CROSSING OVER
“IT IS PROHIBITED TO TRANSMIT CERTAIN ARTICLES OF PROPERTY ACROSS THE BORDER FOR PROFIT OR OTHER PURPOSES. SUCH ARTICLES OF PROPERTY INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, MEDICINES, PHARMACOLOGICAL MEDICATIONS, MEDICAL SUPPLIES, MEDICAL DEVICES, SYRINGES, MEDICAL EQUIPMENT …”
***
As the Captain paused for a moment to clear his throat, I felt my anxiety grow stronger. We sat in his small hot office in the northern Sonoran desert. He read from a black hardbound book of laws and regulations pertaining to what you could, or more accurately, could not bring into Mexico from the United States. An official of the Mexican Government, his voice was stern and unyielding. He spoke Spanish slowly and clearly, but with a flat tone, devoid of any emotion. About five foot eight inches tall, his shoulders were broad and covered by his light brown, short sleeved shirt with its gold badge of authority over his left pocket. He looked to be in his early forties, had a neatly combed head of perfectly maintained hair just beginning to show some grey, and had a very well trimmed full black mustache. He never looked toward me, sitting across from him at his desk as he read carefully from his book of official regulations.
At least this office has a fan, I thought to myself during his pause in reading. And, at least the fan swivels back and forth and blows some air at me once in a while. Then, I considered my predicament. Boy, am I screwed. Why did I ever get myself into this mess?
I was sitting in that sweltering office in early June of 1965 just a few miles below the border we had just crossed at Nogales, Arizona. It was about 110 degrees outside. I was leading a group of San Francisco Bay Area college students to do community development work this summer in fourteen villages in central Mexico. Our destination was still some 1,500 miles to the south. The desert here, all around us, had nothing to offer but sand, rocks, low hills, various types of spindly cactus plants, sage brush, and some tumble weeds. Off in the distance far to the east, I could see long line of purple mountains that ranged from north to south. They stretched as far as the eye could see, and almost looked pretty, as did the subdued colors of the desert, but what I thought more about was how unforgiving this landscape was. Good for a few scorpions and rattle snakes, but not much else.
We had every item the Captain was describing in our pickup trucks. It was as if he was reading from our packing list. We all looked pretty scraggly and forlorn. There were about fifty of us, all young men, in fourteen old pickup trucks, panel trucks, and even one vintage VW van, all in various states of disrepair. All of these vehicles had been donated one way or another, and all were full of supplies and materials we were trying to bring into central Mexico for our work.
***
“ … SHOES, CLOTHING, FRESH FOODS, ELECTRONIC DEVICES, RADIOS, TELEVISIONS, ALL MANNER OF TOOLS INCLUDING SHOVELS, PICKS, HAMMERS, SCREW DRIVERS, PLIERS, WRENCHES …”
***
As I sat there listening, hearing the words flow from the Captain’s lips, I remembered I had been unsure about whether we could pull off this border crossing with so many trucks and supplies. Since I had the most experience, having worked in the program for the past three summers, I had been appointed the leader. The group had about the same level of idealism that had first attracted me to this work four years ago. But in the last three years, maybe we had become too big, too fast. Maybe our group was in danger of losing its original focus of simplicity, innocence, even naivete, which had been such strong attractions for me. Had we lost sight of our original motivation just to be able to have a larger number of students involved?
When I first got involved with the program at U.C. Berkeley, I was lost and looking for something meaningful in the midst of the huge, impersonal university. Almost by accident, I came upon a group of college students and young adults who were planning to work with the poor in a small village in rural Mexico. This was in 1962. The group was led by young people who had been influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Their ideology was pacifist and somewhat left-wing Catholic, believing that hard, physical work and identifying with the poor were worthy ways to spend your life. They were serious about trying to make a difference in the world. They showed me that your actions say a lot more about what you believe than your words.
But they always seemed joyful. That year, we laughed a lot … about the absurdity of trying to change the world for the better, … about the idea of traveling 2,500 miles to work in a small, out of the way village, … about our mistakes pronouncing Spanish words wrong and being corrected by little kids, … and about often being considered curiosities by adults and elders in the village. And, I loved the work, the people, and returned for more.
We had called ourselves “The International Student Worker Corps” during that first year, and had no support or sponsorship from any established institution, just thirty students and young adults, making a go of it on our own. The inspiration of our movement was a family, the Carotas, who had seventeen kids, most of whom were adopted. Mario Carota was an inspiring man. A man who believed in miracles. Mario believed that even the most common things were forms of divine intervention. The food at your table had really arrived there through a series of miracles. These included the work of the farmer, good weather, farm workers gathering the food, people transporting it, and finally those who cooked it. We were all dependent in a myriad of ways upon one another. From him, we inherited a feeling, a way of being, in which we always trusted that if we asked for what we truly needed, it would come our way. We’d somehow be taken care of. Sometimes, by a miracle.
But, after that first year, we were “adopted” by a Catholic priest from the Newman Center at U.C. Berkeley. At the time there were only four or five of us left who were still trying to continue. We were pretty green, and obviously needed help. Our oldest, most experienced members were pretty far away, one in Mexico and the other working as a high school teacher in Vallejo. Two of us were just getting well from being ill with infectious hepatitis.
One day, Father Joe, as he liked to be called, asked me some questions in his office. “Do you really have a place to go back to?” he asked.
“Sure.” I said, feeling unsure. “There’s a Benedictine Priest we met who wants to set us up in a couple of small villages in the mountains.”
“Oh yeah? I dunno if that’s gonna be enough. You know where you’re going to stay? How you’re gonna eat? You sure this thing can be pulled off?”
“Yeah, I’m positive. And, we got a lotta students interested. Plus, Jack, Judy and I want to go back, and Joe’s already in Mexico, and he can help us out with setting up the living arrangements in the village sites.”
We might not have known how to organize this venture too well, but we had an awful lot of enthusiasm and commitment.
“OK, then. But we’re going to make sure things get organized.”
I was surprised, but with that comment, he had bought in. He quickly provided our movement with sponsorship, structure, and legitimacy in the eyes of potential donors, parents, and clerical and government officials in both countries. Father Joe had been a chaplain in the Navy, and had a military approach to how we should operate.
“We need stability and structure to do things right”, he would say. His idea was to expand rapidly, get as many students involved as possible, and have a snazzy name for fund raising and publicity. We began to recruit and attract students who were very different than the “radicals and beatniks” who had initiated our movement that first year. Mainstream students, a lot from sororities, quickly became the norm. We soon got big on rules about who could participate, how much preparation and training the students had to have, and how much work they had to do to be able to go to the villages in Mexico. Except that Father Joe often waived his rules for students he thought were special, letting these certain students go to Mexico without having worked like the rest of us had to. Only he knew the reasons why he would make exceptions to what we were told were important rules.
So, we had become “Amigos Anonymous” in 1963. Three short years later, I was the leader of this group of now 250 students from not only the Bay Area, but also Los Angeles and Seattle, on our way to work in fourteen villages in central Mexico.
We now tried to bring as many supplies and materials as possible with us to further our work of helping to set up health clinics, schools, water and sanitation systems and sports programs.
Father Joe also believed in bringing supplies and materials with us in significant amounts.
“We need to bring tools, medicines, and materials to give the students something to do, and we need to bring food and supplies for the ‘troops’”, he announced. He liked to call us the ‘troops’. Thought it was a catchy name, kind of like a group going to battle to help the poor and for Christian love. Something like that, anyway.
So, here I was sitting in this Mexican border official’s office trying to figure out how I could get through the border with fourteen vehicles, one for each village, and all fully loaded with forbidden articles. Of course, I’d been through the border before. But the other times were a lot easier.
The first time, we had only two trucks, and we had ended up crossing at Sonoita, a small out of the way border portal on the Mexico side just below Gila Bend, Arizona. We had first tried to cross at Mexicali that year, but the border guards turned us back. At Sonoita, they didn’t really care, and we got through by only having to give the guards a few pesos.
Mexican Border guards in the days of the 1960’s were a lot different than now, and the border was a lot wilder, more wide open than it is now. The border guards had really low salaries, like 5 or 6 Pesos a day. So, they made most of their money on mordidas, bites or bribes, often paid willingly by clients to avoid red tape and hassles. They were usually pretty rough looking types, scroungey with old, frayed, often torn uniforms. Nearly all of them carried side arms, some had .45’s, others had .38’s, and a few poorer ones had to make do with .22’s. I quickly made it a policy never to irritate a border guard, on either side of the border. That said, more often than not, they had their hands out always ready to supplement their meager wages.
The second time we crossed, we had six pickup trucks, and I thought we could use the small crossing at Sonoita again. But the guards there weren’t cooperating that day, so we went east and eventually got through here at Nogales. With just the six old pickups, we hadn’t had any trouble that had not been solved with “helping” the guards out a little.
But this time … this huge convoy presented a real problem. In the earlier years, I could understand and accept the idea of bringing some medical supplies, tools, and canned food down with us to help with our work and living situations. Back in the 1960’s it was especially easy to get donations of medicines, since all the big drug companies were giving out free samples to doctors to get them to prescribe their products. We were able to get all kinds of unused prescription medications by asking doctors, and eventually going directly to the drug company representatives. I guess they thought they could get good publicity out of this. And, the medicines were really helpful in the villages where public health was always a problem, and paying for a prescription was out of the question for most of the residents who were so poor that malnourishment was a problem. All we had to do was to sort them out and catalog them, which had been the task of the many nursing students who had been a part of our group.
It was also a lot easier to get small businesses to donate tools, like shovels, hammers, wrenches, etc. These items were really useful in most of the villages where we were often engaged in building schools, community centers, health clinics, and in working on roads, potable water and/or sewage systems.
But large quantities of all of this stuff created a much different problem.
This time with a long line of fourteen trucks, I felt it might be more difficult. I had begun to get a bad feeling in my stomach as we approached this border check area about fifteen miles south of Nogales. This border station was the one where the contents of all vehicles were checked – kind of like a customs inspection. The scruffy border guards took one look at us, and motioned for us to pull all our vehicles off to the side. Then, five or six of them grouped together between us and the two-lane highway and talked among themselves for what seemed a long while, from time to time glancing toward us with suspicious eyes. By this time, I had begun to believe that maybe we were crazy to try this kind of a stunt. All I had with me were three or four letters of testimony from the mayors of the villages we were going to saying that what we were carrying was for charity and wasn’t going to be sold. Although the letters looked official and had elaborate seals at the bottom by the signatures of the mayors, I knew that our documents were closer to prayers than any legal rights that might get us anywhere. For all I knew, the border guards could just as easily consider them to be of better use in their latrines, where toilet paper was always in short supply.
I got out of my truck while the guards were talking together. One of them broke away from the group, ambled over toward me, and said,
“Orale tu, Gringo. Who’s in charge?”
“I guess that’s me”, was all I could say.
“Bueno. Vente conmigo! Andale!” he exclaimed, while motioning for me to follow him.
I motioned for one of the students to come over for a minute. I asked Steve, who had been with me during the past two crossings, and who spoke Spanish fluently, “Look. Tell everybody to stay by the trucks, and don’t try anything. Keep them away from the border guards, OK?”
“Yeah. Where you going?”
“I dunno. With this guy.”
I fell in behind the border guard, and he walked toward this little adobe building with a door and window facing the road. It was about 100 yards off the road, through the sand and cactus plants, down a gully and up the other side. I followed obediently three paces behind. What ran through my mind at that point, was what’s going to happen to me? I had on my soiled jeans and a dusty T-shirt with dried sweat under the arms and on the front, having been on the road for three days and nights. I don’t think I’m going to impress anybody dressed like this, that’s for sure, I thought.
He opened the door to the small building, went in and motioned for me to follow him. And … there was the captain sitting behind his desk, being cooled a bit by a fan blowing from the corner of the room. He had sunglasses on, so I couldn’t see his eyes, as he looked up toward me. Before he could say anything, I pulled my letters out and placed them on the desk in front of him. The guard who brought me over motioned for me to sit in the only other chair in the office that was right in front of the captain’s desk. That’s when the captain had started reading from his book.
He had just kept on reading.
“NO ELECTRONIC ARTICLES, EQUIPMENT, WIRING TOOLS, RADIO PARTS, TUBES, AND NO CANNED GOODS, TOYS, GAMES, OR ANY OTHER ARTICLE OF ANY SIGNIFICANT RETAIL VALUE THAT COULD BE SOLD IN MEXICO.”
Then, after what seemed an eternity to me, he finally stopped his reading. Put the book down on his desk, still open to the page, put his sunglasses back on, and looked up at me. If he was expecting me to say anything, he was going to be in for a long wait. I was frozen. All I could think of doing was to look back at him with a neither unfriendly nor frightened expression. Or at least so I thought.
After what seemed a long time just listening to the fan rattle from side to side, he finally made a motion toward me with his hand. It was a sign of dismissal, like “get out of my office. I’m through with you.”
I got up to leave, and then remembered my letters were still on his desk. He had never even looked at them. I opened my hand toward the letters to see if he’d let me have them back at least. He didn’t change his expression, which had been inscrutable to me anyway, so I quickly picked up my letters and followed the guard who’d brought me out the door into the blinding sun light. I thought, well, this is the end of us. We walked slowly back toward the trucks still parked where they had been. I had to keep my head down to watch where I was walking to avoid tripping over the uneven ground and rocks.
As we made our way back toward the trucks, the guard turned toward me, tapped me on my side with the back of his hand, and said,
“Oye, joven! Fíjate bien. Give us a little help, and we can get this done a lot faster.”
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
“IT IS PROHIBITED TO TRANSMIT CERTAIN ARTICLES OF PROPERTY ACROSS THE BORDER FOR PROFIT OR OTHER PURPOSES. SUCH ARTICLES OF PROPERTY INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, MEDICINES, PHARMACOLOGICAL MEDICATIONS, MEDICAL SUPPLIES, MEDICAL DEVICES, SYRINGES, MEDICAL EQUIPMENT …”
***
As the Captain paused for a moment to clear his throat, I felt my anxiety grow stronger. We sat in his small hot office in the northern Sonoran desert. He read from a black hardbound book of laws and regulations pertaining to what you could, or more accurately, could not bring into Mexico from the United States. An official of the Mexican Government, his voice was stern and unyielding. He spoke Spanish slowly and clearly, but with a flat tone, devoid of any emotion. About five foot eight inches tall, his shoulders were broad and covered by his light brown, short sleeved shirt with its gold badge of authority over his left pocket. He looked to be in his early forties, had a neatly combed head of perfectly maintained hair just beginning to show some grey, and had a very well trimmed full black mustache. He never looked toward me, sitting across from him at his desk as he read carefully from his book of official regulations.
At least this office has a fan, I thought to myself during his pause in reading. And, at least the fan swivels back and forth and blows some air at me once in a while. Then, I considered my predicament. Boy, am I screwed. Why did I ever get myself into this mess?
I was sitting in that sweltering office in early June of 1965 just a few miles below the border we had just crossed at Nogales, Arizona. It was about 110 degrees outside. I was leading a group of San Francisco Bay Area college students to do community development work this summer in fourteen villages in central Mexico. Our destination was still some 1,500 miles to the south. The desert here, all around us, had nothing to offer but sand, rocks, low hills, various types of spindly cactus plants, sage brush, and some tumble weeds. Off in the distance far to the east, I could see long line of purple mountains that ranged from north to south. They stretched as far as the eye could see, and almost looked pretty, as did the subdued colors of the desert, but what I thought more about was how unforgiving this landscape was. Good for a few scorpions and rattle snakes, but not much else.
We had every item the Captain was describing in our pickup trucks. It was as if he was reading from our packing list. We all looked pretty scraggly and forlorn. There were about fifty of us, all young men, in fourteen old pickup trucks, panel trucks, and even one vintage VW van, all in various states of disrepair. All of these vehicles had been donated one way or another, and all were full of supplies and materials we were trying to bring into central Mexico for our work.
***
“ … SHOES, CLOTHING, FRESH FOODS, ELECTRONIC DEVICES, RADIOS, TELEVISIONS, ALL MANNER OF TOOLS INCLUDING SHOVELS, PICKS, HAMMERS, SCREW DRIVERS, PLIERS, WRENCHES …”
***
As I sat there listening, hearing the words flow from the Captain’s lips, I remembered I had been unsure about whether we could pull off this border crossing with so many trucks and supplies. Since I had the most experience, having worked in the program for the past three summers, I had been appointed the leader. The group had about the same level of idealism that had first attracted me to this work four years ago. But in the last three years, maybe we had become too big, too fast. Maybe our group was in danger of losing its original focus of simplicity, innocence, even naivete, which had been such strong attractions for me. Had we lost sight of our original motivation just to be able to have a larger number of students involved?
When I first got involved with the program at U.C. Berkeley, I was lost and looking for something meaningful in the midst of the huge, impersonal university. Almost by accident, I came upon a group of college students and young adults who were planning to work with the poor in a small village in rural Mexico. This was in 1962. The group was led by young people who had been influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Their ideology was pacifist and somewhat left-wing Catholic, believing that hard, physical work and identifying with the poor were worthy ways to spend your life. They were serious about trying to make a difference in the world. They showed me that your actions say a lot more about what you believe than your words.
But they always seemed joyful. That year, we laughed a lot … about the absurdity of trying to change the world for the better, … about the idea of traveling 2,500 miles to work in a small, out of the way village, … about our mistakes pronouncing Spanish words wrong and being corrected by little kids, … and about often being considered curiosities by adults and elders in the village. And, I loved the work, the people, and returned for more.
We had called ourselves “The International Student Worker Corps” during that first year, and had no support or sponsorship from any established institution, just thirty students and young adults, making a go of it on our own. The inspiration of our movement was a family, the Carotas, who had seventeen kids, most of whom were adopted. Mario Carota was an inspiring man. A man who believed in miracles. Mario believed that even the most common things were forms of divine intervention. The food at your table had really arrived there through a series of miracles. These included the work of the farmer, good weather, farm workers gathering the food, people transporting it, and finally those who cooked it. We were all dependent in a myriad of ways upon one another. From him, we inherited a feeling, a way of being, in which we always trusted that if we asked for what we truly needed, it would come our way. We’d somehow be taken care of. Sometimes, by a miracle.
But, after that first year, we were “adopted” by a Catholic priest from the Newman Center at U.C. Berkeley. At the time there were only four or five of us left who were still trying to continue. We were pretty green, and obviously needed help. Our oldest, most experienced members were pretty far away, one in Mexico and the other working as a high school teacher in Vallejo. Two of us were just getting well from being ill with infectious hepatitis.
One day, Father Joe, as he liked to be called, asked me some questions in his office. “Do you really have a place to go back to?” he asked.
“Sure.” I said, feeling unsure. “There’s a Benedictine Priest we met who wants to set us up in a couple of small villages in the mountains.”
“Oh yeah? I dunno if that’s gonna be enough. You know where you’re going to stay? How you’re gonna eat? You sure this thing can be pulled off?”
“Yeah, I’m positive. And, we got a lotta students interested. Plus, Jack, Judy and I want to go back, and Joe’s already in Mexico, and he can help us out with setting up the living arrangements in the village sites.”
We might not have known how to organize this venture too well, but we had an awful lot of enthusiasm and commitment.
“OK, then. But we’re going to make sure things get organized.”
I was surprised, but with that comment, he had bought in. He quickly provided our movement with sponsorship, structure, and legitimacy in the eyes of potential donors, parents, and clerical and government officials in both countries. Father Joe had been a chaplain in the Navy, and had a military approach to how we should operate.
“We need stability and structure to do things right”, he would say. His idea was to expand rapidly, get as many students involved as possible, and have a snazzy name for fund raising and publicity. We began to recruit and attract students who were very different than the “radicals and beatniks” who had initiated our movement that first year. Mainstream students, a lot from sororities, quickly became the norm. We soon got big on rules about who could participate, how much preparation and training the students had to have, and how much work they had to do to be able to go to the villages in Mexico. Except that Father Joe often waived his rules for students he thought were special, letting these certain students go to Mexico without having worked like the rest of us had to. Only he knew the reasons why he would make exceptions to what we were told were important rules.
So, we had become “Amigos Anonymous” in 1963. Three short years later, I was the leader of this group of now 250 students from not only the Bay Area, but also Los Angeles and Seattle, on our way to work in fourteen villages in central Mexico.
We now tried to bring as many supplies and materials as possible with us to further our work of helping to set up health clinics, schools, water and sanitation systems and sports programs.
Father Joe also believed in bringing supplies and materials with us in significant amounts.
“We need to bring tools, medicines, and materials to give the students something to do, and we need to bring food and supplies for the ‘troops’”, he announced. He liked to call us the ‘troops’. Thought it was a catchy name, kind of like a group going to battle to help the poor and for Christian love. Something like that, anyway.
So, here I was sitting in this Mexican border official’s office trying to figure out how I could get through the border with fourteen vehicles, one for each village, and all fully loaded with forbidden articles. Of course, I’d been through the border before. But the other times were a lot easier.
The first time, we had only two trucks, and we had ended up crossing at Sonoita, a small out of the way border portal on the Mexico side just below Gila Bend, Arizona. We had first tried to cross at Mexicali that year, but the border guards turned us back. At Sonoita, they didn’t really care, and we got through by only having to give the guards a few pesos.
Mexican Border guards in the days of the 1960’s were a lot different than now, and the border was a lot wilder, more wide open than it is now. The border guards had really low salaries, like 5 or 6 Pesos a day. So, they made most of their money on mordidas, bites or bribes, often paid willingly by clients to avoid red tape and hassles. They were usually pretty rough looking types, scroungey with old, frayed, often torn uniforms. Nearly all of them carried side arms, some had .45’s, others had .38’s, and a few poorer ones had to make do with .22’s. I quickly made it a policy never to irritate a border guard, on either side of the border. That said, more often than not, they had their hands out always ready to supplement their meager wages.
The second time we crossed, we had six pickup trucks, and I thought we could use the small crossing at Sonoita again. But the guards there weren’t cooperating that day, so we went east and eventually got through here at Nogales. With just the six old pickups, we hadn’t had any trouble that had not been solved with “helping” the guards out a little.
But this time … this huge convoy presented a real problem. In the earlier years, I could understand and accept the idea of bringing some medical supplies, tools, and canned food down with us to help with our work and living situations. Back in the 1960’s it was especially easy to get donations of medicines, since all the big drug companies were giving out free samples to doctors to get them to prescribe their products. We were able to get all kinds of unused prescription medications by asking doctors, and eventually going directly to the drug company representatives. I guess they thought they could get good publicity out of this. And, the medicines were really helpful in the villages where public health was always a problem, and paying for a prescription was out of the question for most of the residents who were so poor that malnourishment was a problem. All we had to do was to sort them out and catalog them, which had been the task of the many nursing students who had been a part of our group.
It was also a lot easier to get small businesses to donate tools, like shovels, hammers, wrenches, etc. These items were really useful in most of the villages where we were often engaged in building schools, community centers, health clinics, and in working on roads, potable water and/or sewage systems.
But large quantities of all of this stuff created a much different problem.
This time with a long line of fourteen trucks, I felt it might be more difficult. I had begun to get a bad feeling in my stomach as we approached this border check area about fifteen miles south of Nogales. This border station was the one where the contents of all vehicles were checked – kind of like a customs inspection. The scruffy border guards took one look at us, and motioned for us to pull all our vehicles off to the side. Then, five or six of them grouped together between us and the two-lane highway and talked among themselves for what seemed a long while, from time to time glancing toward us with suspicious eyes. By this time, I had begun to believe that maybe we were crazy to try this kind of a stunt. All I had with me were three or four letters of testimony from the mayors of the villages we were going to saying that what we were carrying was for charity and wasn’t going to be sold. Although the letters looked official and had elaborate seals at the bottom by the signatures of the mayors, I knew that our documents were closer to prayers than any legal rights that might get us anywhere. For all I knew, the border guards could just as easily consider them to be of better use in their latrines, where toilet paper was always in short supply.
I got out of my truck while the guards were talking together. One of them broke away from the group, ambled over toward me, and said,
“Orale tu, Gringo. Who’s in charge?”
“I guess that’s me”, was all I could say.
“Bueno. Vente conmigo! Andale!” he exclaimed, while motioning for me to follow him.
I motioned for one of the students to come over for a minute. I asked Steve, who had been with me during the past two crossings, and who spoke Spanish fluently, “Look. Tell everybody to stay by the trucks, and don’t try anything. Keep them away from the border guards, OK?”
“Yeah. Where you going?”
“I dunno. With this guy.”
I fell in behind the border guard, and he walked toward this little adobe building with a door and window facing the road. It was about 100 yards off the road, through the sand and cactus plants, down a gully and up the other side. I followed obediently three paces behind. What ran through my mind at that point, was what’s going to happen to me? I had on my soiled jeans and a dusty T-shirt with dried sweat under the arms and on the front, having been on the road for three days and nights. I don’t think I’m going to impress anybody dressed like this, that’s for sure, I thought.
He opened the door to the small building, went in and motioned for me to follow him. And … there was the captain sitting behind his desk, being cooled a bit by a fan blowing from the corner of the room. He had sunglasses on, so I couldn’t see his eyes, as he looked up toward me. Before he could say anything, I pulled my letters out and placed them on the desk in front of him. The guard who brought me over motioned for me to sit in the only other chair in the office that was right in front of the captain’s desk. That’s when the captain had started reading from his book.
He had just kept on reading.
“NO ELECTRONIC ARTICLES, EQUIPMENT, WIRING TOOLS, RADIO PARTS, TUBES, AND NO CANNED GOODS, TOYS, GAMES, OR ANY OTHER ARTICLE OF ANY SIGNIFICANT RETAIL VALUE THAT COULD BE SOLD IN MEXICO.”
Then, after what seemed an eternity to me, he finally stopped his reading. Put the book down on his desk, still open to the page, put his sunglasses back on, and looked up at me. If he was expecting me to say anything, he was going to be in for a long wait. I was frozen. All I could think of doing was to look back at him with a neither unfriendly nor frightened expression. Or at least so I thought.
After what seemed a long time just listening to the fan rattle from side to side, he finally made a motion toward me with his hand. It was a sign of dismissal, like “get out of my office. I’m through with you.”
I got up to leave, and then remembered my letters were still on his desk. He had never even looked at them. I opened my hand toward the letters to see if he’d let me have them back at least. He didn’t change his expression, which had been inscrutable to me anyway, so I quickly picked up my letters and followed the guard who’d brought me out the door into the blinding sun light. I thought, well, this is the end of us. We walked slowly back toward the trucks still parked where they had been. I had to keep my head down to watch where I was walking to avoid tripping over the uneven ground and rocks.
As we made our way back toward the trucks, the guard turned toward me, tapped me on my side with the back of his hand, and said,
“Oye, joven! Fíjate bien. Give us a little help, and we can get this done a lot faster.”
***** ***** ***** ***** *****