THE HAUNTING OF THE MEXICAN BORDER
THE HAUNTING OF THE MEXICAN BORDER
A Womans Journey
KATHRYN FERGUSON
2015 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved. Published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 151 2 3 4 5 6
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Ferguson, Kathryn.
The haunting of the Mexican border : a womans journey / Kathryn Ferguson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8263-4058-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8263-4081-8 (electronic)
1. Ferguson, KathrynTravelMexican-American Border Region.
2. Mexican-American Border RegionDescription and travel.
3. Mexican-American Border RegionSocial life and customs. I. Title.
F787.F45 2015
972'.1dc23
2014049533
Frontispiece photograph by Tim Fuller
Cover photograph courtesy of Sandy Huffaker Jr.
Designed by Felicia Cedillos
For those who must leave home and travel to another land.
For Ed McCullough, the Pathfinder.
CONTENTS
This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and details have been changed in consideration of privacy.
TO BEGIN...
I AM NOT a migratory bird. I have always had a place. It is located west of the tall saguaro, south of the dry river, beyond the certainty.
Before I knew that place intimately, I thought it was easy to get there.
For the earliest road trip, I just threw a few things in the back and inserted the key. The ignition turned over the first time. Good omen. All thinking was behind. Now it was the doing. Did I remember my cash, my map? What if theres trouble? The hour-long drive south was full of doubt. But when I crossed the border, the smell of burning mesquite carried away the worry. We know where we belong.
Beginning in the mid-1980s and for fifteen years thereafter, I made documentaries in Mexico. I researched, hiked trails, talked with strangers, and filmed in the rugged Sierra Madre in the state of Chihuahua. Then I returned home to Tucson to produce, organize, and edit. Swinging between my country and the neighbor to the south was as vibrant as chile on the tongue, and as scary as freedom. For years I traveled in Mexico, sometimes with a film crew or a friend or just an idea.
Most of the time I had few problems. But in the 90s, changes began to occur in Mexico and the United States that affected my day-to-day life, and I began to be watchful. I became aware that as I made my journey south, people from Mexico made their journeys north. Our paths converged, and I learned that the line on which these journeys pivot is deadly.
Mexico treated me well with an occasional run-of-the-mill jolt of fear thrown in. Fear is a funny thing. When you think of fear, you think about the five-foot-long Black Iguana with alligator eyes, ridges of teeth, and spiked backbone. It looks terrifying. As it charges you with world-record speed, you panic. But upon observation, you see that it prefers to dine on flowers and fruit. Such is the nature of fear. It is only your imagination, up until the day you are eaten.
In my own country, I came to know the wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-something-is-wrong fear. The I-havent-heard-from-him-for-eight-hours fear. The what-am-I-going-to-do-if-I-have-to-leave-my-country-forever fear. The what-is-this-click-click-on-the-phone fear.
There is the kind of fear when you are startled; it takes your breath away. There is the stab-in-the-stomach sudden fear. There is the growing fear, the slow-cooking Crock-Pot kind of fear (there is also the crackpot kind but Ill get back to that), when you listen in the dark to an out-of-the-ordinary rustlewas it really a rustle or just something in your head? When you wait for the sound to repeat and you slow down the run-away-train breathing. When you walk from the dark hallway to the dark kitchen to stand near the door where you heard it, hoping not to hear it again.
Fear is when you drive around the little dirt roads in the cemetery and cant find your parents graves. You know they were buried here a few months ago but the graves are not here. Fear is when you sit on the ground by the big memorial moose statue with antlers and know that the graves have gone missing and so has your family. Fear is when you are twenty-two years old and you know that there will be no more times together.
After my parents die, words like edgeless, limitless, and formless wake me in the middle of the night, and I realize I am free to do whatever I want. So I decide to start moving around. At first, it feels like an unnamed flailing dance that urban street kids do that no one pays any attention to. But then the freedom dance formalizes into a rock-solid new cathartic social art form like hip-hop or becomes a national competition like krumping, and then you just keep dancing hard until it morphs into some other rock-solid thing, like hope.
ISierra Madre Trails
Hunting
CHAPTER 1
GUNS AND GERSHWIN
FIRST COMES THE wind. The breeze brushes lightly against your cheek. You are convinced of your safety until sharp grains of sand rise up, dust devils surround you, and the sky grows dark as lightning clicks from cloud to cloud until it suddenly shoots to the ground at 140,000 miles per hour like a disturbed rattlesnake and the sliced air snaps back together in a burst of thunder and the wind blows fierce, lifting all in its path, and roars to the edge of the earth.
If luck is with you, there will be a rock to brace against. And wind will jerk your head as fear bites into your heart and you cannot take your eye off the spectacle as rain pelts your skin, fills your pockets and shoes with water, and pours over your body as if you are cattle of the field.
August, my birth month. The season of chubascos, storms with elephant-gray and tangerine clouds. When wet dust is heavy and smells the way a rock tastes.
It is the time of petrichor, a liquid that flows in the veins of gods. A profound description for a profound experience: to smell rain on the desert. The smell of creosote. It is my birth plant. If I could bottle it as perfume, I would, but not everyone agrees. Some call it maloliente, Spanish for stinky.
My name of choice was Spurs (my father was the only family member who agreed to call me this) and my gun of choice was Wyatt Earps Buntline Special, which arrived in the mail in a cardboard box. I had to glue the plastic parts together and bind them with rubber bands until they dried. I wore an Annie Oakley hat but at heart was Calamity Jane.
One day I was hit by a grand dream that I could ride two galloping horses at once, standing up with one foot on the back of each horse, straddling the rushing air beneath. To this end, I put two sawhorses side by side, jumped up on the narrow spines, and practiced each day, whipping my steeds into a mad race to nowhere.
When I was a little older, I tossed away the sawhorses as I discovered Rhapsody in Blue
