too poor to afford the guesthouses and the smugglers’ fees camp outdoors. The Catholic church at Altar tries to help the indigent migrants. There, Father René Castañeda Castro presides over a dormitory for scores of the overexposed, and a kitchen to feed them. He and his crew try to convince the desperate migrants to turn back, telling them stories and showing them videos of the dangers ahead. “It’s not a desert anymore,” he tells them, “it’s a cemetery.”3
A Legit Business Opportunity
The free market adapts to change quickly on the Tijuana-San Diego border. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, legal border crossers were faced with extraordinary delays as U.S. agents carefully checked documents and searched cars. Those walking across the border also were subject to increased scrutiny, their papers checked thoroughly and their possessions sent through airport-style inspection machines. The wait was hours long. But there was a third option. In addition to motor vehicles and pedestrians, there was a unique line for bicyclists. And very few border crossers were heading north by bicycle. There was virtually no waiting in the bicycle line.
Thus a group of Mexican entrepreneurs set up shop just south of the border with a haphazard collection of bicycles, offering them for rent to anyone standing in the hot sun waiting to pass the U.S. control point. I was in that line and jumped at the opportunity to speed up my passage, happy to rent a bicycle ludicrously too small for me. Riding was not an option. I couldn’t fit on it. I gave the new businessman five bucks and took temporary custody of the bike. He instructed me to push the bike up to the crossing point, passing the hundreds of pedestrians sweltering in the sun.
“What do I do with it once I’m on the other side?” I asked him.
He smiled. “There’s another bandito at the other end who will take the bike.”
And indeed there was. As soon as I cleared U.S. immigration minutes later, his partner grabbed my bicycle and sent it south to earn another five dollars.
Striptease Interlude
My wife and I were en route to Dallas and made a typical tourist stop along the border. We parked the car in the shade in El Paso, and left a window cracked open and plenty of water for our dog, Amigo. Then we walked over to Juárez just to see it, before the long drive across Texas. (As a popular postcard says, “The sun is riz, the sun is set, and we ain’t out of Texas yet.”)
We were strolling down the streets of Juárez, just walking around looking at the sleazy honky-tonk joints that hug the border, and Sheila said, “Why don’t we go into this one?” She’d never been in a strip club before. Inside were Formica tables lined up theater-like in front of a stage. The place was empty; it was still early in the afternoon. We sat down and ordered a couple of beers, asking for Carta Blanca. “Okay,” nodded the waiter. He disappeared into a back room and returned with a couple of bottles of beer with labels identical in design to the Carta Blanca trademark. Except they said, Carta Cruz. It tasted terrible, watery. He charged us top dollar, which we paid, because the floor show was included.
We nursed the beers, waiting. Finally the waiter climbed up on the stage and announced, “And now,” dramatic pause, “the world famous Miss Lola Brigetta!” From the wing stage left, Miss Lola slouched out on the boards. She was wearing a green-sequined dress that looked a little worn out, as did she.
On the stage, perched on a stool, was an old portable record player. Wires trailed across the floor to speakers set up on the edge of the stage, facing the audience: just the two of us. Miss Lola turned on the record player, plopped the needle onto the spinning vinyl, and began walking around the stage, more or less in time to the burlesque music. She made it abundantly clear that she was not just disinterested, but utterly bored. Quickly she claimed center stage and began unzipping her dress, not as a stripper, but as if she were getting ready for bed and no one was watching. Underneath were her bra and panties. The music bumped and ground. She pranced around in her underwear. Then she took off her bra and dropped it on the stage next to her dress. She meandered around some more in her pasties and panties, stopped and looked at her watch. She called off into the wing what we only figured must have been a message to the manager, something like, “I’ve been out here long enough, okay?” He must have said okay, because she quickly pulled off the panties, giving us a look at her thong while she tapped her foot waiting for the record to end. Then she picked up her clothes and walked off the stage. The whole affair lasted the amount of time it would take to smoke a cigarette.
Yesteryear’s Borderless Border
Sent to cover the Mexican Revolution by Metropolitan magazine and the New York World newspaper, journalist John Reed traveled with Pancho Villa and reported from the front lines in 1913 and 1914. He went to Nogales to interview the future Mexican president Venustiano Carranza—described by Reed as “a slightly senile old man, tired and irritated.” The Nogales he found was nothing like the armed camp that divides the contemporary border. “Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico really form one big straggling town,” he wrote.
The international boundary runs along the middle of the street, and at a small customshouse lounge a few ragged Mexican sentries, smoking interminable cigarettes, and eventually interfering with nobody, except to collect export taxes from everything that passes to the American side. The inhabitants of the American town go across the line to get good things to eat, to gamble, to dance, and to feel free; the Mexicans cross to the American side when somebody is after them.4
No meandering back and forth between this Nogales and that Nogales any longer. In 2018, the U.S. Army was ordered by its commander-in-chief Trump to line the 20-foot post-9/11 wall through Nogales on the American side with coils and coils of concertina wire—a bloody trap for border jumpers and a photo-op for the White House. “This is not right, what they’re doing,” was the response of Nogales, Arizona, Mayor Arturo Garino. “This should not be happening to our community.”5 On the Mexico side, white wooden crosses hung on the Nogales wall in memory of those who died crossing the border that John Reed saw as “one big straggling town.”
Freelance Gringo Coyotes
Over fifty thousand cars, trucks and busses roll through the main crossing point between Tijuana and San Diego every day. The Department of Homeland Security admits it only stops and searches a fraction of them. Because of these odds, plenty of migrants take a gamble and just come north through the official crossing point, hidden casually under sleeping bags and baggage or carefully stashed in secret compartments.
This type of human smuggling caught the fancy of freelance gringo coyotes—students and other cash-strapped San Diegans who discovered that a quick trip over the border and back can earn them mucho tax-free dollars. And the risks are minimal—even if the penalties can be severe for those who are caught. But prosecutors acknowledge that they rarely pursue these ad hoc smugglers if their human cargo is not mistreated and if they are not dealing with more than a few migrants.
“The number of cases exceeds the available resources in the criminal justice system,” is how Adele Fasano, then the San Diego director of Customs and Border Protection, reacted when the gringo scheme made news. “We prioritize and prosecute the most egregious ones.”6
These gringo coyotes, often high school students, don’t necessarily need to arrange for their cargo in advance. Savvy Mexicans solicit the gringos where they’re frolicking at Tijuana bars and dance clubs.
In 1993, the U.S. government imposed what it called Operation Gatekeeper along the border at San Diego. A high gash of concrete replaced ad hoc and sometimes minimal fencing while the Border Patrol bloated with new hires. But Operation Gatekeeper did not keep Mexicans out of the United States, it simply pushed them from the urban crossing point at Tijuana east to the rural deserts of California and Arizona.