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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Over time, they became gangly adolescents themselves. Though each of them had gained popularity through the universal currency of school athletics, the Martinez kids were becoming discrete individuals before our eyes. Of the boys, one was emerging as a ladies’ man. Another was affable and unaffected, while the third was the opposite, occasionally seen brooding by the lake amid a pile of beer cans, seemingly haunted by his family’s ghostly status here.
Christina was the quintessential good girl, bright and unflappable. Her success seemed preordained. But even as the family’s sole American, Christina’s fate rested on the rickety imperatives of the “arrangement.” One night she heard her mother telling a Mexican friend, “If we get deported, I’m not leaving her behind. We’re not going to separate the family.”
YEAR AFTER YEAR, the immigration attorneys hired by our family slowly worked the process. My grandfather had to prove to the government that Vicente Martinez’s value to the horse operation was unique, that his talents could not be replicated by the average American. His job had to be offered to applicants in area newspapers. A day finally came in 1981 when the Martinezes were informed that their papers awaited them in Monterrey, Mexico. After almost a decade of waiting, they weren’t sure whether to believe it. They packed for a week-long trip, wondering all the same if they would ever see the ranch and the rest of their belongings again. From Wimberley, they drove more than three hundred miles to Monterrey. The six of them waited for hours in a crowded, cold office. On the second day they were there, their name was called.
Vicente stared at the papers for a while. Of course, he could make no sense of them. Since they were already in Mexico, Maria wanted to visit her mother in Matehuala for the first time in a decade. Not yet, said Vicente. He told the family to climb into the truck. Then he drove north, toward the borderline.
At the checkpoint, Vicente held out the papers for the border guard to inspect. The Martinezes, long experts in the art of silence, barely breathed as the government official studied the papers they themselves could not understand.
The man handed the papers back to Vicente and waved them through.
Vicente drove into America. Turned around after a couple of blocks. Then headed south again. That day in Matehuala, there would be a fiesta.
THE NEXT YEAR, in December 1982, while chainsawing cedar brush at the ranch, my grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack. The funeral in Houston was a montage of grief and power. President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, James Baker, was there. So was U.S. Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell. So was Vice President George Bush.
When Vicente’s Ford Lariat pickup truck pulled up to First Presbyterian Church just before the funeral service, a swarm of Secret Service agents descended upon its six brown-skinned inhabitants. The Martinezes were told that they could not go inside. Then someone—I believe it was my aunt Joanie—interceded. “They’re sitting up front with us,” she told the agents.
“I shook the vice president’s hand,” Carlos recalled with a grin as he chewed on a steak in a restaurant halfway between Austin and Wimberley. “He asked me if I knew Leon. He said, ‘He was a great man.’”
Carlos couldn’t ascertain if George Herbert Walker Bush was wondering how this Mexican kid knew Leon Jaworski. Nor did he care. The vice president’s hand! It was a clean thrill, untainted by any fear. Now Vicente’s son found himself imagining that a life of some distinction might be his one day as well. Or if not, it might come to his eldest daughter, who today is in college and on track to become the first in the Martinez family tree to accrue a degree. Meanwhile, Carlos has had a good job in the Austin bedroom community of Dripping Springs for the past fourteen years. His charitable work resulted in a photo op with Governor Rick Perry. People told me that he was highly respected in Wimberley.
Of course, turning Vicente’s children into productive Americans wasn’t why my grandfather had hatched his guest-worker scheme. Then again, those of us who watched their path to legitimacy unfold aren’t shocked by the outcome. Market forces and the fear of legal retribution made honest brokers out of everyone involved despite the laws on the books. The least savory aspect—the demeaning nature of invisibility—could have been overcome if Congress had stepped in and ratified our crude construct with an aboveboard guest-worker program.
We’re still waiting. Today, a meanness has overtaken the language of the immigration debate. The illegals in our midst are viewed as pests and leeches whose arrival on this side of the border was no more solicited than the presence of a cockroach in our soup.
My family can’t account for this hatred. We can only account for the Martinezes. They are all legal. They all work and pay taxes. They own homes and go to church. They have committed no felonies. They wish for their children—who speak English and attend public schools—a life that much better than the life their own parents sacrificed fiercely to provide for them. If the Martinezes are in any way distinguishable from anyone else in the American middle class, it is because they are somewhat less entitled, less ungrateful. Somewhat, may I venture to suggest, better.
I SHOWED UP TO CARLOS’S GROCERY store the day after we had dined at his parents’ place. He wore a tie and a dress shirt and was patiently explaining to a distressed elderly woman—obviously a frequent customer—that the product she had ordered would be arriving soon. Carlos threw a quick wave when he saw me, a polite way of saying that he was busy for the moment. Then he returned to his conversation with the customer. He must have spent ten minutes with her. I thought of Vicente’s attention to the grooming of our horses. He still kept pictures of some of them at his house in Wimberley, even though they had long been out of his care.
Carlos eventually broke free and told his assistants that he was taking a lunch break. For the next hour, I sat across the table from this big, round-faced fellow with his father’s expressive hands. He talked about the great pride he felt running a grocery store. The steady profits, the loyal customer base, the employees. A few of the latter were from down south—all legal, of course. Carlos had the same question about them that the rest of us do: Do they want to do right by America?
“I tell the Hispanic guys we hire, ‘You’ve got the same opportunity I do.’ They look at me in my shirt and tie like I’m white. I write letters for ’em. I help ’em send their money back to Mexico by Western Union.”
Carlos let those facts and all they implied settle in for a moment. Then he said, “I’ve got this one guy, Raul. He told me he wanted to go to the immigrant rally in Austin. I warned him. I said, ‘You know, Raul, at the march, you could get arrested and get hurt.’
“But I could tell he really wanted to. So I told him, ‘Go ahead. Don’t worry about your work.’”
Carlos Martinez said these words as my grandfather might have. He was El Patrón now.
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