The time to leave home, family, and everything I knew in this world had arrived. There was no need to be afraid or to think that I couldn’t do it. All I needed to take with me was Tata Juan and Nana Maria’s lasting guidance and everything that I’d been blessed to learn in my eighteen years. That, and the sixty-five American dollars I had to my name.
As I devised the strategy I planned to execute, auspiciously, on New Year’s Day, 1987, I spent the hours before dawn sitting outside in the darkness without a star in the sky. My thoughts wound back to my trips to the mountains with Tata Juan as we made our way to the little town of Rumorosa, along the steep edges of the Sierras. I remembered how dangerous the road was and the fact that many cars had fallen down the cliffs in terrible weather and in other mishaps. And yet my grandfather had chosen not the safest route but the one that provided the most interesting little stops along the way. While Tata was as eager to get to the cabin as I was, he didn’t agree with me that the shortest and most direct route between two points was best. He wanted to show me what I would miss if I focused only on my destination.
Desperate situations—like the one in which I found myself on the eve of my nineteenth birthday—require desperate choices. Having made my decision, I couldn’t allow any regrets or second thoughts to deter me. Don’t look back, I told myself. I had to go forward to find my destiny, crossing the border fence to see where the path on the other side would take me. I had to act boldly, decisively, and immediately. And I had to climb to the top and jump.
THREE The Kaliman Maneuver
How did I do it?
Even today, I’m not sure how I managed to jump the fence to start a new life in California. Throughout the years since then, I have often said that I was propelled by a combination of audacity and naivety. Why else would I defy gravity and risk injury, incarceration, and even death to cross the border? Without a certain degree of ignorance about all the things that could go wrong, it would have been much harder to screen out disabling thoughts. If I had been more realistic and had considered the pitfalls in greater depth, I might not have made the journey at all.
But I was not entirely blind to the risk I was taking on that New Year’s Day in 1987. When I watched the sun rise over the fields of home for possibly the last time, I was fully aware that the strategy I’d crafted during the night might fail. If anything, life had taught me not to be afraid of failure. What made me more afraid was not trying to embrace the world just beyond my reach. My fear was that I would not go for it, not give it my very best shot. And that wasn’t audacity or lack of worldly experience. It came from the belief that I had valuable assets to offer—my passion (Quiñones stubbornness) and boundless energy, even if I didn’t yet know how to harness it in a meaningful way.
These resources likewise came into play in my approach to crossing the border without documentation. Certainly, desperation added fuel to the fire. But the scientist inside me was also already at work. Remembering Tata Juan’s advice, I realized that I had to veer off the well-traveled path to build a promising future. And anticipating the advice of the great scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose writing would influence me greatly in my career, I knew instinctually that I needed to think clearly, plan my strategy carefully, and never give up. Of course, having just put away my school books to prepare for full-time work at the lowest rungs of agriculture, I would have laughed at the notion that I could become a scientist one day—let alone a neuroscientist.
Not that my plan was perfect. As any science-minded person could have told me, most real breakthroughs come about through a process of trial and error, repetition and adaptation, imaginative leaps, and—even though we are not supposed to admit it in the scientific world—the all-important commodity of good luck.
Indeed, there was nothing very scientific about my decision to defy the conventional wisdom that the safest way to get across without capture by the border patrol was to make a hole at the bottom of the fence or tunnel under it. According to lore, if not fact, people who attempted to scale the fence, as I planned to do, and then tangled with the barbed wire were the ones who sustained the worst injuries, and some even died. Although armed vigilantes were not prevalent at the time, most of the stories about shooting fatalities at the border involved people who had been trying to go over the fence rather than under it.
Perhaps it was the underdog in me—the boy who was used to being challenged and who wanted to do things differently—that opted to go the dangerous route. And being of a rebellious mind-set anyway, I found no allure in going the easier way—or so I tried to explain to Gabriel, Fausto, and Oscar on the evening of January 1, as the sun began to set during our drive to the drop-off point in Mexicali.
“Doc, you’re crazy!” cousin Oscar scoffed from the back seat of my Thunderbird, where he sat next to Gabriel. “Nobody jumps the fence.” What he meant but didn’t need to say was that nobody jumped the fence in the middle of Calexico. Actually, lots of people found remote stretches of the fence to climb. But attempting to do so in the middle of town was so bold as to be nuts.
From the front passenger seat, I glanced over at Fausto, who was behind the wheel. In his kind, intelligent fashion, Fausto suggested, “Well, I think we’re using the word ‘jump’ as a euphemism, right Freddy?”
“Exactly.” Then I explained that my move would, in fact, be more of a Spiderman climb up the eighteen-foot fence, followed by a hop over the barbed wire and a leap toward foreign soil—culminating in a flying descent and a pantherlike, spring-loaded landing, reminiscent of the Kaliman maneuver that I’d never mastered.
Although Oscar and Gabriel expressed misgivings about this outlandish plan, we were all pumped by the excitement of the undertaking.
For all the risk that the gravity-defying portion of the crossing would entail, the rest of the plan was much tamer and had fewer potential pitfalls. Or so I insisted while explaining that Fausto should stop the car a few blocks from the stretch of border fence where I would attempt “the maneuver.”
Fausto would then drive west the three miles or so to the main crossing gate where cars went from Mexico into the United States and, from there, slowly make his way through the streets of Calexico to our designated meeting place behind the house of one of our relatives. My intention, the moment I landed on the other side of the fence, was to race off in an entirely opposite direction from the Thunderbird, kill some time in order to lose the trail of any suspicious border agents, and eventually wind back to our spot. From there, after we made it out of town and onto the highway, the plot would thicken as we implemented a few measures to avoid the immigration checkpoints—which actually posed the biggest obstacle for most border crossings.
Today, with the many changes in technology, many more checkpoints along numerous transportation channels, and much tougher measures along the U.S.-Mexico border, this plan of mine would not work—for good reasons. Immigration issues have grown much more complicated, and we have much work to do in figuring out how to reach fair-minded reform with all of those considerations.
In some respects, however, things haven’t so much changed as they have intensified, including economic extremes in both developing and developed countries. For the poor and the powerless, literal hunger and a quest for opportunity are enough to compel them to risk everything, even their lives, to cross the border. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant resentment has grown too, mainly against the poor, undocumented workers who provide cheap labor.
As I would learn later on, developed countries will always welcome the Einsteins of this world—those individuals whose talents are already recognized and deemed to have value. This welcome doesn’t usually extend to poor and uneducated people seeking to enter the country. But the truth, supported by the facts of history and the richness of the immigrant contribution to America’s distinction in the world, is that the most entrepreneurial, innovative,
