Becoming Dr. Q. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
strikes twice in the same place.
Not so fast!
We weren’t stopped that day. But on New Year’s Eve, now back in Mexico, the three of us decided to drive back over the border to Calexico, at which point a couple of border agents stopped us and asked to see our passports. We showed them the documents, and everything was fine—until the agent asked when I had last entered or left the country and where I had been. “Fresno,” I said. “Travel. Visit family.”
Fausto and Oscar waited in the car as Gabriel and I were escorted into a room, where a two-hour interrogation ensued. The agents had nothing on us. Finally, they asked if we’d ever worked during our travel and family visits to the United States. “What?” I asked indignantly, as if that notion were the craziest thing I’d ever heard. All this time I had been working with only a tourist visa—clearly illegal. Now I was sweating bullets, but I managed to appear cool.
When they were about to let us go, one of the agents said, “Fine, let me take a look at your ID again.”
But instead of letting me pull out the paperwork to show him, he grabbed my wallet, where he immediately found fairly recent pay stubs, issued in the United States, with my name on them. And there was a pay stub with Gabriel’s name on it, too.
We were now officially in trouble not just for working without a permit but for lying about it.
And that was how lightning struck twice and I had my passport confiscated, as did Gabriel. When we came outside, Fausto and Oscar were waiting in the Thunderbird. I got behind the wheel and followed the agent’s directions as he pointed us back south toward Mexico.
If I had been at all ambivalent about leaving home and spending a longer period of time in the United States, that incident sealed my fate. Granted, I had no passport, no legal means of crossing the border again. But that technicality wasn’t going to stop me from executing a new plan. There was no time to make my good-byes, no time to explain myself or express my regrets to my friends or my girlfriend.
I had searched my heart and looked to the wisdom of my grandparents, who seemed to be sending me the same message: go! The time to leave home, family, and everything I knew in this world had arrived. There was no need to be afraid or to think that I couldn’t do it. All I needed to take with me was Tata Juan and Nana Maria’s lasting guidance and everything that I’d been blessed to learn in my eighteen years. That, and the sixty-five American dollars I had to my name.
As I devised the strategy I planned to execute, auspiciously, on New Year’s Day, 1987, I spent the hours before dawn sitting outside in the darkness without a star in the sky. My thoughts wound back to my trips to the mountains with Tata Juan as we made our way to the little town of Rumorosa, along the steep edges of the Sierras. I remembered how dangerous the road was and the fact that many cars had fallen down the cliffs in terrible weather and in other mishaps. And yet my grandfather had chosen not the safest route but the one that provided the most interesting little stops along the way. While Tata was as eager to get to the cabin as I was, he didn’t agree with me that the shortest and most direct route between two points was best. He wanted to show me what I would miss if I focused only on my destination.
Desperate situations—like the one in which I found myself on the eve of my nineteenth birthday—require desperate choices. Having made my decision, I couldn’t allow any regrets or second thoughts to deter me. Don’t look back, I told myself. I had to go forward to find my destiny, crossing the border fence to see where the path on the other side would take me. I had to act boldly, decisively, and immediately. And I had to climb to the top and jump.
THREE The Kaliman Maneuver
How did I do it?
Even today, I’m not sure how I managed to jump the fence to start a new life in California. Throughout the years since then, I have often said that I was propelled by a combination of audacity and naivety. Why else would I defy gravity and risk injury, incarceration, and even death to cross the border? Without a certain degree of ignorance about all the things that could go wrong, it would have been much harder to screen out disabling thoughts. If I had been more realistic and had considered the pitfalls in greater depth, I might not have made the journey at all.
But I was not entirely blind to the risk I was taking on that New Year’s Day in 1987. When I watched the sun rise over the fields of home for possibly the last time, I was fully aware that the strategy I’d crafted during the night might fail. If anything, life had taught me not to be afraid of failure. What made me more afraid was not trying to embrace the world just beyond my reach. My fear was that I would not go for it, not give it my very best shot. And that wasn’t audacity or lack of worldly experience. It came from the belief that I had valuable assets to offer—my passion (Quiñones stubbornness) and boundless energy, even if I didn’t yet know how to harness it in a meaningful way.
These resources likewise came into play in my approach to crossing the border without documentation. Certainly, desperation added fuel to the fire. But the scientist inside me was also already at work. Remembering Tata Juan’s advice, I realized that I had to veer off the well-traveled path to build a promising future. And anticipating the advice of the great scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose writing would influence me greatly in my career, I knew instinctually that I needed to think clearly, plan my strategy carefully, and never give up. Of course, having just put away my school books to prepare for full-time work at the lowest rungs of agriculture, I would have laughed at the notion that I could become a scientist one day—let alone a neuroscientist.
Not that my plan was perfect. As any science-minded person could have told me, most real breakthroughs come about through a process of trial and error, repetition and adaptation, imaginative leaps, and—even though we are not supposed to admit it in the scientific world—the all-important commodity of good luck.
Indeed, there was nothing very scientific about my decision to defy the conventional wisdom that the safest way to get across without capture by the border patrol was to make a hole at the bottom of the fence or tunnel under it. According to lore, if not fact, people who attempted to scale the fence, as I planned to do, and then tangled with the barbed wire were the ones who sustained the worst injuries, and some even died. Although armed vigilantes were not prevalent at the time, most of the stories about shooting fatalities at the border involved people who had been trying to go over the fence rather than under it.
Perhaps it was the underdog in me—the boy who was used to being challenged and who wanted to do things differently—that opted to go the dangerous route. And being of a rebellious mind-set anyway, I found no allure in going the easier way—or so I tried to explain to Gabriel, Fausto, and Oscar on the evening of January 1, as the sun began to set during our drive to the drop-off point in Mexicali.
“Doc, you’re crazy!” cousin Oscar scoffed from the back seat of my Thunderbird, where he sat next to Gabriel. “Nobody jumps the fence.” What he meant but didn’t need to say was that nobody jumped the fence in the middle of Calexico. Actually, lots of people found remote stretches of the fence to climb. But attempting to do so in the middle of town was so bold as to be nuts.
From the front passenger seat, I glanced over at Fausto, who was behind the wheel. In his kind, intelligent fashion, Fausto suggested, “Well, I think we’re using the word ‘jump’ as a euphemism, right Freddy?”
“Exactly.” Then I explained that my move would, in fact, be more of a Spiderman climb up the eighteen-foot fence, followed by a hop over the barbed wire and a leap toward foreign soil—culminating in a flying descent and a pantherlike, spring-loaded landing, reminiscent of the Kaliman maneuver that I’d never mastered.
Although Oscar and Gabriel expressed misgivings about this outlandish plan, we were all pumped by the excitement of the undertaking.
For all the risk that the gravity-defying portion of the crossing would entail, the rest of the plan was much tamer and had fewer potential pitfalls. Or so I insisted while explaining that Fausto should stop the car a few blocks from the stretch of border fence where I would attempt “the maneuver.”
Fausto