The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Before and After
What happens when an immigration raid tears a family apart?
GUADALUPE says: I’m a subscriber and read this story when I got the Dec ’08 issue. I love this story & it touched me so when the family was split apart. I’ve wondered since what ever happened when the story ended. Did I miss a continuation in one of your issues? (August 19th, 2009 at 4:19pm)
(Page 5 of 5)
When we’d finished talking, Juventino led us past a shop window where multitiered, ornately frosted, sagging cakes listed behind the glass; then down a narrow passage that overlooked a pigsty; and then into a low-ceilinged breezeway, part devoted to laundry and part to the raising of quail in cages. There we found another ring of patio chairs, one of them occupied by a man who’d been arrested in the December raid and had only been deported the week before. That man accompanied us to the next house, where I met an older man who’d fled Mount Pleasant after working at Pilgrim’s for eleven years. Juventino left us but was soon replaced by Judith’s brother David, a slight, soft-spoken man who’d lived in Mount Pleasant for a couple years and worked at Pilgrim’s. He had been deported, he said, after being arrested for fishing without a license at a lake near the plant.
The conversation turned to the unusual situation of a woman from Xaltianguis named Floriberta Beltran, whom I had recently interviewed at the Titus County jail. Her brother, Pablo, had been sought in the raid; two weeks later, in the course of looking for him, police had arrested Floriberta and her husband, who were also in the country illegally. Their three kids had gone to live with an aunt and uncle. By the time I interviewed her in July, she was more than eight months pregnant, a small woman with a giant bulge beneath her orange jail scrubs who started to cry when she talked about the baby girl she was expecting.
But there had been good news in Floriberta’s case. Her lawyer had convinced the judge to let her out on a personal-recognizance bond the week before my trip to Mexico, and immigration officials had decided not to take her back into custody. Word had quickly traveled to Xaltianguis. In the men’s shared telling she had to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet and would be returned to jail after the baby was born, both of which facts turned out not to be true. A story that did turn out to be true was that when she was let out of the Titus County jail, her four-year-old had run to her and attached himself to her leg and refused to let go, even for a few seconds. Her husband was still in jail, and the prospect of deportation still hung over the family, but for now she and the boys were back in their trailer house in Winfield, a little community of beer barns and shrimp shacks and old double-wides, eight miles west of Mount Pleasant.
That bit of news was tonic, if only slightly so, in a town beset by reversals and misfortunes. I met two women, former Pilgrim’s workers, one arrested in December and one in April, who’d left their American-born kids behind in Mount Pleasant, figuring that their prospects would be better in Texas. They hoped the kids would be able to visit during the Christmas holidays. And in addition to those who’d come back because of the raid, there were all the ones who’d come back for other reasons: the man who’d run a red light and been arrested and deported, as well as people arrested for DWIs and more-serious offenses. There was talk of a man who’d married a deaf woman with a way of yelling and moaning that had led to his being arrested for spousal abuse and deported. Another man who’d been living legally in the U.S. had lost his vision due to nerve degeneration and moved from Texas to California. He’d come to Mexico to visit, and when he tried to return to the U.S., he learned that his visa had been revoked. Perhaps, he speculated, he’d missed some piece of official correspondence. Now he wore dark glasses and was led around town by his mother and wondered whether there was any way to be allowed back into the country where his children lived.
On my last day I met Floriberta Beltran’s sister-in-law, Carmela Flores Vargas, who had been arrested and deported. She and her husband had already planned on returning to Xaltianguis later in the year to open a vegetable stand; now, though, they didn’t have the money to open the business and, like so many others, didn’t know what they were going to do. She took us to the house Floriberta had bought for her father. The door opened onto a long, bare cement hallway with rubber hoses running from the ceiling to a drain in the floor and a scruffy, pointy-eared animal I couldn’t identify (an opossum?) in a cage that gave off a faint urine odor. Floriberta’s father, old and thin and weathered, had greeted us out front. I’d been reluctant to accept a Coca-Cola from a man who didn’t look as if he could afford to give one away, yet I did, and patio chairs appeared. As he had very few teeth and spoke gruffly, I struggled to understand him, meanwhile eyeing the strange animal in its cage, and whereas the attractions of an old trailer house in Winfield had been somewhat abstract to me beforehand, now they were obvious, viscerally so.
V. In Between
Days I was in Mount Pleasant, I would keep the car radio tuned to La Explosiva, which meant that I listened to a lot of norteño ballads. I’d never really cottoned to those mournful polkas, with their often sad subjects countered by accordions and relentless bass lines, but over time they began to make a little more sense. “If you leave [oompah, oompah], I’m going to die.” “It’d be easier to ascend to the sky [oompah, oompah], than to melt your heart of ice.” Et cetera. There was much to bemoan; still, the two-four beat would go on.
Reality lacked that steady rhythm. “There’s a sadness,” a woman who owns a local piñata business told me, “because no one wants to do anything now. No one has a project or a plan for the future anymore, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s not any more ‘tonight,’ there’s not any more ‘in the morning’ or ‘next week’ or ‘next month.’ You’re just in between. This is not our community anymore, not the one we used to have before all these things.”
Maria was a planner by nature, but her plans kept shifting, the day she might next see her husband receding into the future. By next year she would finish her degree, which she thought would give her a better shot at the visa. Meanwhile Annette, who would turn fifteen in October 2009, wanted to have her quinceañera in Mount Pleasant. Maybe after that they would move to Mexico. Maria had stopped trying to research schools and neighborhoods in Mexico City; it could wait. She’d looked into assistant teaching jobs, which would provide necessary experience before she could be hired as a salaried teacher, and was disheartened to learn that they paid about $10 an hour. It was hard to see how she could manage on a little more than half of what she was currently making.
Already she’d applied for Medicaid for her kids, after having always eschewed public assistance. Following her release, Floriberta Beltran had also sought Medicaid for the first time, as well as food stamps. This seemed to complete an unfortunate cycle: It used to be that Mexican workers came to the U.S. seasonally to support their families, who remained at home; after border enforcement became stricter and people began to fear for their ability to go back and forth with ease, they brought their families to live with them; now families are being left behind to support themselves, in some cases seeking public assistance.
One night I was at Maria’s house when she dialed Francisco and set the phone on the coffee table, on speaker. Next to it, her address book was open to a doodled-on page containing her name and her husband’s and a big heart between them. The twins ran toward the phone—“Papi! Papi!”
“Gabriel hit me with this control,” Francisco Jr. said in Spanish, waving the television’s remote control at the phone. “Will you buy us candy?”
“Yes, lots of candies,” came his father’s voice.
In their excitement, the boys knocked the phone over, then crouched over it in alarm, as if their father himself might have been injured in the fall. Maria shooed them away so that I could speak with Francisco. He talked about his old job at Pilgrim’s, of his arrest and time in jail, but declined to reminisce about his old life in Mount Pleasant. “It’ll make me cry,” he said, and Maria’s eyes welled up.
He’d hoped the girls would like Mexico, but they hadn’t really—except for Yvette, whom everyone in the family knew to be “daddy’s girl” and who’d wanted to stay there with him. While we talked, she was sitting on the sofa with her sketch pad, composing a long letter to the president to argue that her father should be let back in the country. As for Francisco himself, he said he would rather the family live in Mexico than in the United States, if only there were jobs to be found.
Later on, after the call had ended and I was about to leave, Maria stood in the doorway, looking off toward the unlit street and wondering how long they could wait it out as a couple. “I tell him, if you see someone else, just tell me, and it’s over,” she said. “That’s our main worry. I tell him I’ve got the kids and I’m too busy for anything like that.”
The night was warm and black, and she spoke over a refrain of crickets. Maybe she would enroll the kids in school in Mexico next year, then fly back for Annette’s quinceañera—but she stopped herself.
“No, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “If we make plans, it’s probably not going to happen that way anyway, so let’s just wait, and we’ll see.”
My Library
