An Ode to the Man Face Down in the Rio Grande
Dated March fifteenth, 2006.
This passage comes from time spent with STEER, the Laredo-based South Texas Environmental Education and Research program. Eight to ten million gallons of raw sewage are pumped into the Rio Grande, known in Mexico as the Río Bravo, each day. Combined with chemical runoff from U.S.-based warehouses, the contamination poses major environmental and health risks.
This greatest risk of the day, however, turned out to be the river itself.
- - - - -
Yesterday I saw the body of a dead man on the Rio Grande.
I was with a college group collecting water samples. Upstream, a group of children started shouting at us, "hay un mojado", "hay un mojado"--"there's a wet", "there's a crosser". Our group didn't know what to make of this at first. Were the kids really saying what we thought
they were saying? Did they really mean what we thought they meant?
I started walking towards the kids, alone, as they began coming our way. When we met, all suspicions were confirmed. With a modest net in tow, they intended to go fishing. Their unfortunate catch of the day: an "hombre muerto"--a "dead man".
I walked up the river with them. We strode down the shore, chattering, crawled under a barb wire fence and jumped over gullies. The walk seemed so deliberate, so anxious.
We arrived at the body, and we stopped. Just stopped. The kind of dramatic pause that you see in the movies, when the detectives walk into the room with the corpse and halt in mid-stride, transfixed. They take slow looks around and even slower steps forward. Whispering about in
furtive hypotheses, they return to normal time.
The body was red and black, burnt by the sun and charred with decay. The man's hands--surely he was a man at one point--were taut and sinewy. You could see his bones through thin layers of muscle. His torso was bloated, raw and yellowish by the waistline. A hole in his exposed back, along his spine and directly between his shoulder blades, was bubbling like some festering geyser. The man's body was giving one last and long exhale.
I called 9-1-1. I took pictures. The children walked away, perched on a small island in the distance.
I looked at the body, face down and unmoving. Get up, I couldn't help thinking. Why wouldn't he get up? Get up.
He didn't.
The college students arrived and milled about, some close and some far, but all within eyeshot. Would he get up for them?
He didn't.
* * * * *
There are two stories to this man's death. The first is the one you might expect. He drowned.
According to official counts by the Border Patrol, four-hundred and seventy-two people died trying to cross the Rio Grande/Río Bravo into the United States last year, forty-nine in Laredo. Unofficial counts put the total much higher--around eight-hundred. Oft-referred to "mojados" cross for many reasons: some haul drugs, more reunite with family and most seek jobs. The river can be unforgiving in these ventures. It swells with irrigation water, whorls in unseen whirlpools and charges with undercurrents. Most know its dangers, but few expect to confront
them.
Face-down in the mud, this man had no other choice.
The second story: he was murdered.
Next to the man was a shopping cart, upturned and sinking into the earth along with its unanticipated partner. Had one wanted to kill the man and discard of the body in the river, a shopping cart might have been a sufficient, however unlikely, vehicle to navigate the maze of
undergrowth in the hills above. A final heave of the cart might have left the man prone, sprawled and perpendicular to the shoreline.
This year, an average of two homicides are committed in Nuevo Laredo every three days. Chalk up the murders to exceptional drug-related violence. Some of that violence has spilled over into its American sister, Laredo, but at a number that pales in comparison: twenty-one.
Chances are, the man died while trying to cross the river. Homicides are relatively rare occurrences in Laredo, the body lacked visible signs of trauma, the cart would have been difficult if not impossible to squeeze through thick scrub, and the river was strong enough to carry both cart and body miles from upstream. .
I'll never know for sure.
* * * * *
As I walked back downstream, past the bras and panties, shorts, candy wrappers and plastic bags of the successful, I spoke with a director of the college program. A decade-long regular of the water sampling trips, this was his third run-in with would-have-been crossers. The first was a body, much like the one we just saw. The second was a skeleton, bleached by the sun and adorned with a burial shroud of swimming trunks.
He wishes that migrants could find a safer way to cross.
"You know what the weird thing is?", he asked. "We talk about the wages in Mexico, as far as NAFTA and all that. I'll tell you my personal opinion. Even if they raise wages some, some of the companies are moving because they still can't compete. They still have to move to other parts of the world, where labor's even cheaper. And they're not paying much here, y'know?"
He stopped and turned around, facing me. "It all comes back to the consumer," he said.
"How much are you willing to pay?"
* * * * *
While the college group finished collecting samples, I sat and wrote, trying to collect my thoughts.
Hundreds of migrants must have passed through that spot--an enclave of desert thicket, discarded clothing and trash bags, trash bags and more trash bags. Water-proof carry-alls for each person who swam the river.
Dated March fifteenth, 2006.
This passage comes from time spent with STEER, the Laredo-based South Texas Environmental Education and Research program. Eight to ten million gallons of raw sewage are pumped into the Rio Grande, known in Mexico as the Río Bravo, each day. Combined with chemical runoff from U.S.-based warehouses, the contamination poses major environmental and health risks.
This greatest risk of the day, however, turned out to be the river itself.
- - - - -
Yesterday I saw the body of a dead man on the Rio Grande.
I was with a college group collecting water samples. Upstream, a group of children started shouting at us, "hay un mojado", "hay un mojado"--"there's a wet", "there's a crosser". Our group didn't know what to make of this at first. Were the kids really saying what we thought
they were saying? Did they really mean what we thought they meant?
I started walking towards the kids, alone, as they began coming our way. When we met, all suspicions were confirmed. With a modest net in tow, they intended to go fishing. Their unfortunate catch of the day: an "hombre muerto"--a "dead man".
I walked up the river with them. We strode down the shore, chattering, crawled under a barb wire fence and jumped over gullies. The walk seemed so deliberate, so anxious.
We arrived at the body, and we stopped. Just stopped. The kind of dramatic pause that you see in the movies, when the detectives walk into the room with the corpse and halt in mid-stride, transfixed. They take slow looks around and even slower steps forward. Whispering about in
furtive hypotheses, they return to normal time.
The body was red and black, burnt by the sun and charred with decay. The man's hands--surely he was a man at one point--were taut and sinewy. You could see his bones through thin layers of muscle. His torso was bloated, raw and yellowish by the waistline. A hole in his exposed back, along his spine and directly between his shoulder blades, was bubbling like some festering geyser. The man's body was giving one last and long exhale.
I called 9-1-1. I took pictures. The children walked away, perched on a small island in the distance.
I looked at the body, face down and unmoving. Get up, I couldn't help thinking. Why wouldn't he get up? Get up.
He didn't.
The college students arrived and milled about, some close and some far, but all within eyeshot. Would he get up for them?
He didn't.
* * * * *
There are two stories to this man's death. The first is the one you might expect. He drowned.
According to official counts by the Border Patrol, four-hundred and seventy-two people died trying to cross the Rio Grande/Río Bravo into the United States last year, forty-nine in Laredo. Unofficial counts put the total much higher--around eight-hundred. Oft-referred to "mojados" cross for many reasons: some haul drugs, more reunite with family and most seek jobs. The river can be unforgiving in these ventures. It swells with irrigation water, whorls in unseen whirlpools and charges with undercurrents. Most know its dangers, but few expect to confront
them.
Face-down in the mud, this man had no other choice.
The second story: he was murdered.
Next to the man was a shopping cart, upturned and sinking into the earth along with its unanticipated partner. Had one wanted to kill the man and discard of the body in the river, a shopping cart might have been a sufficient, however unlikely, vehicle to navigate the maze of
undergrowth in the hills above. A final heave of the cart might have left the man prone, sprawled and perpendicular to the shoreline.
This year, an average of two homicides are committed in Nuevo Laredo every three days. Chalk up the murders to exceptional drug-related violence. Some of that violence has spilled over into its American sister, Laredo, but at a number that pales in comparison: twenty-one.
Chances are, the man died while trying to cross the river. Homicides are relatively rare occurrences in Laredo, the body lacked visible signs of trauma, the cart would have been difficult if not impossible to squeeze through thick scrub, and the river was strong enough to carry both cart and body miles from upstream. .
I'll never know for sure.
* * * * *
As I walked back downstream, past the bras and panties, shorts, candy wrappers and plastic bags of the successful, I spoke with a director of the college program. A decade-long regular of the water sampling trips, this was his third run-in with would-have-been crossers. The first was a body, much like the one we just saw. The second was a skeleton, bleached by the sun and adorned with a burial shroud of swimming trunks.
He wishes that migrants could find a safer way to cross.
"You know what the weird thing is?", he asked. "We talk about the wages in Mexico, as far as NAFTA and all that. I'll tell you my personal opinion. Even if they raise wages some, some of the companies are moving because they still can't compete. They still have to move to other parts of the world, where labor's even cheaper. And they're not paying much here, y'know?"
He stopped and turned around, facing me. "It all comes back to the consumer," he said.
"How much are you willing to pay?"
* * * * *
While the college group finished collecting samples, I sat and wrote, trying to collect my thoughts.
Hundreds of migrants must have passed through that spot--an enclave of desert thicket, discarded clothing and trash bags, trash bags and more trash bags. Water-proof carry-alls for each person who swam the river.
Trash bags were everywhere: at my feet, among the empty bags of Ramen and potatoe chips; at
my side, wrapped around the trunk of a tree; and overhead among dense, interlocking branches, dangling like cheap party decorations and dancing like phantoms.
I scribbled haltingly, imagining forty-nine bodies stacked one by one by one, placed next to each other in a long string of compounded, irreconcilable failure--the deaths multiplied, riverside. I thought of migrants back home in Arizona--two-hundred and eighty-two of them this last year--emptied, withered and wasted, leaning against saguaros and swimming through sandy deserts. I thought of the man upstream, and after a while I didn't think any more.
I looked to my right and saw the river. It seemed so peaceful. Peaceful, comforting and inviting.
* * * * *
The death wasn't reported in the American news today. Bodies in the river don't usually make the five o'clock.
A Nuevo Laredo-based paper, La Tarde, carried a story about the "Mortal Río Bravo"--the "deadly Rio Grande". The headline on the cover: "Six undocumented immigrants have died in the murderous waters of the Rio Grande, in only the last two and a half months. The river has become deadly for those migrants who desire to attain the 'American Dream'."
What that dream is, I don't know. The America I know is torn between border enforcement policies and DREAM Act legislation, free trade and free movement of workers, the threat of narco-terrorism and the boon of international money remittances.
If the American Dream means money and success, then one must consider who is earning the money and how he is successful. Is he the migrant who sends money back to her family in his country of origin? Are they the business owners, profiteering off of a group often referred to as a
"shadow society"? Or are they the drug runners, the human traffickers and the corrupt border officials? The landscapers, the hotel maids and the restaurant cooks? The consumer who buys the fruit, or the worker who picks it?
Is success measured in in raw profit, or is it measured in mouths fed? Is “success” making it into the upper-middle class of American society, or is it just making it across the river?
If the "American Dream" means something else--a core value of achievement despite all obstacles--then perhaps we have to rethink our highly militarized border and police-state enforcement policies: constructing a seven-hundred-mile-long series of walls, the further restriction of humanitarian aid laws, criminal prosecution of naturalized family members (children) for harboring undocumented relatives-turned felons (parents), and local police enforcement of federal-level responsibilities. Perhaps we need to stop dreaming and wake up, get up, and face the reality our policy drowns people in a river.
For many, the American Dream isn't defined by luck or good fortune. It's defined by opposition. It’s defined by what goes unsaid.
* * * * *
As we bounced along the dirt road leading back to the city, our university van came upon two squad cars meandering down to the river. A lone policewoman drove by in the first car. Four men drove by in the second—two officers in the front, and another two twenty-something men in the back (or were they two of the children?). The drivers stopped to discuss the whereabouts
of the body.
I imagine that there were no other questions. There was no investigation. For them, cased closed: the man had drowned.
The cars began to pull away. With nothing else to say, I stuck my head out the window in the rear of the van: "it's down by the shopping cart. The shopping cart."
Heads nodded in each of the three cars. We all knew.
* * * * *
Today, in passing, I told a man about the dead body on the river. "Yeah," he said. "That happens a lot." He turned away and went on with his business.
"Another floater," he mumbled.
* * * * *
Get up.
The cars began to pull away. With nothing else to say, I stuck my head out the window in the rear of the van: "it's down by the shopping cart. The shopping cart."
Heads nodded in each of the three cars. We all knew.
* * * * *
Today, in passing, I told a man about the dead body on the river. "Yeah," he said. "That happens a lot." He turned away and went on with his business.
"Another floater," he mumbled.
* * * * *
Get up.
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