After I transferred from the university in Phoenix in late 1995, I kept myself in motion so compulsively that I barely got to know my new town. I biked to class. I hiked after class. I ditched class to hike during the week and drove all over Arizona’s rugged southeastern corner to hike the whole weekend. Half a year passed during which I spent as little time in my sad, lonely apartment as possible. I didn’t know anybody in Tucson, and I didn’t want to — not yet. My previous friendships had only helped me turn myself into a pothead. And yet I couldn’t stand to be alone and sit still either. Struggling with my isolation and anxiety about life, I tried to work through my twitchy misdirection in the border region’s dry mountain forests and lowland deserts, taking advantage of the long highways that gave me time for silent contemplation at 75 miles per hour.
Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains, Sycamore Canyon in the Pajarito Mountains — in those first Tucson months, I saw more of this rugged landscape than many University of Arizona students did in four years of college, yet I never really saw my new city for what it was, because I didn’t take the time. I only saw the land around it.
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I was restless at age 20, lost, searching for something beyond my reach and always beyond my understanding, some cosmic insight and career path that Mother Nature’s vast deserts seemed capable of offering in a way cities could not. I’d smoked too much weed during the previous three years, and I was trying to quit in order to find my calling. Sitting still meant dealing with temptation; hiking kept me on track. I read a lot of ecology and nature books back then, and what compounded my avoidance was my belief that the wilderness held the answers to all of humanity’s questions — from the meaning of life to cures for cancer to an objective sense of right and wrong. I still believe in wild nature, but in my young, confused Thoreauvian worldview, urban areas were cancerous “man-made” places to escape, not savor, so I fled Tucson every chance I got, just as I had fled Phoenix the year before.
Phoenix was bland. It had a Taco Bell personality. Tucson had a singular, authentically Sonoran Desert character that evolved from its origin as a military outpost in Spain’s old northern territory, then developed in the isolation resulting from Phoenicians’ dismissal of the city as a backwater. People nicknamed it the Old Pueblo. Even before I moved there, I could see the Old Pueblo’s superiority. Prickly pear cactus grew as tall as trees. Roadrunners climbed ornamental palo verdes in the middle of town, and the lonely howl of passing trains rang throughout the night. Many streets had no sidewalks, just as many houses had no lawns. The plaster on old buildings peeled to reveal straw in the adobe bricks underneath. It was as if the city was letting you see who it really was.
Phoenix looked as engineered as Las Vegas, or worse, like bad cosmetic surgery. Central Tucson looked like an extension of the desert, natural and spacious and endearingly shaggy. I could see this when I arrived, but my philosophical views let me rationalize my unwillingness to really appreciate it; it was a city, natural-looking or not. Only when I discovered The Shadow of Your Smile, an album by a band called Friends of Dean Martinez did I finally quit running long enough to find something to value about urban Arizona, besides Mexican food and live music. I’d learned to use cities as basecamps for outdoor excursions. This instrumental steel guitar band helped me stay put, because its cinematic cowboy lounge music matched the personality of this Spanish colonial city. When I started looking at its beauty as equal to that of wildlands, I not only started feeling at home in my city, but also in my own body, and I found my sense of direction. Read more…
The lower Rio Grande forms the border between Texas and Mexico. Although it’s the fourth-longest river in the U.S. and feeds wildly diverse ecosystems along its 2000-mile course, the Rio Grande is treated like an irrigation ditch and what writer Nick Paumgarten calls a “moat” dividing the two nations. Trump’s proposed border wall would follow a large portion of it, devastating its fragile ecology without slowing the trafficking of hard drugs.
For The New Yorker, Paumgarten floated the rugged river canyons through Big Bend National Park. Camping on both sides of the border, his flotilla included such esteemed companions as Democratic Senator Tom Udall, from an influential conservation-minded family, and Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandson.You have to see certain places to understand why they must be protected. Paumgarten’s story lets readers experience this landscape themselves, to appreciate what Trump’s wall would destroy: not only the landscape, but the opportunity to experience tranquility around campfires, for wildlife encounters, starlit nights and spiritual experiences, and the chance for future generations to connect with nature.
Having been determined by the 1848 peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, the border traces the river’s deepest channel—the thalweg—which, because the riverbed frequently shifts according to the water’s whims, is in some respects notional. Of course, no one is proposing that a wall be built in the middle of the river, or for that matter on Mexican soil, even if Mexico is going to pay for it. So the wall would go on the American side, some distance from its banks—miles into U.S. territory, at times. It would cut people off from their own property and wildlife from the main (and sometimes the only) water source in a vast upland desert. The Center for Biological Diversity has determined that ninety-three listed or proposed endangered species would be adversely affected. The wall could disrupt the flow of what meagre water there is, upon which an ecosystem precariously depends. And it would essentially seal the United States off from the river and cede it to Mexico: lopping off our nose to spite their face. It would shrink the size of Texas.
There is also the matter of efficacy. The wall would probably delay a hypothetical crossing by a few minutes, depending on its design and the manner of the breach. There are videos of Mexicans deploying ladders, ramps, ropes, welding torches, and tunnels to get over, through, or under border fences. (There are about seven hundred miles of fence already, most of it in California and Arizona.) For a great deal of its length, the river is insulated on both sides by hundreds of miles of desert—inhospitable terrain that does more to discourage smugglers and migrants than a wall ever could. (The vast majority of hard drugs intercepted on the southern border is coming through so-called points of entry—the more than forty official crossings—hidden in vehicles and cargo.) And, while the banks of the river, for much of it, are free of impediments, except for thick stands of invasive cane and salt cedar, which can make life miserable for the Border Patrol, about a hundred miles of it cut through deep canyons far more imposing and prohibitive to a traveller on foot than a slab of concrete or steel. The canyons don’t require funding from Congress.
When I was first introduced to the work of adrienne maree brown, it was through fiction. A mentor at the time suggested I read Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015), a science fiction anthology co-edited by adrienne and the activist Walidah Imarisha. Their goal was to produce a collection of “Visionary Fiction” written by social justice organizers; the grounding principle of their collaboration was the idea that “all organizing is science fiction.”
In that project, adrienne asked activists to imagine possible future worlds; in her next project, she’s asked her readers to imagine a future for the only possible world: this one.
Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." (RICARDO HERNANDEZ / AFP / Getty Images)
It isn’t easy to read “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” novelist Junot Díaz’s beautiful and searing personal essay published in the New Yorker’s April 16 edition. It’s the kind of piece “trigger warnings” were made for, the kind you don’t link to in your group chat without disclaiming. Sitting on a crowded, air-compressed Amtrak car on a cloudy Monday before 8 a.m., waiting to depart for a day trip to Philly, I was in a brain fog after reading it and texted its link to a friend without thinking. Not even five minutes passed before I came to my senses and tried to walk it back, like you would a text you’d mistakenly sent to a parent instead of a lover.
At about 5,000 words, “The Silence” is a #longread and not anybody’s crowdsourced listicle or half-baked take. By way of structure and content, it’s obvious that it took some mulling over, a life lived, to create. An essay, in the literary sense, is an attempt. The word comes from an old French verb meaning to try, and the first known writer to use it to describe his own work meant that he’d offer a lot of thoughts in an attempt to reveal himself — his mind, his consciousness, his relationship to the world outside — on the page with some precision. There should be a discovery of something in an essay, a path, though perhaps meandering, through many questions that lead to an answer or lesson or something else entirely. That winding road is what makes an essay different from an article or a paper. It is an attempt to approximate the neural processes that make up thought, memory or revelation itself.
In the eighth paragraph of “The Silence,” Díaz tells us he was sexually assaulted by a trusted family friend when he was only 8 years old. The admission feels spat out and abrupt — it has taken a reserve of courage to get it out. He has written around this incident for years, he says, but fear and shame have choked his truth and cheated him out of years of a life lived with an honest reckoning, in community with other survivors. “And always I was afraid — afraid that the rape had “ruined” me; afraid that I would be “found out”; afraid afraid afraid,” he writes. Here, I feel the weight of shame for one of our society’s collective failures — how we too often allow the wronged to carry the burden of crimes committed against them. Read more…
As I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of a Mexican restaurant, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the table. I didn’t want to follow through with my plans. I splashed a bit of water on my face and tried to give myself a pep talk, but nothing helped. It was all just too painfully awkward.
I was at the restaurant to apologize to Chris, a regular of mine when I used to serve tables a few years back, who I had befriended and stayed in touch with. He didn’t know I was planning to apologize — or even what I’d done in the first place — so if I wanted to go the cowardly route, I could get away with it.
I thought about that when I’d pulled up outside of his apartment and opened the back of my SUV so that his guide dog, Westin, could hop in. I thought about it as I helped lead Chris from the parking lot to our table. I thought about it as I avoided making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror. How could I even explain why I was apologizing, anyway?
Let me try right now: We’ve all been in a public place, maybe a grocery store for example, and spotted someone we know before they spotted us. We didn’t feel like talking to them for whatever reason. Maybe we were in a hurry. Maybe we didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone. So we changed directions or walked down another aisle and managed to avoid the interaction altogether. It’s not a particularly nice thing to do — treating someone as if we wished they didn’t occupy the same space as us.
But how do you apologize for that? Worse yet, how do you apologize for walking right past them without saying a word? How do you apologize for using someone’s blindness to avoid interacting with them? How do you begin to fess up for doing that numerous times, months apart?
I reminded myself that this was the right thing to do, that I owed this to my friend, even if he didn’t know it. But I really didn’t want to do it. Soon, the food would be at our table. I could order another beer, tell a couple jokes, listen to his stories and have a great time catching up.
William T. Vollmann is as renowned for the size of his books as the magnitude of his subjects: poverty, the morality of violence, the collision of Indigenous and European cultures. His book Rising Up and Rising Down spans seven-volumes and 3,300-pages. Imperial runs 1,306 pages. But his beautiful sentences, challenging structures, and documentary photography deserve equal attention, and his ten published novels and four story collections often require as much research as his nonfiction.
His newest project is a two-volume series called the “Climate Ideologies” that addresses how the wonders and waste of energy consumption are irrevocably heating our planet. The first volume, No Immediate Danger, covers the effects of manufacturing, farming and nuclear energy, and it took him into the restricted zone one mile from Japan’s ruined Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Volume two, No Good Alternative, covers coal, oil, and natural gas.
Prolific, original and determined, on paper Vollmann cuts an intimidating figure. He famously wrote his first novel You Bright and Risen Angels at the San Francisco office where he worked as a computer programmer, often sleeping there a week at a time and living off of vending machine candy bars. In person, his warmth and humor make for easy conversation. Years ago, when I gave up on a big book project that was tormenting me, I did something crazy and wrote him a letter through his agent, telling him about my idea and struggles. Four months later, a handwritten letter arrived in my mailbox, encouraging me with wisdom that distilled his own approach to writing: read as much as you can about the subject, take the trip as many times as necessary to get it right, then the story will be yours. His words were just what I needed. I booked a flight soon after and wrote a whole book based on that reporting trip. Writers need mentors, and hungry readers need writers like Vollmann.
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Aaron Gilbreath: You start No Immediate Danger by stating that it’s too late to stop climate change, so now we can only understand what led our species here so future generations know the details. Did your 2014 book Last Stories, about death, help prepare you for this grave work?
William Vollmann: Yeah. I had been preparing for the worst for a long time, but in Carbon Ideologies I do believe that it’s probably too late, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. Any book is really about its own present, even a science fiction book or a book like this, so it’s always possible that maybe some sort of a plant-based carbon sequestration system could come to our rescue. I’m not counting on it.
AG: I like that it’s dedicated to your daughter since that does add a small sense of hope that maybe salvation is possible.
WV: It would be nice, and if it isn’t then I’m just hoping that her life won’t be too much worse than mine and that there might be a few more generations yet before it peters out. You never know.
AG: One interesting thing about Carbon Ideologies is that it functions as an apology to future generations for the earth that we destroyed. The fact that you’re even hopeful enough to envision future readers makes me want to uses this interview to talk about writing in the same way, as a time capsule message to other writers both alive and unborn.
WV: Why not?
AG: You are one of the most productive writers on earth. A lot of my fellow writers know how hard it is to research, report and write a single-story, so we always wonder how you sustain your pace, publishing so many books at this size nearly every year. People like me picture you sort of living at your computer from morning until night. They wonder if you sleep. What are your writing days like?
WV: Well, I try not to have a schedule. So, I’m pretty much writing every day at some point, but I do other things also. When I get bogged down, there is something that I don’t understand, I set that aside and do something else, whether it’s another writing project or doing a little maintenance at my studio or painting or going on some river adventure to see my outlaw friends in the Delta. I just try to mix it up. So I very rarely feel any boredom, unless of course, I’m on my stationary exercise bike. After about 10 or 11 hours of misery, I get off and realize it’s been about 30 seconds.
AG: That sounds like my gym experience. Is that bike in your studio where you can toggle between it and your computer?
WV: It’s at the home, yeah and maybe I should get one at the studio too, I don’t know. But it’s also so hateful that it might be better just to swell up and die of diabetes or something. We will see.
AG: Did somebody convince you to get a bike, or was that your own decision to start that?
WV: It was my own decision. I have had that bike for 20 years, and once in a great while I will force myself to use it.
AG: The older I get, the more I wonder how exercise fits into the daily routine of somebody with a sedentary profession that involves so much reading and writing. Do you take preventative measures? Are there measures you wish you had taken now that you’re 58?
WV: There was an old guy one time who said, “Bill, in your 50s you start having problems. In your 60s you realize that you have to do something about those problems, and in your 70s you realize that those solutions don’t work.” So, you might as well just have a sense of humor about it and know that it has to end badly one way or another so, why worry?
AG: Smoke a cigar and have a drink.
WV: Exactly.
AG: It surprises me that you don’t have a schedule. Is part of your productivity related to successful multitasking and time management?
WV: I guess so, and also the fact that I don’t want to feel forced to do this or forced to do that. Sometimes I have to for a while, but mostly, if I really don’t want to be working on one particular thing at that particular time I don’t have to do it. That keeps me feeling fresh and gives me the sense of novelty, because once that’s gone you are thinking, Well, why on earth am I doing this? How can you write something interesting if it’s just drudgery?
When I’m researching a book, there is some necessary drudgery, so if I’m working on one of the Seven Dreams books, I try to get up to speed on the anthropology or archeology of those people whom I’m writing about. With Carbon Ideologies, there were a lot of tables I had to put together. At first, that was a rather dreary experience. Then I began getting quite interested. Whether or not the reader will ever be interested, I can’t say. But, once I had those tables, I felt that I was able to start saying things about what the tables implied. So that’s just how I do it.
AG: Making sure that it retains enough freshness to drive your interest?
WV: Yeah, I would say. How about you when you are writing, what do you do?
AG: Sort of the same thing. Since most of the time nobody is paying me ─ I write so many essays on spec ─ that I only write because it’s interesting and not drudgery. I operate almost entirely out of curiosity. I want to know or process my own experience or learn about the world, so I write because those subjects are fresh.
WV: That makes sense to me. If I try not to put limits on the curiosity, then I’m more likely to actually learn something. In Riding Toward Everywhere I talked a little bit about this one thing Thoreau said that I have always found inspirational. It runs something like, “We must not let our knowledge get in the way of what’s far more important, which is our ignorance.” So as long as I keep saying, “Alright, I’m ignorant. I’m ignorant about everything, and I want to learn more,” then I’m more likely to actually learn more, as opposed to saying, “Okay, now I know the answers about climate change.” People knew the answers about climate change a long time ago, and they were wrong.
AG: I saw that you mentioned that in the book that people had suspicions in, was it 1945 or the ’50s?
WV: By the ’70s people really started wondering. At Oak Ridge they were saying, “Well, things probably won’t be too bad until we get up to 400 parts per million of C02, but why worry, because that won’t happen until the 21st century.” So it’s an odd thing thinking about our obligation to the future. We never really had to do that. We probably should have done that, but we never actually considered the possibility that we might be making the future unlivable. Then suddenly here we are forced to decide, “Well, is that our responsibility? Do we want to do something about it?” I hope the answer is yes.
AG: In No Immediate Danger you distilled that sort of frivolity with the phrase “Keeping the lights on.” That seems to summarize the sense of convenience and thoughtlessness. Flicking the lights on and leaving them on, we don’t even think about energy’s effects or waste.
WV: There is something very beautiful in the idea that we have all this electric power at our disposal to make our lives better, and of course, in many ways, it has improved our lives, and will probably continue to do so. One of the real troubling things is that what we’re doing is not entirely frivolous. The fact that someone can do all the cooking and cleaning in the kitchen in less time than they used to. That’s really great. But what about all the so-called vampire power? All the lights on, computers and surge protectors just to keep telling you, “Yes, everything’s good, I’m still drawing current.” There are so many things that we don’t need, and one very dangerous aspect of our economic system is that there’s this notion that one has to keep creating demand. That means we will need more and more power, and no matter how efficiently we use it, if our absolute demand is increasing, most likely so will our greenhouse emissions. That is not very promising at all.
AG: Is that related to the sort of capitalist ideology of constant expansion? Edward Abbey said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
WV: That’s right. It is a capitalist pattern, and it was also a socialist pattern. I talk at one point about the Russian’s idea that there have to be more consumer goods. They were doing it differently at a different scale, but what it really comes down to in my opinion is natural biology. A tree is going to try to grow taller and maybe crowd out the competition. A rabbit is gonna have lots of bunnies if it can, and we humans are going to want to have more and more. We want to reproduce and make our lives more comfortable and interesting, and in a sense that’s the natural thing that every organism does. Of course, the problem is that there are not unbounded limits. There are bounded limits, so unless organisms are checked by some means, organisms that obey their natural proclivities will get into trouble. I can’t even really blame capitalism as much as I would like to.
AG: In a sense, it’s a very judicious way of viewing our perilous climate situation. You do an impressive job in No Immediate Danger of not being judgmental of the culprits and instead simply look at why we do what we do, and assess what we have done. Are you are saying we are the victims of our own biology, even if we don’t recognize it or not?
WV: We’ve been very successful. I love being able to plug my laptop into the wall; I’m able to write more books. I love being able to get on a plane and fly to other countries. Probably the single best thing that you or I could do would be to give up air travel. I mean, there are lots of other things we could do. I’m still flying. I want to advance my career. I want to write a book. I want to see this or that, so I’m part of the problem. How can I blame capitalism for that?
AG: You implicate yourself right before the table of contents. You admit that you’ve consumed all these forms of energy and say, “Better an honest muddler than a carbon-powered hypocrite.”
WV: That is right.
AG: I grew up as an environmentalist, so I always felt very conflicted about procreation because of the amount of waste generated with plastic diapers and trash bags and all sorts of things. Once I met the right person, I wanted to have a kid. Then I met my daughter and just thought, To hell with it, this is the right thing to do.
WV: In a way that’s the so-called tragedy of the commons. Are you familiar with that paradigm?
AG: Yes.
WV: So, we all want to do what’s best for us, and we each take a tiny share of the net detriment to everyone that our choice has caused, so we’re still ahead by getting most of the net benefit.
AG: There’s obviously a moral imperative, but in our very individualistic society, is it possible for us to accept that moral imperative that comes with being a part of the commons in order to make any lasting changes?
WV: I am guessing that you and I as individuals can’t really do very much. We can reach out to other individuals and maybe, if I were lucky and many people read my book, and they all decided, for instance, not to fly anymore. That would make some difference, but my suspicion is that it wouldn’t make enough difference. What we really need are top-down regulatory changes. Why is it that in Japan it takes a lot less coke to make coal than it does in the US? Why shouldn’t we say, “Alright, if we’re going to make steel from coke then we have to at least use the Japanese technology?” And maybe somebody has to decide when we really need to use aluminum and cement and these other so-called big five materials that use 80% of all the energy for manufacturing. Of course, the more of this regulatory or bureaucratic burden you impose, the more we become something like East Germany. It will get less and less pleasant. But it may well be that we are approaching a state of emergency and won’t have any choice. It’s certainly true that the sooner we start figuring out how to reduce demand, the easier it’s gonna be.
AG: The regulatory experiment that Mayor Bloomberg did with the size of sodas in New York was an interesting way of changing people’s perception of what’s required to quench their thirst and what actually qualifies as a “large size.” It seems you’re right: the only way to make these large-scale, long-term societal changes will be top-down regulatory in that same generational way.
WV: I think that’s right, and I think that we are going to have people making cost-benefit analyses of various things. For instance, it takes almost a hundred times more energy to manufacture a pound of aluminum than a pound of cement, which is the lowest energy user of the big five materials. But aluminum, by being so strong, light and recyclable, makes a lot of sense in skyscrapers and bridges, and it may actually be more energy efficient to use that aluminum than to use the vastly heavier, greater quantity of steel that you would need to use. So who is going to figure that out? You want someone who is intelligent, practical and doesn’t have some kind of a bias, someone who is not a show for the aluminum industry or the steel industry. Where are we going to find people like that? I don’t know where to look. Those are the kinds of things that really make me very disheartened about the dilemma we’re in.
AG: It might be easier to create a colony on Mars than to find an unbiased politician who isn’t influenced by industry lobbyists.
WV: Yeah, a colony on Mars would probably be a fantastic boondoggle, and a lot of people could probably get rich supplying and exploiting it.
AG: If we are going to keep creating demand, why not do it on another planet?
WV: That’s right. First, we need to create some Martians that we can sell to.
AG: I did enjoy your comments in previous interviews about the potentially positive effects of swine flu.
WV: It’s all rather bleak. And that would certainly be an effective way to reduce demand, but I would rather we reduce demand in some voluntary and kinder way.
AG: A question for you about the origins of this book. A lot of us nonfiction writers fret about how to come up with ideas: have we run out of ideas? Can we generate more? I remember you saying you came up with the idea for the Seven Dreams Series while researching Rainbow Stories, asking yourself what the continent looked like before all these parking lots. How do you generate ideas, and how did you come up with Carbon Ideologies?
WV: Well, I guess it was my visit to Fukushima in 2011. First, I saw the devastation created by the tsunami. Then I went into the areas that were already abandoned as a result of the nuclear disaster. The tsunami left very palpable effects, but when I first went into the town of Kawauchi, for instance, it seemed as if people might almost still be there. It was very eerie. There were blinds pulled down, a couple of places maybe an umbrella would have fallen down at the front doorway, some potted plants starting to die. Over the next few years, as I kept returning to those parts of Fukushima that hadn’t been reclaimed, they were looking worse and worse and more creepy. But still, the local people kept saying, “Well, I don’t even know what radiation is. I mean, I don’t itch from it, I can’t really see it. It’s invisible.” And I started thinking about how great a metaphor that is for the effects of all these fuels. After a while, you can see indirectly the effects of the radiation contamination by looking at these hideous abandoned places, but you can’t see the contamination directly. Then when you go to nonnuclear fuels, you start seeing certain affects ─ the mountaintop removal and various ugly sites of oil and coal in Bangladesh ─ but you can’t see the emissions. So it’s a more slowly unfolding version of the tsunami or of the radiation contamination. You kind of have to work yourself into understanding it or to feeling it. That’s how I started thinking about Carbon Ideologies.
AG: So you started with invisibility as a metaphor, then in No Immediate Danger‘s Japan sections, you use your dosimeter and scintillation counter to bring this invisible drama to life, both to measure it and to prove that it exists at all. And people in the no-go zones still don’t believe you!
WV: I really wish that I had a lot more money to throw at this problem. I would have liked very much to have had a FLIR camera ─ forward-looking infrared ─ so that in my book I could have pictures of carbon dioxide coming out of smokestacks or people’s mouths, or of methane rising from manure heaps. But I wasn’t able to make those emissions visible in that way. Those cameras cost something like $60,000.
AG: Well, if you were online you would have been able to do some sort of Kickstarter campaign.
WV: That’s right. If I were online I’m sure I could do all kinds of great things.
AG: And be monitored. What about doing that retroactively; has it ever been done before?
WV: Well, maybe you can do it.
AG: I would love to. I’d have to get some money together. But the fact that you work in multiple mediums for different projects and have a photo book to accompany Imperial, you’re obviously the ideal person.
WV: Well, it would really be fun to be able to do it, and it would be nice if they had cameras to show the radioisotope blooms. Maybe they do. Anyway, all we can do is do our best with our limited senses. One of the things that I liked about the pancake frisker, which was the real-time analog to the decimeter, was as one of my friends put it, it’s like an extra sense. It was really fascinating to frisk my daughter’s cat. I was frisking everything for a while, and then I would be a little bit unnerved if something was four or five times more radioactive than something else. Eventually, I realized that that’s all so trivial. You fly to the East Coast or you go out to the granitic rock of the Sierras, and things are 10 times higher or whatever. Then you go to Fukushima and you might find things up to 700 times higher.
AG: What about your health: In one great scene in Japan’s radioactive city of Ōkuma, the protective shoe covers and painter’s suits “manufactured with pride in the United States of America” ripped. Have you been tested for the effects of radiation lately?
WV: I doubt that you could really tell. If I got some kind of cancer maybe there would be a way to track it back to the cesium, or maybe not. We probably all have micro-particles of various isotopes from atmospheric testing and concentration in seafood or whatever, so if I get cancer, maybe I can just console myself that it was as a result of drinking a lot of whisky or playing around in the dark room.
AG: You have made your peace.
WV: I have, yes.
AG: If the idea for this book started with your first visit to Fukushima, how do your other books evolve?
WV: It sort of depends on the book, Aaron. With one of the Seven Dreams books, I know what the story is, or at least what I think the story is. It turned out that what I thought I knew about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith wasn’t exactly true, but still I knew the basic historical events were fixed and my job was not to write a new story but to interpret those events. With something like Carbon Ideologies, the events and their effects are still unfolding and, to some extent, in dispute. My job there would be to take a lot of notes, visit the people and places available to me, read a lot of books and just let my ignorance guide me and hopefully save me from too much prejudice as I started building up judgments about these things.
AG: In your fiction, how do you inhabit other people’s lives in those historical eras?
WV: Well, for the Seven Dreams it’s possible to go to a very particular place. In The Ice Shirt I was able to go to the ruins of Erik the Red’s farm in Iceland and I could stand there and think, Okay, this is not too dissimilar to the view that Erik himself had. So I’m looking out at the water, at the clouds and the birds and grass and flowers and the stones and thinking, How does this make me feel? Is there any way brings me closer to Erik? For him, these things would all have been more quotidian and yet still there must be some kind of a common human response to wet grass and gray sky. That’s one of the ways you can just kind of work yourself back into seeing and trying to feel what those people would have. Then you try to perform some of the acts that you know the historical characters would have. For The Dying Grass, I had a chance to fire a Springfield single-shot rifle of the kind that the US cavalry would probably had fired. So I could say, Okay, this is what it feels to hold something of this weight. This is how you load it and how quickly could a person do this? Not nearly as quickly if one had an AR-15. How steady can you hold it? How difficult is it? What’s it like and here comes this topple white smoke from the black powder out the barrel, and then I have to clean it afterwards; the barrel is quite fouled with this stuff. So I’m doing all of these things relative to one particular action that if I describe accurately, I’m describing something intrinsically true about those US Calvary men. That’s another way of getting into what they might have felt and seen, and that is so much of who you are or who you become I think and what you do.
AG: So research and travel are the essential elements that unite both genres for you. The structures of all your books vary widely, so do you just adjust your approach and the structure of a book according to each project?
WV: That’s right. I think it would be a drag for me and the reader if I were just following some formula for my books. As I get older my options narrow, and I imagine that my books will become a little bit more of a piece, and that’s probably already happening. But the extent that I can resist that and make every book new, I think that’s a win-win for the reader and for me.
AG: So far, mission accomplished. One of the things that I also love about your nonfiction is its dry sense of humor. One of countless examples in No Immediate Danger was, “Let us now celebrate the miraculous smog of Calabar!” What else can humor do besides add levity to certain dark subjects?
WV: Sometimes you can make a frightening or bitter point more effectively through humor. You can actually make it sting a little bit more, and you can also try to sparkle up the page a little bit. If there are a lot of things about agriculture, fertilizers and so forth, it’s really incumbent on me to try to give the reader some little reward every now and then for reading that.
AG: You embrace the exclamation point, which I also like. Is that contentious punctuation also a way to get people’s attention?
WV: Yeah, and often in Carbon Ideologies the exclamation point adds to the ironic pseudo-ingenuous nature of some absurd claim about how wonderfully healthy radiation is or whatever.
AG: No Immediate Danger isn’t a joke, but in the way you point out the flaws of our thinking and denial about nuclear energy and climate change, this 600-page book all seems sort of punctuated by a giant exclamation point.
WV: That’s right. In a way it is, of course, a joke, right? It’s just the joke is on us and we’re not gonna like it, but maybe the beetles that replace us will somehow be able to laugh with their antenna.
AG: That sounds like your first novel brought to life. The fact that you wanted a FLIR camera to document the carbon dioxide and methane and expand the range of your climate change inquiry to a second medium makes me think how you like room to explore your subjects sufficiently. From what I gather, though, there’s been a long-standing attempt by your publishers to get you to cut your books, including page limits in your contracts and lowering royalties for longer books. Can you tell me about your legendary resistance to heavy editing?
WV: What if someone were to tell you, “We think your daughter was born a little bit too tall, so would you mind chopping off her legs?” You might not have the most compliant reaction to that, right?
AG: No.
WV: My books are my children. They’re just like my daughter. She’s turning out the way she’s turning out and that’s just how it is, so people can like her or not, but I love my daughter and I’m not going to chop off her legs. [laughs]
AG: So editing is forced surgery. You try to let the story be what it is, and the people who publish the book have their financial and other concerns? What dictates this chopping of the legs?
WV: Well, wouldn’t it be perfect for editors and publishers and maybe reviewers if all books had to be the same length? They all had to be, let’s say, exactly 124 pages, and the extra 24 pages all have to be ads. I mean, wouldn’t that just be lovely? One of the many reasons that I love the internet is, of course, because that’s how things are there. You can watch something and there’s going to be some wiggly, giggly little ad in the corner the whole time, and also, let’s track your eye movements. How wonderful it all is. As soon as there is any attempt to control creativity for noncreative purposes, we start going down that miserable road. But as I always say, Aaron, the world doesn’t owe me a living, and a publisher could legitimately say, “Well, Bill, we just don’t think you are going to pencil out, so we don’t want to publish your book.” That’s like saying, “Well, your daughter really is too tall, so we don’t want her to date our son.” That’s okay, but how awful it would be if they said, “Your daughter is too tall, so we want to chop off her legs,” and I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” What kind of a father would I be? What kind of an author would I be to go along with that bologna?
AG: So protecting your vision of your book seems to be first and foremost?
WV: That’s right. My strength and my weakness is that I don’t really care about the financial implications. I don’t care too much about whether a book is going to make its advance back, which means I’m not a good team player. I have to be very thrilled and grateful that Viking once again saw things my way and let me publish Carbon Ideologies at the length that I thought it needed to be. It certainly can’t be too good for Viking’s bottom-line, but I think that, like me, they’re worried about climate change. They worked so hard, it was a real thrill to have such dedicated colleagues. I worked really hard too, and we all did our best without cutting off anybody’s legs.
AG: You struck a few of those chords in the “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of No Immediate Danger. You meant for the two volumes to appear as one volume. Your endnotes and citations got cut. I interpreted the “Note” as an apology to readers that the book they hold isn’t the book you intended. There and in the acknowledgements in the back of the book, you weren’t shaming Viking, but you were like letting the reader in on this push and pull between both parties. What was your intent including those?
WV: The main reason is that I’m very grateful. This is to some extent a math/science book, and I’m not a mathematician or a scientist, so I’m doing my best. Even so, it’s a risk for me and a risk for the publisher. So I’m really, really thrilled that they tried to help me and everyone by publishing this. That’s the main thing. As far as the push and pull part is concerned, I think that’s kind of interesting, and it’s probably a good thing that readers who care can learn that I didn’t want to cut the source notes. I wish they could have been in the hard copy. This is the first time that that’s happened, and it was a compromise that I was willing to make because Viking had already done so much for me and this book. Thank God I don’t have to understand their financial imperative, and I guess that’s all I would say.
AG: You do your job and they do theirs, and it seems you are able to meet in the middle.
WV: That’s right.
AG: I just love that there is a couple of places at the beginning of the book where you say, you know, it will be okay to skip the primer section and start over 200 pages in. I just pictured your publisher shaking their head, like, “Bill, please, try harder to entice the reader!”
WV: [Laughs] Unfortunately, it is to some extent a dreary book about a dreary subject. Of all my books, it’s probably not the book that people are going to put a pick up and re-read for fun. It can’t be. Just having to decide Let’s see, do we want to talk about lignite’s emissions per pound or its emissions per energy produced when it’s burned? ─ all this kind of stuff. It’s important and needs to be discussed, but it’s not particularly fun.
AG: But you clearly tried to have fun. You titled one section “The Parable of Adipic Acid” and had some fun there despite the dreariness of the subject.
WV: I do my best. [Laughs]
AG: As informative as it is, there are some funny lines in there like, “What a treat to watch adipic acid combining with the hexamethylene diamine so that we could see a pallid syrup forming, settling out into something resembling melted cheddar cheese!”
WV: Aw, how delicious.
AG: I guess it’s a good example that there are different types of books for different kinds of experiences, and your oeuvre contains so many different sorts, including the kind that we probably aren’t going to read on the beach.
WV: No, maybe not. Unless, of course, rising sea levels turn your backyard into a beach.
AG: That’s what so many residents of Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up were banking on with California earthquakes. They didn’t understand geology. Speaking of which, I was just reading about California governor Jerry Brown retiring, who said he doesn’t believe in legacies. I was wondering if you as a writer believe in legacies.
WV: Well, I want my daughter to live as long and as happily as she can, and I feel the same about my books. If people find some value in them after I’m gone so that their lives are extended, that’s a concept that makes me happy. But it’s hard for me to believe that I’m going to know it, and therefore what’s the point of a legacy in the way. You find that you give someone a very nice tomb and what happens? The tomb gets robbed. That’s life and that’s death.
AG: It seems interesting to think that since you don’t know if there will be a legacy, you shouldn’t burden yourself with trying to create one. Is that liberating?
WV: That’s right, but that doesn’t let me off the hook. I want to make sure that I do the best job I can and try to make things ─ to the extent that that’s possible ─ somewhat timeless. I try not to get too bogged down in what is current in 2018, for instance. I’m hoping that in the future someone could pick up Carbon Ideologies and say, “Alright, here and there, this part seems a little bit antiquated now, a little bit superseded, but still I understand what Bill’s trying to do, and how he’s trying to compare the different fuels, and this was how many perks per million of C02 there were in his lifetime.” What I would like is for the book to still be useful or of interest or still something in its dated way.
AG: When it’s a paper copy or in your achieves at the Ohio State University, readers will be able to see your intent and data unchanged, unlike on the evolving internet.
WV: Unlike the internet, exactly.
AG: Can I ask you about your daughter? I’m curious what it was like raising a child as a writer who travels for work as much as you do.
WV: Well, I love her very much and it’s been a thrill to be in her life.
AG: Your father was a very encouraging, cool father, a business professor who frequently told you, “Bill, if it’s not easy, lucrative, or fun, don’t do it.”
WV: Yeah, he was great. That’s a good business plan. I recommend that to everybody, especially to people like you and me Aaron who are self-employed. There is certainly no reason to do something for nothing unless it’s going to be fun.
AG: Amen. My dad, who is Mr. Practical, had good advice in that same vein. He said, “When you find what you like, do the hell out of it and make sure you enjoy it.”
WV: I agree with that.
AG: Do you see some of your intellectual appetites and hunger for knowledge and experience in your daughter?
WV: I think so, yes.
AG: As a new father myself, I just wonder how working writers balance everything, that and I want to help encourage curiosity in my own daughter.
WV: The good news is that as parents we will inevitably fail, and therefore all we can do is fail with grace and let our children see that we are not perfect and they are not going to be perfect either. If we can help each other through the hard times and forgive the rest then we are probably doing our best.
Headshot of the author at 18, courtesy of the author; body composite by Katie Kosma.
Alexander Chee | Longreads | April 2018 | 16 minutes (3,921 words)
Some years into the writing of my first novel, I was 32, living in Brooklyn and waiting tables in a midtown Manhattan steakhouse a few shifts a week. I worked there instead of some trendier or more downtown place for the exact reasons that made it seem odd to the people I knew: it was a world apart from the one I wanted to live in. The commute was long, 45 minutes on the subway each way from my Park Slope Apartment, but I used the time to read and write, often writing on legal pads as I came and went. My income from three or four nights a week, 5 hours a night, was just 15 percent of what the people who ate there spent on dinners out each year — after taxes, I lived comfortably on this. To my relief, I never saw anyone I knew there, except for a single classmate who worked at Vanity Fair and was good at not condescending to me. Celebrities came so regularly, it was a little like working inside the pages of a gossip magazine. I remember the day O. J. Simpson reserved a private dining room under his lawyer’s wife’s name, but then came out onto the main floor, joking around with the diners. The New York Post cover the next day had a photo of our steak knife, bearing an uncanny likeness to the presumed weapon in his wife’s murder.
The best celebrity sighting for me, however, was Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
The hostess seated her in my section for lunch, at an unassuming but generous table by herself. “I love her,” the hostess said, as she walked by me. We had what I thought of as the ordinary interactions between waiter and guest, and I left, put her order in, and returned to my work. Sometime after her food had been served, she called me over as I passed her table. I stopped and leaned in.
“You’re not a waiter, are you?” She said this with a conspiratorial affection, like she knew me.
“Is something wrong with your service?” I asked, alarmed.
“No,” she said, smiling. “Everything is wonderful. But you’re not a waiter, are you? You’re a writer.”
The lunchtime clamor receded a little around the last word. I felt found out, if in the nicest possible way
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.” I then asked her why she had asked me that.
“You can just tell,” she said, her smile gone cryptic.
I thanked her, then went back to serving lunch. I tried to think of what it was that had caused her to descend into my station like an oracle and make this pronouncement, the sort of unrealistic deus ex machina moment of the kind I eventually made the topic of my eventual second novel. I was surrounded by coincidences then, a forest of messages from the universe. But this couldn’t have been a coincidence. Surely this was something else, a more divine and direct kind of message. The voice from the burning bush, but instead of a bush, the message was coming from that marvelous smile, the familiar, kind eyes, the perfect hair — and that twinkle.
Here I was again in an old story, one that had begun with people always telling me to be a writer, starting at the age of 14. My interaction with Dr. Ruth that afternoon, though, mattered in an entirely new way. By that time, I had finally decided to be a writer. I just wasn’t sure I could do it. But I was trying. I was halfway through the novel, though I didn’t know that then. The difference Dr. Ruth made, however, was this: she wasn’t telling me to go and become a writer. She was telling me I was one. And that it was finally something visible, even legible, no matter what else I was doing.
En la primavera de 2016, mientras Trump se aferraba a su nominación como el candidato republicano para la presidencia, yo manejaba hacia el este del Valle de Coachella, en busca de un jornalero llamado Roberto. Mi celular se había quedado sin batería y no pasó mucho tiempo antes de que me perdiera entre los caminos rurales, en los que rara vez me topaba con otro vehículo. Cuando por fin encontré a Roberto, lo hallé de pie junto a su remolque esperando pacientemente, llevaba un sombrero vaquero en la cabeza y una sonrisa divertida en el rostro.
* Por razones de seguridad, los nombres de algunas de las personas que aquí se mencionan han sido cambiados.
Al norte y oeste del remolque se podían ver otros más estacionados; mientras que en los flancos sur y este, el jardín de Roberto* desembocaba en el desierto, en donde se podían encontrar algunos campos de lechuga y viñedos. Esta era la tierra que Roberto había trabajado durante los últimos 20 años. Se trataba de ese tipo de tierra que te hacía sentir pequeño pero no insignificante. Entramos al remolque y nos sentamos frente a la mesa de la cocina. Las sombras se imprimían ante el calor, y Roberto le quitó el sonido a la televisión de la sala, en donde el conductor de un noticiero en español hablaba sobre el muro que Trump había propuesto construir en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos. Roberto vestía una playera gris descolorida y unos pantalones de mezclilla rotos de las rodillas, tenía una complexión rolliza, hombros anchos y el abdomen un poco abultado. Primero tomó un trago de la botella de agua, luego puso sus manos nudosas sobre la mesa y comenzó a hablar.
A medida que conversaba, quedó claro que había muchos motivos para tener miedo de cómo sería todo si Trump llegara a la presidencia. Al igual que su esposa Leticia*, él era un inmigrante mexicano indocumentado. Sus tres hijos habían nacido en México. La hija menor cursaba el octavo grado y tampoco tenía documentos. La hija de en medio estaba en el colegio comunitario y tenía la protección del Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, por sus siglas en inglés, programa creado en la era de Obama y que Trump amenazaba con eliminar. El único miembro de la familia que era residente legal era su hijo mayor, quien estaba casado con una ciudadana estadounidense. Trump era como una granada que podía caer dentro de una familia y explotar, expulsándolos a todos en diferentes direcciones. Roberto pronunciaba el nombre de Trump raramente, en cambio, se refería a él como el “disturbio”.
Pero este no era solo el caso de Roberto, casi todos sus conocidos se encontraban en una situación parecida. Él vive en una comunidad no incorporada llamada Themal, misma que, de acuerdo con el censo de Estados Unidos, es 99.9% latina (para ser exactos, a excepción de 3 personas, los 2,396 habitantes son latinos). De igual forma, la comunidad de Oasis, ubicada a varios kilómetros de distancia, es 98.2% latina. Por su parte, Coachella, la ciudad más cercana, es 97.5% latina. En este lado del desierto se habla un español con toques de inglés, y no al revés
Este era mi primer viaje hacia el este del Valle de Coachella, y mi objetivo era recopilar historias de la voz de los jornaleros. Durante estas conversaciones, Trump era un tema frecuente. Su nombre empezó a ser como el de un espectro que acechaba la región, sus amenazas resonaban en la radio y la televisión; aunque también era un poco como una broma. En ese momento nadie con quien hablara seriamente consideraba la idea de Trump como presidente. Y entonces ganó. Repentinamente, el candidato, cuya campaña arremetía de manera directa en contra de la gente que vivía en este valle, se había convertido en la persona más poderosa del mundo. Inicialmente, había ido a Coachella para saber cómo era la vida de un jornalero, pero ahora surgía una pregunta nueva: ¿Cómo era vivir en un lugar en donde todos se sentían blanco de ataque?
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El Valle de Coachella es un tramo de 72.42 kilómetros de largo de terreno abrasador, el cual empieza cerca de Palm Springs y llega hasta el sureste del Salton Sea. Se trata de una tierra de extremos imposibles, un lugar que no tiene sentido pero que sin embargo existe, un testimonio de la soberbia, del trabajo duro, de los canales de riego y también del racismo. Cerca de Palm Springs uno se encuentra rodeado de campos de golf, mansiones deslumbrantes y country clubs con albercas y canchas de tenis. Conforme uno atraviesa el valle con dirección al suroeste, estos lugares se ven reemplazados, como si se tratará de un espejismo, por campos de agricultura y campamentos polvorientos de remolques. En Palm Springs uno se puede llegar a gastar hasta $1 millón de dólares en una estadía de dos noches en algún lujoso resort. Como contraste, en el lado este, los terrenos están cubiertos aquí y allá por tiraderos ilegales de basura, y el agua potable se encuentra envenenada con arsénico.
Si has escuchado hablar de Coachella, es muy probable que sea por el festival musical y artístico del Valle con el mismo nombre. Se trata de una bacanal que se celebra cada año en terrenos donde se practica de polo, a casi 16 kilómetros de distancia del remolque de Roberto. Para la edición 2017 del festival, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga y Radiohead fueron los artistas principales, y se recaudó una cifra récord de $114.6 millones de dólares. Los boletos VIP costaron $900 dólares cada uno, mientras que las parejas que no quisieran escatimar en gastos podían rentar una moderna yurta durante el fin de semana por $7,500 dólares. Sin embargo, el festival tiene poca relevancia en la vida de las personas en el lado este del valle, excepto quizás si se trata de un recordatorio de lo fácil que resulta no percatarse de ellos.
La belleza de la región es impresionante. Las montañas se alzan dramáticamente al oeste y los árboles de dátiles se enfilan hacia el difuso horizonte. La tierra es fértil, y en ella se producen cerca de $640 millones de dólares anuales en cultivos, como uva de mesa, limones, pimiento morrón y mucho más.
También es un lugar donde la vida es dura. Aproximadamente una tercera parte de los residentes del poblado de Thermal viven por debajo del umbral de pobreza, incluyendo a casi la mitad de los niños. No es fácil ser jornalero en ningún lado, pero aquí el trabajo es particularmente extenuante, las altas temperaturas del verano pueden alcanzar hasta los 48° C. Las viviendas se saturan tanto en la temporada de cosecha de uvas, que muchos jornaleros migrantes duermen en sus carros o sobre cajas de cartón aplanadas que instalan en los estacionamientos. Algunos incluso se bañan en los canales contaminados por las escorrentías de los pesticidas.
Sin embargo, el festival tiene poca relevancia en la vida de las personas en el lado este del valle, excepto quizás si se trata de un recordatorio de lo fácil que resulta no percatarse de ellos.
La comunidad más grande de Thermal se encuentra cerca de la Avenida 66 y Tyler Street, y es sede de tres escuelas que se encuentran una junto a la otra en medio de lo que, de otro modo, serían campos vacíos: se trata de la escuela primaria Las Palmitas, la secundaria Toro Canyon y la preparatoria Desert Mirage. El año pasado, durante una nublada mañana de abril, me encontré con María, maestra auxiliar en Las Palmitas y mujer purépecha, grupo indígena proveniente del estado mexicano de Michoacán con una presencia considerable en el poblado de Thermal. El día escolar acababa de terminar, y nos sentamos en una mesa larga de una cafetería vacía mientras observábamos a los niños correr en el patio. Era el cumpleaños de María – ahora tenía 21 años-, y los niños se habían pasado el día entero cantándole canciones de cumpleaños en diferentes idiomas.
“Mi primito me llamó la noche de la elección”, me contó María “Me dijo ¿ya votaste? Estoy muy preocupado por mi mamá”. Al día siguiente llamó llorando para preguntar si María había iniciado el proceso para arreglar la condición de inmigrante de su mamá para que no pudieran deportarla, como si el trámite fuera una simple cuestión de papeleo. “No pude responderle” dijo María suavemente. Luego hizo una pausa y miró hacia la mesa. “Al final le dije ‘Sí, ya lo estoy haciendo’. Lo hice solo para que se tranquilizara.” Me dijo que ahora su primo estaba mejor porque pensaba que su mama ya era residente legal. También me contó que muchos otros padres han usado la misma estrategia con la esperanza de proteger a sus hijos y evitarles preocupaciones.
El día después de la elección, los estudiantes de Las Palmitas subieron aturdidos al autobús. Al principio muchos de ellos estaban en silencio, pero poco a poco las preguntas comenzaron a salir a borbotones. ¿Cuándo llegue a casa mi mamá seguirá ahí? ¿ya construyeron el muro? ¿en México dan clases de educación especial? ¿quién me va a enseñar a leer? Algunos maestros cancelaron sus lecciones y usaron la clase para conversar sobre lo que todos estaban pensando. “Normalmente llegan con energía, bromeando y correteándose entre ellos” dijo Adam Santana, maestro de artes del lenguaje en Toro Canyon, pero “ese día todos estaban callados. Era como si una tragedia hubiera ocurrido en el campus. Finalmente, uno de los estudiantes preguntó ‘¿De verdad van a haber deportaciones?’”
En el caso de los estudiantes de preparatoria el miedo era menos evidente. “Los estudiantes más grandes suelen interiorizar su estrés mucho más” dijo Karina Vega, asesora de tiempo completo para casi 19,000 estudiantes en el distrito de escuelas unificadas del Valle de Coachella. El día que nos vimos, se había descompuesto el aire acondicionado de su cubículo, el cual se encuentra dentro de las oficinas centrales de Thermal; su rostro estaba ruborizado y lucía preocupada. Vega creció en Mecca y es hija de jornaleros. En un rincón de su oficina se podían ver apiladas cajas de dátiles provenientes del rancho de su padre. Su hijo, Anzel, estaba cursando su último año en la preparatoria Desert Mirage, la cual tiene una larga historia de activismo. En 2016, los estudiantes salieron de clases y marcharon casi 9.5 kilómetros para protestar en las oficinas del distrito a favor del alza de salarios de sus maestros. Un par de años antes, los estudiantes marcharon en contra del despido de su director y subdirector. “Nuestros chicos tienen corazón, uno muy grande”, me dijo Vega.
En algunas escuelas del país, Trump inspiró a los niños blancos a cantar “¡Construyan el muro!” ante sus compañeros latinos. Este tipo de situaciones no pasarían aquí porque no hay niños blancos. Santana, el maestro de secundaria, trata de preparar a sus alumnos para encuentros como estos en el mundo fuera de Thermal. “Les digo, cuando vayan a la universidad, o si se mudan o consiguen un trabajo en otro lugar, las cosas van a ser muy diferentes. No todos tendrán apellidos parecidos a los suyos o el mismo color de cabello, ni todos van a hablar español”. El aislamiento se ha convertido en una fuente de fuerza y comodidad. Por ejemplo, un alumno del último año de preparatoria y beneficiario de DACA me dijo que antes vivía en el condado de San Bernardino, en donde otros chicos lo golpeaban y agredían porque seguía aprendiendo inglés. “Nos mudamos aquí cuando estaba en segundo grado; yo quería hablar inglés y español, y todos podían hablar ambos idiomas. Yo estaba como, ‘Oh, así que aquí es a donde pertenezco’. Ellos entienden mi personalidad y mis luchas, y yo los entiendo a ellos.”
Desde el día de la elección Vega ha tenido que lidiar con una ola de comportamiento autodestructivo entre los estudiantes de preparatoria. “En el caso del duelo podemos darnos cuenta”, me dijo, “Si alguien muere, sé qué hacer con eso”. Sin embargo, el ambiente de miedo generalizado, las amenazas de separación de la familia, el hecho de que nadie sabe qué va a pasar; estos son los problemas existenciales que, según me dijo, “no pueden recibir ningún tipo de consejo”. Poco antes de eso, Vega había ido a una capacitación en donde una oradora describió que, durante un tiempo especialmente difícil en su vida, llegó a beber salsa picante. “Cuando sentía el ardor recorrer su garganta ella se decía, ‘Bueno, aquí estoy’”, señaló Vega. “Siento que en nuestra comunidad nos encontramos en un momento parecido. Tenemos la necesidad de sentir. No quiero decir que esto no haya sido una realidad con Obama, pero ahora es una constante. Se escucha en todos lados, es el único tema del que hablan.
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Durante la presidencia de Obama los inmigrantes indocumentados estaban lejos estar a salvo. A lo largo de esta administración se alcanzó una cifra récord de 2.8 millones de deportados. De igual manera, se supervisó la expansión dramática de un programa llamado “Comunidades Seguras”, que permitía el intercambio de información entre el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional y las fuerzas policiacas locales. Esto condujo a la deportación de muchos individuos con infracciones mínimas, como la de conducir un auto con un farol trasero roto. Fue sólo durante los últimos años de su presidencia, y gracias a la presión de activistas, que Obama disminuyó su mano dura en temas de inmigración, creando así el programa DACA, que protegía a jóvenes inmigrantes indocumentados. También se intentó, sin mucho éxito, extender esa protección a sus padres. En el mejor de los casos, se puede decir que el legado de esta presidencia tiene resultados mixtos.
Sin embargo, en el caso de Trump nada es mixto. Durante su campaña, las calumnias en contra de los mexicanos se repetían sin cesar en los noticieros en español, lo que robaba el oxígeno en los hogares en el Valle de Coachella como si se tratara de un miembro de la familia rebelde y ruidoso. Posteriormente su victoria llegó, y las amenazas empezaron a cobrar sentido. En su primer mes en el poder, Trump firmó una orden ejecutiva que dejaba a un lado el escalonado sistema de Obama, provocando que, en esencia, cualquier indocumentado se considerara como prioridad para deportación. A esta acción le siguieron varias semanas de historias sobre inmigrantes que habían sido detenidos a lo largo y ancho del país, incluyendo 161 en el área de Los Ángeles. En tiempos de Obama se habían llevado a cabo acciones similares, pero ahora parecía como el primer ataque de guerra. Bajó el mandato de Trump, a los agentes de Inmigración y Aduanas de los Estados Unidos, ICE, por sus siglas en inglés, se les otorgó el poder de detener a cualquier persona que encontraran a su paso, algo que la agencia definió como “arrestos colaterales”. Tan solo en el primer año, las aprehensiones se multiplicaron 40 por ciento. Los agentes arrestaron a defensores que se hallaban dentro de las cortes, a indigentes en busca de refugio en las iglesias, e incluso a un joven de 23 años protegido por DACA. “Las medidas enérgicas contra criminales ilegales no es más que el cumplimiento de mi promesa de campaña,” tuiteó Trump el 12 de febrero de 2017. Aquí en Coachella, lugar que también alberga una estación de la patrulla fronteriza, el mensaje era claro: nadie estaba a salvo.
Berta*, que vive a unos metros de Roberto, fue la primera en hablarme sobre las redadas en el Valle de Coachella. El 15 de febrero de 2017, se encontraba en casa trabajando como niñera al cuidado de dos niños, cuando a eso de las 10 am recibió una llamada. Era una amiga que le dijo haber escuchado de un vecino que había camionetas de la Patrulla Fronteriza estacionadas frente al local de Cardenas, una cadena de tiendas de abarrotes que ofrece productos para latinos. Luego llamó su cuñado, quien había leído una publicación en Facebook que señalaba que se estaban haciendo redadas en ese momento. Las llamadas siguieron entrando durante el espacio de una hora. Berta perdió la cuenta después de las primeras 10, al tiempo que el alcance de la operación seguía creciendo. La captura de migrantes continuó en las tiendas Cardenas, Walmart y Food 4 Less en Cathedral City y Coachella, dos ciudades cercanas. Los agentes demandaban que cualquier persona que entrara o saliera de éstas mostrara sus documentos. Algunos trataron de huir, dejando atrás carros de supermercado llenos de comida. Otro se refugiaron en el lugar, rehusándose a salir. En las calles, los agentes de la patrulla fronteriza establecieron retenes, deteniendo a todo conductor que no pudiera probar que se encontraban en el país legalmente.
Conforme las llamadas siguieron entrando, Berta empezó a precipitarse hacia un colapso nervioso. Su esposo, también indocumentado, trabaja en la demolición de edificios y se traslada a diferentes lugares en construcción a lo largo del Valle de Coachella. Cuando ella se comunicó con él, se encontraba en su lugar de trabajo, cerca de Cathedral City, y ya había recibido por Facebook numerosos mensajes de alerta.
Berta caminaba de un lado a otro dentro del remolque, intercambiaba mensajes de textos, enviaba decenas de mensajes de Facebook, recibía la ola de pánico y la hacía circular de nuevo. Su esposo se encontraba a casi 50 kilómetros de distancia; un movimiento en falso y lo mandarían de vuelta a México. Finalmente, Berta a llamó a su cuñada, que era ciudadana estadounidense. Al igual que todos los demás, estaba enterada de las redadas y se había ofrecido a recorrer en su auto las calles en donde supuestamente se encontraban los retenes de la Patrulla Fronteriza.
La cuñada de Berta manejo durante más de una hora sin encontrar un solo retén. No encontró agentes en Cardenas, Walmart o en Food 4 Less. De hecho, ese día no se habían llevado a cabo ningún tipo de redadas, ni se habían instalado retenes en el Valle de Coachella. Cuando Berta se enteró, lloró de alivio.
Hablamos a mediados de abril; dos meses después de que se esparcieran los falsos rumores que habían aterrorizado al valle. Cuando Berta relató lo ocurrido ese día, sus manos empezaron a temblar y comenzó a llorar de nuevo. “Decidí no preocuparme más,” dijo mientras se secaba las lágrimas. “Es muy estresante pensar en todo lo que puede pasar.” Se detuvo por un momento y pensó en esas probabilidades. “¿Qué pasaría si agarran a mi esposo?” se preguntó. ¿O si me agarran a mí? ¿Qué pasaría con mis hijos? Su hijo mayor, de 18 años, acababa de renovar su permiso de DACA, mientras que su hijo menor, entonces de 14 años, era demasiado joven como para unirse al programa.
Berta acababa de escuchar en las noticias que la nueva prioridad de Trump era deportar a gente que se había quedado en el país después del vencimiento de sus visas. Este era su caso, y el gobierno tenía la dirección de su cuñado, que era la persona que ella había dicho que supuestamente visitaría. “Ese va a ser el primer lugar al que irán a buscarnos,” dijo. Miró su reloj, eran las 3:30 de la tarde. Estábamos sentados dentro de su remolque con las cortinas cerradas. Su esposo siempre llegaba mucho más tarde, pero ella ya empezaba a preocuparse.
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La sede del Centro Migratorio y Estacional Head Start de Thermal es un edificio amarillo de un piso ubicado frente a la oficina de la consejera escolar Vega. Visité el lugar meses antes de que Trump tomara el poder y conocí a Beatriz Machiche, directora y ex-jornalera. Al final del pasillo había un salón vacío en cuya puerta estaba pegada una hoja de papel con la leyenda: “Cerrado hasta nuevo aviso. Enero 2017.” Habían cerrado el salón debido a que no asistían suficientes niños. El año anterior en la misma época tenían una lista de espera de 200 niños. Machiche me dijo que sospechaba que los padres ya no querían dar información al gobierno federal por miedo a que los deportaran. Ella y su equipo habían empezado a visitar los campos para pasar la voz sobre sus servicios, pero hasta ese momento la gente se mostraba reacia. “Los padres dicen que vendrán, pero no lo hacen,” dijo. Machiche nunca había visto algo parecido en los diez años que llevaba trabajando en esa oficina.
Esta era una de las peores consecuencias del miedo: los inmigrantes se mantenían alejados de aquellas instituciones que estaban diseñadas para ayudarles y educar a sus hijos. De igual modo, muchas de las otras agencias migratorias y estacionales Head Start en California habían reportado caídas en las inscripciones de entre 15 y 20 por ciento en el transcurso de ese año. Una de las subvenciones más grandes del tipo Head Starten el país es la del Consejo Migratorio de Texas, que opera en siete estados. Sin embargo, el año pasado, el número de niños que atendían cayó 11 por ciento. En Texas, el número de estudiantes apoyados a través del Programa de Educación al Migrante, que apoya a niños de jornaleros migrantes con obstáculos para tener acceso a la educación, cayó 22 por ciento del 2016 al 2017, mientras que en California la disminución fue de 7 por ciento.
El miedo también hacía que la gente pasara hambre. Tras los falsos rumores de las tiendas Cardenas, Verónica García, trabajadora de Borrego Health, proveedor de atención médica sin fines de lucro, se dedicó a tocar puertas en un campamento de remolques en Thermal. Una mujer de unos 60 años le dijo a García que muchos de sus vecinos habían dejado de hacer compras porque estaban convencidos de que los agentes de migración tenían en la mira a las tiendas de abarrotes. Conforme sus armarios empezaron a vaciarse, la mujer visitaba los sitios locales de distribución para recolectar víveres gratuitos que repartía entre familias agradecidas. Mientras platicaba con García, varios niños hambrientos pasaron por su casa para que les diera emparedados de mantequilla de maní. Al terminar la conversación, las mejillas de la mujer estaban surcadas por el llanto.
“Nos estaba informando sobre lo difícil que se ha puesto la situación para todos ahí,” dijo García. “La gente tiene miedo de salir.” Anteriormente, García trabajó en el banco de alimentos del Valle de Coachella, Food in Need of Distribution o FIND, por sus siglas en inglés. Fue así como ella decidió contactar al banco para explicar la gravedad de la situación. Después de un buen rato, un camión llegó al campamento y, en cuestión de horas, casi 200 personas habían recibido alimentos.
Chantel Schuering es la directora de relaciones comunitarias de FIND, y señala cada año se inscribían 3,000 familias para recibir cupones de alimentos y Medicaid. Tras la elección, sus cifras cayeron a más de la mitad, tendencia que duró hasta la primavera. De igual manera, los programas de alimentos para los necesitados en todo el país registraron caídas drásticas en sus inscripciones. En California, el número de participantes de WIC, o “Programa suplementario de nutrición para mujeres, infantes y niños”, cayó 7 por ciento en el último año. En Florida, las bajas fueron aún mayores, con un 9.6 por ciento, mientras que el número de participantes en Texas disminuyó 7.4 por ciento.
Esta era una de las peores consecuencias del miedo: los inmigrantes se mantenían alejados de aquellas instituciones que estaban diseñadas para ayudarles y educar a sus hijos.
Muchas de las personas que entrevisté recalcaron que no podían explicar con certeza las caídas en las inscripciones, pero creían que el miedo a la deportación era uno de los factores. No obstante, muchas veces la relación entre el temor y la situación era directa. Tras una redada en febrero de 2017 en Woodburn, Oregon, durante la que ICE detuvo a dos camionetas de jornaleros, muchas familias locales respondieron llamando a la “Coalición para el desarrollo de los niños en Oregon” –la cual ofrece atención del tipo Head Start en el estado- para exigir que sus nombres fueran eliminados de las bases de datos. En Coachella, FIND recibió numerosas llamadas de los residentes, quienes querían saber cómo podían interrumpir su inscripción a los cupones de alimentos y Medicaid. En febrero de este año, los temores fueron confirmados, Reuters reportó que la administración de Trump estaba trabajando en reglas nuevas para sancionar a los inmigrantes que inscribían a sus hijos nacidos en los Estados Unidos en programas como Head Start, cupones de alimentos, entre otros.
Al parecer, el miedo también está provocando que los migrantes vacilen en reportar crímenes. En abril del año pasado, el jefe de la policía de Houston anunció que el número de hispanos que reportaron casos de violación disminuyó casi 43 por ciento en los primeros tres meses del año, en comparación al mismo periodo del año anterior. Durante los primeros seis meses de la administración de Trump, los reportes de violencia doméstica entre latinos disminuyeron 18 por ciento en San Francisco, 13 por ciento en San Diego y 3.5 en Los Ángeles (entre las comunidades no latinas no se percibió prácticamente ningún cambio). Por su parte, Sarah Stillman, quien escribe para el New Yorker, reportó que en un barrio latino de Arlington, Virginia, los reportes de violencia doméstica disminuyeron más de 85 por ciento en los primeros ocho meses de 2017, en comparación con el año anterior; mientras que las denuncias por violación y ataques sexuales cayeron 75 por ciento.
En los meses que sucedieron a la elección, la gente de Coachella cambió sus rutinas diarias, recalculando los riesgos que podrían correr. Asimismo, la asistencia a la iglesia católica más grande del Valle de Coachella, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, cayó entre 10 y 15 por ciento. “[En algún punto] la gente se sentía segura aquí,” señaló el Padre Guy Wilson. “Bajo este nuevo clima político parecería como si fueran a perseguirlos a todos.”
Otra mujer me contó que su esposo, un inmigrante indocumentado, había dejado de usar camisetas con mensajes políticos, lo que de algún modo se traducía en una anulación sutil de su personalidad. Otros dejaron de ir al cine o a restaurantes, ya que cada salida aumentaba la posibilidad de ser detenidos por la Patrulla Fronteriza. Una tarde llevé en mi auto a una mujer indocumentada a recoger a su hijo de una clase en una escuela comunitaria. Varias veces durante el trayecto, ella agarraba el volante y veía todos los espejos, revisando si había alguna de las camionetas verde con blanco de los agentes. Cuando regresamos a su remolque, los dos colapsamos aliviados en el sillón. Esto no se sentía como un modo de vida aceptable en lo absoluto.
En abril del año pasado, Desert Sun, un diario local, reportó que los centros de salud estaban percibiendo un declive en el número de pacientes. Doug Morin dirige Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, clínica local gratuita que atiende a personas sin seguro médico. Este lugar llena la brecha en una región en donde la proporción médicos-población es cuatro veces mayor a la recomendada por la federación. En algún momento, la clínica llegó a ser un proyecto fuerte. “Nuestros números aumentaban cada mes, cada año,” me comentó Morin. En enero, cuando Trump llegó a la presidencia, las consultas se desplomaron. Ese mes recibieron 171 pacientes; una caída con respecto a los 429 en enero de 2016. En septiembre, cuando conversamos, me dijo en el transcurso del año las visitas habían disminuido 25 a 30 por ciento.
Morin también me contó el caso de una mujer mayor que había acudido quejándose de un dolor abdominal. La señora ya había ido a la sala de urgencias de un hospital local, en donde los doctores descubrieron que tenía un bulto en el útero, pero que como no tenía seguro médico decidieron mandarla a la clínica de Morin. Ahí, un médico determinó que el bulto no era un fibroma, condición bastante común y tratable, sino que probablemente se trataba de un tumor canceroso. Mientras un miembro del personal hacía el papeleo para ingresar a la mujer a programa Medi-Cal de urgencias, que está a disposición de inmigrantes indocumentados, la hija de la señora llegó a la oficina.
“Nos dijo, ‘borren todo’” relató Morin. “No quería que nadie proporcionara el nombre ni la dirección de su madre”. El personal trató de explicarle la gravedad de la situación, pero la hija tomó los papeles y salió del lugar con su madre. “Se fue tan rápido que nadie pudo siquiera darle a la señora algo para el dolor” recordó Morin.
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El año pasado, en la época que el invierno se torna en primavera, visité el remolque de Roberto en varias ocasiones; siempre lo encontraba desafiante, sin miedo. Los rumores de redadas inundaban el valle y los supervisores de Roberto habían recomendado a los trabajadores moverse en grupos pequeños para no llamar la atención de los oficiales de migración. Roberto se encontraba con los agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza casi todos los días, a veces detrás de su carro cuando el semáforo estaba en rojo, otras veces en la fila para comprar café de un mercado cercano. Cuando le pregunté qué sentía cuando veía una camioneta de la patrulla fronteriza por el retrovisor, simplemente se encogió de hombros. Ellos estaban haciendo su trabajo, y él el suyo.
Me contó que había perdido el miedo diez años antes, cuando su hijo Ángel había estado a punto de morir. Ángel tenía 16 años en ese momento y estaba recogiendo uvas con él cerca de Bakersfield. La temperatura alcanzó los 40 grados, y Ángel empezó a decir que se sentía mareado y muy débil para seguir trabajando. Después de que Roberto insistiera en que trasladaran a su hijo al hospital, la compañía subió a Ángel en una camioneta, le pusieron bolsas de hielo debajo de las axilas y lo llevaron a una clínica.
Ángel fue enviado de regreso a su casa esa misma tarde, lucía débil y pálido. No fue capaz de indicarle a su padre el tratamiento que había recibido, si es que siquiera le había dado algo. Pasó la noche entera sudando y vomitando en una habitación de 50cm x 50cm, la cual compartía con los otros cuatro miembros de su familia dentro del primitivo campo de trabajo en el que se encontraban. Fue solo hasta que un organizador del grupo de jornaleros United Farm Workers [Jornaleros Unidos]llevó a Ángel al hospital que los doctores finalmente le diagnosticaron un golpe de calor y descubrieron que estaba infectado por el virus del Nilo Occidental. La insolación había debilitado el sistema inmune del muchacho, provocando que el Nilo Occidental evolucionara en meningitis, afección que inflama las membranas alrededor del cerebro y la médula espinal. Ángel entró en coma y, por un tiempo, creyeron que no iba a sobrevivir. Cuando Ángel recuperó la conciencia, su padre se encontraba en la habitación del hospital. Después de recibirlo con un abrazo, Roberto salió al pasillo y se arrodilló: él también se había recuperado.
“Eso te quita el miedo”, me dijo. “¿Qué me pueden hacer ahora?” Antes, él trabajaba duro pero en silencio; después del roce de Ángel con la muerte, Roberto viajaba hasta Sacramento para compartir su historia y promover medidas que protegieran a los jornaleros contra el calor, mismas que se implementaron en 2005, después de que el entonces gobernador, Arnold Schwarzenegger, firmara su entrada en vigor. Roberto ahora retaba a aquellos supervisores que no respetaban a los trabajadores. También empezó a llevar su teléfono a los campos para grabar a jornaleros hablando sobre sus vidas. Por otro lado, su hija mayor, Rosa*, se estaba preparando para ser periodista, mientras que Roberto mismo se estaba convirtiendo en una especie de jornalero-periodista; pues subía a Facebook los videos que había tomado. Inclusive, en uno de ellos se dirigió directamente a Trump. “Estas son las personas que los policías no quieren, pero mientras estos duermen, toda esta gente trabaja en los campos de todo California,” dijo, al tiempo que un grupo cosechaba apio detrás de él. “Y le mando un saludo a Donald Trump, que no nos quiere. Lo invito a que venga aquí y se entere de nuestro trabajo. Esto que ven es el apio que le da sabor a esta sopa.”
Palpar el miedo en el valle no resultaba difícil, pero al mismo tiempo se sentía la resistencia. Una tarde decidí visitar a Jorge Ortiz en su casa en Coachella, donde vive con su esposa Imelda y sus tres hijos. Su sala estaba llena de cajas sin desempacar -acababan de cambiarse de casa-, y Ortiz permanecía en el sillón, exhausto y encorvado. El hombre de 44 años acababa de llegar a su hogar después de un largo turno como capataz en una compañía de diseño de jardines. Los fines de semana trabajaba en una empresa de catering, y a veces aceptaba alguno que otro trabajo en construcción o jardinería. “Mi historia es la misma que la de los demás: pensaba quedarme dos o tres años aquí y luego regresar a México”, me dijo. Eso fue hace 17 años, pero cuando empezó a ascender dentro de la compañía de jardinería, mando a traer a su esposa y a sus hijos. Los dos mayores tienen el DACA; mientras que el menor es ciudadano estadounidense. Jorge e Imelda siguen siendo indocumentados.
Dado que se rehúsa a esconder su identidad cuando da entrevistas a los medios, Ortiz se ha vuelto uno de los activistas en migración más identificables en el área. Uno de sus clientes en jardinería es un veterinario que cuida a los perros de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Cuando los agentes llegan al consultorio, Ortiz los saluda. El 1° de mayo del año pasado, se unió a colegas activistas en una protesta frente a la estación de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Una semana antes, él y su familia acababan de aparecer en un popular y muy difundido video de AJ+ que reseñaba su activismo. “Quisiera mandar un mensaje a mi gente latina: muestren sus rostros,” dijo a la cámara. Sin duda, esta postura ponía nerviosos a aquellos que lo rodeaban. Durante la protesta del mes de mayo, un participante le insistió a Ortiz que usara un sombrero negro y lentes de sol para ocultar su rostro, mientras que otro asistente se mantuvo a su lado todo el tiempo, para evitar cualquier intento de los agentes por capturarlo.
Pienso que Ortiz podía notar lo difícil que me resultaba entender su falta de miedo. Me contó que su trabajo como activista había iniciado una década antes, en un grupo llamado Consejo de Federaciones Méxicanas, COFEM, el cual ayudaba a los padres de familia a tomar el liderazgo en las escuelas de Coachella. Conforme fue teniendo más facilidad para expresarse, otros inmigrantes indocumentados empezaron a llamarle para pedir consejos o simplemente para externar sus preocupaciones sobre el futuro. Desde el triunfo de Trump, las llamadas aumentaron vertiginosamente, y él había podido ver cómo el miedo se extendía de tal manera que la vida cotidiana estaba dejando de parecer vida.
‘Quisiera mandar un mensaje a mi gente latina: muestren sus rostros,’ dijo a la cámara.
Ortiz admitió que, por supuesto, también tenía miedo. No quería que lo separaran de su familia y quería que sus hijos siguieran estudiando en Estados Unidos; pero tampoco quería que el miedo se apoderara de él, por lo que su respuesta fue hacerlo a un lado e ir hacia delante. “Si llamas al miedo, el miedo llega,” me dijo. “Pero si llamas a la fe, esta llega también.”
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Un sábado de junio me estacioné en la entrada del remolque de Roberto. Era un poco más de medio día y la temperatura estaba alcanzando los 41° C. Roberto se encontraba afuera, bajo la sombra de una cochera que había construido hace poco, junto a la cerca que acababa de terminar de poner y que colindaba con un cobertizo que había descombrado y convertido en un pequeño estudio musical. Le gustaba llegar a casa después del trabajo y entretenerse afuera, ya que solía pasar su turno encerrado en una oficina con aire acondicionado.
Ese día, sin embargo, no estaba trabajando. En sus hombros colgaba un acordeón, del que extraía una melodía. En una mesa cercana había extendidos varios chiles jalapeños que el mismo había cortado antes del amanecer. Normalmente la mirada de Roberto emitía un destello juguetón, pero esta vez resplandecía.
“Rosa se gradúa hoy del colegio,” dijo. Puso el acordeón a un lado, sacó un banquillo y me ofreció una silla. Aunque tenía que arreglarse e irse a Los Ángeles pronto, estaba disfrutando el momento. Rosa era la razón por la que había llegado a Estados Unidos. Cuando vivía en Mexicali, Roberto trabajaba para una empresa de pan llamada Bimbo, en donde era el encargado de monitorear la línea de tostado. Cuando pidió que le dieran un día libre para ir al bautizo de Rosa, su supervisor le negó la petición y Roberto, quien nunca había faltado al trabajo, no hizo caso y se fue a la celebración. ¿Cómo iba a perderse el bautizo de su propia hija? Debido a esto, el supervisor lo suspendió por 15 días y Roberto, furioso, salió del lugar y nunca más volvió.
Nunca pudo encontrar un trabajo estable, por lo que la familia vino a Estados Unidos con una visa de turista y nunca regresaron. Una brisa suave acariciaba mi cuello sudoroso. Roberto, que no sudaba – o al menos eso me parecía- hablaba sobre el futuro de su hija. Sabía que ella era trabajadora y que su sueño era ser periodista, pero no estaba seguro de cuáles eran sus planes para después de graduarse. Rosa ya se movía en un mundo diferente y se encontraba feliz y en ascenso. Eso era todo lo que él necesitaba saber. “Le dije, no porque te hayamos ayudado quiere decir que nos debes algo”, señaló. “Haz tu propio camino y no te preocupes por nosotros.”
Después de media hora de estar conversando en el patio me fui para que Roberto entrara a tomar un baño. Para este gran día había escogido un atuendo esplendoroso: una lustrosa camisa morada con azul, pantalones negros, botas vaqueras blancas y un sombrero que le hacía juego. A pesar del “disturbio”, la familia seguía adelante.
* * *
Jose Simo es un consejero de voz suave del College of the Desert, escuela comunitaria en el Valle de Coachella que impulsa a los niños a tomar otro camino que no sea el de trabajar en los campos. En 2008, Simo fundó “Alas con futuro”, club que atiende a estudiantes indocumentados y los conecta para obtener becas y apoyo financiero. El 5 de septiembre, el club llevaría a cabo su primera junta del año escolar 2017-18. El plan era presentar al grupo de estudiantes de nuevo ingreso. Horas antes de la reunión, Trump anunció la cancelación del DACA. A partir de ese momento, el teléfono de Simo no dejó de recibir mensajes de texto. La junta se convirtió en una especie de confesionario, y los estudiantes se movían alrededor de la mesa compartiendo sus miedos y secándose las lágrimas. “La gente estaba simplemente devastada,” dijo Simo. “Fue extremadamente difícil. Aun así, siempre me sorprende lo fuertes que son los estudiantes. El cinco de septiembre fue duro, como también lo fue el seis; pero para el día siete ellos ya estaban con la mirada hacia adelante”
Varias semanas después, Simo se encontraba en una de las salas de juntas de la escuela, en donde casi una treintena de personas se habían juntado para tomar una sesión informativa sobre DACA. Al frente del salón se encontraba Luz Gallegos, con un grupo llamado TODEC Legal Center. Ella inició el taller compartiendo la historia de su primera campaña como activista en 1986. Gallegos tenía 7 años cuando viajó a Washington D.C. con sus padres con el objeto de presionar a los miembros del Congreso para que aprobaran una reforma migratoria. Aunque habían juntado suficiente dinero para su vuelo, no tenían para pagar el alojamiento, por lo que durante su estancia de una semana en Washington durmieron debajo de un puente. Cada mañana iban a una iglesia local para asearse y bajar al Capitolio.
El punto de la historia era que la victoria se puede alcanzar: el presidente Ronald Reagan, un republicano conservador, firmó la ley de reforma migratoria que legalizaba a casi tres millones de inmigrantes indocumentados. En otras ocasiones había tenido la oportunidad de ver a Gallegos en acción, y este era siempre su mensaje: Si puedes pelear, puedes ganar. “No están solos,” le dijo a los estudiantes. “No deben tener miedo, porque eso es justo lo que ellos quieren. Detrás de ustedes hay mucha gente que los apoya. No olviden que son lo mejor de lo mejor, la crema y nata.”
Trump declaró que el 5 de marzo de 2018 sería la fecha oficial del fin de DACA, aunque los beneficiarios cuya protección había caducado podían aplicar para obtener una prórroga de dos años. La fecha límite para mandar peticiones de renovación era el 5 de octubre, y Gallegos luchaba para informar a tantas personas como le fuera posible, llegando a dar hasta tres talleres diarios. En una ocasión, me dijo que después de la elección su organización había implementado una política de auto-cuidado, para evitar el desgaste del personal y ayudarles a lidiar con el estrés emocional de trabajar en una comunidad en crisis. Esto había pasado hace cinco meses, pero no parecía que ella hubiera tomado un solo día libre. Cuando se lo pregunté, ella simplemente se rió. El momento para descansar vendría después. Se excusó para ir a ayudar a una estudiante con su papeleo.
Cuando llegué al remolque de Roberto, este estaba inusualmente callado. “¿Piensas que nos equivocamos con Dolores*?” preguntó. Su hija menor había cumplido 15 años en julio, lo que quería decir que era elegible para obtener el DACA, pero Roberto vacilaba en dar información al gobierno federal con Trump como presidente. Ahora esa limitada protección también había desaparecido. ¿Y qué sería de Rosa, cuya vida post-escolar apenas comenzaba?
“Trabajamos, y quizá parecemos felices ante los ojos de otros,” dijo. “Pero tenemos mucha incertidumbre”. Estaba en el sillón, acompañado de la siempre silenciosa Leticia. La pareja lucía agotada. La temporada había cambiado una vez más, y ahora se dedicaban a sembrar apio por $10.50 dólares la hora. Lo tenían que hacer de noche, para proteger las semillas del calor del día. “No sabemos qué puede pasar mañana,” dijo, sus ojos se posaron en la novela que pasaba por la televisión. “A veces nos vamos a trabajar a las dos o tres de la mañana, migración nos puede detener y hasta ahí llegamos.” Esta fue la primera vez que Roberto insinuó la posibilidad de la derrota. Habló de envejecer sin tener ahorros para el retiro; de una vida sin seguro de empleo o de salud; de sus padres en México, quienes murieron sin que él pudiera despedirse bien de ellos. Estos fueron los sacrificios que tuvo que hacer por el bien de sus hijos. ¿En verdad podía todo esto desaparecer en un instante?
Durante mis visitas anteriores Dolores nunca estaba ahí, pero ese día ella se encontraba en casa y salió a platicar a la sala. La estudiante de preparatoria tenía una larga cabellera negra y un fleco que enmarcaba un rostro amplio y una sonrisa alegre. Su familia se mudó a los Estados Unidos cuando ella tenía dos años y, con excepción de algunos viajes a Bakersfield durante el tiempo de cosecha de uvas, había pasado toda su vida en aquel campamento de remolques. Me contó que su área de juegos era el desierto circundante, en donde inventaba personajes y hablaba con las palmeras. “Me inventaba la historia de que era un caballero tratando de salvar a una princesa,” dijo riendo. “Estoy segura que mi papás pensaban que estaba zafada.”
Dolores daba la impresión de estarse tomando las noticias de la cancelación del DACA mejor que su padre. A veces se sentía perdida y preocupada por su hermana Rosa, que era su mentora y mejor amiga. Dolores siempre había soñado con estudiar fuera; idea que ahora parecía imposible. Sin embargo, aún tenía en la mira la misma meta: asistir a la Universidad de California en Berkeley. “Si tengo que trabajar el doble o el triple, no tengo duda alguna de que lo voy a hacer,” dijo. “Mi hermana siempre me dice ‘No es difícil, sino que lleva tiempo.” Esta frase se ha vuelto una especie de mantra para Dolores, que estudia hasta cinco horas al día y hace sus notas a mano, pues la familia no cuenta con una computadora. Su horario de clases habitual incluye: historia mundial, literatura multicultural, español, matemáticas, física y danza, todas bajo el esquema educativo estadounidense de “colocación avanzada”, AP, por sus siglas en inglés). “Debes tratar de entrar a todas las clases de colocación avanzada que puedas, porque te van a ayudar mucho,” comentó, lamentándose de que Desert Mirageno ofreciera más cursos avanzados. Sus calificaciones siempre habían sido las más altas.
Dolores me dijo que quería ser la primera de su familia en graduarse con una toga blanca; honor reservado para los 10 estudiantes más destacados de la escuela. Todavía no sabe qué va a estudiar, pero lo que sí sabe es que jamás quiere poner un pie en los campos, y que con un buen empleo será capaz de ayudar a sus padres. “Ellos trabajan horas extras y les pagan muy poco”, señaló. “Sé que les gritan. Recuerdo a mi papá con las manos llenas de moretones y a mi mamá con las rodillas adoloridas. Llegan muy cansados a la casa.” Mientras Dolores hablaba, Roberto se había quedado dormido en el sillón y roncaba suavemente.
* * *
La última vez que visité a Roberto fue un día después del de acción de gracias”, a la hora del crepúsculo. El cielo de Coachella tenía un bello tono púrpura. Rosa estaba de visita de Bakersfield, en donde había encontrado un empleo como defensora de inmigrantes. Estábamos afuera de la casa rodante, disfrutando la brisa vespertina mientras ella platicaba sobre su trabajo. Había estado en protestas y escrito artículos, y pronto viajaría a Washington, D.C., para apoyar a la “Ley Dream”[Sueña], misma que, si era aprobada, le abriría el camino de la ciudadanía a los jóvenes indocumentados. Roberto estaba a su lado, sonriente.
El miedo en el Valle de Coachella parecía estar emprendiendo retirada. Después de los rumores de redadas y deportaciones masivas, mucha gente me dijo que las cosas habían llegado a una especie de normalidad. Doug Morin, del grupo de voluntarios médicos del valle de Coachella, señaló que las visitas de los pacientes se habían reactivado. Por otro lado, las inscripciones al Head Start también aumentaron, en parte gracias a la enérgica difusión de Beatriz Machiche y de su equipo. Sin embargo, no resultaba difícil imaginar lo rápido que todo podía cambiar. En las primeras semanas de 2018 hubo un aumento evidente en el número de agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza a lo largo del Valle de Coachella, lo que generó nuevas preocupaciones de acciones policiales (aunque, de nuevo, ninguna de ellas se materializó). En febrero, como parte de una serie de medidas enérgicas a los empleadores, los agentes de ICE visitaron muchos negocios locales para llevar a cabo auditorías. En un restaurante, un grupo de clientes abandonó el lugar de manera abrupta después de que los agentes entraran, y regresaron más tarde solo a pagar sus cuentas. Para las familias de indocumentados, el miedo podía resurgir sin previo aviso.
Un poco antes del Día de San Valentín, Roberto me llamó para darme buenas noticias: Dolores había obtenido el 8° lugar de su clase entre un grupo de 516 estudiantes, lo que significaba que la chica cumpliría su sueño de graduarse de blanco. También le había pedido a sus padres que le organizaran su fiesta de quince años, que es cuando las jóvenes celebran su presentación ante la sociedad. Dolores había cumplido 15 en julio, pero no le había hecho ninguna fiesta porque estaban apretados de dinero y, por supuesto, la situación seguía igual. No obstante, Roberto me dijo “ella nunca nos ha pedido nada”, por lo que él y Leticia le había prometido a su hija que le harían una gran fiesta, cuya fecha se fijó para mayo. Era necesario contratar músicos y alguien que tomara video, ofrecer comida a los invitados y rentar un espacio. Según sus cálculos, Roberto pensaba que el evento costaría $ 7, 000 dólares. No tenía idea dónde iba a conseguir ese dinero, pero estaba convencido de que lo lograría. Aunque estaba casi a punto de cumplir 50 años, él también era un soñador.
In the spring of 2016, as Trump was clinching the Republican nomination for president, I drove east into the Coachella Valley, looking for a 48-year-old farmworker named Roberto. My cell phone had died and I soon became lost, meandering along country roads where I rarely passed another vehicle. When I finally found Roberto, he was standing outside a single-wide trailer, waiting patiently in his cowboy hat, with an amused smile on his face.
To the north and west of his trailer were more trailers. To the south and east his yard opened into the desert, which gave way, in places, to lettuce fields and vineyards. This was the land Roberto had worked for the past 20 years, the kind of land that made you feel small but not insignificant. We stepped inside and sat at his kitchen table. The shades were drawn against the heat, and Roberto muted the television in the living room, where a newscaster spoke in Spanish about Trump’s proposed wall along the southern U.S. border. Roberto, who wore a faded gray t-shirt and jeans torn at the knees, was built thick, with broad shoulders and the hint of a gut. He took a swig of bottled water, placed his gnarled hands on the table, and began to talk.
As he spoke, it became clear that there were plenty of reasons for him to fear a Trump presidency. He was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, as was his wife, Leticia. (I’ve changed all the family names.) All three of their kids were born in Mexico. His youngest daughter was in eighth grade and also undocumented. His middle daughter was in college and protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an Obama-era policy Trump had threatened to end. Only his oldest son, married to a U.S. citizen, was a legal resident. Trump was like a grenade that could land inside the family and explode, sending people flying in all directions. Roberto rarely uttered Trump’s name, instead referring to him as the disturbio, the disturbance.
But it wasn’t only Roberto — just about everyone he knew was in a similar situation. He lives in an unincorporated community called Thermal, which, according to the U.S. Census, is 99.9 percent Latino (all but three of its 2,396 people, to be exact). In nearby Mecca, another unincorporated region of nearly 9,000, Latinos also make up 99.9 percent of the population. The community of Oasis, several miles away, is 98.2 percent Latino. Coachella, the closest city, is 97.5 percent Latino. On this side of the desert, you hear Spanish peppered with English, not the other way around.
It was my first trip to the Eastern Coachella Valley, and I was collecting the oral histories of farmworkers. During those conversations, Trump was a frequent topic. He began to feel like a specter haunting the region, his threats blasted out on the radio and television. He was also something of a joke. At the time, no one I spoke with seriously considered the idea of a Trump presidency. Then he won. The candidate who had campaigned directly against the kind of people who lived in this valley was suddenly the most powerful person in the world. I had originally come to Coachella to learn what it was like to be a farmworker here. Now there was a new question: What was it like to live in a place where everyone felt under attack?
* * *
The Coachella Valley is a 45-mile stretch of scorching terrain that begins near Palm Springs and runs southeast to the Salton Sea. It is a land of impossible extremes, a place that doesn’t make sense but exists nonetheless, a testament to hubris and hard work and irrigation canals, and also to racism. Near Palm Springs, you are surrounded by golf courses, sprawling mansions, and country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts; as you travel southeast through the valley, they are replaced, mirage-like, by agricultural fields and dusty trailer parks. In Palm Springs you can spend $1 million renting out a lush resort for two nights. On the east side, the land is dotted with illegal dumps and the drinking water is laced with arsenic.
If you’ve heard of Coachella, it’s almost certainly because of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, an annual bacchanalia that plays out on polo grounds about 10 miles from Roberto’s trailer. The 2017 festival, headlined by Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga, and Radiohead, brought in a record $114.6 million. VIP tickets went for $900 apiece, and couples looking to splurge could rent a modern yurt for the weekend for $7,500. But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.
The region can be strikingly beautiful, with dramatic mountains to the west and date trees that march to the hazy horizon. The land is rich, producing some $640 million in crops — table grapes, lemons, bell peppers, and much more — each year.
It’s also a hard place. In Thermal, about a third of the residents live below the poverty line, including nearly half of all children. Being a farmworker isn’t easy anywhere, but here it’s particularly grueling, with summertime highs that can top 120 degrees. Housing is so tight during the grape harvest that many migrant farmworkers sleep in their cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in parking lots. Some bathe in canals polluted by pesticide runoff.
But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.
Thermal’s largest community spot lies near the intersection of 66th Avenue and Tyler Street, home to three adjacent schools in the middle of otherwise empty fields: Las Palmitas Elementary School, Toro Canyon Middle School, and Desert Mirage High School. On a cloudless morning last April, I met up with Maria, a teacher’s assistant at Las Palmitas who is a member of the Purépecha, an indigenous group from the Mexican state of Michoacán that has a sizable presence in Thermal. School had just gotten out, and we sat at a long table in an empty cafeteria, watching children race around the playground. It was Maria’s birthday — she was now 21 — and kids had spent the day serenading her with multilingual renditions of “Happy Birthday.”
“I had my little cousin call me on election night,” Maria told me. “He said, ‘Have you voted already? I’m just really worried about my mom.’” The next day, he called in tears to ask if Maria had begun the process of fixing his mother’s immigration status so that she wouldn’t be deported, as if it were a simple matter of paperwork. “I could not respond to him,” Maria said softly. She paused, looking down at the table. “At the end, I told him, ‘Yes, I’m already doing that.’ Just to keep him calm.” She told me that her cousin was doing better now, because he thought his mother had become a legal resident. Many other parents, she said, had used the same strategy, hoping to protect their kids from worry.
On the morning after the election, students at Las Palmitas filed off the bus in a daze. Many were silent at first, but the questions eventually tumbled out. When I get home, will my mom still be there? Is the wall already built? Do they have special education classes in Mexico? Who will teach me to read? Some teachers put aside lesson plans and opened up class to a discussion about what was on everyone’s mind. “They usually come in with energy, joking around and chasing each other,” said Adam Santana, who teaches language arts at Toro Canyon. “That day they were silent. It was as if there had been a tragedy on campus. Finally, one of the students asked, ‘Are there really going to be deportations?’”
With the high school students, the fear was less on display. “The older students tend to internalize their stress a lot more,” said Karina Vega, who is one of just two full-time counselors for the almost 19,000 students in the Coachella Valley Unified School District. We met on a day when the air conditioning had gone out in her portable office, located at the district headquarters in Thermal, and her face was flushed and worried. Vega grew up in Mecca and is the daughter of farmworkers; stacked in the back of her office were boxes of dates from her father’s ranch. Her son Anzel was completing his senior year at Desert Mirage High School, which has a history of activism. In 2016, students walked out of class and marched nearly six miles to protest at the district office in support of higher salaries for their teachers. A couple of years before that, they marched out after the principal and vice principal were fired. “Our kids have hearts, big hearts,” Vega told me.
In some schools across the country, Trump inspired white kids to chant, “Build the wall!” at their Latino peers. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen here, because there aren’t any white kids. Santana, the middle school teacher, tries to prepare his kids for encounters like that in the world outside Thermal. “I tell them, when you go off to college, or if you move and get a job somewhere else, it’s going to be very different. Not everybody is going to have similar last names as you, or the same hair color. They’re not all going to speak Spanish.” The isolation has become a source of strength and comfort. One high school senior, a DACA recipient, told me that he first lived in Bloomington, in San Bernardino County, and was beaten and bullied by kids because he was still learning English. “We moved here when I was in second grade, and I would want to speak Spanish and English, and everyone was able to talk both. I was like, ‘Oh, so this is where I belong.’ They understand me and my struggles, and I understand them.”
Since the election, Vega has dealt with a surge of self-destructive behavior among the high school students. “With grief, we can figure it out,” she told me. “If someone dies, I know what to do with that.” But the general climate of fear, the threats of family separation, the fact that no one knows what’s coming next — these were existential problems that she told me “couldn’t be counseled.” She had recently attended a training that featured a speaker who described, during a particularly rough stretch of her life, drinking hot sauce. “When she would feel the fire going down her throat, she would be like, ‘Oh, there I am,’’ Vega said. “I feel like that’s where we are right now as a community. We need to feel. And I’m not saying that all of this wasn’t real under Obama, but now it’s a constant. It’s all you hear, it’s all they talk about.”
* * *
Undocumented immigrants were far from safe under Obama. During his administration, a record 2.8 million people were deported. He also oversaw the dramatic expansion of a program called Secure Communities, which allowed for information sharing between the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement agencies and led to the deportation of many individuals with infractions as minor as driving with a broken taillight. It was only during his final years in office, under pressure from activists, that Obama became less hawkish on immigration, creating the DACA program to protect young undocumented immigrants, and trying, unsuccessfully, to expand those protections to their parents. His legacy was, at best, mixed.
There was nothing mixed about Trump. During the campaign, Trump’s slander against Mexicans was repeated incessantly on Spanish-language news programs, sucking up the oxygen in living rooms across the Coachella Valley like a loud and unruly family member. Then he won and his threats started to mean something. In his first month in office, Trump signed an executive order that abandoned Obama’s tiered system, essentially making any undocumented immigrant a priority for deportation. That was followed by several weeks of stories about immigrants being swept up across the country, including 161 in the Los Angeles area. Similar actions had been carried out under Obama, but now they felt like the opening shot in a war. Under Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were given new powers to pick up anyone they encountered, in what the agency termed “collateral arrests,” and apprehensions in the first year jumped 40 percent. Agents arrested defendants inside courthouses, homeless people seeking shelter at a church, and even a 23-year-old protected by DACA. “The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise,” Trump tweeted on February 12, 2017. Here in Coachella, which is also home to a Border Patrol station, the message was clear: No one was safe.
Berta, who lives down the road from Roberto, was the first person to tell me about the raids in the Coachella Valley. (I’ve changed her name.) On February 15, 2017, she was home at work as a nanny, watching two young children when she got a call around 10 a.m. It was a friend, who heard from a neighbor that Border Patrol vans were parked in front of the local Cardenas, a grocery store chain that caters to Latinos. Then her brother-in-law called; he’d read a post on Facebook that raids were underway. Over the next hour, the calls kept coming — Berta lost count after 10 — and the scope of the operation expanded. Immigrants were being rounded up at Cardenas stores in two nearby cities, Cathedral City and Coachella, and at a Walmart and a Food 4 Less. Agents were demanding documents from anyone entering or leaving. Some attempted to flee, leaving behind carts filled with food. Others sheltered in place, refusing to exit. On the streets, Border Patrol agents set up checkpoints, sweeping up drivers who couldn’t prove their legal status. News of the raids soon leaped from social media to a local Spanish-language radio station.
As the calls kept coming, Berta veered into something close to a breakdown. Her husband, also undocumented, works in demolition and travels to construction sites across the Coachella Valley. When she reached him, he was at a jobsite not far from Cathedral City. He had already received numerous warning messages on Facebook.
Berta paced her small trailer, exchanging texts, shooting off Facebook messages, absorbing the panic and sending it back out. Her husband was 30 miles away; one wrong turn and he’d be sent back to Mexico. Finally, Berta called her sister-in-law, a U.S. citizen. Like everyone else, she had heard about the raids, and she volunteered to drive through the streets where Border Patrol checkpoints had reportedly been set up.
Berta’s sister-in-law drove for more than an hour and didn’t come across a single checkpoint. There were no agents at Cardenas, or Walmart, or Food 4 Less. There were, in fact, no raids or checkpoints in the Coachella Valley that day. When Berta got the news, she broke into tears of relief.
It was mid-April when we spoke, two months after the false rumors had terrorized the valley. As Berta described that day, her hands shook and she began to cry all over again. “I decided not to worry anymore,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s too stressful to think about all the possibilities.” She paused and thought about the possibilities. “What would happen if they got my husband?” she asked. “Or if they got me? What would happen to my kids?” Their oldest son, at 18, had just renewed his DACA permit; their youngest son, then 14, was too young to enroll.
Berta had just heard on the news that Trump’s new priority was to deport people who had overstayed their visas. Berta had overstayed her visa, and the government had the address of her brother-in-law, whom she had said they were visiting. “That’s the first place they’re going to look for us,” she said. She looked at her watch. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. We were seated in her trailer with the curtains pulled shut. Her husband wasn’t due to be home for several hours, but she was already beginning to worry.
* * *
Thermal’s Migrant and Seasonal Head Start center is located in a yellow one-story building across the street from Vega’s office. When I visited, several months after Trump took office, I met the director, Beatriz Machiche, a former farmworker. Down the hallway was an empty classroom with a sheet of paper taped to the door that read, Cerrado hasta nuevo aviso, Jan 2017. They had closed the classroom because they didn’t have enough kids. This time last year, they had a waiting list 200 kids long. Machiche told me she suspected parents no longer wanted to turn over their information to the federal government for fear of being deported. She and her staff had started making trips to the fields to spread the word about their services, but so far, people were reluctant. “Parents say they will come, but they don’t,” she said. In more than a decade at the office, she’d never seen anything like it.
This was one of the harshest consequences of the fear: Immigrants were staying away from the very institutions designed to sustain them and elevate their children. In California, several other agencies that provide Migrant and Seasonal Head Start care reported drops in enrollment last year of between 15 and 20 percent. One of the largest Migrant and Seasonal Head Start grantees in the country is the Texas Migrant Council, which operates in seven states; last year, the number of kids they served dropped 11 percent. In Texas, the number of students assisted through the federally funded Migrant Education Program, which provides assistance to children of migrant farmworkers who face special obstacles accessing education, dropped 22 percent from 2016 to 2017. In California, the drop was 7 percent.
The fear was also causing people to go hungry. After the false Cardenas rumors, Veronica Garcia, who works with Borrego Health, a nonprofit health care provider, was knocking on doors at a trailer park in Thermal. A woman in her 60s told Garcia that many of her neighbors had stopped shopping, convinced that immigration agents were staking out grocery stores. As their cabinets emptied out, she had begun to travel to local distribution sites to collect free food that she’d pass out to grateful families. As she spoke to Garcia, hungry kids walked by her home to pick up peanut butter sandwiches. By the end of the conversation, tears were streaming down the woman’s face.
“She was letting us know how bad it had gotten for everybody there,” said Garcia. “People were too scared to come out at all.” Garcia had previously worked at Coachella Valley’s food bank, Food in Need of Distribution, or FIND. She contacted them and explained the gravity of the situation, and several hours later a truck rolled into the trailer park. Within hours, nearly 200 people had been fed.
Chantel Schuering is the community relations director for FIND, and says that they typically sign up about 3,000 families a year for Medicaid and food stamps. After the election, their numbers dropped by more than half, a trend that lasted into the spring. Across the country, programs that feed the hungry have seen sharp drops in enrollment. In California, the number of participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, dropped 7 percent last year. In Florida, the decrease was even higher, at 9.6 percent. Texas participants were down 7.4 percent.
This was one of the harshest consequences of the fear: Immigrants were staying away from the very institutions designed to sustain them and elevate their children.
Many people I interviewed emphasized that they couldn’t definitively explain the drops in enrollment, but they believed that fear of deportation was a contributing factor. Sometimes, though, the link was direct. After a raid in February 2017 in Woodburn, Oregon, during which ICE picked up two vans of farmworkers, several local families responded by calling the Oregon Child Development Coalition, which provides Migrant and Seasonal Head Start services for the state, to demand that their names be expunged from the database. In Coachella, FIND received numerous calls from residents wanting to learn how to unenroll from food stamps and Medicaid. This February, those fears received confirmation: Reuters reported that the Trump administration was working on new rules to punish immigrants for enrolling their U.S.-born children in Head Start, food stamps, and other programs.
The fear also appears to be causing immigrants to hesitate before they report crimes. Last April, Houston’s police chief announced that the number of Hispanics who reported rape had dropped nearly 43 percent in the first three months, compared to the same period the previous year. During the first six months of the Trump administration, domestic violence reports among Latinos dropped 18 percent in San Francisco, 13 percent in San Diego, and 3.5 percent in Los Angeles. (There was virtually no change in reporting among non-Latinos.) Sarah Stillman, writing in the New Yorker, reported that in one Latino neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, domestic violence reports dropped more than 85 percent in the first eight months of 2017, compared to the previous year, while rape and sexual complaints were down 75 percent.
In the months after the election, people in Coachella altered their daily routines, recalculating risks. Attendance at the largest Catholic Church in the Coachella Valley, Our Lady of Soledad, dipped between 10 to 15 percent. “People [once] felt pretty safe here,” said Father Guy Wilson. “In the new political climate, it’s like they’re going to go after everyone.”
Another woman told me that her husband, an undocumented immigrant, had stopped wearing political T-shirts, which amounted to a subtle erasing of his personality. Others eliminated trips to the movies or to local restaurants, because each journey increased the chance of being stopped by Border Patrol. One afternoon, I rode in the car with an undocumented woman who was picking up her son from a community college class. During the drive she gripped the steering wheel and repeatedly scanned her mirrors for the green-and-white truck of an agent. When we got back to her trailer we both collapsed on the sofa, relieved. This did not feel like a sustainable way to live.
Last April, the Desert Sun, the local newspaper, reported that medical clinics were seeing drops in the number of patient visits. Doug Morin directs Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic that serves individuals without health insurance, filling a gap in a region where the doctor-to-population ratio is more than four times federal recommendations. The clinic once did a brisk business. “Every month and every year, our numbers went up,” Morin told me. In January, when Trump took office, patient visits nose-dived. They had 171 patient visits that month, down from 429 in January of 2016. When we spoke in September, he said visits were down by 25 to 30 percent for the year.
Morin told me of one elderly woman who had come to the office complaining of abdominal pain. She had previously gone to the emergency room of a local hospital, where doctors discovered a mass on her uterus, but because she didn’t have insurance, she was sent on her way. At Morin’s clinic, a physician determined that the mass wasn’t fibroids, a common and treatable condition, but likely a cancerous tumor. As a staff member filled out paperwork to enroll the woman in Emergency Medi-Cal, which is available to undocumented immigrants, the woman’s daughter entered the office.
“She told us, ‘Delete everything!’” said Morin. “She didn’t want her mother’s name or address to be shared with anyone.” They tried to explain the severity of the condition, but the daughter grabbed the paperwork and marched her mother out. “She left so quickly that we weren’t even able to give her mother anything for her pain,” recalled Morin.
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Last year, as winter turned to spring, I stopped byRoberto’s trailer several times and always found him defiant and unafraid. More rumors of raids had swept through the valley, and Roberto’s supervisors had recommended that employees travel in small groups to avoid attracting attention from immigration officials. Roberto saw Border Patrol agents just about every day, sometimes idling behind his car at a red light, other times in line when getting coffee at a nearby market. When I asked him how he felt when he saw a Border Patrol truck in the rear mirror, he shrugged. They were doing their jobs and he was doing his.
He told me that he had lost his fear a decade ago, when his son, Angel, had nearly died. At the time, Angel was 16 and picking grapes near Bakersfield with him. The temperature hit 104 degrees, and Angel began to complain that he felt dizzy and too weak to work. After Roberto insisted that his son be taken to the hospital, the company put Angel in a truck, placed ice bags under his armpits, and brought him to a clinic.
Angel was dropped off at home that evening looking pale and weak. He couldn’t tell his father what kind of treatment — if any — he had received. He spent the night sweating and vomiting in the 14-foot-by-14-foot room that their family of five then shared in their employer’s primitive labor camp. It was only after an organizer with the United Farm Workers drove Angel to the hospital that doctors finally diagnosed him with sunstroke and discovered that he’d been exposed to the West Nile virus. The sunstroke weakened his immune system, likely causing the West Nile to develop into meningitis, an infection that inflames the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Angel went into a coma, and for a time it seemed he might not survive. When he regained consciousness, Roberto greeted his son in the hospital room. Then he stepped into the hallway and kneeled on the ground, overcome.
“That takes your fear away,” he told me. “What can anyone do to me now?” Before, he had been a hard but quiet worker. After Angel’s brush with death, Roberto traveled to Sacramento to share his story and speak out in support of heat protections for farmworkers, which were signed into law in 2005 by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Roberto now stood up to supervisors who disrespected workers; he had also begun to take his phone into the fields, where he videotaped farmworkers speaking about their lives. His oldest daughter, Rosa, was majoring in journalism, and Roberto had become something of a farmworker-journalist himself, uploading the videos he took to Facebook.In one, he addressed Trump directly. “These are the people that the politicians don’t want, but while they sleep at this hour, all these people are working in the fields across California,” he said, as a crew harvested celery stalks in the background. “And a greeting to Donald Trump, who doesn’t want us. I invite him to come here and find out about our work. This here is celery, which gives flavor to this soup.”
It wasn’t hard to find fear in the Coachella Valley, but there was resistance as well. One evening, I visited Jorge Ortiz at his house in Coachella, where he lives with his wife, Ymelda, and their three sons. Their living room was filled with unpacked boxes — they had recently moved — and Ortiz sat on the couch, hunched over and exhausted. The 44-year-old had just arrived home from a long shift as a foreman at a landscaping company. He worked weekends as a caterer, and sometimes picked up the odd gardening or construction job. “I have the same story as everyone else: I was going to stay here two or three years and go back to Mexico,” he told me. That was 17 years ago. When he started to rise at the landscaping company, he sent for his wife and kids instead. Their two oldest kids have DACA, while their third son is a U.S. citizen. Jorge and Ymelda remain undocumented.
Because he refuses to hide his identity when giving media interviews, Ortiz has become one of the most recognizable immigrant activists in the area. One of his landscaping clients is a veterinarian who cares for dogs used by the Border Patrol; Ortiz greets the agents when they arrive. Last year, on May 1, he joined fellow activists at a protest in front of the local Border Patrol station. Just a week earlier, Ortiz and his family had been profiled in a widely watched video made by AJ+ that showcased his activism. “I would like to send a message to my Latino people: show your faces,” he told the camera. It was a stance that made the people around him nervous. At the May protest, another participant insisted Ortiz don a black hat and sunglasses to conceal his face; another walked alongside him to guard against any attempt by border agents to seize him.
Ortiz, I think, could sense that I was struggling to understand his lack of fear. He told me that he had got his start as an activist a decade ago with a group called the Council of Mexican Federations, or COFEM, which helped parents become leaders within Coachella schools. As he became more vocal, other undocumented immigrants starting calling him to ask for his advice, or simply to worry aloud about the future. Since Trump’s election, the calls had skyrocketed, and he had seen how fear could grow until the life you were living didn’t look much like a life at all.
‘I would like to send a message to my Latino people: show your faces,’ he told the camera.
Ortiz admitted that he did, of course, have fear. He didn’t want to be separated from his family, and he wanted his sons to be able to continue their studies in the United States. But he didn’t want to be ruled by fear. So his answer was to push the fear aside and charge forward. “If you call for fear, fear will come,” he told me. “But if you call for faith, faith will also come.”
* * *
On a Saturday in June, I pulled into the driveway of Roberto’s trailer. It was a few minutes past noon and the temperature was on its way to 106. Roberto was outside, in the shade of a carport he had recently built, next to a fence he had recently completed, adjacent to a shed he had cleaned out and converted into a small music studio. He liked to come home from a day in the fields and tinker around out back, as if he’d spent the shift bottled up in an air-conditioned office.
Today, though, he wasn’t working. An accordion was slung over his shoulders and he was squeezing out a melody. Several large jalapeño peppers rested on a nearby folding table, which he had risen before the sun to pick. Roberto often had a playful sparkle in his eye, but now he was positively beaming.
“Rosa graduates from college today,” he said. He put the accordion down, pulled up a stool, and offered me a chair. He would need to clean up soon and head into Los Angeles, but right now he was luxuriating in the moment. Rosa was why they had landed in the United States in the first place. Back in Mexicali, Roberto worked at a bread company called Bimbo, where he monitored a toasting line. When he asked to have a day off for Rosa’s baptism, his supervisor denied the request. Roberto, who had never missed a day of work, went anyway. How could he miss the baptism of his own daughter? For that, the supervisor suspended him for 15 days. Furious, Roberto walked out and never came back.
After that, he hadn’t found steady work, so the family came to the United States on a tourist visa and never went back. As a slight breeze tickled the sweat on my neck — Roberto didn’t sweat, as far as I could tell — he talked about Rosa’s future. He knew that she was a hard worker and had dreams of being a journalist, but he wasn’t sure of her plans after graduation. She moved in a different world already and was rising and happy. That was all he needed to know. “I told her, just because we helped you out, you don’t owe us anything,” he said. “You make your own path and don’t worry about us.”
After half an hour, I left Roberto so that he could go inside and shower. He had picked out a sparkling outfit for the big day: a sleek purple and blue dress shirt, black slacks, white cowboy boots and a matching white tejana, or cowboy hat. Despite the disturbio, his family was moving forward.
* * *
Jose Simo is a soft-spoken counselor at the College of the Desert, a community college in the Coachella Valley that serves as many young people’s path out of the fields. In 2008, he founded Alas Con Futuro, or Wings to the Future, a club to support undocumented students and connect them with scholarships and financial aid. On September 5, the club held its first meeting of the 2017-18 academic year, where they planned to introduce the group to new students. Several hours before they met, Trump announced that he was canceling DACA, and Simo’s phone started buzzing with texts. The meeting turned into a confessional, with students going around the table, sharing their fears, wiping away tears. “People were just devastated,” said Simo. “It was incredibly difficult. Yet I’m always amazed at how resilient the students are. The fifth of September was hard, and the sixth was hard, but by the seventh, they were just going to move forward.”
Several weeks later, Simo was in a meeting room at the college, where two-dozen people had gathered for a DACA clinic. At the front of the room stood Luz Gallegos with a group called TODEC Legal Center. She began the workshop with a story about her first activist campaign, in 1986. Gallegos, at age 7, traveled with her parents to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress on immigration reform. While they had raised enough money for their airfare, they couldn’t afford lodging, so they spent their week in Washington sleeping under a bridge. Each morning they’d clean up at a local church and descend on the Capitol.
Her point was that victory was possible: President Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, had signed an immigration reform bill that legalized the status of nearly three million undocumented immigrants. I’d seen Gallegos in action before, and this was always her message: You could win if you fought. “You are not alone,” she told the students. “You don’t need to have fear, because that’s what they want you to feel. There are so many people behind you, supporting you. Don’t forget that you are the very best of the best, the crème de la crème.”
Trump had announced March 5, 2018, as the official end date for DACA, though recipients whose protections expired before then could apply for another two-year reprieve. The deadline to send in renewals was October 5, and Gallegos was scrambling to reach as many people as she could, giving upward of three workshops a day. She’d once told me that after the election her organization had instituted a policy of self-care to prevent burnout and help staff manage the emotional stress that came with working with a community in crisis. That was five months ago, and she didn’t look like she had taken many days off since. When I asked her about it, she just laughed. Time for rest would come later. She excused herself to help a DACA student fill out her paperwork.
When I swung by Roberto’s trailer, he was uncharacteristically quiet. “Do you think we made a mistake with Dolores?” he asked. In July, his youngest daughter had turned 15, which meant she was eligible to apply for DACA, but Roberto had been hesitant to turn over any more information to the federal government as long as Trump was president. Now even that limited protection was gone. And what about Rosa, whose life after college was just starting to unfold?
“We work, and maybe from the viewpoint of others we look happy,” he said. “But we are uncertain.” He was seated on the couch next to Leticia, who remained quiet throughout, as she often did. The couple looked exhausted. The season had shifted again, and they were now planting celery for $10.50 an hour, a task performed at night to protect the young seedlings from the daytime heat. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” he said, his eyes turned to a soap opera on the television. “Sometimes we get off work at two or three in the morning and we could just be pulled over by immigration and that’s it.” For the first time, he hinted at the prospect of defeat. He spoke of getting older without any retirement savings, of a life without unemployment insurance or health care, of his parents in Mexico, who had both died without him being able to say a proper goodbye. Those were all sacrifices made for the benefit of his kids. Could everything really be wiped away in an instant?
Dolores hadn’t been around during earlier visits, but today she was home and came out of her room to chat. The high school sophomore has long black hair with bangs cut short across her forehead, framing a broad face and bright smile. She was 2 when the family moved to the United States, and except for trips to Bakersfield during the grape harvest, she’s spent her entire life in the trailer park. She told me that her playground was the surrounding desert, where she invented characters and talked to the palm trees. “I would make believe that I was a knight and I would be trying to save princesses,” she said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure my parents thought I had a screw loose.”
Dolores seemed to be taking the news of DACA’s cancellation better than her father. At times she felt lost, and she worried about her sister Rosa, who was her best friend and mentor. Dolores had always dreamed of studying abroad, which now seemed impossible. But she still had the same goal in sight: to attend the University of California at Berkeley. “If I have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m going to do it,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘It’s not hard — it’s time consuming.’” The phrase has become something of a mantra for Dolores, who studies up to five hours a day, writing by hand because the family doesn’t own a computer. Her current class schedule includes AP world history, AP multicultural literature, AP Spanish, math honors, physics, and dance. “You try to get as many AP and honors classes as you can, ’cause they’re going to help you out,” she said, saying she was frustrated Desert Mirage didn’t offer more advanced courses than it did. She’s only ever received A’s.
Dolores told me that she wanted to be the first person in her family to graduate in a white gown, an honor reserved for the 10 best students in the school. She doesn’t yet know what she wants to study. What she knows is that she never wants to step foot in the fields, and that with a good job she can help support her parents. “They work extra hours and are paid so little,” she said. “I know they’re being yelled at. I remember my dad with all of his hands bruised and my mom’s knees aching. They come home so tired.” Behind Dolores, Roberto had fallen asleep on the couch and was snoring gently.
* * *
When I lastvisited Roberto, it was dusk on the day after Thanksgiving and the sky over Coachella had turned a gorgeous purple. Rosa was visiting from Bakersfield, where she had gotten a job advocating for immigrants, and we stood outside the trailer, enjoying the evening breeze as she described her work. She attended protests and wrote articles and would soon be traveling to Washington, D.C., in support of the Dream Act, which, if passed, would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented youth. Roberto stood next to her, smiling.
In the Coachella Valley, fear appeared to be in a moment of retreat. After rumors of raids and massive deportation forces, many people told me that things had entered a period of normalcy. Doug Morin, of Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, said patient visits had rebounded. Enrollment at Migrant and Seasonal Head Start had also bounced back, thanks in part to the aggressive outreach of Beatriz Machiche and her staff. It wasn’t hard, though, to imagine how quickly everything could change. In the first few weeks of 2018, there was a visible increase in Border Patrol agents throughout the Coachella Valley, which led to fresh worries of an enforcement action (though, again, none materialized). In February, as part of a national crackdown on employers, ICE agents visited several local businesses to conduct audits. At one restaurant, a number of customers abruptly left after the ICE agents entered, only returning later in the afternoon to pay their bills. For undocumented families, fear can surface at a moment’s notice.
Shortly after Valentine’s Day, Roberto called with good news: Dolores was ranked eighth in her sophomore class of 516 students, which meant she was on track to graduate wearing white. She had also recently asked her parents to organize a fiesta dequinceañera, the coming-of-age celebration for girls when they turn 15. Dolores had turned 15 last July, but the summer had passed without a party because money had been tight. Money was still tight, of course. But Roberto told me “she has never asked for anything,” and so he and Leticia promised their daughter a big party, setting a date for May. They needed to hire musicians and a videographer, feed everyone, and rent out a space. Roberto estimated it would cost $7,000 to pull it off. He didn’t know where they’d get that kind of money, but he had no doubt that they would. He was nearly 50 years old, but he was a dreamer, too.
This essay is published in collaboration with TMI Project, a non-profit organization offering transformative memoir workshops and performances that invite storytellers and audience members to explore new perspectives. By sharing their personal stories, storytellers become agents of change. Larry told an abbreviated version of this story in the spring of 2017.
I feel my face flush as I consider what I’m about to do. I’m in my kitchen, at the table. This is the sixth or seventh time I’ve done this, in the span of a few years. I pull up the App Store on my phone and type in the word that makes me cringe, and feel oddly exhilarated all at once. The familiar yellow-orange logo appears. I hit the icon to reinstall Grindr on my phone.
I tell myself, This time will be different.
With my new Grindr profile almost complete, I look forward to what I hope will be the fun part — chatting with men. But first I have to fill in the field that describes my body type. The choices in the menu include Toned (I do like the way that sounds), Average (this one just depresses me), Slim (a possibility), and Muscular (despite repeated efforts, I am not). Or I can choose to leave it blank, but when it comes to dealing with anonymous gay men this is not an option. We want to know. I sweat it out for a solid two minutes, then go with Slim.
I ignore, at least for now, the fields of “I’m Looking For” and “My Tribes” which includes a list of descriptive terms such as Bear, Daddy, Leather, Otter, Poz, Rugged, Trans, and Twink. They make my head spin. For my profile picture, I choose a photo of a thin, semi-hairy shirtless man from a Google search, and crop it accordingly. I‘m too embarrassed to show my own chest, with its flaws and lack of definition, and showing my face is simply out of the question.
I pause when I get to the relationship status field. My husband and I have been together for almost 20 years. At the 10-year mark, after much consideration and help from a couple’s therapist, we negotiated the terms of what is now our open relationship. I know I’ll limit my options by selecting Married, but I don’t want to lie and mark Single either. Picking Open Relationship feels like I’m revealing something too personal, soI choose Partnered, and prepare for the influx of inquiries about threesomes — something I don’t do.
I hit “Save” and return to the home screen to start the process of scrolling through men’s profiles to block anyone I know. A neighbor, former customers of mine, cashiers, I block them all with the hope of avoiding any embarrassing exchanges.
I’m barely through my first round of blocking anyone familiar, when I see the red dot indicating I’ve got a new message. It doesn’t take long before I’m tripped up by a young guy who says he’s 22. I’m 45. Read more…
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