direct confrontations with criminal gangs, and focus on devising policies to prevent violence and crime on the local level.
Four months later, Marisol began receiving the usual threats. She chose to leave the country, turning herself in to an immigration agent and applying for asylum.3 Her husband, her parents, her two sisters, and her infant son were with her, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and their birth certificates. After spending a few days in a U.S. immigration detention center, they were released to live with relatives, ten people in one house. Eight months later, they still had not been granted permission to work, which was usually granted to applicants while their asylum cases are wending their way through the courts.
When questioned by the media about Marisol’s departure, the mayor’s office in Práxedis Guerrero denied that she had received any threats, asserting that she had asked to take a week off for personal reasons and that she would be fired if she did not return to work. The governor of Chihuahua, César Duarte, went further, accusing Marisol of exploiting her “fame” to move to the United States, thereby damaging Chihuahua’s image, and insinuating that she had left her job due to romantic problems. Then Carlos Spector took her case.
That the morals of people leaving their country to stay alive are questioned infuriates Carlos. He maintains that government authorities seeking to protect their reputation are as guilty of this practice as the news media. After Marisol’s departure, for example, “an article was published saying she had been planning to come to the United States ever since she was a little girl, because she wore Polo T-shirts when she was seven or eight.” He smiles wryly, shaking his head. “I’m proud to have such far-sighted clients.” Even some human rights groups, he says, “view people who apply for political asylum as abandoning the fight for Mexico. Maybe they would rather see them die in Mexico. To them, that is a good Mexican: someone who gives their life, not someone who tries to save it through political asylum.” Marisol’s case was eventually closed: she obtained a work permit but was not granted political asylum.
After deciding to focus on asylum cases, the Spector family established the organization Mexicans in Exile for Mexicans arriving in the El Paso area, fleeing violence in Chihuahua and bringing their cases to Carlos’s law practice. The group’s goal is not just to win asylum but also to denounce the violence in Mexico, to provide guidance and support to those fleeing the country, and to demand justice from the Mexican authorities for all of the unsolved murders and disappearances. Just as the organization was getting off the ground in 2012, Carlos was dealt a tremendous blow: he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and tongue and nearly died.
“I couldn’t talk or eat,” Carlos recalls. “Either someone wanted to shut me up, or to send me a message … I got the chance to taste death, through chemotherapy and radiation … I realized life is very short, and you have to do something that fills your soul … I didn’t go to law school so I could make a lot of money; I went to make justice. And when I was so sick, Carlos Gutiérrez came to me—his legs had been cut off—telling me, ‘You can do it.’ And Saúl Reyes, whose brothers had been killed, telling me, ‘Don’t give up.’ They helped me to see that we are making a difference. They are saving our souls.”
On February 2, 2007, a group of about fifty people in fifteen cars, led by the San Diego–based pro-immigrant organization Border Angels (Angeles de la Frontera), gathered in San Ysidro, California, at the westernmost point of the U.S.-Mexico border. A fence made of rectangular bars spaced just far enough apart for an arm to pass through separated the two countries. Now, those spaces between the bars are covered with metallic mesh that barely allows a finger to pass through. This site is popularly known as “la esquina de Latinoamérica,” or “the corner of Latin America”: the northernmost point along the continent that those of us growing up in Mexico and all points south of it were taught to call ours.
The group was about to start the Migrant March, a two-week trip making stops at the main border cities in both the United States and Mexico, ending in Brownsville, Texas, at the easternmost point on the border. The goal was to gather stories from people who lived on one side of the line or the other, talking about how immigration reform could benefit them and how a wall between the two countries would affect their daily lives. A few months earlier, the numerous pro-immigrant marches of 2006 had put the immigration issue back in the political spotlight. As a result, in 2007 Congress was debating a legislative initiative that would permit the construction of a contiguous wall running along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border.1
The imaginary line that begins at the Pacific Ocean runs for 3,326 kilometers, or 1,989 miles—according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed by the two countries in 1848—and ends where the Río Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Passing through water, over mountains, and through the desert, and often marked by sections of cement wall topped with razor wire (remnants of different moments in history), the border is a long, meandering scar tarnishing landscapes, forests, and neighboring communities that have never been divided in practice. One could stop anywhere along the border and see that on both sides, the water does not change color, the dry land gives rise to the same dust, the wind sweeps from one side to the other, seeping through the bars, drifting back again. The longer one travels along it, the more senseless the imaginary line becomes.
As we know, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants come through the border every year, as well as 350,000 people who cross legally. One way or the other, this line has the power to erase or recreate one’s identity. Tell me how, why, when, where, and in which direction you crossed the line, and I will tell you who you are.
The group participating in the Migrant March chose February 2 to begin their journey: the day of the celebration of the Virgin of Candelaria in Mexico. It is also the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the end of the Mexican-American War (1846 to 1848). With the signing of the treaty, Mexico ceded to the United States territory that included present-day California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
The treaty established arbitrary dividing lines between California and Baja California, Sonora and Arizona, New Mexico and western Chihuahua. It was decided that the Río Grande would serve as the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and eastern Chihuahua. Areas like Paso del Norte, which for centuries had served as an intermediary point, providing protection, rest, and supplies to travelers heading north to New Mexico or south to Chihuahua, Zacatecas, or Mexico City, suddenly became border towns.
But the border between Mexico and the United States is more than just a line on a map, and its construction did not begin with the signing of a treaty. It is the product of a long chain of actions and complex relationships affected by political, cultural, racial, economic, military, and security interests, and by the dynamics of social groups living on both sides. The border is a laboratory that legitimizes and excludes; one side defines the other, reaffirming and reinforcing differences.
Historian Carlos González Herrera has studied the phenomenon of the border’s construction more than perhaps anyone else. In his book La frontera que vino del norte, the author explains how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the geopolitical dividing lines between the United States and Mexico were established as the binational relationship between the two developed, designating people as “legal” or “alien.” Herrera starts his analysis in the El Paso—Juárez border region.
Like other old cities in the southwestern United States, the area around what
