Heliotropic ángeles

"¡Chicharitoooooo!!!!!!" the commentator screamed from the radio. While the rest of the volunteers received a tour of the desert aid camp, I retreated to the only location available to listen to the Mexico-Argentina game: my car, which sat in full sun on a 104 degree day in southern Arizona.

I began my third summer volunteering with a group that provides humanitarian aid to migrants crossing the Sonoran desert in Arizona. It is the deadliest migration corridor in the United States.

I liked the group of people we were working with. Every summer is different and this appeared to be an especially friendly and cooperative group. The first week, we faced extreme heat both in the camp and while hiking migrant trails and were literally not encountering any migrants. Speculation swirled. Were folks waiting for World Cup to end? Had the U.S. economy slowed immigration? Were they out there in that heat, wilting, withering, dying...and we weren't finding them? To the contrary of the seriousness of our mission in the desert, things were getting slap happy in camp. I like it that way. It is difficult to be around morose people that speak of nothing but the plight of migrants and the disaster of U.S. border policy. I prefer working with people that know when to play and know when to work.

"Waaaaake UPPPPPPPPP!!!!!" a shrill voice howled in an eighties, hair band falsetto while rapidly playing a Neil Young song on an acoustic guitar. I laid in my sleeping bag in the open air under the 5AM sun shuttering with giggles as I watched a sandy haired young man lean over a sleeping volunteer, screaming his song until she sat up. Coyotes began howling in the distance.

Melissa saddled herself into a fanny pack in order to hold up her sagging jeans as we began our morning hike. "Dude, I hope there's no cuties in the wash. I have no game with this fanny pack on". I had never heard this preoccupation at the prospect of encountering migrants before and it absolutely killed me. "Man, this tastes as good as he looks" she continued, taking a sip of water laced with an electrolyte powder gifted from a male admirer as we trudged out on to the trail.

"God, it even smells like shit" I commented, eyeing a road side Border Patrol station. "Um, sorry, that was me" my co-pilot stated as we promptly rolled down all of the windows.

A story was circulating about a group of migrants someone had encountered the previous week. Members of the migrant group had asked the volunteers a series of questions: #1 "Do you have water?", #2 "Do you have food?", #3 "Who won the Mexico-France game?".

We kept finding these insane black water bottles in the trails. I have encountered gallon bottles painted black during previous desert visits; apparently clear gallons reflect the light of the moon and attract Border Patrol to night walkers. It appears someone got smart in Altar and started marketing black ones. Some of us began referring to them as "Model 2010".

The mood shifted when we found Leonardo the Saturday after the one week volunteers had returned to Tucson. He was young. He couldn't remember the last time he had eaten and estimated that he had been walking nine days. He had been left by his group and had been walking alone for two days without water. I stared at his lonely, scared, crestfallen face. My eyes attached to his Jack Skellington bracelet, a popular symbol with my students in Tijuana. I knew he was a prepa kid. He couldn't walk anymore. I couldn't watch him touch his toes for Border Patrol, put his hands behind his back, the frisking and shoving and eventual boarding into the back of their dog catcher trucks. I would not be able to watch one of my students being loaded into a BP truck. I couldn't watch Leo.

I remember Julio from Chiapas who returned to Mexico to bury his son. I remember Pedro from D.F. that would whisper water requests. I remember Juan from Sinaloa that had been robbed and left to die by his group. Hector and Eduardo from Sonora, the feral and gaunt looking men who approached us, yelled "México!", asked for water and said they were going back, the men of Puebla, of Vera Cruz, the men who made the sign of the cross when given water, reminding me of my students that made the sign of the cross when I gave them their final exam, I remember the men that exchanged few words and the others that told me everything. And I remember Rogelio.

He was heavy set and limping. He wanted to return to his parents, wife and children in the United States. After nearly ten years in the U.S., he seemed to identify more with the American city in which he lived than the Mexican city he came from. More than anything, I remember the fear and desperation in his eyes when I left him.

I felt numb, but guarded. Someone got us a treat one day, ice cream that was still frozen for lunch. I put my spoon into the dish I had been handed, thought of Rogelio and wanted to cry. I got control of myself, but triggers would puncture my numbness at unexpected times. Like finding Rogelio's discarded water bottle from Altar, something he didn't think he needed anymore wherever he was going.

There are people in the desert called angels, but there really aren't any angels out there. Well, there's one, but you will have to ask my friend Lupe about that. I'm no angel and most of the migrants aren't sprouting wings either. Contrary to popular belief, poverty does not bring out the best in people, it often brings out the basest forms of barbarism. There are some devils out there, some acts of courage and selflessness and a lot of contradictions.

After two weeks in the desert, I returned to TJ, flocked by passing border patrol trucks throughout Arizona and California. I cried when I left the desert, like I always do, somewhat relieved to leave but with a profound sense of sadness. Hours later, as I drove down a deserted southern California road, I suddenly saw a sea of twinkling lights.

I have never felt so relieved to see Tijuana.