Journey Along the Border

By JOHN BORRELL TIJUANA

From a bank of fog loitering along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, the waves emerge silently, advancing slowly and uniformly, like long thin lines of infantry, on the mouth of the Rio Grande. The river, exhausted after its tortuous odyssey along more than half of the 2,076-mile U.S.-Mexican border, offers little resistance to this serried assault. Its tired brown water backs up and bivouacs in a lagoon near a white lighthouse, and from there it slips, as stealthily as a camp deserter, into the Gulf.

It is a far from glorious end for a river that for 140 years has been the most tangible physical divide between the U.S. and Mexico as well as the symbolic frontier between the two dominant cultures of the New World. As I skipped stones across the river's mouth with just one bounce, I felt vaguely disappointed. The Rio Grande ought at least live up to its name and course majestically eastward before spilling vigorously into the gulf.

But in reality the river's final moments, and indeed much of its progressively arthritic journey toward the sea, are as fittingly equivocal as ) the relationship between the two countries and cultures it bisects. That became ever more apparent during the four weeks I spent following the river westward and, then, when it turns north to New Mexico, keeping as close as possible to the 258 white obelisks that mark the remaining 750 miles of the border from El Paso to the California coast. There is fusion, especially where the two countries meet. But the region is also a fault line where the tectonic plates of nationalism grind away despite such tokens of integration as Big Macs in Mexico City and tortillas in Tucson. There certainly is no identifiable third country in the making here, as popular myth would have it.

Skipping one last stone across the Rio Grande, I started inland across flat, marshy country where clumps of sable palms stand out like the befeathered scouts from a Zulu impi. Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, in Texas, are the first of a score or more twin towns strung along the frontier. The poverty that prowls much of the country's southern border like a hungry coyote sits back on its haunches and howls in Brownsville. "This is the poorest part of the U.S.," says Tony Zavaleta, a Brownsville sociologist. "We have whole suburbs without electricity, sewerage or running water." Across the bridge in Matamoros, where not even the poorest of the poor get food stamps, Indian women work a line of cars for coins as their barefoot children play on the sidewalk.

If poverty is relative, so too are many other experiences. A woman in Brownsville, so recent an arrival in the U.S. that she needs a Spanish interpreter in court, is convicted of trying to influence the result of a local election with a $20 bribe. In Matamoros, where posters from last summer's presidential campaign still crowd the walls, elections are invested with fewer moral, if not legal, expectations. Perhaps the single most striking statement to emerge during the campaign was the call by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and the eventual victor, for honest voting and an honest count. Not exactly the kind of statement that would make people sit up and rub their eyes during an American campaign. Americans expect it; Mexicans are surprised by it.

The land remains flat on both sides of the river beyond Matamoros. The first small hills rise in Starr County, west of McAllen, Texas. The moon darts in and out of clouds driven by a strong wind as Border Patrol officers Leo Laurel and Juan Trevino sit in the blacked-out cab of their Chevrolet Suburban. "They choose their sheriffs and deputies by the pound around here," jokes Trevino when asked why the police do not make more drug busts in one of the most important marijuana and cocaine importation routes in the country. "If an officer doesn't grab his man in the first couple of steps, he is away free."

Trevino, no lightweight himself, is out of the van and running a couple of hours later when a gang of smugglers has been tracked to a mesquite thicket. Suddenly shots ring out and bullets buzz overhead. There is shouting in English and Spanish. One armed suspect has been shot in the arm and another captured unhurt along with a dozen bags of marijuana, worth about $250,000 in south Texas (and about twice that in New York). Judging by the haul recovered from the brush, eight or nine other "mules" made it back to the river. It is the third such bust in as many days. As an ambulance takes the wounded man away, Laurel shakes his head. "I don't like it when the shooting starts," he says. "In the old days we just got poor campesinos from the interior with huaraches ((leather sandals)) on their feet. Now we are up against tough river rats. If I came across someone wearing huaraches these days, I think I'd hug him."

As I drive west along the Mexican highway, listening to my car radio and its plaintive norteno corridos (a kind of Mexican country-and-western in which unrequited love, boozy camaraderie and unfaithful women are constant themes), I wonder about the growing clamor in the U.S. for more drug interdiction programs and even a military "sealing" of the border. Could a democracy manage such an operation in peacetime? And if the U.S. Government could not stop Americans from supplying guns to Colombia's drug cartel, what hope did it have of stopping non-Americans from catering to the U.S. addiction for drugs?

Crossing into the U.S. near the Texas town of Del Rio, I spot an old mailbox that U.S. Customs has converted into a drug drop. DEPOSIT CONTRABAND HERE BEFORE YOU ENTER THE UNITED STATES reads a sign in language that seems more suitable for an antilittering campaign. The lock on the mailbox is rusty, and a spider has built a formidable web over the chute where any law-abiding, English-speaking drug smuggler would drop his neat little packet of cocaine or heroin. While the mailbox is an extreme example of bureaucratic wishful thinking, the larger U.S. approach to the problem often seems little more sophisticated.

Before reaching Del Rio, the road wanders through Roma, a steamboat terminus in the 19th century. The sheriff is out to lunch, but his office, on a bluff overlooking the river, is unlocked and unminded. Two hundred yards upriver a trio of illegal immigrants from Mexico wade across and disappear, just three more of the estimated 1 million to 2 million people who slip across the border each year.

West of Del Rio, Texas grows dryer by the mile. Tumbleweed bounces across the road and windmills draw up precious water for cattle. On the horizon, dust-shrouded hills appear, blue and mysterious-looking from afar. Roadrunners, heads down and tails up, sprint across the highway. River and road separate here as the Rio Grande, cutting through deep limestone canyons, makes a wide arc that has given this bulge of Texas the nickname Big Bend. Driving south through Alpine and Marfa, I see the border again at Presidio.

I double back 50 miles to the Lajitas Trading Post, an old single-story adobe building with a wide porch, where storekeeper Bill Ivey is preparing for a dance that night that will bring Mexicans and Americans together as informally as is possible anywhere on the border. There are no Customs and Immigration formalities here; Mexicans simply cross the river in a battered aluminum rowboat to shop, have a beer, go to church or, a couple of times a year, step out at an Ivey dance. By 9 p.m. the beat is lively, and more than 100 people, nearly half from across the river, are kicking up their heels beneath a corrugated-iron roof that someone ventilated with bullet holes at a previous get-together.

As I head west to El Paso the next day, I think about why these dances are so rare and why both sides seem to misunderstand each other so deeply. "Neither of us ever hears what the other is saying," Octavio Paz once wrote. "Or if we do hear, we always think the other was saying something else." The roots of the two cultures are so deep and gnarled by time that it is not just language that cuts a deep scar across the continent.

The Spanish conquistadores who fell upon Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in 1520 came to establish the old order in the New World. They came as agents of the King and God. They also came in search of gold, and they came without women. Just as Mexico City was constructed on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the new societies throughout Hispanic America sprang from the loins of the defeated Aztecs, Mayas and Incas. Nearly a century later, English settlers arrived in North America for different reasons. Accompanied by their families and not haunted by visions of gold, they sought less to conquer than to escape the old order and to begin afresh.

After winning independence from Britain, the fledgling United States established a democracy that reflected the character of the colonizers. Simon Bolivar and other Latin American revolutionaries tried to emulate the American Constitution, but their carefully crafted documents were quickly subverted by strongmen. When Augustin de Iturbide, Mexico's George Washington, assumed power in 1822, for example, he immediately had himself crowned Emperor. The Great Experiment never took firm root in Mexico or the rest of Latin America, causing a great deal of misunderstanding that persists to this day.

My ramble through history ends as I arrive in El Paso, directly across the border from Ciudad Juarez (the two cities' combined population exceeds 1.5 million). But for the narrow concrete channel that guides the Rio Grande through the urban sprawl, it would be difficult to pick out the boundary. There is synergy everywhere, from the maquiladoras on the Mexican side, where American manufacturers pay less than $1 an hour to a largely grateful work force, to the shops lining El Paso's Bridge Street, where Spanish is the vernacular.

Yet many differences abound, suggesting that even here the border is much more than just cartographical whimsy. Two American youths from El Paso were arrested and accused of killing a Mexican policeman and wounding another during a night out in Ciudad Juarez. On the U.S. side, outrage erupted over perceived weaknesses in the Mexican judicial system, with newspapers carrying stories of Mexican police corruption and the shakedowns that supposedly occur so frequently south of the border. But Mexican newspapers highlighted the fact that the slain policeman was the father of three and accused youthful American visitors of an arrogant belief that in Mexico, anything goes. "We still don't understand one another," says Guillermina Valdes-Villava, head of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juarez. "We seem tied to images that are largely historical."

Perhaps it is more than just images. In Las Cruces, N. Mex., where the road west finally abandons the Rio Grande, I talk with historian Louis Sadler. "Americans have never really had to deal with fixed borders," he says. "Europeans have had centuries of experience, but until recently in the U.S. there was always room for expansion. I think we are still working out how to deal with borders and other cultures." Farther west in Tucson, Dr. Michael Meyer, director of the Latin America Center at the University of Arizona, points out the inordinate influence of American culture. "I doubt that one American out of 10,000 would know who Sandino was," he says, referring to the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader who in the late 1920s and early 1930s defiantly resisted U.S. intervention in his country and whose name was appropriated by Nicaragua's currently reigning Sandinistas. "Yet nine out of ten Latins know who George Washington was."

Long before I reach Arizona, I leave Highway I-10 and bump along ranch roads that bring the border back into view. In Columbus, N. Mex., which the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa raided in 1916, John Alcorn, 69, gestures in the direction of the border. "Had 16 teeth out and a new set of dentures made over in Palomas last week," he says, massaging his gums. "Would have cost me $2,000 in the U.S. I paid $600 over there, and the dentist did a damn good job." Health care is a relatively new economic trade-off, but the principles underpinning it are as old as the border itself. At Ernest Hurt's ranch just east of the Continental Divide and an easy horse ride to the Antelope Wells border post, Carlos Chavez Perez, 46, works as a cowboy for $450 a month, about six times what he could earn at home in Chihuahua. Like the Palomas dentist or the assembly-line maquiladora worker in Ciudad Juarez, Chavez eats a lot better doing the gringo's chores than he would doing his own.

The numbered white border markers stumble on west across the Divide and through the Sonoran desert, where giant saguaro cacti, limbs upraised, seem to be surrendering en masse to the high temperature. Along with the sand and outcrops of flinty rock that run west to California, the heat and the saguaros are constant reminders that most of the border is largely uninhabited. But as the Pacific Ocean nears, human settlement increases until, on the western edge of Otay Mesa, suburban Tijuana begins in Colonia Libertad.

Like much of Tijuana, a city of 1 million, the Colonia is a jumble of tiny houses that press against the border of the U.S., marked here by two sagging steel ropes, piles of rubbish and cannibalized cars. On the other side are open fields crisscrossed with the tracks of vehicles used by the U.S. Border Patrol to man the line. The view conveys a powerful Dickensian image of poor faces pressed to the window of the world's biggest and most exotic emporium.

Late one evening on an Otay Mesa ridge, Border Patrol agent Michael Nicley uses binoculars to scan an area known as the soccer field, the most important staging point for illegal entry into the U.S. on the entire border. Some 300 people are already there tonight; Nicley recalls a recent sweep of the area during which around 1,000 illegal aliens were arrested in 30 minutes. An hour later, down at the 12-ft.-high wire-mesh fence that strides alongside the Tijuana river at San Ysidro, a soft light from the sinking sun catches the faces of a family waiting for a chance to outwit the Border Patrol. It could have been the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath. When the man bends down to talk to his young son, I think of Grandpa Joad's vision of California: "They's grapes out there, just a-hangin' over inta the road. Know what I'm a-gonna do? I'm gonna pick me a wash tub full a grapes, an I'm gonna set in 'em, an scrooge aroun' and let the juice run down my pants." The voluptuousness of the image, however expressed, inspires poor Mexicans and Central Americans now just as it did Oklahomans in the 1930s.

Even the legal human traffic between the two Californias can be dizzyingly frenetic. At San Ysidro there is nearly always a broad, sluggish river of cars, sometimes stretching back bumper to bumper for a mile, bearing down on the 23 U.S. Customs and Immigration booths. Thirty-six million individuals pass through each year, making it the busiest single border crossing in the world. Americans head south to shop and play; Mexicans travel north for everything from a family visit to work. Ana Maria Ley Estrella, a Tijuana dentist, crosses the border just to have her laundry done. "It washes whiter," she says. Yet the land that washes whiter is not where she wants to live. "Too much sex, too much violence, not enough family values," she says.

That is something that Jorge Bustamante, director of the Tijuana-based Colegio de la Frontera Norte, understands. "Here in Tijuana we have working relations with San Diego, a modus vivendi if you like. Tijuana really has more in common with Santiago, Chile, than with San Diego, California."

The official modus vivendi Bustamente talks about is a reminder that this is a unique border between the first and the third worlds. Perhaps the closest ^ comparison is the frontier between Western and Eastern Europe. Yet whereas the East Europeans are preoccupied with keeping their own people in, U.S. efforts on this frontier revolve around keeping foreigners out. Only the bureaucratic language and style are similar. WARNING reads a sign in English and Spanish in the U.S. pedestrian immigration hall at San Ysidro. YOUR ACTIONS AND CONVERSATIONS ARE BEING RECORDED BY VIDEO CAMERA.

If that sounds more like something to be found on the approaches to the Berlin Wall, then it would probably surprise Americans to learn that foreigners entering the U.S. are often accorded a good deal less courtesy than they would expect, perhaps demand, from a Mexican official. Proffering my British passport, with its multiple-entry visa to the U.S. inside, to a Customs officer, the conversation goes like this:

"Where do you live now?"

"Mexico City."

"Why are you entering the United States?"

"To have a drink in San Diego with a university professor."

"Now that doesn't sound likely, does it? All the way from Mexico City to have a drink in San Diego."

"It does if you happen to be staying in Tijuana."

"How do I know you are staying in Tijuana?"

After providing apparently satisfactory answers to this and other questions, I am waved on, the possessor not only of a newly stamped passport but also of a sense of just how far the final few feet from Mexico to the U.S. really are.

More than 2,000 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande, a marble obelisk with the number 258 marks the Pacific boundary of the frontier. On the U.S. side of the wire-mesh fence, this one corroded by the sea air, sanitation workers are emptying trash cans set about the neatly cut lawns of a small park. On the Mexican side of the fence an eroded gully is filled with garbage. What was once the Playa Azul restaurant is drunkenly toppling sideways, its concrete supports undermined by the sea.

Down on the pebbly beach, where small waves skip in one after another, the fence stops short of the water. Its concrete foundations have been laid bare by erosion; on one concrete post someone has written SIN FRONTERAS (without borders). Whether a plea or a demand, the slogan seems more appropriately a dream. Rich man, poor man, Anglo and Hispanic. They might well rub shoulders along this frontier, but they are still set apart by more than just a river, a fence or a line of marker posts.