“Yeah, I worked in a twin plant once,” she says, wrinkling her nose. She much prefers being in El Paso and working for people like her former employer Carol, a divorced mother of two preschoolers who, after five years as a medical transcriber at a major hospital, was earning $5 an hour. The kids had terribly British names, blond hair, and were bilingual thanks to Marta, and refused to speak a word of Spanish outside the house. Day care for Heather and Stephanie was out of the question, since it costs $80 a week for two kids — hardly affordable on Carol’s typical El Paso salary. Marta, on the other hand, gladly slept on Carol’s couch, tended the children, and even kept the house for only $40 a week. While Marta served the nachos and tamales at suppertime, Carol would sit around wondering if she was eligible for foodstamps. When her friends came to visit, they would light up a joint and say, “Have the maid bring us something cold.”
Marta likes to swagger and snicker when she talks about the migra. “Once I was crossing over with four girlfriends and this migra saw us and I said, ‘Run, girls!’ and we ran and ran with him right behind. I was the ringleader, and I made us run forever. But then I looked back and he had his gun pointed at us. I told my amigas to freeze. He huffed and puffed all the way back to the pen. ‘Oh girls’ he kept saying,” Marta laughs.
But sometimes she gets wistful. “I tried to bring my little girl over — she was two years old then and still drinking out of a bottle. But she slowed me down so much that naturally I got caught at the river. They bused us all the way down to Ysleta (12 miles from downtown El Paso) and let us off on the Mexican side. There I was without a peso and had to wait a long time to hitch a rid back to Juarez. My little girl’s bottle was empty… she was really sweating… a lady gave me money for a lemonade. I called my mom and she took the bus from our house that night, a four-hour trip to Juarez. ‘I’m taking the baby back with me,’ she said. And naturally as soon as she left I crossed the river with no trouble.
“How often do I see my little girl? Well, every couple of months. At least the last few months she’s gotten old enough to remember I’m her mother.
“The scariest experience I ever had with the migra was one day when I had to take Heather” — Carol’s daughter — “down the street to kindergarten and Stephanie (the two-year-old) was still asleep. So I left Stephanie in the crib and locked her in the house. On the way back from walking Heather to school this migra drove past me and stopped. ¡Gracias a dios! I had on my jogging shorts and a sweatshirt and my hair was a mess. I started trotting and the migra said in English: ‘Good morning. Out for a run?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said in English, and he said ‘Have a good day!’ and drove off. Pretty good, huh? But, dios mío, imagine if he’d caught me and kept me for hours and deported me to Juarez, with the baby locked up in the apartment? Every time I think about it I still shake,” she says.
I had told Marta I would be riding with an Hispanic border patrolwoman. “If it’s the skinny one, she’s the one who’s picked me up twice. Ask her please, why does she do this to her own people?” Marta said.
“Oh, they ask me that all the time,” Henderson answered. “If it’s a man who asks, I say, ‘It’s your job to build rock walls.’ If it’s a woman I say ‘It’s your job to take care of other people’s children. And it’s my job to catch you.'”
