making them feel welcome. In comes Martín Huéramo, forty-six, a trusted political ally of the Reyes brothers back in Guadalupe, and like a brother to Saúl. When the Reyes family moved to Fabens in 2013, Martín was already there. With a powerful build, a complexion tanned from the sun, and a thick mustache framing a gentle smile, Martín had been doing well in Guadalupe. His family, originally from Michoacán, had moved to Guadalupe when he was just a boy. Like everyone who grew up in Juárez Valley then, Martín remembers a time of plenty, when hard work paid off. Skilled in construction, Martín built himself three houses in Guadalupe. He sold one in order to come to Fabens.
“They weren’t fancy houses, just the typical kind of house in Juárez Valley,” he says, humbly. Martín wears a checkered shirt typical of the working-class men in the area, and even though he has lived in Texas for three years, when he talks his accent is 100 percent Chihuahua.
Since he had always owned the houses where he lived, Martín set about searching for a plot of land to build a house on when he arrived in the United States. But a few days into his search, he got the first hard dose of reality that often greets new arrivals: the value of Mexican currency plummets the minute you cross the border.
“What had been my whole life’s work had no value here,” Martín explains, dejected. “I was basically illiterate, I didn’t know the language and I couldn’t write. I had to start all over, like a child.”
A few minutes before the clock strikes midnight, as the women put the final touches on the meal, Saúl and Martín talk. Martín comments on the sheer magnitude of the migration from Juárez to El Paso. Because of the politics specific to border cities, many people on the Mexican side have a document that allows them to cross back and forth. Others are U.S. citizens or have children who are. In the face of growing violence and the resulting crisis in Juárez Valley and in the capital city of Chihuahua, people are coming over to El Paso and deciding to stay put. The effects of the growing numbers of exiles have become apparent within just a few months, Martín says, including overcrowding in schools from the influx of new students and heavier traffic on the highways connecting El Paso to the surrounding suburbs.
One of those suburbs is Fabens. It’s something of a paradox that, of all the places to migrate, these natives of Guadalupe have settled in a town that’s the mirror image of where they came from. When I ask Saúl and Martín if the similarity convinced them to stay in Fabens, they both smile. Saúl assures me that they live in Fabens simply because it’s cheaper than other places.
I met Sara Salazar de Reyes for the first time in a Chinese restaurant in El Paso, the same day I met Saúl, Gloria, and their children. Doña Sara was seventy-nine, with a vacant stare. She is polite and smiles cordially to everyone, but her eyes are blank—the emptiness death leaves behind.
Almost a year later, I see Sara for the second time, at the New Year’s dinner at Saúl’s trailer home. At the stroke of midnight we are all sitting around the table, with Saúl’s rosca de reyes, or three kings’ bread, which he baked that afternoon at the supermarket bakery where he works. As the head of the family, Saúl thanks everyone for their friendship and for coming to dinner. He also gives thanks simply for being alive, and says that he hopes the new year will be the best one yet. The clock strikes twelve, announcing the arrival of 2014, and everyone starts hugging each other. Doña Sara goes over to a little side table to look at some family photos displayed there and starts to cry. She does not stop for quite a while. A decorative wall hanging reads, “The love of a family is life’s greatest blessing.” Later, Sara tells me that when her son Eleazar was diagnosed with cancer, she told everyone, “It is forbidden to die before I do.”
The next morning everyone gets together again for a breakfast of leftovers from the night before, and Gloria cooks some more. The women play dominoes at the table, while Doña Sara invites me to come back to her little room to talk. There, surrounded by photos of all of her children, she tells me about each one of them. Her daughter Elba died in childbirth, and Sara raised Elba’s son, Ismael, like one of her own. Rubén, her son, was a good man; he had been walking to the store to buy milk for his workers when he was killed. Josefina was closest to her mother; Sara went along with her to the demonstrations, the protests, the meetings with other activists. “Just imagine, me and my daughter are having coffee, and just an hour later they tell me she has been killed. It was very hard,” she says, letting out a sob.
Sara tells me how painful it was to see Saúl in those first days of exile. When she first arrived in El Paso, the family was still living in a shelter. “When I got there, I found my son eating a piece of stale bread,” she says. “It broke my heart.”
“I always went along with my children in everything we did,” she recalls of the family’s activism in Mexico. “After they killed my grandson, we stepped up protests against the police, the soldiers. When the soldiers came, that’s when our martyrdom began. We started to protest, to get people together to demand the soldiers be withdrawn, but my children started to fall.” She weeps openly. “The last thing, which was hardest for me, was the kidnapping of Elías and Malena. I don’t mean it wasn’t hard with my other children—as each one fell, a piece of my heart was lost—but with them I had nothing left.”
Sara had not wanted to come to the United States, but had been left without a choice when Saúl began receiving threats. “If you stay here, they’re going to come after you to find out where I am,” Saúl told her. Now she says she probably would not return to Mexico. “We don’t have anything left there anymore,” she says. “They burned it all down.”
Through Doña Sara’s window you can see laundry hanging out to dry on the clotheslines. On sunny days, like that New Year’s Day in 2014, the clothes dry quickly. But when the wind picks up and gusts from the south, everything gets covered in dust. The desert is wily.
Carlos Spector, Attorney-at- Law for Impossible Cases
I first meet Carlos Spector, a lawyer, in early 2013 at ¡Ándale!, a restaurant in El Paso with a logo of a fat man in a sombrero eating tacos. Stepping inside is like walking into a garish street fair, with fake cast-iron bars over fake windows and fake serenades. An overweight Joan Sebastian impersonator performs for a sparse audience, who silently beg him to stop. Carlos’s wife Sandra greets me warmly at the door, and we look for a table as far as possible from the “entertainment.”
A longtime social activist, Sandra works for a Texas labor union. She is sixty years old, but youthful and vivacious; only a few lines on her face hint at her age. Her eyes sparkle, her black hair shines, and she gestures enthusiastically with her hands. She wears boots over slim-fitting pants and two sweaters—it’s a chilly desert night in January. Even though her first language is English, Sandra speaks with me in Spanish.
A few minutes later Carlos walks over with a firm step and joins us. His appearance catches me off guard. I have seen him before in photos and videos, with a robust frame, deep voice, and impassioned way of speaking that lent him an imposing air. The Carlos in front of me has the same wavy sandy hair, pale complexion, strong nose, mustache, sideburns, and somewhat uneven beard, but is someone else: thirty pounds lighter, the skin on his face hanging slack around squinty eyes, his voice raspy, tired. Sandra tells me that her husband was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx a few months before. He is recovering from an aggressive course of radiation treatment.
Carlos asks for a glass of water without ice and starts to talk, gesturing with his hands for emphasis. He’s an effective orator: like a preacher, but without the arrogance. He smiles and speaks with passion. In recent months, all of his time and energy have been consumed by a particular kind of case: Mexicans
