, three human heads appeared in front of the building. Martín was approached by a man who rattled off a list of construction jobs performed by Martín in recent months, and how much he had charged for each one. “You have nice children; take that money and get out of here,” he said.

  “We wanted to support [President] Calderón but we weren’t given any tools,” Martín explains, seemingly to justify his departure from Mexico. He returns over and over again to this part of the story. After the municipal president and then two city council members were killed, Martín reluctantly left the country at the urging of his friends and brought his family to El Paso. Lacking the funds to buy land or even rent, he accepted the offer of a woman he knew from Guadalupe to let him live in a mobile home, in poor condition. In exchange, he points out emphatically, he made many repairs and improvements to the home. He and his family lived there for six months.

  “I figured in around six months, things were going to change in Mexico. I even thought, the day Calderón leaves office, things are going to change. But then it was 2010 and they killed Josefina Reyes, and Rubén, and other colleagues, and I saw that things were not going to stop.”1

  Martín began to consider applying for asylum. Several of the lawyers he consulted asked him why
he didn’t just move to another state in the central or southern part of Mexico, instead of coming to the United States. Martín realized that people in the United States really had no idea what things were like in Mexico. He, as a councilman, had not had the support of the Chihuahua state government or the federal government. He could count on even less support in any other state.

  “Moving to central Mexico meant taking my children there so they could be big criminals someday,” Martín says. “White-collar criminals if they’re educated, or if not, common street thugs. This is what I want the United States to understand, the magnitude of the problem the Mexican government has created. Here in the United States, they allow people to own guns and defend their homes, their property … In Mexico the Secretary of National Defense regulates arms, but … even the municipal police have obsolete weapons, while the criminals have much more modern weapons they get smuggled in, and the government knows this. You can’t win.”

  Then Martín reconnected with Saúl, who told him about Carlos Spector. Martín presented his case to him, and Carlos said he might be able to help.

  Four years later, and in spite of everything, the Huéramo family has managed to settle in. Martín’s children have had their ups and downs, but they have adjusted to school. Martín proudly shows me a photo of his eldest son, who plays on an American football team. Still, Martín hopes that his sons will not always live “in a country that is not theirs,” although it will most likely be a long time before they can return. It pains Martín to be on this side of the border. “No one comes here wanting to stay,” he says, as if this were a universal truth. “Here you have to learn how to live.”

  Later in our conversation, Martín confides that one of the reasons he has stayed in Fabens is because he wants to return to Mexico. Many people he knew from Guadalupe have gone to Oklahoma to find a better place for their families. He doesn’t believe that leaving for another state is the answer. He can die in peace, he says, only when he has left his children in their motherland or at least obtained asylum for them. Of course that wouldn’t be the same as being in their own country, but in the end that is what they can do for now. By this point in our talk, Martín’s eyes have filled with tears.

  “Now I know, being born on this planet does not guarantee you can live freely.” A tear runs down his cheek. “I believe exile is something human beings are obligated to live … It’s hard to accept because you want to adapt to this world, and you realize you are not of this world.”

  Carlos Spector’s office has changed almost as much as he has over the last few years. The façade of the little two-story building, painted gray, on the north side of the highway that splits El Paso in two, has stayed the same, but the files inside have multiplied and filled the building. One of the oldest and fattest case files is that of Cipriana Jurado, the first Mexican human rights defender who, under Carlos’s representation, was granted political asylum in the United States.

  Cipriana, a single mother of two children, went to Juárez to work in a factory when she was just thirteen years old. There, she founded the Center for Investigation and Worker Solidarity, which operated out of her home with the help of volunteers to fight for workers’ rights, and to denounce and investigate the murders of women in the city. Cipriana was a lifelong friend of Josefina Reyes, Saúl’s sister. In 2007, when the first troops sent by Felipe Calderón started arriving in Juárez, Josefina and Cipriana organized public protests to denounce the disappearances, torture, and murder of local residents. Neighbors and acquaintances relied on them for help.

  Although attempts had been made to intimidate Cipriana before, the direct attacks started in 2009, after she denounced the torture and murder of a fellow activist. There were several break-in attempts at her house, files were stolen from her office, and her son, then nineteen, was followed and threatened. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, recommended that she apply for political asylum in the United States.

  Just like Martín, Saúl, and most others who have had to make this difficult decision, Cipriana did not want to leave Mexico. She felt responsible for the people who worked with her and an obligation to continue pressuring the government to investigate hundreds of murders and disappearances. But then, Josefina Reyes’s son was killed. Cipriana went to the funeral; looking at the coffin that held his young body, she knew her own son could be next. In 2010, an organization in Chicago invited her to give a presentation on violence in Juárez. She went with her children, and when her visa expired in December, she did not return to Mexico. A Presbyterian church in New Mexico gave her financial assistance and a place to live as she began the process of applying for asylum.

  “When we left Mexico, the idea was to stay in Chicago for just a few months,” Cipriana tells me in a phone conversation from her home in Santa Fe. She has lived there for four years with her son, now twenty-two, and her daughter, eleven. “But things got worse, and like a lot of people, I thought if you apply for asylum, you’d never be able to go back to Mexico ever.” She got in touch with Carlos Spector, whom she knew from his work with migrants in El Paso. Carlos and his wife, Sandra, joined her in Santa Fe to begin the asylum application process. Cipriana’s case, to their surprise, moved quickly: after filing the application in January 2011, Cipriana was granted her first interview in March. Her application was approved in June.

  Despite this success, however, life in the United States has not been easy for Cipriana or her children: her son struggled with serious depression and Cipriana with feelings of guilt for her inability to help her community back in Mexico. “Then on top of that, here you have to start over from zero,” she says. With limited English, Cipriana has fewer employment options and has had to do a little bit of everything: cleaning houses, babysitting, cooking, selling jewelry, transcribing interviews. Adjusting to the U.S. financial system has been a challenge as well: “In Mexico, the fewer debts you have, the better, but here if you have debts and pay them off on time, that’s good for your credit. No one tells you that; you have to figure it out as you go … In Mexico, if you rent, and you fall behind a month, you can negotiate with the landlords. Here, no, you have to pay the bills no matter what. Here, everything’s controlled by companies, big and small, not people with faces. There’s no humanity, they just charge interest.”

  In addition to taking English classes at a local community college, Cipriana has been one of the mainstays of a nonprofit organization called Mexicanos en Exilio (Mexicans in Exile), which developed out of Carlos Spector’s work over the past few years. The organization, known as MexenEx in El Paso, channels the efforts of Carlos and his team to provide free legal advice to those seeking asylum and to help them start their new lives in the United States. Cipriana is the president of the board of directors; Martha Valles, sister of Marisol Valles, the former chief of police in Práxedis, Guerrero, also sits on the board, as does Saúl Reyes, a cofounder of the organization. “Our primary goal is justice,” Cipriana says; asylum, while important, is secondary.

  “I knew the organization was feasible in 2008, but I started looking around for leaders, because I knew the group would not grow unless it was led by members of the affected community,” Carlos explains. “I knew the character of the group would be defined by them.” He continues to play a prominent role in the organization’s public events, however, because he crafts the legal strategy that then influences the group’s political work. When the Alvarado girls were looking for information on their mother, for instance, the group organized a protest in front of the Mexican Consulate. “That way we’re killing two birds with one stone,” Carlos explains. “We’re sending a message, and making progress on one of the cases. That is the group’s success. Every time we make progress on one family’s case, we’re making progress for everyone’s case.”

  Part of MexenEx’s political strategy is to publicize the cases of murdered activists. One such activist is Marisela Escobedo, killed in the city of Chihuahua in 2010 in front of the Government Palace,
while she was protesting the murder of her daughter, Ruby Marisol Frayre, in Juárez two years earlier. The Escobedo family had investigated the killing, to which Héctor Escobedo, Marisela’s brother, had been an eyewitness. MexenEx succeeded in pressuring the Mexican government into taking an official declaration from Marisela’s son Juan Frayre, who maintained all along that he knew who had murdered his mother: the brother of Ruby Marisol’s confessed killer. In 2015, Carlos won political asylum for Juan.

  Another MexenEx case that made headlines was that of Carlos Gutiérrez, a businessman from the city of Chihuahua, whom I met in Carlos Spector’s office in 2012, and who had once led a relatively stable life in Mexico with his wife and two children. In 2011, he was extorted by armed criminal groups, who demanded that he pay them $10,000 for the right to continue operating his business. Calling the police would have been useless, he says, so he agreed to pay the extortionists. But as violence escalated throughout the state, business declined, and eventually he could not make the payment. The extortionists kidnapped him, took him to a remote spot, and sawed off his feet as a warning to other businessmen, leaving him for dead.

  After miraculously surviving the attack, Carlos made his way to El Paso, where his legs had to be amputated below the knee. Disabled, traumatized, with no money, he contacted Carlos Spector and began the process of applying for political asylum. The case stalled, leaving Carlos Gutiérrez in legal limbo, allowed to stay in the United States but without access to citizenship.