In Their Shoes: In Their Shoes

16: Crossing with Nannies

((1 was acting more as a mother." -Zoe Baird, President Clinton's first choice for U. S. attorney general, admitting to hiring an illegal immigrant ((Maybe Zoe Baird was right.... Maybe American parents have decided that the house is best maintained by the Latino. -Richard Rodriguez, MacNeil-Lehrer Report, April 8, 1993 7"m McAllen, Texas, I traveled nearly a thousand miles westward. On an earlier trip to El Paso, I had become acquainted with some Catholic nuns, and I went to their convent, where I stayed in a private room. In my talks with the nuns, I told them my plan: to cross with undocumented workers. One nun talked about a means of doing so, el punte negro, a black bridge. "It's a Southern Pacific Railway bridge used only for freight," she told me. "Mexicans run across this black bridge-there are no checkpoints-and once across the bridge, they are here in El Paso." The next morning, I left all my identification papers with one of the sisters, boarded one bus, changed to another and, without anyone asking for documentation, arrived in the Mexican town of Juarez. Before leaving the bus, I asked the driver, "Where is el punte negro?" He gave directions, and I walked to the bridge. I found sixty to seventy undocumented workers standing on the Mexican side, ready to make a dash. Looking over to the U.S. side, I saw one patrolman sitting at the 163 164 In Their Shoes wheel of a sedan. He held a small army of people at bay. Along with the others, I waited in the sun. I got acquainted with two young men, Roberto and Joaquin, both in their late twenties and somehow related. Both wore clean slacks with short-sleeved cotton shirts, open at the neck. Their hands were smooth and white, indicating they were office workers, a class apart from others around us, laborers who will dig ditches, bend and stoop over crops, pour concrete, clean abattoirs. "We might be sitting here all day," Roberto said after a two-hour wait. We were seated on an embankment, three in a row. As we talked, two Mexican women walked along a path below, then retraced their steps and climbed up beside us on the retaining wall. Seeing us as co-conspirators , one, somewhat hesitantly, said in Spanish, "We want to cross the bridge." I moved to one side, and they sat beside me. "Have you worked for the Anglos?" one asked. She volunteered they came north from Durango, having heard there were jobs as domestics in El Paso. Without needing to dissemble, I said that I had. We discussed the price that maids earn in El Paso, and to them the wages sounded fabulous. One of them remarked, "No woman earns such money where we come from." Taking my eyes off the black bridge, I studied the would-be domestics, neatly dressed in slacks and shirts and carrying only small purses. Neither of the women was rushing to divulge case histories. No one questioned them. They sought greater independence. But like me, they had linked their immediate future with the two men in our midst. Each hoped we would have the strength to cross the bridge together. As we waited, we saw the black bridge as our hope. Focused on our plan, we scarcely spoke. Yet we had silently agreed to trust one another. In those moments we were closer than kin. By mid-morning, the heat had become steamy, and we feared the immigration car would remain as a barrier. So Crossing with Nannies 165 we walked east, toward Chamizal Park, where Mrs. Jimmy Carter and Senora Carmen Romano de Lopez Portillo, wives of the presidents of the United States and Mexico, held a 1977 Good Neighbor meeting. The park takes its name from the Chamizal Treaty that returned 630 acres along the disputed U. S. border to Mexico. With Roberto and Joaquin and the two women, Carmen and Cristina, I watched the Rio Grande. Here it was unimpressive, a sluggish small stream flowing through a manmade canyon separating jobless workers from U. S. factories and fields. Carmen, the older and taller ofthe two women, with ample bosom and hips, tied her long, black hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her dark eyes spoke of a woman's inner life and personal sadness. Yet, she was quick to...