We Built the Wall. Eileen Truax
One of those suburbs is Fabens. It’s something of a paradox that, of all the places to migrate, these natives of Guadalupe have settled in a town that’s the mirror image of where they came from. When I ask Saúl and Martín if the similarity convinced them to stay in Fabens, they both smile. Saúl assures me that they live in Fabens simply because it’s cheaper than other places.
I met Sara Salazar de Reyes for the first time in a Chinese restaurant in El Paso, the same day I met Saúl, Gloria, and their children. Doña Sara was seventy-nine, with a vacant stare. She is polite and smiles cordially to everyone, but her eyes are blank—the emptiness death leaves behind.
Almost a year later, I see Sara for the second time, at the New Year’s dinner at Saúl’s trailer home. At the stroke of midnight we are all sitting around the table, with Saúl’s rosca de reyes, or three kings’ bread, which he baked that afternoon at the supermarket bakery where he works. As the head of the family, Saúl thanks everyone for their friendship and for coming to dinner. He also gives thanks simply for being alive, and says that he hopes the new year will be the best one yet. The clock strikes twelve, announcing the arrival of 2014, and everyone starts hugging each other. Doña Sara goes over to a little side table to look at some family photos displayed there and starts to cry. She does not stop for quite a while. A decorative wall hanging reads, “The love of a family is life’s greatest blessing.” Later, Sara tells me that when her son Eleazar was diagnosed with cancer, she told everyone, “It is forbidden to die before I do.”
The next morning everyone gets together again for a breakfast of leftovers from the night before, and Gloria cooks some more. The women play dominoes at the table, while Doña Sara invites me to come back to her little room to talk. There, surrounded by photos of all of her children, she tells me about each one of them. Her daughter Elba died in childbirth, and Sara raised Elba’s son, Ismael, like one of her own. Rubén, her son, was a good man; he had been walking to the store to buy milk for his workers when he was killed. Josefina was closest to her mother; Sara went along with her to the demonstrations, the protests, the meetings with other activists. “Just imagine, me and my daughter are having coffee, and just an hour later they tell me she has been killed. It was very hard,” she says, letting out a sob.
Sara tells me how painful it was to see Saúl in those first days of exile. When she first arrived in El Paso, the family was still living in a shelter. “When I got there, I found my son eating a piece of stale bread,” she says. “It broke my heart.”
“I always went along with my children in everything we did,” she recalls of the family’s activism in Mexico. “After they killed my grandson, we stepped up protests against the police, the soldiers. When the soldiers came, that’s when our martyrdom began. We started to protest, to get people together to demand the soldiers be withdrawn, but my children started to fall.” She weeps openly. “The last thing, which was hardest for me, was the kidnapping of Elías and Malena. I don’t mean it wasn’t hard with my other children—as each one fell, a piece of my heart was lost—but with them I had nothing left.”
Sara had not wanted to come to the United States, but had been left without a choice when Saúl began receiving threats. “If you stay here, they’re going to come after you to find out where I am,” Saúl told her. Now she says she probably would not return to Mexico. “We don’t have anything left there anymore,” she says. “They burned it all down.”
Through Doña Sara’s window you can see laundry hanging out to dry on the clotheslines. On sunny days, like that New Year’s Day in 2014, the clothes dry quickly. But when the wind picks up and gusts from the south, everything gets covered in dust. The desert is wily.
Carlos Spector, Attorney-at- Law for Impossible Cases
I first meet Carlos Spector, a lawyer, in early 2013 at ¡Ándale!, a restaurant in El Paso with a logo of a fat man in a sombrero eating tacos. Stepping inside is like walking into a garish street fair, with fake cast-iron bars over fake windows and fake serenades. An overweight Joan Sebastian impersonator performs for a sparse audience, who silently beg him to stop. Carlos’s wife Sandra greets me warmly at the door, and we look for a table as far as possible from the “entertainment.”
A longtime social activist, Sandra works for a Texas labor union. She is sixty years old, but youthful and vivacious; only a few lines on her face hint at her age. Her eyes sparkle, her black hair shines, and she gestures enthusiastically with her hands. She wears boots over slim-fitting pants and two sweaters—it’s a chilly desert night in January. Even though her first language is English, Sandra speaks with me in Spanish.
A few minutes later Carlos walks over with a firm step and joins us. His appearance catches me off guard. I have seen him before in photos and videos, with a robust frame, deep voice, and impassioned way of speaking that lent him an imposing air. The Carlos in front of me has the same wavy sandy hair, pale complexion, strong nose, mustache, sideburns, and somewhat uneven beard, but is someone else: thirty pounds lighter, the skin on his face hanging slack around squinty eyes, his voice raspy, tired. Sandra tells me that her husband was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx a few months before. He is recovering from an aggressive course of radiation treatment.
Carlos asks for a glass of water without ice and starts to talk, gesturing with his hands for emphasis. He’s an effective orator: like a preacher, but without the arrogance. He smiles and speaks with passion. In recent months, all of his time and energy have been consumed by a particular kind of case: Mexicans living in exile in the United States because of violence in their home country.
“Everything is political,” Carlos tells me the day we meet. “It has to be political to make the case for someone applying for asylum, to make the U.S. government understand what is happening.” When the Reyes family’s case found its way to Carlos, he began to see a pattern in the stories of his clients—journalists and social justice and human rights activists and defenders—and their motivations for fleeing to the United States. He began studying “those individuals who, before the attack, had been working on protecting democracy.” A human rights defender, he says, is someone who works professionally in the defense of human rights, while an activist (e.g., a family member of the disappeared) seeks justice where the state fails to provide it. Within just a few months, Carlos had compiled a list of twenty-one human rights defenders who had been assassinated. Justice had not been served in a single case.
The asylum cases coming from Guadalupe are, for Carlos, personal. Born in 1954 in El Paso, he describes himself as a “pocho”—a slang word roughly translating to “Americanized Mexican”—but strongly identifies with Mexico. His mother was from Guadalupe; his grandfather was mayor of the city. As in all border communities, Carlos’s family home “on the other side” was an extension of his own.
“We knew through our family that things were really bad, that Chapo Guzmán had gotten there in 2008, and they were killing the leaders of La Linea,” Carlos explains, referring to the local cartel in Juárez. Some of Carlos’s relatives were among that group—“a little bit removed”—so they knew the details. Then the Reyes Salazar family was referred to him.
The family’s case, Carlos says, represents the entire system of “authorized crime” in Mexico. “The criminals don’t function without authorization from the state,” he says, “whether it’s on a municipal, state, or federal level.” When criminal groups first arrive in a town, they tend to identify and target the area’s political leadership first as a form of “ideological cleansing,” Carlos explains. Over the course of several election cycles for governor of the state of Chihuahua, Guadalupe was the only place in the entire state where a leftist candidate from the PRD party won. The candidates who prevailed there were from the Reyeses’ party; the family was therefore considered “dangerous.”
Aside from relying on open, obvious repression and expelling its people, Mexico also considers those who seek asylum in the United States to be traitors. “People who are under