La Migra

To first see the U.S.-Tijuana border is somewhat akin to stepping into the pages of Dante’s Inferno. It is a hellscape, a sort of desolate and eerie substratum between the third-world purgatory below and the city of angels above. Silver-tipped cholla cacti loom everywhere, ready to insert their fanged tubercles into any flesh that brushes past. Barrel cacti also lurk underfoot, and their steel ribs and fierce spines will slice right through a combat boot to skewer a whole foot. The night air is ripe and wretched; Mexican tire fires and wild anise ferment in the damp briny ocean air. The landing strip that separates the countries stands ready to snag a ringed finger and strip it to the bone, or take fingers off hands entirely. By day, it’s an open-air tacos-and-tennies for sale fiesta; by night, it’s an Olympic sprint, from the fence to the pavement, where shadowy groups that can number over 100, drop as silently as goats into the canyons beyond the highway, out of the reach of the border patrol, into waiting taxies, bound for Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and back again to la patria.

A sort of divine comedy between the United States Border Patrol and the Mexican population has played itself out here for decades. Drugs and desperation come north; money and guns go south. From the polluted Pacific shore to the west, where the fence finds final solace in the waves, through the Tijuana river bottom that fluoresces in the moonlight, past canyons with names like Washerwoman’s and Dead Man’s, over the mesa called the Soccer Field, and disappearing into the Ojai Mountains, and when the sun and sea unite, approximately 10,000 people will make their run north. And then the nocturnal cha-cha between La Migra and los pollos that has gone on since 1924 erupts with bodies and batons.

Sensors belch out foot traffic, the night scope calls out group after group, someone calls for the helicopter, the radio is jammed, the transport van screams to life, trainees get lost, bodies are separated from tennies, life belongings go to their graves in the river, and the hapless Border Patrol is overrun by peasants, farmers, transvestites, the impregnated, the one-legged, maybe a wheelchair or two, most of Oaxaca, and the occasional Russian. They catch one-third of what they see, and by their third year in, most agents won’t shift out of park if Pancho Villa himself strode by during lunch.