The Northern Line

In September 1973 a man picked me up hitchiking in Benson, Arizona, on my way from LA to Corpus Christi. Two Mexican men crossed I10 in front of us barefoot, south to north, with their shoes tied together and hung over their necks. They each had a small plastic bottle on a string, a hat, and nothing else. They looked like coyotes, glancing both ways up and down the freeway, then crossing way out in the middle of nowhere. Where were they going?

The old man driving told me they were illegals, that they had come from a village way down to the south over the mountains that we could just see in the distant haze, way down in Mexico, and that they had crossed the desert barefoot to save their shoes for when they found work. He said the bottle was for water, that they made the trip on about a quart. I had been out of the infantry just over two years and thought about their trip. I asked why they would do such a thing.

The man said that in Mexico there is no work for men like these, that their only income came from making the desert trip, finding piece work, then taking the money back to their village. He said that, recently, he had to have a sanitary pit dug at his house and that the backhoe man had wanted over a thousand dollars--which he didn''t have--but two Mexican illegals came along and dug the hole in one day with picks and shovels for fifty dollars. Fifty dollars, and sandwiches for lunch, and the hole was perfectly square--as good or better than the backhoe could do.

He said that just as America had become a source of income for these people, the local economy had come to depend on their labor. Otherwise, neither side would live nearly as well; they were co-dependant.

Sixteen years later I was a welfare worker in San Diego County, Calif. interviewing recent arrivals from Mexico every morning. Many of them were like the two men I''d seen crossing I10 in 1973; but most of them, applying for welfare, were pregnant women. I came to know why they came to America: Mexico doesn''t care. America cares, perhaps too much. I saw the supposedly infinite financial resources of the people of California being poured, like acid, over the decency, ethics and morality of the people of Mexico, reducing them to welfare dependency.

I taught English on the border, in the packing houses and barrios, in adult education, in migrant schools, and I supervised them for years as they passed through the American justice system in Texas--fascinating. I came to know them and the border, how its lack of structure draws the criminal element from both sides, how it feeds on innocence and need, encourages amorality and violence. The situation in California fifteen years ago was hopeless--I can only imagine the current misery there and in Arizona and New Mexico; public agencies and others wish it were as simple as when I worked there.

So now the border has gained national attention--thank God. If conditions I worked in fifteen years ago are considered the good old days, what will they be in another fifteen if we don''t do something now? With luck, a national movement will reform the border as labor was reformed at the beginning of the twentieth century, setting structure for the phenominal growth the border will see in this century. And as the population explodes, the Rio Grande Valley becomes one massive Los Angeles, the deserts fill up with Hispanic or Asian migrants, few of those people will study history to find us--who cared enough to challenge authority, to bring decency and structure to this nightmare.

The situation is that severe. What we do now will determine whether criminal activity or the rule of law dominate North America, as this wave of immigration sweeps north for the rest of the century.

I forgot to mention the men I worked with on Spring Street in LA in 1966 and 1967, who were there at the factory when I arrived at 7:30 and were there when I left at 5. They cursed when there was no work.
There is no place for men like these in Mexico--there should be.

Apparently, Mexico will not change. We on this side of the border, of all races and ethnicities, where there is a semblance of law and order, will have to do all the work.