Earlier this summer Henderson’s patrolman husband, Carl Ray (a.k.a. Bear), was driving his van full of wets through south El Paso when a young Hispanic beckoned him over, ostensibly to point out more illegals. Bear asked the man for his papers. Instead he received two thumbs in his eyes, sever bites, and knife slashes in the arms. His assailant, strangely enough, was a U.S. citizen. The Hendersons and their supervisors blamed the incident on the fact that the perpetrator was high on something and “possibly a gang member.” But Estella Henderson admits that “there’s a lot of animosity… citizens will often try to interfere when you’re questioning an illegal alien.” As for the illegals themselves, thought, “They don’t get mad at me. They understand I’m just enforcing the laws.”
What does she think of the laws? “I don’t know. I just enforce them,” she says, steering past the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“A lot of migras are pretty nice,” says Marta, and her assessment is echoed by another maid, Vicki: “This gringo migra caught me but he was very helpful. He said American girls always carry purses with them and if I get myself one, he won’t pick me up the next time. But the Mexican” — i.e. Hispanic — “migras are the meanest,” Vicki says.
Cesar Baballero, a chicano and an activist in El Concilio de El Paso, an umbrella group of Mexican-American organizations, agrees. “A lot of us in the late ’60s and ’70s pushed for Hispanic representation in all jobs, including border patrol,” says Caballero. “In the barrio when I was a kid we used to play migra instead of cowboys and Indians. The border patrol would be the bad guys and the illegal aliens were teh heroes. The object of the game was to run fast and find real good places to hide. Now chicanos are the biggest cabrones — the biggest bastards — in the migra.”
“Maybe they join the border patrol to show they’re really part of the establishment,” says Professor Aguilar. “They’ve been raised in fear of the migra and it’s their way of proving to themselves that they’re not afraid.”
“Sometimes I think we’ve created a monster,” Caballero says.
As for Henderson, though she grew up on the border, she doesn’t recall having any relatives on the Mexico side. She does remember being stopped many times by the Border Patrol and being asked about her citizenship.
“I never minded that. I figured they must have a good reason,” she says. “They were doing their job. I’m doing mine.” And it’s a good job — a great job for someone who hasn’t finished college in a region where a secretary averages $10,000 a year. Not counting the extra she makes in overtime and shift differentials, Henderson is making in the low 20’s after only two years with the patrol. She wants to take some classes and finish up her bachelor’s in law enforcement. And she and her husband are planning a baby soon.
She’ll probably need her own maid then.
Meanwhile, what Henderson and her fellow agents say they enjoy most is plainclothes duty at the airport. The wets there have more money, more savvy, and more style than you average pedestrian house servant. “That’s where you find the challenges” the ones with forged documents, even people who’ve been living here for years and maybe have their own businesses,” Henderson says. “But you can still tell they’re illegal. Like, they could even wear expensive jeans, but they’re too brand new. Or they don’t fit quite right. These people walk around looking uncomfortable and nervous. You develop a sense for who they are.”
But not always. Lately the airport has gotten notorious as a place where chicanos say they’ve been questioned and even detained by overly hardworking migras. Caballero, a university librarian, says he gets stopped every time he tries to catch a flight. That he’s now a regular habitué of airports rather than the south El Paso slum where he spent his boyhood makes little difference. “It doesn’t matter how far you’ve come in the world,” he says. “They’re going to hassle you if you’re brown.”
On the other hand, every time the Border Patrol stops somebody like Caballero, presumably some real wets are making it through the line somewhere else. Despite the state of siege, you can still get over still master the Look. Especially if you have help form the kind of people who get L.L. Bean catalogs in the mail.
Like one guy active in the sanctuary network who dresses Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees for their trips farther in to El Norte. “I lent this one man my pink Izod shirt, an old pair of Nikes, some jeans, and these yucky sunglasses. He got through,” says the networker. “But you’d be surprised how many Central Americans absolutely refuse to dress up to go to the airport. We’ll say ‘Put on this alligator shirt’ but they’ll say ‘No. I want to dress like me. I am not an American.’ Here they’ve made it to El Paso after escaping death squads, walking through Mexico, maybe being raped by the police there… and all they have to do is this one last thing to get up to Chicago or Canada. And they won’t. What is it? Pride?”
Or maybe it’s just too enervating to make the effort. Americans are supposed to have an instinct for ever-changing ready-to-wear in their blood. And Mexicans have been raised so close to this cynical sense of style that it’s not much work for them to grasp the conecpt that wearing plastic shoes last year would have screamed “illegal,” but now it’s okay because all the best gringa girls have their Jellies. For people who’ve spent their lives hundreds of miles rather than hundreds of yards south of the Look, trying to learn it quickly may be too hard. Some may find it better to hang onto their un-self-conscious foreignness, saving that precious élan that can get you past some pretty ight spots. “You’d be surprised at the number of people who go to the airport in their own clothes and still get through,” the sanctuary worker tells me. He says taht tone in threee Central Americans makes it past the border. The Border Patrol says two in three Mexicans do. And if they get far enough away, they leave the Look behind them.
But what will happen from Los Angeles to New York and through the heartland, if enough citizens take seriously the immigration refore talk of once and for all getting rid of the wets, the illegals, the mojados? Will the Rio Grande upstage the coasts as a mecca for style? Will all the brown people in America have to draw a straight line between citizenship and Reeboks?
The mojados are in every city now, in just about every factory every field, every take-out joint and sit-down restaurant everywhere in America. No matter what laws are passed against them, the economy will keep needing them. So we might as well ask whether we’re also going to want the vans, the squad cars, the TV cameras, the guns, the migras, and yes, even the soldiers everywhere in America. That’s what it would take, after all, to nationalize the tyranny of the Look.
***
This essay is an excerpt from Women and Other Aliens.
