her about the sound documentary my husband and I were almost finished working on. We had not yet sampled Trique—it was a rare language to come by. She agreed, hesitantly, and when we met in the park next to the school a few days later, she said she would ask for one thing in exchange for this. She had two older daughters—eight and ten years old—who had just arrived in the country, crossing the border on foot, and were being held in a detention center in Texas. She needed someone to translate their documents from Spanish into English, at little or no cost, so she could find a lawyer to defend them from being deported. I agreed, without knowing what I was getting myself into.
PROCEDURES
First it was just translating legal papers: the girls’ birth certificates, vaccination records, one school report card. Then there was a series of letters written by a neighbor back home and addressed to Manuela, giving a detailed account of the situation there: the untamable waves of violence, the army, the gangs, the police, the sudden disappearances of people—mostly young women and girls. Then, one day, Manuela asked me to go to a meeting with a potential lawyer.
The three of us met in a waiting room in the New York City Immigration Court. The lawyer followed a brief questionnaire, asking questions in English that I translated into Spanish for Manuela. She told her story, and the girls’ story. They were all from a small town on the border of Oaxaca and Guerrero. About six years ago, when the younger of the two girls turned two and the older was four, Manuela left them in their grandmother’s care. Food was scant; it was impossible to raise the girls with so little, she explained. She crossed the border, with no documents, and settled in the Bronx, where she had a cousin. She found a job, started sending money back. The plan was to save up quickly and return home as soon as possible. But she got pregnant, and life got complicated, and the years started speeding by. The girls were growing up, talking to her on the telephone, hearing stories about snow falling, about big avenues, bridges, traffic jams, and, later, about their baby brother. Meanwhile, the situation back home became more and more complicated, became unsafe, so Manuela asked her boss for a loan, and paid a coyote to bring the girls over to her.
The girls’ grandmother prepared them for the trip, told them it would be a long journey, packed their backpacks: Bible, water bottle, nuts, one toy each, spare underwear. She made them matching dresses, and the day before they left, she sewed Manuela’s telephone number on the collars of the dresses. She had tried to get them to memorize the ten digits, but the girls had not been able to. So she sewed the number on the collars of their dresses and, over and over, repeated a single instruction: they should never take their dresses off, never, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American, be it a policeman or a normal person, they had to show the inside of the collar to him or her. That person would then dial the number sewed on the collars and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.
And it did, except not quite as planned. The girls made it safely to the border, but instead of taking them across, the coyote left them in the desert in the middle of the night. They were found by Border Patrol at dawn, sitting by the side of a road near a checkpoint, and were placed in a detention center for unaccompanied minors. An officer telephoned Manuela to tell her that the girls had been found. His voice was kind and gentle, she said, for a Border Patrol officer. He told her that normally, according to the law, children from Mexico and Canada, unlike children from other countries, had to be sent back immediately. He had managed to keep them in detention, but she was going to need a lawyer from now on. Before he hung up, he let her speak to the girls. He gave them five minutes. It was the first time since they’d left on the journey that she’d heard their voices. The older girl spoke, told her they were okay. The younger one only breathed into the phone, said nothing.
The lawyer we met with that day, after listening to Manuela’s story, said sorry, she could not take on their case. She said the case was not “strong enough,” and gave no further explanation. Manuela and I were escorted out of the courtroom, along corridors, down elevators, and out of the building. We walked out onto Broadway, into the late morning, and the city was buzzing, the buildings high and solid, the sky pristine blue, the sun bright—as if nothing catastrophic were happening. I promised I’d help her figure it out, help her get a good lawyer, help in any way possible.
JOINT FILING
Spring came, my husband and I filed our taxes, and we delivered our material for the soundscape project. There were over eight hundred languages in New York City, and after four years of work, we had sampled almost all of them. We could finally move on—to whatever came next. And that was exactly what happened: we started to move on. We were moving forward, but not quite together.
I had gotten involved further with the legal case against Manuela’s two girls. A lawyer at a nonprofit had finally agreed to take on their case and, although the girls were still not with their mother, they had at least been transferred from a brutal, semi-secure detention facility in Texas to a supposedly more humane setting—a former Walmart supercenter converted into an immigration detention center for minors, near Lordsburg, New Mexico. To keep up with the case, I had been studying a bit more about immigration law, attending hearings in court, talking to lawyers. Their case was one among tens of thousands of similar ones across the country. More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.
At that time, the radio and some newspapers were slowly starting to feature stories about the wave of undocumented children arriving in the country, but none of them seemed to be covering the situation from the perspective of the children involved in it. I decided to approach the director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. I presented a rough idea of how to narrate the story from a different angle. After some back-and-forth, and a few concessions on my part, she agreed to help me fund a sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border. Not a big production: just me, my recording instruments, and a tight time line.
I initially hadn’t noticed, but my husband had also started to work on a new project. First, it was just a bunch of books about Apache history. They piled on his desk and on his bedside table. I knew he’d always been interested in the subject, and he often told the children stories about Apaches, so it wasn’t strange that he was reading all those books. Then, maps of Apache territory and images of chiefs and warriors started filling the walls around his desk. I began to sense that what had been a lifelong interest was becoming formal research.
What are you working on? I asked him one afternoon.
Just some stories.
About?
Apaches.
Why Apaches? Which ones?
He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they’d been the last Apache leaders—moral, political, military—of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender. It was, of course, a more than compelling reason to undertake any kind of research, but it wasn’t quite the reason I was waiting to hear.
Later, he started referring to that research as a new sound project. He bought some bankers boxes and filled them with stuff: books, index cards full of notes and quotes, cutouts, scraps, and maps, field recordings and sound surveys he found in public libraries and private archives, as well as a series of little brown notebooks where he wrote daily, almost obsessively. I wondered how all of that would eventually be translated into
