It’s puritanical, as described by Marta, an illegal live-in maid: “When you’re crossing the river, don’t wear bright colors. You don’t want to stand out from other people. When in the United States, don’t wear anything sexy or flashy. Stick to shorts or jogging pants. A knit shirt or a T-shirt. Tennis shoes.”
It’s boring: “Dow what my illegal students from Juarez do,” advises Ricardo Aguilar, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “Just look like a yuppie.”
It’s obsessive, like Reyna’s endless questions to me now: “You should wear cotton, right? And what about my heels? Americans don’t wear them this high, do they? How about mascara? Eyeshadow? I notice gringas do wear eye makeup. But it’s not as bright as this shade, is it? Or is it?”
Border Patrolwoman Estella Henderson recently verified the basic rules. She is chicana and great up in south Texas a few miles from the river. The surname came from marrying a fellow agent she met at border patrol training school in Georgia. Henderson is 29, dark, very slender, and beautifully correct in her dark green military pants, shirt and cap, spiffy black leather boots, and belted revolver. She pays out of her own pocket to have the uniforms dry cleaned. She is a woman who cares about Looks.
She took me riding in her green van, down the dirt road by the Rio Grande, just after the sun came up. Out-of-towners are always shocked when they see what separates the United States from Mexico at El Paso: nothing worth mentioning. No fence for many stretches, no desert — just a slip of a river and its concrete beaches. In some parts you can almost hop across, or pay some guy a nickel and walk to America on his old two-by-four. At this time of morning, men are standing in the murky water in their underwear. Women are dismounting from the shoulders of the burros who’ve helped them avoid the ultimate El Paso fashion no-no: walking around in wet clothes.
The first shift is about to start in the factories, restaurants, golf courses, lawns and laundry rooms of the First World. The mojados wish Henderson would leave so they can get to work. They look expectant, despairing, wired for the chase. “In about 15 minutes they’ll all of a sudden stampede together and we’ll only be able to pick up a few of them and the rest will just run between those tenements and disappear into the shopper traffic on South El Paso Street,” says Henderson. She’s been working since midnight. Soon she’ll be off, and another shift of agents will spend the day cruising down the streets, staring, checking, stopping, deciding who does and who doesn’t have the Look.
Back at the border patrol’s downtown offices she gives me a few tips, indicating the group of 60 bleary-eyed men shuffling around in the peeling, graffiti-smeared holding pen. They’re mostly the night’s catch from the freight trains bound from El Paso to Kansas City, L.A., and Chicago. “See him?” Henderson points. “His hair is longer than they wear it around here. And that one over there. He’s darker than people around here. And see that goatee? He’s not from El Paso because men hardly wear beards here.”
“Dangerous business, riding freights,” comments a Puerto Rican patrolman. “They see us coming and try to run away. They get hurt. Two months ago a guy had his ankles cut off while he was running from us. And remember that lady last year who was hiding between the trains near the Border Highway and was changing her baby’s diaper? Threw the baby to her husband just in time. Then she got sliced in two…”
There are other occupational hazards involved in getting to work in the morning if you’re a mojado. Like the culvert the border patrol calls the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It starts off by the river, a few yards away from an El Paso café where they serve great chile rellenos and superb frozen margaritas. After dinner and drinks you can stroll to the trail and chat with as many mojados as you want. They enter the culvert, which can be very muddy, and emerge a quarter mile away near the business administration building of the University of Texas. I met an old man there once with a bag of hedge clippers dangling from a plaster cast on his arm.
“I slipped while they were chasing me,” he said. “Do you need your lawn done?” Others try their luck running across Interstate 10, which runs to Houston and L.A. No time to look for traffic if the migra’s on your heels… The newspapers are filled with two-inch boiler plate about “Mexican nationals” run over gravely or fatally.
Then there are the drownings. The mojados see the migra coming and start running. They slip, and the current is fast. Or they’re making their daily wade to America and suddenly hit a deep spot that wasn’t there yesterday. That’s what happened last summer to El Paso Times reporter Berta Rodriguez’s uncle from Juarez. “He needed to come to El Paso to do some roofing work and it made him real nervous to cross illegally. He drank a lot of beer to get his courage up, so he was probably a little drunk. He went down in the river and never came up,” Rodriguez remembers.
And there were the four women found drowned, raped , and strangled at the river this spring. One’s still unidentified; one was 13 years old. They were all maids coming over to look for work. The man who confessed said he got them by offering to help them cross without getting wet. “Too bad about those girls. They must have been naive,” says Marta, the maid who knows not to look sexy on this side.
