We Built the Wall Read online

  After spending a few years in the military as a medical assistant and a few months on the front lines in Vietnam, Kent decided he wanted to be a photographer. He earned a master’s degree at Illinois University and a doctorate in mass communications at the University of Iowa. He worked for a while at various newspapers, and then, in the eighties, he moved to California to be a professor in photojournalism at CSUN. He soon realized that Southern California had no photojournalism archives. Local newspapers like the Los Angeles Times had photojournalists on staff who captured thousands of images of the civil rights and Chicano movements, but only a few of those pictures were published in the paper, and the rest were thrown away.

  In 1990, after jumping through many bureaucratic hoops, Kent finally got his project off the ground: the Center for Photojournalism and Visual History, which he now directs. One of his central objectives was to find images from photographers working in media made for people of color, since it was clear that coverage in the so-called “mainstream media” only focused on issues relating to the white Anglo population. With that perspective, his first collections included thousands of images by Guy Crowder, photographer for the African American daily LA Sentinel, and Emmon Clarke, who documented the movement to unionize farmworkers led by the Chicano activist Cesar Chavez in California. Today the institute has over 850,000 negatives and the largest collection in existence of African American photographs, as well as works donated by the fine art photographer Richard Cross documenting the wars in El Salvador and Honduras.

  Kent was working on building the center’s collection in 2002 when he was promoted to director of the Department of Journalism at CSUN; one of his first initiatives in that post was to start a journalism program in Spanish. He began searching for a coordinator for the project, and that’s when José Luis Benavides came on the scene.

  José Luis is a charming man. With dark hair and a dark complexion and soulful eyes with bags under them, he tends to wield his winsome smile as a tool of persuasion. He speaks Spanish with a light accent which could be Chicano but isn’t quite; it’s the classic “not from here nor there/ni de aquí ni de allá” that comes from both sides of the border.

  José Luis came to CSUN by way of Texas, where he earned his master’s and doctorate degrees. Originally from Mexico City, he was critical of the vacuous nature of the U.S. university system, the lack of cultural diversity in academic life, and the ignorance often found among journalists. After accepting the position of director of the Spanish journalism program from Kent, he developed a solid curriculum mainly for immigrants and the children of immigrants from Latin American countries. He hoped to work with audiences from those countries, in Spanish- or English-language media, and to focus on issues affecting the Spanish-speaking community in the United States. In 2007, José Luis founded the Spanish-language student newspaper El Nuevo Sol, a multimedia publication covering issues of particular interest to the Latino community, including immigration and border issues.

  José Luis and Kent’s meeting could not have been more fortuitous. In spite of very different backgrounds and a fifteen-year age difference, the two clicked right away. Their ideologies and visions for the future aligned perfectly, and immediately they set to work on several projects together. When Kent stepped down from his post at the Department of Journalism, José Luis took his place.

  Writer and journalist Charles Bowden, who would pass away in August 2014, after our trip to Casa Amiga, spent more than a decade writing about issues and events surrounding the border. At the time of our visit, he had recently turned his attention to the violence in Juárez from the alleged war on narcotrafficking initiated by the government. Of particular interest was the economic and political relationship between the two countries: the corruption, impunity, and indifference on both sides of the border. His book Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (Nation Books, 2011) was published to great acclaim. José Luis discovered Charles’s work and mentioned it to several colleagues, including Kent. The two made arrangements for Charles to come to CSUN in November 2011 and give a talk to the journalism students.

  Charles traveled to Los Angeles with his partner, Molly Molloy—the American academic-activist who would later come with us to Juárez—from their home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a town forty minutes away from the El Paso–Juárez border. José Luis and Kent visited him there months later, coming face-to-face with the stark realities of life for those exiled by violence. They spent five days around the border and, after returning to Los Angeles, could talk about nothing but Juárez.

  “We realized there is an enormous need to preserve the memory,” José Luis explains to Irma and the rest of the group sitting around a table at Casa Amiga. “When violence forces people to abandon their homes to save their lives, they [the criminals] go and ransack the house and burn it down. There’s nothing left, and we run the risk of people saying it never even happened in the future.” After their trip to the border, he and Kent decided to create an oral history archive, collecting interviews with victims of violence in Juárez and those attempting to help them.

  This is the third trip José Luis and Kent have made with the aim of preserving memory. They conduct interviews with people exiled by violence, many of whom are represented by Carlos Spector. Some of the interviews go on for hours. When they get back to Los Angeles they transcribe the recordings, translate them so that the archive is in Spanish and English, and file them with no editing. The archive includes 17,000 images as well. The plan is to keep adding as many interviews as they can get. The project has no budget; twice a year, the two professors dip into their own savings and devote their free time to traveling half the length of the border, collecting fragments of the present, in the hope that they will someday be a tool for those who want to know what happened here.

  Irma, who is surprised and moved by what she hears, offers to help in any way she can, including granting access to some of Casa Amiga’s files that would not violate anyone’s privacy. As we have coffee and cookies, it occurs to me that we have spent the past three hours talking about murders, mutilations, and raped women. Horrific images run through my mind, and I feel physically ill. The people who have told us about these cases are outraged but not surprised. I think they don’t react like the rest of us anymore. They are different, because they happen to live in Juárez.

  “We are in El Paso, today is January twenty-first, and we are with Gloria Lopez.”

  José Luis makes sure the microphone is working and begins his interview with Gloria, who is sitting up very straight with the clip-on mic attached to her blazer lapel, facing her interviewer. Gloria is married to Saúl Reyes, the only surviving male of the ten Reyes siblings. She and their three children came with Saúl when he decided to apply for political asylum.

  Gloria dressed up for the interview. She is wearing a purple blouse under a fuchsia blazer, glasses, stud earrings, and a silver necklace, her hair pulled back. She starts off talking about how she was born in Chihuahua in 1974. When she was seven years old, the family moved to Guadalupe. As with all the others who have been interviewed during this trip, Gloria’s childhood includes idyllic memories of Valle de Guadalupe: it was prosperous, with plenty of jobs, people were happy to work in agriculture, and she fondly remembers her father taking her out to play in the plaza. That all ended, she recalls, when the factories started coming.

  While Gloria talks and José Luis performs his role as interviewer/memory collector, Kent attends to other tasks: he takes photos of Gloria, and of José Luis, and of the two of them; he sets up a camera to record some video; he makes sure there are enough batteries. Kent does not speak any Spanish, but he understands a bit thanks to Juana, his wife of fifteen years, whose family lives in Tijuana. Gloria speaks softly; she is shy and at first her answers are brief, without elaboration. But as the interview goes on, she begins to talk more freely, emphasizing the most important parts of her story.

  The story that José Luis captured that day
is about how Gloria, the daughter of a family of PAN (National Action Party) supporters, fell in love with Saúl, of the Reyes brothers, the leftist PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party) family who had a successful bakery, where the whole family worked. While they baked bread and distributed it to other businesses, the Reyes family exchanged progressive books, making sure not to discuss a book until everyone had read it. Gloria says the Reyes family’s class and social consciousness fed on bread and books.

  Gloria and Saúl had their first date on January 1, 1994, while in the Selva Lacandona, a group of indigenous people took up arms under the banner of the Zapatista Liberation Army. They got married a year and a half later, and lived with his parents while Saúl saved up money to build their own house. Life with Saúl and his family made Gloria understand why the activist Reyes were so vocal: if the authorities would not listen to them and the government would not satisfy the demands of their constituents, they had to speak up. Other PAN supporters accused Gloria of being a spy; she soon switched her party allegiance to PRD. The people in town knew they could count on the Reyeses. When women had a problem, they sought out Josefina, Saúl’s sister, who participated in the movement demanding justice for the women who had been killed in the area.

  After living with Saúl’s parents for a while, Gloria and Saúl had saved up enough money to build their own house. With a pride that lights up her face in a wide smile, her glasses rising a bit higher over her cheeks, Gloria recalls how they built the house with their own hands, mixing the cement, pouring it into molds, constructing the walls, and putting in the windows. In 2000 they opened their own bakery and moved into their new house with their two-year-old son, Saúl Ernesto (his middle name an homage to Che Guevara) and Saúl’s growing book collection. Two more sons followed. Then the Reyes assassinations began in 2008. Magdalena, Elías, and Luisa were kidnapped and killed. Saúl started receiving text messages sent from Elías’s phone, saying, “You’re next.”

  Saúl and Gloria took one last look at their house, their bakery, the bookshelves filled with books, their land. They walked across the bridge, leaving behind the country they loved, entering another from which as leftists they had always questioned seeking asylum. Living for months in a shelter for the homeless, piled on top of one another, unable to work, unable to do anything, having to accept help. Receiving asylum, getting a job in a supermarket with a salary that barely paid the rent on a tiny apartment for the family of five and Saúl’s mother. Trying to make a paycheck last through the week. Losing your country.

  “You plan out your life, you think it’s going to go a certain way,” Gloria says, smiling ironically, but without bitterness. “I remember when I was in my house, with our business and my three children, I thought, my life is so boring, nothing interesting ever happens. Just imagine.”

  Gloria says she doesn’t like living in the United States, but one day she hopes to adequately thank all the people that welcomed them there. As long as there is life, she says, there is hope.

  Gloria unclips her microphone, and before she leaves, José Luis gives her two books he brought along for Saúl, one by Eduardo Galeano and the other by José Saramago. Gloria thanks him and tells him how much her husband has enjoyed the other ones. He is even considering buying a bookcase.

  We are in Carlos Spector’s office in El Paso, a two-story building with walls adorned with Chicano artwork evoking the border. It has a warm, welcoming feel, in spite of the hundreds of manila folders with colored labels arranged in alphabetical order on shelves.

  Today we’re here to interview journalist Alejandro Hernández Pacheco. Carlos successfully handled his case for asylum. Alejandro just barely managed to get out alive.

  José Luis sits down and assumes his role as the interviewer. Across from him, dressed casually, tall, with a solid build, large hands, and a ruddy complexion, sits Alejandro. He has coarse features, but a very gentle expression. He is timid at first, but once he gets comfortable, he speaks freely. José Luis hunches over a bit as the story unfolds, tilting his head to the right, gazing at his subject over his eyeglasses. He makes an effort to rephrase his academic modes of expression during interviews. All the little details in an interview help to get the story told.

  Alejandro’s father is a miner for the Peñoles mining company, the second largest in Mexico. For five years, Alejandro worked as a cameraman for the Telecable television network in Torreón before moving to Júarez. When he got there in 1997, the story of all the women being murdered started to make the news. He worked for the Televisión Azteca company, and then for the newspaper and Internet portal Milenio. In 2008, when things started getting tough in Torreón, he went back to work for Televisa, in an area of the city known as Laguna. Alejandro assures us that, from what he saw, the official number of reported murders during Felipe Calderón’s presidency is much lower than the reality. He is the third person interviewed on this trip to tell us this. “Seeing so much death all around affects you at first,” he says, “but then you get used to it … to the smell and everything.”

  Until it touches you. On July 26, 2010, Alejandro was kidnapped along with Héctor Gordoa, a producer for television journalist Denise Maerker’s show Punto de Partida (“Jumping Off Point”), broadcast on the Televisa network, the largest television corporation in Mexico. They were working on an investigative story on the alleged complicity of prison officials with organized crime at the Centro de Rehabilitación Social in Gómez Palacio, Durango. The story implicated Margarita Rojas Rodríguez, the director of the prison at the time. On the drive back to Torreón, a vehicle cut them off and kidnapped them, along with another reporter who was released a short time later. The group that kidnapped them said that in exchange for their release, the Televisa network had to air a video linking officials with criminal activities of the narco gang Los Zetas. Televisa did not acquiesce, and on that day Maerker’s show was not broadcast; after a brief explanation from Maerker, the screen stayed fixed on a logo.

  “Televisa left us very vulnerable,” Alejandro recalls. “Héctor and I joined hands and started to pray; we thought about our children.” The two were blindfolded, tied up, and held in a house for two days. “There were dried bloodstains on the walls, and little scraps of hairy skin, teeth,” says Alejandro. “When it was morning, I was surprised I hadn’t been dismembered.” He and Héctor were beaten, and didn’t eat or sleep.

  The kidnapping, which Alejandro attributes to a group affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel, lasted for five days. On the fifth day, for reasons he doesn’t understand, they were both released. They immediately went to the federal police, who, it turned out, knew about the kidnapping already.

  “They were waiting for us,” Alejandro recalls, bitterly. “Genaro García Luna—the secretary of public security then, in Felipe Calderón’s administration—put on a big show for the media, to announce our “rescue.” They didn’t even let us see our families. Without questioning us, without letting us see a doctor first, nothing, they put us on a plane and flew us to Mexico City for a press conference … Of course I was afraid to go back home, they had my name, they knew where I lived, and the whole time they told me they were going to kill me.”

  An official with Sitatyr, the union representing television and radio workers in Mexico, offered Alejandro temporary use of a house in Mexico City while Televisa resolved his situation. The company offered to relocate him to another city and to help pay for his housing costs. A week later they rescinded the offer.

  Alejandro realized that neither the company nor the government was going to manage the situation. The public exhibition the government made of him, in fact, later helped Alejandro win his asylum case in the United States; that exposure, he argued, clearly demonstrated that the government lacked the most basic logistical knowledge necessary to protect his life. On August 21 he traveled to Chihuahua, and the next day he crossed the border, never to go back.

  “We left behind everything, our families, our homes, our friends,” he says. “To work
so hard to get your home, only to leave it to those idiots …” His jaw is clenched with rage, as he tries to control himself. “They ransacked it, they took everything, the pipes, the window grates, everything.”

  When José Luis asks him what support he has received from international organizations, Alejandro smiles ruefully.

  “I contacted Article 19, and Reporters Without Borders,” he says. “I asked if there was some way they could give me some financial support while my asylum case was in process, because I couldn’t work. They told me they didn’t have the resources. They put out their little press releases about ‘We support the reporter so-and-so’ and that’s about it.”

  Alejandro worked as a landscaper, he painted fences, he shined shoes. Like the other interviewees, he is tremendously grateful to all the people who did help him, some of whom he never even met. His was the second asylum case to be granted to a Mexican in the United States, under the grounds of persecution.

  “We’re peons, nothing more,” he says. “The television network used us, the government used us, the narcos used us. We didn’t matter to anybody. The new migration is journalists fleeing—not because they want to work here, but out of fear.”

  Kent and José Luis have an interesting rapport. They remind me of an old married couple who know each other’s strengths and weaknesses perfectly. They get along well, and it’s clear that their relationship is built on tolerance, respect, and affection.

  We drive around the city in Kent’s pickup truck, with a cabin that seats two comfortably in the front, and two more, uncomfortably, in the back. José Luis and I fight over who gets to sit in the back seat; I can better observe the academics’ relationship from there, while he, old-fashioned, would feel badly if he were to travel more comfortably than a woman.