by Brad Neaton
There’s something existentially horrific about waking before dawn. Particularly when you’re about as far away from home as you’ve ever been, ensconced in a caravan of migrants you don’t belong with, wrestling with a beleaguered conscience that seems intent on minimizing your sleep, all while trying to figure out how to end an elementally-fraught situation, the indefinite prolongation of which has become insufferable.
Presently, it’s approximately 0125hrs and I’m sitting on a bridge. Around me are hundreds, if not thousands of migrants from all over the world, most of whom are asleep. It’s the Naco Bridge, where your correspondent now sits recording this, the last segue to the U.S. border. This is the 4th day we’ve been here, and by now we’ve long since passed the point at which we look more like Dickensian urchins than a hopeful caravan of people who want nothing so much as the opportunities America offers. Behind us is Blvd. Internacional, a straight, eleven-mile spine of asphalt connecting Mexico to Towner Avenue in Arizona, and beyond that the Sonoran Desert sprawls hypnotically, its immutably carnelian background an impoverished reddish panorama of iron oxide, its hills and basins and basins and hills dressed in tufts of buffelgrass and creosote, and saffron dust devils lurching into the bluffs, and giant cacti standing like serried statues off in the distance.
I knew this time would come, obviously; I was the one who’d come up with the plan, after all. But that truth doesn’t soften its arrival. I’d been feeling apprehensive about the precipice to which my decisions had led me long before now. Indeed, I had spent much of the day ruminating on my intention, fought to an impasse by countless considerations, the most salient of them being the fact that what I was about to do was a felony.
As I sit outside my tent, contemplating a languishing, crescent moon and watching the clouds move glacially across a sky freckled with stars, I’m now realizing that these people have gentled my heart. Though we might as well be from different planets, what’s invisible to the naked eye is what makes us similar, and, like the abiding commonness of our blood, it’s the integral part of what bonds us together.
They say that only the most life-changing experiences refuse to be trivialized by time, and I’m inclined to be so. I imagine that, for me at least, before this night is over, the impending will be one of them.
9
It had not been my plan, when I initially came up with the idea to travel to Mexico and witness the immigration crisis with my own eyes, to join a migrant caravan. In fact, I never even intended on being here more than a day. I had been disappointed when John, my boss and the editor at a certain national newspaper I’ve been writing for since 2007, informed me that due to budget cuts, I would only be receiving a measly two days of per diem, and that if I wanted to stay in Mexico any longer than that, expenses would have to be out of pocket. But the unprecedented explosion of global migration was a subject matter we’d scarcely covered, and I believed there was a need for on-the-ground reporting at the border, perhaps a story that challenged prevailing narratives. I booked a flight and was on my way before the week was up.
But shortly after arriving in Central Mexico, a chance encounter waylaid my plans and gave me reason to pause. It occurred to me that the project I originally had in mind wouldn’t come close to accomplishing what I had hoped it might. There are some things that must be experienced before you’re capable of explaining them to others; some things are past conception to those who’ve not witnessed the same. Conducting a few interviews, snapping a few pictures—this seemed grossly inadequate, considering. The truly meaningful things about a people are not learned via traditional reporting, but by going out and living among them.
An opportunity to do just that presented itself while I was waiting to speak to a ticket agent at the bus station in Rancho Nuevo, a small Mexican town located off Av 3 de Mayo in the state of Michoacán. It was then that I first met Jose, a young and slight man smartly dressed in Levi’s, a white cowboy shirt, and elongated-toe cowboy boots, or botas picudas mexicanas. He was with his wife, Ana, and their daughter, Yénifer, the three of them in front of me as we stood in line at the ticket window. Normally, I would have paid little attention to them, but Jose kept turning around and grinning at me at sporadic intervals, his teeth like amber pegs that reminded me of dried corn kernels. I was fairly fluent in Spanish, having grown up with a maid with the patience to informally teach me, and was about to say something when he beat me to it.
“American, si?” he asked, nodding his head. His wife smiled meekly.
“Si.”
“Eh…traveling?”
“Sort of. I’m a journalist.”
“Ah! Muy bien! Me llamo Jose Ramirez,” he said, shaking my hand.
“David Bennet,” I said. He introduced me to his family, and I nodded politely. His wife gave a shy smile, and I could tell she wasn’t as fluent in English as Jose.
“Why do you ask?”
“Mi familia,” he said, looking around as if to make sure nobody was listening. “We are…mojados.” He laughed.
“Do you mean…?”
He nodded enthusiastically.
“But how are you…”
“Coyote,” he said. “Coyotes” were the smugglers who helped people cross the border for a handsome fee, and bus terminals were ideal recruiting grounds. I smiled, but then saw he and his family had no luggage, just a couple fiber costales (woven sacks) and what appeared to be a garbage bag full of coats and blankets. That’s when I realized he was being serious, and I grew concerned. Coyotes were untrustworthy, for one. I recalled a story about a man who’d paid a coyote 75,000 quetzals—about $10,000—for a journey across the desert and to the border that was supposed to take three days, only to be abandoned less than twenty-four hours later. Then there was the matter of crossing the border itself, which was nowhere near as easy as it had once been. Now there were bigger fences and more floodlights, increasingly sophisticated sensors and infrared spy videos, night vision cameras, Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoints on every major freeway, and more agents. Not to mention the terrain and the brutal trek that you had to make just to get to the border—hard enough for a grown man, let alone a child.
I felt morally obligated to at least try explaining this to Jose. It took a while to convince him, especially coming from a gabacho—a foreigner—but I eventually succeeded in getting him to reconsider. I could tell he was disappointed. Jose told me how desperate he was to get to America, how badly he wanted to give his family a better life, and how in just the past few years alone they’d witnessed suffering that would “break anyone’s soul.” He glanced at Yénifer. “And mi hija, she will soon be of the age when the girls get picked up,” said Jose, describing the ubiquitous sexual violence that so many women endure in Mexico. Then he explained why they had finally decided to leave home for good: gang members had threatened to kill his daughter if he didn’t pay $1,500—the equivalent of five months' income from the family’s fruit stand. Going back was not an option.
“If you can make it to El Norte, everything changes,” he said. “There we are safe from the cartels and the gangs and the corruption. In El Norte, the dreams we have here can be reality.”
I nodded solemnly. Unsure of what to say, I suggested he try to cross another way, and that maybe it would make more sense to request asylum.
“But where are you going, friend?”
“Naco.”
“The border?”
“Si,” I said, explaining that I was hoping to interview individuals affected by the immigration crisis. I had done some brief research prior to leaving for Mexico and decided that the port of entry into Naco, Arizona seemed like an ideal destination. I was also somewhat familiar with the area, having spent my high school summers at my grandpa’s ranch in Huachuca City, which was less than an hour away.
“Is there a crossing there?”
“There’s a fairly busy port of entry; I’m sure there’s a Border Crossing Station.”
“Would it be trouble to come too, señor? Maybe you help us, no? And I help with your writing?”
I shrugged. “Of course you’re welcome to. I’m not sure I’d be of much help, though.”
“Si, but having a gringo is good, no?” He smiled. “Maybe you translate if necessary? And I for you?”
I looked at his wife and daughter, the two of them holding hands and standing timidly behind Jose but listening closely, Yénifer’s chestnut eyes staring up at me.
“Sure,” I shrugged again. I didn’t have the heart to say no. Besides, what Jose was asking of me wasn’t anything excessive, nor was his suggestion impractical. It suddenly occurred to me that I could even interview Jose, get to know him better while on the bus. “Yeah,” I said a little more encouragingly, “feel free to tag along, absolutely.”
Thus, Jose, Ana, Yénifer and I all boarded the same northbound bus at 1530hrs, the three of them squeezing into the seat across from mine. Neither Jose nor Ana had a cell phone, as they’d sold nearly everything of value to come up with the coyote’s extortionate fee, but I of course had mine, along with a solar charger I’d brought along in the event I found myself in a predominantly rural area. No itinerary had been provided for the trip, which I found strange but understandable given how rundown the bus station was. I should have known better.
8
I tried following our progress using Google Maps but soon lost service. Within the first two hours the bus made several stops and more passengers boarded. Many appeared to be farm men—straw cowboy hats, canvas pants, dirty feet in worn huaraches, tough-skinned hands and weathered faces. As we slowly made our way north, it began to dawn on me that most, if not all, the other passengers were migrants, and that we weren’t making nearly as much progress as we should’ve been. We inexplicably switched buses three times. I started to get irritated. Jose must’ve noticed because he asked if anything was wrong.
“Well, we keep stopping and changing buses. And it seems like every time we do, the bus gets more crowded,” I said.
“But of course, señor. We are going to the border.”
“Are these—are we part of a migrant caravan now or something?” I asked, laughing.
Jose nodded.
“Oh.”
I hadn’t envisioned this happening. Though I’d read somewhere that migrants sometimes travel via caravan because it provides safety in numbers, it never occurred to me that they might take a bus. By midnight it had gotten so crowded that people were forced to stand in the aisle. I was one of them; when a visibly distraught woman came aboard holding a baby swathed in blankets, I gave her my seat. A man in a black cassock, to whom Jose and Ana had spent the past few hours talking and Yénifer had taking a liking (he had given her a small balón, a soccer ball), saw me do this and smiled, introducing himself as Padre Frances. His English was surprisingly good. He told me I stood out, which made me laugh, and I explained. Padre Frances had robin-egg’s blue eyes of an unexpected gravity, a penetrating gaze that made you feel like he could see everything inside you at once. But he was kind and generous, going out of his way to make those around him feel at ease. He was also full of stories, which helped pass the time. Later, when most everyone else seemed to be asleep and I’d finally opted to sit in the aisle rather than punish my back, Padre Frances asked if he could perform a cursory blessing on me. I of course said that he could, not wanting to be rude.
It was only a moment in the subjective time stream, but it was a moment I would come to ponder.
7
Chaos. That’s the best way to describe what it was like when we finally arrived at Naco in the morning: complete and utter chaos.
News had spread about a court ruling that had come down just hours before we arrived, a ruling which suspended the previous asylum policy. In a frenzied panic, nearly a thousand migrants who’d been forced out of the U.S. and back to the Mexico side of the border rushed the bridge at the port of entry and tried to forcefully enter. After they managed to overturn a barricade, some migrants were able to sneak through, compelling Border Patrol agents to deploy tear gas. That was the scene we arrived at when, for reasons that can only invite wondered speculation, our bus driver thought it wise to park on the bridge, practically cutting a path in the sea of migrants rushing toward the border. Maybe he thought he was doing his passengers a kindness by getting them as close to the gate as possible; maybe he just wasn’t thinking. I don’t know. But when he opened the door, many of those onboard scrambled to get off and there was a great deal of pushing and shoving. At some point during all the commotion, Jose and Ana lost track of Yénifer.
6
Having no reason to hurry, I waited twenty minutes until I was last off. Clutching my bag to my chest, I disembarked and stepped into the pandemonium, trying my best to politely nudge through people, muttering apologies even though nobody paid me any mind. The heat was unbearable; it wasn’t even 10 o’clock in the morning and yet my smartwatch showed 100 degrees. Eventually I managed to make my way to the back of the throng, where I saw Jose leaning over Ana. She was sitting down, crying.
“Is everything okay?”
Jose looked up at me and I saw that he, too, seemed to be shaken. “Yénifer…we can’t find her. We lost her in the crowd.”
I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? I couldn’t even imagine what they were now going through. Though I don’t have children of my own, a dear friend of mine lost a son in a tragic accident some years back, and I know that a tragedy of such magnitude brings with it the kind of ineffable sadness that’s difficult for the mind to fathom, a sadness that makes any attempt to share comforting words seem empty and worthless. I understood the uselessness of my words but could feel them lurking behind my uvula and felt compelled to tender them, nonetheless.
“I’m so sorry.”
“…”
I looked around, hoping to maybe find Padre Frances, who’d be an ideal presence considering the circumstances, but there was no sight of him. Jose returned to the fray to keep looking, and I followed.
5
I didn’t leave. Nor did I push forward with my planned writing assignment. The truth is I felt partly responsible for the mess Jose now found himself mired in; I was the one who butted into his life and steered him toward Naco. If not for me, Yénifer wouldn’t have gotten lost. I believed staying to help search was the right thing to do.
I called my boss and received permission to extend my absence, agreeing to cover any expenses out of pocket as previously stipulated. The next few days are a bit of a blur for me, a period when I felt unmoored from the boundaries of time and afflicted with a sort of existential seasickness, but looking back through a retrospective lens provides a kind of somber clarity.
In the immediate aftermath of the court ruling that suspended the former asylum policy, it seemed that nearly every migrant had opted to remain right where they were—on the bridge. And, due to the newly implemented policy allowing only a handful of migrants to cross the border each day, it looked like they’d be there for the foreseeable future. Many had been driven there by poverty and violence and devastating droughts due to climate change; they had no reason to turn back, on top of the fact that they’d come an extremely long way. Aid workers soon arrived with crates of bottled water and boxes of cheap, single-person tents. By the end of the day, an encampment had sprung up and the air thoroughly smelled of exhaust fumes and excrement. Coming from a culture where one of our big religions is comfort, the encampment was hellaciously wretched, but of course I never complained to these people, so many of whom were accustomed to a level of degradation which scarcely can be described.
In terms of requesting help as we looked for Yénifer, the options were few; it wasn’t like I could call in an APB, and Jose adamantly refused to ask the Federales for assistance, as most officials were extortionate. I considered crossing back over the border myself and seeing if there was anything the Border Control could do but thought better of it after remembering their limited jurisdiction. So, Jose and I were resigned to walking through the daily-growing maze of migrants squatting on the bridge, looking for Yénifer and asking around if anybody had seen a little girl with pretty chestnut-brown orbs for eyes and a tooth-gapped smile wearing a shirt with Elsa from the movie Frozen on the front. Few people even acknowledged us, and I was suspicious of every tent that I couldn’t see into, but I couldn’t just poke my head in. Jose and I searched for two days, and though Ana did her best to look for Yénifer as well, she was often overwhelmed by the smothering inertia of helplessness.
That night, as I sat outside my tent and watched the cotton candy clouds turn a luminous strawberry against the setting sun, I started thinking about how to best tell Jose that I could no longer stay, that I had to return home. And that’s when I received the call.
4
“Hello?”
“Yes, is there a Mr. Bennet, please?”
“This is him.”
“Mr. Bennet, it’s Padre Frances!” He practically shouted into the phone, though I barely noticed, so surprised was I to hear his voice.
“Padre…? Wha—”
“Please, are you—is—are you still in Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Oh lord, please—are you by chance still with Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez?”
“I am, actually. Yes. Why do—”
“Gloria a Dios! Mr. Bennet, I have Yénifer with me!”
I sat up like something had just bitten me.
“You do?”
“Yes!”
“How—”
“I’m an American citizen and—”
“You are?”
“Yes, yes, and I work with Buenos Samaritanos,” he said breathlessly. “It’s an aid group local to Naco, we help migrants with upcoming court dates and provide food and clothing—but yesterday, during our weekly visit, I saw her—Yénifer! She was in the children’s holding facility at the detention center, and I convinced them to release her to me!”
“But how di—”
“I’ve been helping at the holding facility for almost 20 years, I have many good relationships with the agents—”
“Okay, okay, give me a second,” I said, too eager to tell Jose and Ana the good news. “Jose!” I called, waving him over to where I’d been sitting. “Jose, Padre Frances—he has Yénifer!”
“Verdaderamente?”
“Yes!” I said, handing him my phone so that he could hear it from Padre Frances himself. I watched as Jose’s jaw dropped and his face lit up with happiness. Ana came over, and when Jose told her she started to cry tears of joy.
“Mi hija!”
Jose continued speaking with Padre Frances, nodding along, but his smile began to fade. He handed me the phone.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Bennet,” said Padre Frances, his voice lowered an octave. “I’m not sure what’s to be done now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, though I have Yénifer in my care and she’s doing just fine, I can’t seem to come up with a way to reunite her with her parents; short of smuggling her back across the border, which I of course lack the wherewithal to even try, I don’t know.”
“Can’t you just speak to the Border Patrol about this, explain the situation?”
“I have, I have, but they cannot subvert the laws themselves. And even if Jose and Ana were to request asylum, it’d be weeks—months, even—before their court date arrived, followed by an equally long period waiting for a decision.”
“Okay, okay…I’ll try to think of something,” I said.
“You have my number now, Mr. Bennet; please do call me if you think of something!”
“Of course, thank you.”
3
I had an idea. But it was an extremely sketchy idea, certainly not my finest critical thinking, a plan with some serious holes and a hell of a lot of ways it could go wrong. In fact, I was reluctant to even mention it; I was worried what Padre Frances would think of me suggesting such a thing, and of Jose and Ana resenting my naiveté. So, I kept my thoughts to myself, where they hovered on the periphery of my mind, pent up like a held breath, until I decided enough was enough. That same night, Jose and I were sitting companionably outside my dinky little tent, silhouetted against the pressing darkness and trailing in and out conversation when I finally said something.
“I have an idea, Jose.”
He turned to look at me.
“But it’s a very iffy idea. And dangerous and potentially life-threatening. And I completely understand if you don’t want to even consider it.”
“What is it?” he asked, and I could just make out the curiosity in his eyes.
“We could maybe cross the river. To cross the border, I mean.”
“But Señor, I cannot swim—”
“No, you wouldn’t have to swim—well, technically yes you’d swim, but you’d stay afloat.” He didn’t say anything, so I continued. “I was in the Army, back in the day. El Ejército. And we were taught how to turn our pants into makeshift life preservers.”
“El flotador?”
“Si.”
“Pero cómo?”
“It’s actually quite easy. You simply tie the pant legs together tight enough to trap air. Then you put the loop over your shoulders, raising the open waist high enough to scoop in air before slamming it into the water. If you close the waist underneath the water, and keep it closed with your hand, it will hold air.”
“…”
“Obviously, we’d have to tell Padre Frances—he’d have to be okay with it. I was thinking we could meet him somewhere once we crossed.”
“What about la cerca?”
“The fence I don’t know about…we’d have to figure something out. Maybe climb it, if we have to. We could throw a blanket over the concertina wire, possibly.”
“Okay, let us do your plan.”
I was taken aback. “Really?”
“Si. It is a good plan.”
“What about Ana?” She was asleep.
“She will say okay. Cien por ciento. Padre Frances, let us call him.”
Ten minutes later, the plan I’d been so reluctant to even propose was set for the following night, when Jose and Ana would meet me in front of my tent at approximately 0200hrs. Attempting to pull something like this off during the day was out of the question; trying to sneak past the Border Patrol in broad daylight is like trying to sneak a sunset past a rooster. Padre Frances didn’t think it’d be wise for him and Yénifer to be waiting for us at the border fence and suggested instead that (if we managed to get past it) we meet him at a gas station about a mile east of the port of entry and approximately a quarter mile beyond the border—an ideal location, he noted, as the river bottlenecked nearby and would make it easier to cross. Neither of us mentioned the illegality of the plan, nor did we discuss what the Ramirez family would do once reunited.
2
All of which brings us to the present moment, as I sit outside my tent with 0200hrs. drawing nigh, about as nervous as I’ve ever been about anything in my entire life. I’ve spent most of the day doing nothing but thinking about what Jose and Ana and I are about to do. But I’m beholden to my constitution and unwilling to ignore my moral compass, and so I will go through with this. They expect me to have a leonine confidence because I’m a gringo and the one who’s marshalling the plan, so I’m doing my best not to betray my nerves, but it’s hard. I feel like we’re all characters in a story.
There’s movement in Jose’s tent and he sticks his head out, looking left and right before giving me a thumbs up, which I return. He crawls out, followed by Ana, both carrying a pair of pants and their costales.
“Okay,” I whisper, waiting for a threnody of sirens from the U.S. side of the border to subside before continuing. “It’ll be about a thirty-minute walk before we reach the crossing point. Remember: when we start moving, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. There’s no reason to be in a hurry.” It’s not lost on me that the emphasis on stealth lends the whole enterprise the feel of a WWII POW escape. Before leaving, I stick my phone and other valuables in a double-sealed bag and instruct them to do the same.
We proceed with mute rapidity onto the dirt road running perpendicular to the bridge, where we continue single file. I feel my adrenal glands and neurons kicking into action, a mix of unnamed fear and uncertainty and risk stimulating a steady flow of nervous adrenaline that courses through my veins. It’s as dark as a pocket, the only light the diluted luminescence of the stars. Thankfully, the walk goes by fast. I can see the bottleneck Pastor Frances mentioned, and we slowly make our way down a bank thick with brittlebush.
The current isn’t that swift, but you can tell the river is deep in its middle. I step into the water first; it’s surprisingly cold. Jose and Ana follow, the three of us with our spare pants over our shoulders, and once the water’s deep enough I demonstrate how to trap air in them. Jose smiles when he sees that it really does help you stay afloat. I motion with my head to follow me, and we slowly but surely make our way across the river. We stumble onto the opposite bank soaked and smiling, the three of us a little giddy because we’ve made it this far without a hitch, savoring the exquisite feeling of safety. Suddenly, a blindingly bright light slices through the darkness to where we’re standing.
“Pise el banco y no corra,” a voice says.
I freeze in sheer clock-stopping horror.
“La Migra!” Ana whispers.
“Vamos!”
It’s like I’m weighed down with a combination of fear and oddly detached fascination. Only when Jose and Ana move past me and begin climbing up the bank do I snap out of it and follow. The light is lifted, and I see that it’s a lone Border Patrol agent on a horse, a young guy, and he’s looking at us peculiarly. Then I remember how strange it must look to see someone like me trying to cross the border. I’m about to say something when he addresses Ana.
“Tu Nombre?”
“Ana.”
“Ana?”
“Si.”
He looks at Jose and I, his gaze pausing to linger on me, but doesn’t say anything. Then, in a melodious Texas twang, “Aqui. Ve, ve! Aqui!” He points toward the fence, and we start walking to where he’s indicating: a hole covered by branches. Stepping down from his horse, he removes the branches, and we see that the hole goes underneath the fence.
I feel like I’m in a dream.
“Buena suerte!” And then he rides away.
1
I’m not sure what I enjoy more: watching Yénifer’s face glow and hearing her tinkling-bell laugh when she sees her parents, and the way it feels like something warm has spilled over my heart, or knowing that everything that’s happened the past week is going to forever change such time as remains to me on this earth, bleeding into my thoughts and actions going forward, affecting how I see the world from here on out. The sun is just beginning to crest the mountains to the east, warming a cloudless, periwinkle sky when I take my leave. I give Jose my phone number, tell him to check in from time to time—actually, to call anytime.
I want to stay, but I can’t. I have a story to publish.
About the Author
Originally from New Baltimore, Michigan, Brad Neaton graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the Army. In 2017, he moved to Los Angeles to attend grad school at the University of Southern California, where he received a master's degree in Strategic Public Relations. He is the author of the novel Because of Jenny, a book that provides an unflinching portrayal of addiction, love, and the power of empathy. In addition to a personal library in excess of 1000 books, Brad maintains a peculiar affection for cat shirts and an undying desire to domesticate a raccoon. He's also the proud foster-father of the 2 stray cats living behind his apartment, Pizza Roll and Kevin. Brad currently resides in downtown L.A. where he enjoys people watching, being critter-friendly, and saying hello to dogs.
