The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Made in America
Long before “illegal” was a dirty, demagogued word, Vincente Martinez crossed over from Mexico to work my family’s ranch in Wimberley. A generation later, he and his family are still living happily and working productively in the Hill Country— and that’s a good thing, no matter what the TV screamers say.
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But, he added, “I’m a taxpayer. I pay six or seven thousand dollars a year in taxes, because I’m self-employed.” It would be easy to cheat, he said. He knew other Mexican nationals who did. “I subcontract to them sometimes. I’ll drive into town and see them sitting around, and I’ll say, ‘I need a couple of guys to build a fence.’ And they say, ‘I’ll do it for a hundred dollars a day, and I want lunch, and what time is quitting time?’ These are Mexican laborers. They set the terms now. It upsets me.”
Why did this upset him? Our ranch foreman, a fat country boy named Royce, had not exactly allowed Vicente to set the terms. Often, Royce reminded Vicente that only a man with Leon Jaworski’s clout would be able to get Vicente his immigration papers. My grandfather eventually fired Royce, though only after Vicente had weathered a decade’s worth of racist abuse, at a salary that in 1979 peaked at $350 a month. Wouldn’t he have liked to have been able to have some leverage over Royce?
Vicente insisted that this had never been an issue for him. “I feel content,” he said. “Even though I could’ve made more, I’m satisfied with the outcome. Look, where I came from, in Matehuala? When you’re poor, you’re really poor. We didn’t have electricity or running water. I did mining work for two years as a boy. I made seven to fifteen dollars a week. I’d stay underground for sometimes sixteen hours a day.”
Recently, Vicente said, he had bought a second home at his and Maria’s birthplace. Now they drove to Matehuala at least once a year. Vicente Martinez would show up to town in his shiny pickup truck, wearing a fancy suit. He would give money to old friends and slip a $50 bill to the padrino who had baptized his four children.
“They see me as a man who’s done well,” he said with satisfaction.
I have seen men who have done better, and so has Vicente. They were my grandfather’s friends: lawyers, judges, newspaper publishers, oilmen. During hunting season, they would roll up to Circle J Ranch in their Cadillacs and Lincolns, driving on smoothly paved private country roads, past rows of immaculately carved heart-cedar-post fences—all the handiwork of Mexican migrant workers. A member of the Texas Rangers often showed up to my grandfather’s ranch and casually observed the laborers at work. It’s fair to say that the Ranger did nothing to discourage the activity, just as friendly immigration authorities had done Royce the favor of turning the other way when he drove Vicente’s family into America in 1972. The civic titans of Texas who visited my grandfather’s ranch were aware of what was going on. Men like these saw to it that the border, and the laws governing it, would remain a joke.
These men would shoot their hunting rifles all day long and then sit under the stars and drink while Vicente plucked the turkeys or skinned the deer. The men admired Vicente’s old-world comportment. The keenness in his stare, the sureness of his grip. They comforted themselves with the belief that the Mexican seemed to find even lowly work ennobling, and they would tip him well. And the next morning they would go home to their mansions, whose lawns were tended by other uncomplaining Hispanic gentlemen, each of whom would probably be doing this type of work forever so that his children would not have to.
That was the catch in Vicente’s voice I was picking up on at his dinner table. He was not an idiot. A horse trainer, attuned to the elemental, he knew condescension when he saw it. And he knew that, though the opportunity here was far superior to the choices he faced in Mexico, he was not getting paid what a white man might. Both sides understood that this inequality—made possible by the transaction’s unlawfulness—was key to the deal. Because of the cheap labor offered by migrants of modest yet unsinkable ambition like Vicente Martinez, men of means but not of obscene wealth could afford fine lawns, fine ranches, loyal domestic help. And a man like my grandfather could buy thirty broodmares and a stud, churn out foals, and then rely on a Mexican horse whisperer to transform each unruly baby into a poised nine-month-old commodity. Hay, tack, barn equipment—the horse operation would ripple through the economy in a variety of ways, and no one would be hurt by it.
Men like Vicente were the straws stirring the drink. Yet men are what they were—bored and lonely, with families down south. They had but one chip to play: I will accept my lot if you will help me give my children a better one. And so the titans would make arrangements. And a two-door Monte Carlo driven by a fat white man with seemingly no passengers would roll across the border, undeterred, at 30 miles an hour, while on the floorboards a pregnant woman and three little boys crouched with heads down, chewing on cheese crackers and wondering about the ranch that would be their new home.
TO STATE THE OBVIOUS: They were different from us, these three dusty brown-skinned boys and their ominously pregnant mother who simply materialized one day at our family refuge. Now that they had arrived, none of us were sure what would happen next. What exactly would they be doing here? How long would they stay? Yet over time the Martinezes proved themselves to be virtuosos of unobtrusiveness. Somehow the three boys—Carlos, Raudel, and Rene—all learned English on the fly, within a year of being smuggled here. They served as preteen interpreters for Vicente when his supple gestures failed to convey the nuance of this horse’s sickliness or that fence’s state of disrepair. We caught glimpses of the boys at the barn—where they slept in the tack room—and of Christina wandering with Maria to gather cactuses to boil for their dinner. In my state of adolescent self-absorption, it didn’t occur to me that they had been instructed by their parents to stay out of sight, to keep their mouths shut and their noses clean or otherwise the entire Martinez family would be shipped back to Mexico, where they would live in poverty forever. Though my uncle had obtained an H1B visa for the Martinezes a few years after their arrival, they continued to believe that the illegal circumstances of their arrival made deportation an imminent possibility—and wanting to keep Vicente in line, our caretaker Royce did nothing to discourage their fear.
The unintended effect of my grandfather’s guest-worker program was that the Martinez children could not behave like brats, the way his own grandchildren did. On their four-hundred-acre buffer from the outside world, the Martinezes learned about horses and droughts and scorpions, but not about the TV shows their classmates watched. They never went to a movie theater. They didn’t hang out at malls. They didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Their Christmas gifts came courtesy of the Blue Santa charity truck. Their parents, being illiterate in English, never helped them with their homework or attended parent-teacher conferences. Whenever any of them voiced complaint, Vicente or Maria got in their face: We are sacrificing our lives for you.
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