The Rosary

By Scott Steward, 6 October 2022

They walked silently in single file under the desert moon. Sixteen men, women, and children guided by a gang banger. A coyote, as the common slang goes.  The dunes loomed ahead in the darkness, and the walk was getting more brutal in the soft sand. The night was cold. The wind seemed to bite through the thin clothing of the travelers. Lights from a city beyond the dunes illuminated the sky in the distance. “I’m so tired,” the girl whispered. “Quiet Lupe, we’re almost there,” her brother said. They had been walking for hours. The blisters on their feet were turning into open wounds.

Most of the people in the group were with their family members ranging from sixty years old to a little girl who was maybe three. Alejandro and Guadalupe Albamonte were brother and sister. “There’s the highway,” Alejandro whispered as they crested the top of a large dune about three hundred feet tall. There was the sound of motorcycles in the distance. “Motos!” hissed the Coyote. “Move!” he yelled to the group, “Migra!” as he led them down the dune quickly and then up another one. Motos are what smugglers call the Border Patrol’s ATV unit. They ride on four-wheel motorized all-terrain vehicles. Some of the families with small children lagged, and the rest of the group had to wait for them. The sounds of the motos grew closer. “They’re on our trail,” the foot guide said. He was a kid about seventeen with short black hair and tattoos on his arm. “I think we can make it to the Interstate before they catch us if we hurry."

From the dune's height, Guadalupe could see the lights of two motos in the distance, weaving back and forth at a high rate of speed. She had this feeling of being hunted. The group kept moving toward the highway in the distance. She forgot about the cold. Her heart was pounding inside her throat. She felt nauseous. Guadalupe and her brother tried to make the crossing a week ago. They were smuggled in a Chevy Suburban in a caravan with a Jeep and another Suburban. They were crammed in the back with about twelve other people. It was during the heat of day which in October was still warm.

The first Suburban reached a gate to a bridge over a large canal. It was one of the drops, a facility that regulated the flow of the All-American Canal, which came from the Colorado River in Arizona and ran East two West along the US-Mexican border. The man in the passenger seat got out and cut the lock to the first gate on the south side with bolt cutters. The others called him Pipas. He was also a gang member. As the first Suburban drove across the concrete road across the canal to the other gate, Pipas walked ahead to cut the lock on the heavy steel bar that blocked the road. “Migra!” the driver of the first Suburban screamed. From the side and below the concrete road across the drop two men dressed in green flight suits slid spike strips under the second Suburban and the Jeep Cherokee at the back of the caravan. The first vehicle's driver punched the gas and rammed the gate, hitting the heavy steel barrier slamming Pipas against the chain link fence with the arm.

The Jeep was in the rear, and it backed out of the concrete road and slid down the side of a small hill leading up to the canal. People ran everywhere in a panic as Border Patrol agents surrounded them on their ATVs. The first Suburban ran over spike strips and was captured further down the highway. Guadalupe and Alejandro stayed with the Suburban on the drop. A female Border Patrol agent kneeled next to them after they were taken out of the Suburban and were told to sit. She asked them their names, where they were from, and who their mother and father were. “Nacimiento?” the agent asked in broken Spanish. “I’m fourteen,” Guadalupe replied. Her brother was two years older.  They waited on the ground until a van came and took them to the Border Patrol station in Calexico.

At the station, they were searched and given juice and crackers. They were asked more questions, and they put their index fingers on a red light, and the Border Patrol took their photo with a computer camera. They were crammed into concrete cells with a stainless steel toilet and concrete beds. There was a water fountain at the back of the toilet. The doors were kept open, and they could stand and watch other people enter the processing center. People from all over Mexico as well as Guatemala and Honduras. Some strange women didn’t speak Spanish. “Those are Indians,” Alejandro said. “They speak their own language; they’re probably from Chiapas.”

Guadalupe and Alejandro spent about three or four hours at the Border Patrol station before being loaded onto a bus and taken back to the border town. The bus pulled into a large parking lot by the New River. It smelled terrible outside, like sewage and smoke. The Border Patrol bus driver escorted about thirty people through a gate to a Mexican Immigration officer who checked them. Anyone not from Mexico was returned to the Border Patrol. “Many people lie and say they’re from Mexico because it's easier to cross again. Otherwise, they get sent to their home country and must start over.” Alejandro said.

Guadalupe and Alejandro walked through Mexicali's sprawling city on the border's Mexican side. The agreement with the smugglers was that they would guarantee them to get through, they just had to find their contact, but first, they bought some street food with what little money they had left. Along the border fence, families gathered to speak with their loved ones on the US side. They set up lawn chairs and had coolers with beer and food. Street vendors walked among the cars that were waiting in long lines to cross the border at the Port of Entry in Calexico, California. After making a call on a payphone, Alejandro bought some Mexican hot chocolate from one of the street vendors for Guadalupe and him. He pulled off his backpack and found the money he had hidden inside. They sat on the curb, drinking hot chocolate and eating fresh tamales. About an hour later, a pickup truck took them back to the safe house outside the city, where dozens of people waited for their chance to cross.

Guadalupe and Alejandro’s father lived and worked in the United States. He worked as a day laborer but made more money in a day's work than he could make in a week in Mexico. They haven’t seen their father in seven years. Guadalupe barely remembered him. Their mother raised them in Michoacan until she died months earlier from cancer. Their father could not attend the funeral because he did not have the proper paperwork to travel back and forth from Mexico to the US. He was what the Americans called “illegal.” Guadalupe’s mother gave her a rosary carved from smooth wood on her deathbed. “Mija, take this to guide you,” she whispered as she held Guadalupe’s hand with the rosary. “Go with God.” Those were her last words. Cancer took her ability to speak. Within a month, they were attending her funeral. She was thirty-four but looked like she was sixty when she died.

Their father lived in Hayward, California. He called them through their grandmother's phone. “I want my family here with me,” he told them. Their mother always wanted to stay in Mexico near her family. Now that she was gone, their father sent for them. “I’ll make the arrangements.” Their father knew of some people that smuggled people into the United States from co-workers. They charge two thousand dollars per person. If you can’t pay, they will find a way to work off the debt. Some organizations will extort the families of smuggled people who can’t pay. They threaten to torture or kill them if the families don’t pay up. Sometimes they beat them with baseball bats and burn them with cigars while the family members listen to their screams over the telephone. The Border Patrol can do little because kidnapping is a police matter. He made a deal that he would pay for some of the smuggling fees and his children would work off the remaining debt with an employer the smuggling organization would arrange for them. They would give all their earnings to the organization in exchange for housing and paying off their debt. They were promised the world in coming to the United States.

The bus ride from Michoacan to Mexicali was long. Once at the terminal in Mexicali, Guadalupe and Alejandro were greeted by an older man with dark hair and sunglasses. He smoked a cigar. They were taken to a ranch outside of the city and put into a bare cinder block house with a dirt floor and a tin roof. Dozens of other people were lying on blankets on the floor. “It smells terrible in here,” Alejandro said. He opened his backpack and shared some dried Machaca with Guadalupe that their grandmother had given them for the journey. The shredded beef was spicy. The smugglers provided simple meals of rice and beans twice a day.

Guadalupe was a pretty girl. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail. She typically wore dresses, but for the journey, she wore jeans and a black tee shirt. She caught the eye of one of the coyotes. “That guy keeps looking at me,” she said as she nodded to the man standing in the house's doorway. “Just ignore him,” Alejandro said and rolled over his blanket. The man was one of the high-ranking smugglers. He was always giving orders to the others. There were several gang member-looking guys. They were typically paid fifty dollars per head to guide groups of people into the United States. They knew the routes well.

The man in the doorway was the same man who picked them up from the bus terminal. He wore cowboy boots, nice jeans, and a western-style shirt with pearl snaps. The other men called him Salas. He was in his late thirties and had a thick black mustache. He wore a gold bracelet and had gold rings on his left hand. On his neck, there was a tattoo of an Aztec calendar. He would stop by the safe house several times a day to oversee the meals for his investment. One day the smugglers served some chicken with rice and beans. “You’re going to need some energy for your travels,” Salas told them. Alejandro and Guadalupe hungrily scarfed it down. “I feel so sleepy,” Alejandro said as he put his empty plate down and closed his eyes. Guadalupe felt strange. A dizziness came over her. Sounds became distorted, and she felt like she was dreaming when two men came to get her. They led her through the compound to a camping trailer resting on cinder blocks. Inside the trailer, Salas was sitting at the camper’s table inside. There were several other girls inside. One girl was sitting on Salas’ lap, and his hand was on her thigh between her legs. He smiled at Guadalupe as the two men guided her inside and shut the door.

When Alejandro woke up the following day, he did not know where he was for a moment. “Guadalupe,” he muttered. “Where’s my sister?” he asked a woman nearby. “They took her away last night,” the woman said. They said they needed her to make a phone call. That afternoon Guadalupe still hadn’t returned. Alejandro went to the door and asked the man standing there where she was. “Get back inside, pindejo,” the man said. Guadalupe returned three days later in the afternoon. She seemed odd. Distant. Her eyes were glazed. Her clothing was ripped, and her hair was messed up. “What happened?” Alejandro asked,

“What did they do to you?”

“Nothing!” Guadalupe said. Her voice was slurred. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She had tears in her eyes as she rolled over on her blanket. Alejandro could hear her sobbing. He reached over to hold his sister. He fought back the tears himself. He felt powerless.

“Get up!” a man shouted to the group inside the house. “It’s time to go. Gather your things and get into the van.” A Suburban was waiting outside. Guadalupe and Alejandro gathered their backpacks and went out. The sun blinded them. They crawled into the back of the SUV. Both felt groggy and couldn’t think clearly. Guadalupe held her rosary in her hand as the Suburban left the compound, rubbing the smooth wooden cross between her index finger and thumb. They rode on dirt roads in the Sonoran Desert for about an hour before turning onto a Mexican highway. The Suburban turned off the street and drove on another dirt road through asparagus fields before stopping at the base of a large dune. A teenage boy got out of the passenger seat and opened the door in the back. “Let’s go!” he said, “We walk from here.” He wore a blue ball cap with “LA” in white. “Ghost, it’s mile marker one fifty-one. That’s where the meetup is.” Ghost was the kid’s gang moniker. He earned it because he was so good at eluding the Border Patrol. Ghost passed out milk jugs of water to every other person. “You have to share,” he said. He started counting under his breath as he bounced his finger at each person. “Uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis, siete…dieciséis,” he said finally. Sixteen. “Eight hundred dollars,” he thought to himself. “Not bad for a night's work.”

“We are going to walk through those dunes. On the other side is a highway. We’ll meet with a driver there, and he’ll take you to Calexico to another house. From there, you’ll stay a few days until you get another ride to San Bernardino, where you’ll stay until your families pay or the bosses find work for you in Los Angeles.” The group solemnly followed Ghost up the dune under the sunset. The group cast long shadows on the sand as they made their way through the desert.

“The motos are closing in!” Ghost hissed. We need to move. The group started to spread as the families with young children fell behind. “Leave them!” Ghost shouted. “Let’s go!” The group split up with four people staying with Ghost and twelve staggered in smaller groups behind. “Get down!” Ghost whispered, pushing Guadalupe and Alejandro behind a creosote bush on the back side of the dune. “Migra is here.” Two ATVs with Border Patrol agents surrounded the twelve stragglers and sat them down. One of the Border Patrol agents was shouting at one of the mothers in the group after they had them sit down in the sand. He took off his helmet. He was a tall bald man who wore a green jumpsuit. A black leather gunbelt at his waist. “What the fuck kind of mother are you to make your toddler walk through the dunes in patent leather shoes.” He shouted in Spanish. “My daughter is her age, and I can’t even comprehend doing that to her.” A little girl with curly light brown hair watched the angry Border Patrol agent scream at her mother. She wore a fancy black dress and shiny dress shoes.

“Let’s go,” Ghost whispered. Ghost quietly led the remaining four down the backside of the dune while the Border Patrol was distracted with the group. “It will take them a while to figure out we split up,” Ghost said. The group now consisted of Guadalupe, Alejandro, and two men in their early twenties who never spoke. They were simple laborers who worked the corn farms. Mexico once had a thriving corn farming industry. In response to the US farm crisis, the United States, Canada, and Mexico joined the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA in 1994. This flooded Mexico with cheap US corn, which put eight million corn farmers out of work. That was the beginning of the mass migration North as unemployed Mexican farmers and the people their farms supported sought employment in the United States. It is estimated that twelve million Mexican nationals live in the United States illegally. Remittances from these immigrants count as Mexico's second-largest source of income, next to oil exports.

Ghost led them out of the dunes and into a flat area with thick brush and salt cedar trees. The ground was white with alkaline deposits and shone brightly under the moon of the clear night sky. The group stopped to rest under a salt cedar tree. “Get rid of your backpacks.” Ghost said. “We need to travel lightly.” Guadalupe took her rosary and some documents from her blue canvas backpack and put them in her pocket. After some time, they got up and began walking again. They came to a tall hill that ran along the dirt road. It was the All-American canal's bank. Ghost led them to the top and down a dirt road along the canal. Tall reeds spread thickly into the black water, which moved swiftly under the moonlight. The bank on the other side of the channel was about two hundred feet away. “We need to cross the canal,” Ghost said. “We don’t have a raft. We are off the track.” Ghost led them down the dirt road on the Southside of the All-American canal. They had walked for almost an hour when Alejandro tripped and fell. He stood up. “Hijo de puta!” he spat. Alejandro looked down at what tripped him and saw a foot wearing a sneaker. It was a badly decomposed dead body. In its hand was an empty plastic water jug. “The idiot died of dehydration next to a canal,” Ghost said. Just then, the smell hit them. “Let’s keep moving,” Ghost said.

A bridge across the canal loomed into view. There was a Border Patrol vehicle with its running lights facing south. It was a white SUV with a thick green stripe along its side. It was a two-door Chevy Tahoe. It was parked in the middle of the bridge. “Fuck!” Ghost hissed. “I can’t catch a break tonight. We’ll wait until he moves.” They waited in the reeds on the bank of the All-American canal for a few hours.

The Border Patrol agent never moved. Occasionally another Border Patrol vehicle would cross the bridge after stopping next to the one on the bridge. “Wait!” Ghost whispered as he watched the bridge. One of the Border Patrol agents got out of his vehicle and took a photo through the windshield of the parked agent’s Tahoe. “The guy on the bridge is asleep,” Ghost said. “Those migra play games with each other when one of them falls asleep.” They watched as the one with the polaroid put the photo under the wiper of the sleeping agent’s Tahoe before returning to his SUV and driving off. “We have to move!” Ghost shouted. The group ran to the end of the bridge. Ghost quietly walked to the front bumper of the sleeping agent’s Tahoe. He popped up and saw the sleeping Border Patrol Agent. Ghost turned and motioned the group. They quietly crossed the bridge to the other side. Ghost lifted the wiper blade and looked at the photo. The photo showed a fat Border Patrol sleeping with drool around the corner of his mustached mouth. Ghost put the picture back under the wiper blade and met up with the group on the other side of the bridge. “Now we have to backtrack.” Ghost said. “Our meetup site is a few kilometers East of where we saw the motos but first, we’ll get cover under the trees just West of here.”

The five walked back along the North bank of the All-American canal Westward between the embankment and the Border Patrol drag road. On the other side of the tall wall was the channel. The Border Patrol slowly pulls tires behind their vehicles to make a drag road. A drag road is smooth as glass and makes it easier to detect footprints. They walked through the thick brush for about an hour. “We’ll cross the road here.” Ghost said. “Everyone, take off your shoes.” The group crossed the drag road in their socks, with Ghost following behind them, brushing the footprints with a tree branch. When he was done, you could barely see any prints. “Only the best Border Patrol agent will see these,” Ghost laughed. “Most of those guys are stupid.”

They rested in a thicket when the sun began to rise behind them. The morning started to warm from the chill of the night. Ghost led them through the thick brush Eastward toward the bridge with the sleeping Border Patrol agent. When they got close to the highway, Ghost made his way to a call box while leaving the group behind. A few minutes later, he came back. “We must meet the driver at the twin bridges to our East.” The group began walking. “Shit, Migra!” Ghost said. A Border Patrol agent vehicle was behind them. The agent was walking around. “They picked up our tracks,” he said. “Let’s go!” The group began running toward Interstate 8. Once they got within sight of the highway, they turned East. The Border Patrol agent was on their tail. He would drive a little, then get out to find the tracks. He kept slowly moving toward them. Another Border Patrol vehicle was ahead of them. “They are boxing us in.” Ghost said. “If they bring a helicopter, we’re fucked.” They kept moving. The sun was entirely in the morning sky. It was getting warm.

They came across two bridges on Interstate 8 that crossed the All-American canal as it turned North. The Border Patrol agent ahead of them turned South, leaving them an opening to the bridges. The one on their trail was getting close. They could hear his radio as he coordinated more agents to come to hunt them down. They reached the south bridge and ran across it to the east. They hid under a large tree by the Interstate. “Our ride should be here soon.” Ghost said. “Crossing the bridge, the Border Patrol should be thrown off long enough for us to escape.” The Border Patrol agent tracking them was walking around near the east side of the bridge they had just crossed when a white minivan pulled over onto the shoulder of the bridge and honked the horn. “That’s us!” Ghost shouted, and the five ran across the bridge and jumped into the van. The rosary that Guadalupe’s mother had given her on her deathbed fell out of her pocket into the sand and gravel on the side of the Interstate as she got into the van. “My rosary!” she cried as Ghost shut the door, and the van sped off toward Yuma.

As they turned around and went over the north bridge, a lone Border Patrol agent was walking where they had just loaded up. He was talking on the radio through the handheld mike on his shoulder as he looked at the ground. He bent down, picked up the polished wooden rosary from the gravel, and put it in his pocket.

The End.