At the Border

                                                                                   

The desert beyond

     

February 16, 2009 

       At noon, the border town moved with life, mostly Mexicans, from the other side, shopping in stores owned by Koreans and Lebanese, in old, stark buildings leased from absentee landlords who had long ago moved out of town to cooler climates in upscale cities, like San Diego, Balboa, and Los Angeles. The American Graffiti days were long gone, no J.J. Newberry, or kids enjoying English movies at the Fox Theater, the locals shopping at the new mall and Wall Mart outside of town, where they lunched at Applebee's and Coco's. Instead, window displays and racks on the sidewalks were filled with knockoff clothing, cheap houseware goods and plastic toys. 

       By 3:00 P.M., the crowds had thinned. Shoppers made their way back across the border, and by 6:00 P.M., except for a few stragglers, the rest had abandoned the area downtown. As night fell and a cool chill swept through town, there was an eerie silence, a reminder of the great desert beyond. Across the border came the faint echo of voices and music. 

       I asked a friend if the downtown area was always this dead at night. "It's changed a lot since I was a kid," he told me. "But you should see it in the morning, early, before sunlight. “It’s another world.” He didn't elaborate.

       I set my alarm for 4:00 A.M. I hadn't been up that early in a long time. I wiped the sleep from my eyes, washed, dressed, and a half hour later, I stood downtown at the corner of 3rd and Paulin. The sidewalks and streets breathed, crowds everywhere. Men and women in work clothes walked into the donut shops and cafes, some of them small store fronts that had remained closed during the day. Lines of workers stood outside open windows and took bag lunches from cooks who had prepared their food. The workers put the lunches into their backpacks. They congregated in groups, talking and waiting.

       At certain locations, their "connections" would come for them. “Si, pa’ avisarnos,” as one man told me, waiting for a company contractor to "notify" him, a type of approval to guarantee him a day's work. Another man said, in Spanish, “Sometimes they arrive early to get us. Sometimes they don’t come until after 6:00, and sometimes they don’t come at all.” 

       A column of white school buses hauling toilets on trailers, Elkhorn Packing and Southeast Growers, filled the streets, picked up workers, and rushed out of town, crisscrossing the roads and highways, delivering workers to packing sheds and to the fields. It’s a world within a world. 

     The town sleeps. A mass of humanity waits, moves, trudges, and hopes for work. They have faces and voices. They talk, they laugh, and they grow sullen. A handsome man, movie-star handsome, with a neatly trimmed beard looks inside a donut shop window. Dressed for the cold, he carries a backpack, as do most of the people on the street. Is he an artist, or a musician who must work the fields during the day to survive? 

       There are other men, clean-cut, blue eyes, light skin, expressive when they talk, smiling and grimacing, signs of life, real stories evident on their faces and in their speech. There are young women who appear to hide their femininity in the bulkiness of their clothing, gender neutral. Another man, with tattoos sneaking up his neck, a serious look on his face, a heavy jacket, hoodie, and a backpack hanging behind him, waits like the rest, surviving, desperate as the ghost buses move orderly through the streets, more people than buses. Some men are old, wrinkled, barely hanging on, yet they look experienced to this life of the morning, this other world. 

       It’s dusk, the sun rising, swallowing the dark, and the buses are gone, the groans of the engines silenced. The workers, remaining, men and women, walk away in different directions. Many disappear towards the border, crossing back to the other side. By 6:30, it’s light, the last bus moves up Imperial Highway, away from the international border and out towards the desolate fields and packing houses, into the mouth of the desert, Yuma barely an hour away. 

       The streets stand empty. The small, nondescript stores close, until tomorrow morning when it all starts again. I enter a coffee shop and order one large cup. I take a seat at a bench beside an old woman dressed in work clothes, a backpack beside her, a baseball cap covering her gray hair. I ask her if she works in the fields. She must be somebody’s grandmother. She tells me “Yes,” she does work. She crosses the border each morning, hoping, but when the contractors look at her, they think she’s too old, and they will only hire her if there is a shortage of workers. 

       “Today,” she says, “they had plenty of workers. I’ll come, again, tomorrow. Maybe I will be luckier.” She sips her coffee and gives me a smile, as if to tell me not to worry. She knows what she is doing.