The Tortilla Curtain

Over a thousand miles north-west of Tlacote, at the northern end of the narrow desiccated peninsula of Baja California, is the border town of Tijuana. Separating it from the USA is a twenty-seven mile, ten foot-high steel barrier known as the Tortilla Curtain. It was put up by the US authorities in the 1970s to curb illegal immigration. Such is the economic inequality between the two countries that ninety per cent of the illegal immigrants who entered the States in 1994 were from Mexico. In 1995 1.2 million were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally. Even today, as we stand and watch at a point where the Tortilla Curtain runs only yards from the main entrance to Tijuana Airport, there are a dozen people preparing to cross, without papers or passports, in broad daylight.

Huddled beneath a low bridge, in the gully of a dried up river bed, shaken periodically by great dusty trucks thundering in and out of Tijuana and the desert that lies beyond, is a largely silent group of Mexicans, or, quite possibly, Guatemalans, Venezuelans, even Peruvians, waiting to slip under the fence and into the Promised Land. The hard brown earth around them is dotted with the remains of small fires and strewn with cigarette packets, plastic cups, discarded Coke bottles, cardboard sheets and even an old sprung bedstead. There are young men, girls, old women. If they are related you wouldn’t know it. The mood is muted and watchful. A mile or so ahead of us, across the border, a helicopter turns lazily, high in the sky over the United States.

We’ve been brought here by Arturo, a middle-aged Mexican, stocky, bearded, with the looks of an overweight matinée idol. He has himself been across twice, once swimming the Rio Grande River on the Texas border and once on foot. The second time he stayed almost six months. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who hates the smell of new-mown grass. ‘It remind me of when I work in New York, cutting grass.’ He shakes his head with feeling. ‘It is a terrible smell. It reminds me of how terrible the world can be.’

Arturo is bitter about what he sees as American hypocrisy. They pass laws vilifying illegal immigrants whilst continuing to reap the benefits of their cheap labour.

‘Michael, California produce one third of all American agricultural product. The labour force they use is ninety per cent Mexican, sixty-six per cent of them undocumented.’

He looks around at the motley, shabby group, some crouched down, peering through a hole in the fence, like children with noses pressed against a window. He shrugs. ‘That’s why they still go.’

The migrants are known as pollos (chickens) and those who help them across are called polleros or coyotes. A simple crossing can cost a hundred dollars or so; if faked documents are required it can rise to a thousand. It’s a risky business. Many pollos speak only Spanish and have no idea where they are. They are often cheated or preyed on by cholos, gangs of young Mexicans who take whatever money they have.

As we talk, a young man ducks under the fence and saunters across. He wears a white shirt, black trousers and carries his belongings in a plastic bag slung over his shoulder. He seems to make no attempt to conceal himself. Arturo is not especially surprised. Sometimes, he says, it is safer to cross in broad daylight than at night with the laser beams, infrared lights and sensors.

Everyone on the Mexican side stops and watches the young man’s progress. There is no excitement, just curiosity. Most of us seem to hear the sound of vehicles approaching before he does. Even when the two Border Patrol Ford Broncos converge on him he makes no attempt to run or even turn back. He waits for them to pick him up. He has gone no more than three hundred yards. But by then everyone has turned away.

I ask Arturo what will happen to him. He says he will be questioned, finger-printed, possibly held in jail for a while, then bussed back across into Mexico. If he has a record of previous illegal crossings he could stay in jail a lot longer.

An hour later, with the sun at its highest in a cloudless sky, a girl, not more than seventeen or eighteen, better dressed than the rest, secures white strips of cotton over her trousers as kneepads and, gesticulating to the rest of the group to wait, squeezes beneath the fence and is gone. Unlike the man before her she moves like a soldier, at a fast cat-like crouch, weaving and ducking and using the river bed for cover.

Arturo nods and turns to me. ‘She’s the pollero.’

Nothing moves for several minutes. Then she’s up and running on. At this point another seven people, their possessions in half-empty shoulder bags, dodge through and race up the river bed. They freeze, then move, freeze and move, following the girl as she switches across from the main river bed to a steep ditch alongside a fence. Arturo watches, this time with almost painful concentration. ‘They only have to make another two hundred yards to the road then there will be cars to take them on.’

The group have now reached the girl and are momentarily out of our sight. For a moment all is absolutely still. Everyone here is silently cheering them on. Then someone points. I lend Arturo my binoculars and he squints into the distance. The Broncos appear from nowhere and with slow, remorseless, almost choreographed predictability they home in on the pollos. For good measure, a helicopter chatters in and begins to circle the group. One of the pollos next to me hurls a plastic bottle at the fence, but there’s nothing anyone can do, and no one wants to watch any more.

The Tortilla Curtain runs right out into the Pacific. Down at the beach sunbathers lie beside its rusting graffitied sections. ‘Welcome to the New Berlin Wall’, Morta a los Migras (Death to Immigration Officers). There is quite a contrast on the two sides of the fence. The last few yards of Mexico are tatty, lively and busy. The first few yards of the USA are tidy, clean, laid with public picnic tables, and empty.

There is an obelisk on the hill overlooking the Pacific which has been here long before the fence. It marks the fact that this border was drawn in 1848 when, by the treaty of Guadeloupe, the Mexican General, Santa Ana, sold California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to the United States.

From a whitewashed church a bell tolls for six o’clock mass as we head back from the beach to our hotel. Tijuana has always been the victim. The cheap and cheerful haven where Americans could come and spend their money with no questions asked. But it is nowhere near as awful as I had been led to believe and there are odd, mischievous, very Mexican touches, which still defy the international blandness which seeps down north of the border.

One of these is a house in the shape of a thirty-foot naked lady. She stands, white-plastered and voluptuous on an otherwise drab and litter-strewn hillside. Her left arm across her chest, right arm raised in a parody of the Statue of Liberty. She was built by an artist in the likeness of his much-adored wife. Now they’ve split up and the artist is living there with his new partner. Apparently, she’s not at all happy living in the body of his first wife.

As we film this unique accommodation a hand appears from between the breasts and waves at us.