Tidings from Nogales

Maria came up to my shoulder, her bright orange t-shirt leaping out at me despite her small stature. I interviewed her in a halting combination of Spanish and English (her English was better than my Spanish) and tried to jot down notes while balancing in the middle of the bus-depot waiting area. Deported men and women occupied striped bus seats on all sides of us while others milled around the folding card table staffed by young volunteers for No More Deaths(www.nomoredeaths.org) , who wielded cell phones and long lists of people waiting to call relatives in the United States or Mexico. Many had not yet had the chance to tell family members if they were alive or dead.

Maria's story is typical in many ways, but it did not feel typical or trite in any way as I wrote down the events that had befallen her. Her worry, frustration and fear made every stroke of my pen personal and gave her words longevity in my mind and heart. She is nearing 50 years old and has been married for five years to a US Citizen in Delaware, about 15 years older than she. They had tried to adjust her US status but that is difficult today, under our current laws even if one is married to a citizen. Then, disaster struck her family in Puebla, Mexico, and she had to go to them without proper documents.

After her family crisis was resolved, Maria and her brother returned to the border, about 30 hours from her home town. Maria was desperate to be with her husband, who has health issues and relies on her care. Without documents, the siblings joined a group crossing the border on foot. Shortly after they started their journey, they were robbed by cholos, armed bandits. Maria's eyes grew wide as she recalled: "they made us take off all our clothes except for our underwear - it was so embarrassing! Then they made us kneel and put our hands behind our heads. They put a gun behind us and took everything we had. It was terrible." She cried. I did, too.

The group was picked up by Border Patrol and separated. Maria lost track of her brother - she did not see him at the deportation center in Tucson where she was "voluntarily repatriated." That means she agreed to go back to Mexico willingly instead of going to jail in the US. She was taken to Nogales, Mexico, without possessions of any kind. When I met her she was waiting for her turn at the cell phone to call the Mexican Embassy in Tucson and find out information about her brother. She had been able to call her husband, and her family in Puebla, but no one had heard from her brother.

I asked what she was going to do next, and she said she had no idea. "I'm so worried for my husband," she said. My husband was with me at the bus station, and both of us were shaken by Maria's story, just one of hundreds that can be heard in Nogales every week. I felt both lucky and wrong to walk out of the bus station and across the border with him, my life tied up with a bow while hers lay in shambles.