It Took a Village 
Letter From West Texas
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Demolishing the footbridge that connected Candelaria to the Mexican town of San Antonio del Bravo was supposed to put a dent in drug traffic and illegal immigration. Instead it’s made life even tougher for citizens of this desolate corner of Big Bend.
BK says: Its sad, but the reality is that times have changed. We used to cross (1980's)at Boquillas walk across or get pulled across from BBNP in a boat for a $1. Head over to the Park Bar and have a beer and tacos. It was an out of "National Geographic" experience. Today I read in the local So. Cal. paper 135 murders in Tijuana since Sept alone. Go SRSU. (October 21st, 2008 at 3:19pm)
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Peña, like his neighbors, was sympathetic to the Border Patrol’s challenge. Still, its overwhelming task sometimes proved too absurd for him to restrain the occasional joke. Recently, agents had stopped him and asked if he had crossed. Peña replied with a laugh, “I tried, but the river was too full of people.”
With or without a footbridge, it is possible to scrape by in Candelaria. On plots surrounded by dirt and rocks, small one-story structures are rented to residents for $65 to $100 a month. For centuries, before the invasive, water-sucking salt cedar choked out the indigenous plants and dams up the river turned a mighty watercourse into a scrawny rivulet, this land was farmable. Not so anymore. Though jobs are few and far between, several women work as home health care providers, and some men help out on local ranches.
But the bridge’s removal did have effects, especially for the elderly. On my first day in Candelaria, I visited with Olivia Lozano, a sort of village matriarch. Like the walls of other living rooms I saw in town, hers were covered with framed photos of babies, weddings, young men in the U.S. armed services, and family members who were as likely to reside in San Antonio del Bravo as Candelaria. “I cried,” she said. “It’s like they cut the heart out of the two communities.” For years Candelaria residents like her depended on San Antonio del Bravo’s free health clinic. The trek straight across the Rio Grande on the bridge took 20 minutes walking, an easy enough journey; to cross now, they must drive 45 minutes south to the closest legal port of entry, at Presidio, then head north on the Mexican side via a winding, rocky road for two and a half hours to San Antonio del Bravo.
For those without the time or money to drive such distances, trips to visit family now require a little more athleticism. “My cousin’s wife weighs three hundred pounds!” one man told me. “I had to get her over like this—” he laughed, pantomiming his struggle to push her up the side of the riverbank. Like others I met, he rarely crossed the river to wander farther north than this valley, and it wasn’t difficult to see why he’d risk a run-in with the Border Patrol: An offender without proper documentation is fingerprinted and interviewed, then often released at the bridge in Presidio—a mere detour from a San Antonio del Bravo resident’s intended path back home. (According to the Marfa sector public affairs office, the consequences may include jail time.)
Of more concern to locals than mere visits, however, was the welfare of their schoolkids. Their anxiety didn’t surprise Johnnie Chambers, a 79-year-old retired teacher from the area. (Seeing her hair wrapped in a bun on top of her head, no one would question her résumé.) “These people are here because they want an education for their children,” she told me. Chambers ran Candelaria’s schoolhouse for 25 years until its closing, in 2000, when Presidio ISD decided the operation wasn’t economically prudent. The community had prized academics so highly that young kids sometimes brought their pre-K siblings to class. “The younger ones would ask for homework—even the kindergartners,” she said. These days, about fifty kids catch the bus in Candelaria and ride to Presidio for their education. All are U.S. citizens, but a good number reside at least part-time with family in San Antonio del Bravo. No one in town was certain how these kids were going to get to school without the bridge.
Still, the Border Patrol had no intention of disrupting the students’ routine. Later, when the school year began, one resident would tell me that the children were swimming across the river. “Schoolkids aren’t high on the priority list,” Benjamine C. Huffman, the deputy chief patrol agent at the Marfa sector, explained. Dismantling the bridge, he said, was a necessary measure to deter a more threatening activity: drug trafficking. And though smugglers can cross the border anywhere, a footbridge could be seen as a welcome mat. A person with a backpack of marijuana can leave San Antonio del Bravo and walk up the treacherous terrain of the Cuesta del Burro Mountains and through the desert to U.S. 90, twenty miles north of Candelaria. When he arrives, two or three days later, he stands to make $500 to $1,500 for his work.
For anyone who stays in the area and can’t get a job, drug smuggling becomes an inevitable temptation, as ubiquitous in this region as the heat. Residents told me it happens, though not with a frequency that alarms them, as it does the border agents. William L. Brooks, the public affairs officer for the Marfa sector, said, “I can’t tell you exactly how much comes out of there, but it is way more than a guy with a backpack here and there.” Still, unfortunately, narcotics smuggling on the border is relative, and the absence of a close interstate highway minimizes Candelaria’s role in the big operations that lead to violence. Presidio County sheriff Danny C. Dominguez said, “Every place is unique, and some places have more activity. This isn’t Juárez or Laredo.”
Some project that marijuana smuggling will only get worse now that the bridge is gone: Closing unofficial crossings, they say, causes towns to evaporate and drug smugglers to move in after any potential informants have left. But when I spoke with Huffman, he strongly disputed that theory. “We were here for many, many years, and we never got the phone call from those little towns saying, ‘The big drug load is coming through.’ We had to catch it ourselves,” he said. Most Candelaria residents I spoke to agreed with Huffman: They valued their lives too much to call someone they didn’t know and blow the whistle on a potentially violent criminal.
But one glimpse at the Rio Grande—bridge or no bridge—reveals the value of a community that is cooperative and vigilant rather than disaffected and alienated. Judge Agan, who was in the Border Patrol from 1970 to 1999, when he retired as deputy chief patrol agent at the Marfa sector, says a working relationship with these communities isn’t impossible or even that difficult. “You’ve got to go down there and cultivate relationships. They’ve got to see somebody other than a badge,” he said. “They want to know you’re trustworthy and that they’re not going to get shot for telling you something they shouldn’t have told you. They don’t like smugglers coming through there any more than anyone else does.”
On my last day in town, I sat down with an older gentleman from San Antonio del Bravo who was in Candelaria for the day, visiting. I asked if he planned to move out of the area now that the bridge was gone. He had a hard time understanding my question. “Leave?” he asked, as if the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. He pays the Mexican government $12 a year in taxes for a house he built himself, and he survives on a small vegetable crop. His sons, who work in the Texas oil fields, send him money sometimes. I asked him if he was able to find work. There was no work in Mexico, he replied, and I assumed a $1,500 U.S. work visa wasn’t a viable option. “How will you live?” I asked. He thought about this a moment and nodded. “I have a goat,” he said. A person with such resilience doesn’t balk when an obstacle is placed in his way or a footbridge is removed from his path. But friendly obligations cut both ways. God forbid we need his help someday.
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