As rallies subside and Minutemen multiply, the fragrant petals of apricot and peach blossoms fall like tears in the long green orchards of the Grand Valley. With the fruit comes hundreds of brown-skinned migrant workers, their trucks rattling down roads to familiar growers, as they’ve done for more than half a century.
They remind me of the humble Turkish gasterbaiter (guest workers) I met 30 years ago in Germany, a country that imported them for underpaid, menial work but greeted them with fanfare and cheering crowds at the airport. That same year, I attended the first global North- South conference in Paris, where I saw grown men cry with joy because the rich half of the world had begun a dialogue with the other half.
The love-hate border relationship is neither new nor uniquely American, and any genuine solution must begin by considering this a human issue.
Working in the Palisade orchards is Adelaida Torres, a small, pretty Mexican woman in jeans, with sturdy shoulders and shadows under her large dark eyes. Ten years ago, when Adelaida told police in her hometown of Cuauhtemoc that her husband was beating her and her three children, they simply shrugged. But Adelaida went home and packed, suddenly feeling “free as a bird” as she walked out of her 14-year marriage and dreamed of a different life.
Then came years of struggle. Her full- time job at an American-owned factory in Cuauhtemoc netted $10 a day, just enough for food. Her husband refused to pay alimony or help keep the children in public school. She took on more work. Finally, she called her sister, who was married to an American in Albuquerque. “We are going,” she told her children, Juan, Ivan and Carina.
In a northern border town, waiting weeks for the coyote, the human trafficker, they nearly starved. Adelaida gave her car to the coyote, a young man who took them and seven men, at night, to the desert. It was March. All they had was the light summer clothes they wore.
They walked all night, stopping, hiding, stopping, the coyote covering their tracks. In the pitch black, they stumbled into piercing cacti. Adelaida held Carina’s hand. Ivan walked alone. Sometimes the coyote carried 9-year-old Juan. They circled a mountain, looking for a light. No food, no water, no jackets. The coyote said immigration officials were everywhere.
Finally, they saw a tiny New Mexican town, Columbus. They were crammed “like cigars” in an open pickup for eight hours, commanded not to move as the truck went up into the mountains. It rained, then snowed on them.
In Albuquerque, her sister bought them from the coyote for $1,000.
I asked Adelaida what she most misses, and her eyes well with tears. “Mi familia.”
Adelaida was fortunate. Most women anticipate rape, and many die in one of the world’s most forbidding deserts. Ironically, since the 1994 border crackdown, more Mexican and Central American women flee to the U.S. More entire families are crossing the border because the migrant men can no longer afford the expensive coyotes to travel back and forth, as they previously did without them. To succeed, any new policy crafted by the Senate must carefully consider the primordial need of families to stay together.
Who has protected the Adelaidas of this world, or spoken for them? Why are the planet’s most vulnerable people, half of an estimated 180 million migrants, invisible to us?
Through working 12 hours a day – picking crops, cleaning, then housekeeping – for six years, and after a brief, also abusive, marriage to an American, Adelaida earned the hope of all immigrants: a green card. With it she now works legally, and plans to apply for citizenship.
“With the papers,” she says in halting, fluent English, “I am free again.”
Her children are going to college. They will build their first house, hands-on, with Habitat for Humanity. Her border crossing, forgiven by immigration officials, is not even a misdemeanor: It is a violation of a federal immigration statute, less than the equivalent of a traffic ticket.
What if, I wonder, the American factory in Cuauhtemoc had paid living wages, or if we, citizens of the richest superpower, paid full price for the goods that are grown, harvested, packaged or built by people who come from the southern half of the world? What if Mexico protected its families, and did not secretively trade humans like cattle with the United States?
Until our world gains economic equilibrium, the Third World will claw at the northern borders. Until we acknowledge the role of U.S. corporations and the World Bank in the enormous debts of the poor countries, and until we seek a solid border with a multi-tiered system of entry, no real answers will be found.
Imagine a guest-worker program that seeks immigrants like Adelaida. Imagine Minutemen, church workers and immigration officials working together, instead of against each other, to police the border.
How can the North integrate its brothers and sisters of the South? We must. From the painful blossom, el boton, comes the fruit.
Poet and fiction writer Sandra Dorr (sandydorr@bresnan.net) teaches Women’s Wilderness Writing retreats in Colorado and Utah.
