A Midnight Trip to Matamoros
by Elliott Turner
THESE GODDAMN ILLEGALS!
You turned on the local Fox station for a weather update as you put your espresso maker on the stove. You forgot to turn off the television or change channels before the white man in the bowtie in a clip began to explain what is wrong with America.
You change the station to Apple TV with your iTunes match albums you converted from CDs over a two decades ago. You put on some Eddy Herrera, your normal pregame warmup music. Lots of salsa and merengue. You make sure your tochones and shin guards are in your Adidas bag.
The espresso maker hisses and you move it to a burner that is turned off, then pour yourself a good portion in a plastic to-go thermos and add a sprinkling of sugar. You hop in your Nissan Sentra and head South from Edinburg to Alamo, Texas, even though your game is at fields in South McAllen near the military highway just by the border.
You are giving a ride to Gabriel, your team’s star striker who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license. You slow down to cross over the railroad tracks in San Juan near the Farmworker union hall, then enter a subdivision of one-story houses in varying states of disrepair.
You pull into Gabriel’s driveway and wait a few minutes. On a normal day, you’ve barely stopped the car before the front door flies open and he darts out. Like you, he lives for soccer.
But today the door stays closed. You try to call him and it goes straight to voicemail. You text him a few times, but no answer.
You turn off the car and step out. You amble up to Gabriel’s front door. Despite having played soccer for half a year on the same amateur team in the league’s top division, you’ve only entered his house once and met his spouse twice. You knock on the door, wait a spell, then ring the bell.
You hear a shuffling sound inside grow nearer, chanclas over tile, and then the door opens a crack. Marta is much shorter than Gabriel and stout, and you estimate she’s in her mid-forties and older than him. Her azabache hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her ojos de gato when focused could pierce metal.
Wearing just sweatpants and a white t-shirt, you see lines around both her eyes.
She does not invite you in.
She does not even say hello.
You ask for Gabriel.
Le pegó la perrera, she says.
You don’t understand. She reads the confusion on your face and says in English:
He got arrested last night.
…
Piiinche migra.
THESE GODDAMN BEANERS!
You are used to hearing this said explicitly while growing up in the Midwest, but also the common dog whistles amongst people who are xenophobically discreet. You yourself are güero, white skinned; your dad’s side of the family from Mexico is converso, not mestizo. Criptojews. Orden de Expulsión and all that fun. Catholics by the sword, not the word.
You get tagged as a shoplifter and tailed by Mall security guards in your hometown -dangerously if vaguely “ethnic’-, but in good ole Mexico everybody pins you as a pasty gringo. They are right in part. Your mom is what white Americans think of when they say “us” or “white”; she hails from a small town near the Kansas-Oklahoma border.
You hear Mexican friends talk about the pura raza, the pure race, but realize in high school when answering college survey emails that Latinidom is not a race; chicanx is technically an ethnicity. Are you bi-ethnic? Does that even exist?
You grow up Catholic in a very WASPY suburb of Kansas City and struggle to fit in. You blame yourself, wrongly, but still find a good clique of pals most of whom are “off whites” and/or people of color. A “Jackson-Vannick Jew” from Belarus. Two Syrian-American brothers who, like you and your brother, have such different skin complexion shades you’d swear they weren’t related. A Paraguayan-American with curly hair from Asunción.
You relish summer escapes to visit family in El Paso and Juarez. To exist not as an anomaly, but dip your toes in anonymity. When your abue passes, you cry for losing her and also this refuge.
You mind your own business in WASPville, but it is announced over the intercom at school that you did well on the PSAT and are a National Hispanic Scholar. All day, classmates give you the eye; the Principal had even insisted on birth certificates of you and your father and abue to establish a “legitimate Hispanic connection.”
A hockey teammate approaches you after practice two days later and apologizes for “the jokes.” He explains that he watches South Park and meant no harm; he loves Mexicans. And Mexican food.
Another time, in AP Literature, you wore a blue bandana to go with your flannel and wide legged Jncos for a proper Cholo look and a young woman -who will go on to attend Brown- asked you if it’s “like, a David Foster Wallace thing.”
Nobody had connected the dots. Your silence in class, your gaze glued to the floors in the hallways, and then your bursts of violence in hockey. The fighting. The multi-game suspensions. The butt ends in the corner. Your coach won’t look at or talk to you, but once you heard him say: “Nobody will fuck with him and it helps the team; protects the stars. Don Cherry and all that.”
Your fellow drama-queer friends won’t even come to see games; they don’t recognize you.
You once snapped your stick over a player’s neck like a match and when he crumpled to the ice you realized you’d crossed a line. You didn’t need a season suspension or the silence of the crowd and teammates as you skate directly off the ice to know you’ve done something beyond monstrous. You know that police may be called, should be called.
You wait in the locker room, crying, expecting to be handcuffed. But then you hear a knock; the player is standing outside and shaking. He extends a hand, even apologizes for having buttended you repeatedly. You hug him. To yourself, you vow to never fight again.
Your first game of the playoffs, after serving your months long suspension, you get in two fights and are benched by your own coach the entire third period.
You run off to college in Atlanta and the anger disappears almost overnight. You still don’t have the tools to grasp how or why. You feel you can breathe.
Senior year an instructor explains you are in a “majority minority city.” None of your crew will drive a car outside the city limits for any reason ever. Your best friend is Colombian-Venezuelan and when he runs out of cash you use a credit card to buy groceries and he pays you back when he can. You live with a “Taipei Tica” who helps you with tildes on monografías and you review her organic chemistry.
Medicine is not for you, so you move to the Northeast for a different type of graduate school and live near downtown; Salvi verdulerias and pupusa shops dot the barrio. You eat diced mango in tiny plastic bags with abandon. You attend protests against Dubiya and proudly don a shirt ALTO A LAS REDADAS.
You avoid the corporate funnel by being honest in interviews. Even though they fly you across the country and wine and dine you, you tell senior partners about your uncle who defended Phillip Morris a few decades. You refuse to say you dream of being a shareholder; you refuse to be a token hire. You will run like a gerbil in a wheel for three years and make them rich, but once your loan balance is zero you are out.
You still get two job offers, but turn them down to your parents’ horror.
A smallish nonprofit is hiring in McAllen, Texas. You had never heard of McAllen, but see it is right by the border. You email your resume and cover letter, you pass the first phone interview, you get flown out for an in-person.
The office is in a small prefab house on cinder blocks near the old Farmworkers Union hall. There are stray dogs nearby, and one of them is noticeably pregnant. You approach and they run and hide under an abandoned trailer 300 feet away.
You get a job offer. You decide to make them sweat and say you have another interview and can give them a yes/no within 48 hours. They accept the timeframe, even if the director is visibly trying to hide the anger in her eyes and face.
Back in Kansas, you Google “McAllen” and read up. The RGV is just a bunch of small towns strung along an East-West highway. The vibe is mega Mexican, but “de rancho.” Then you find comments from other people who have moved there for work, “white” people.
They complain about the spicy food.
They complain that everybody is speaking Spanish.
They complain that they don’t celebrate Halloween, but do celebrate Three Kings’ Day and also that early December star pinata day.
You confirm your salary in the offer with HR, and moving cost reimbursements, and accept with the earliest start time possible.
THESE GODDAMN WETBACKS!
You see the green-and-white trucks everywhere, on the highway, in HEB parking lots, by the side of the road. You see them everywhere, in their lime green fatigues, in line getting breakfast tacos at Stripes, sitting down for some tostadas at Taquería Zarape, the super majority are Chicano men with mestizo factions: Coca cola black hair buzzed off, cinnamon skin, thick necked and pudgy and almost always 3-4 inches shorter than you.
You secured an affordable apartment in Edinburg near PanAm, the state university which primarily serves commuter students, and your back window looks at a field of corn and grain silos and a tortilleria.
You love the cabrito, Delia’s tamales, and tacos Matamoros, but like the rest of small town America there is no nightlife. Unless you are into blow, which you are not, there is just a line dancing place near Hidalgo and a few dive bars but they seem to close as soon as they open. You lack the stamina to drive to Padre Island every weekend for fun and sun. You also hate the feel of sand between your toes.
And the place is teeming with regias.
The kind that say they have “piel aperlada.”
You get bored right quick and start to jog the mornings before work on the PanAm campus. You see some undergrads cascareando on the soccer and track field and they cue you onto pickup games Thursday nights. You start to hit the Pharr Gym, a paradise of grunts and free weights, when one day an elder in a sleeveless Real Madrid training kit cues you into the LigaMASA.
You first hear the name, and think of Maseca and harina and masa. But it’s the local amateur soccer league with promotion and relegation and is taken deathly serious by all who participate.
The next day at the gym after work, after you have carefully taken the remote control and changed the channel on all the mounted TVs playing anything MunDOS, you resolve to get in shape. Match fit shape.
Not even a week passes and one of your newish buddies at PanAm pickup tells you about his coach Paco, who is starting a LigaMASA club. Apparently it’s comically expensive and strict kit requirements and many clubs have sponsors.
You text Paco, he texts back, but you get a vibe of incredulity. You can’t tell if he’s taking you seriously, but he finally invites you to an indoor game near McAllen to see your alleged skills.
Long after the chickens have roosted in the huizache branches, you turn down dark roads and alleyways before finding the Google Maps forgotten “field.” The indoor arena is not really indoor: it looks like an outdoor futbol cinco court South American style but with enormous chain link fences easily 15 feet high and with serpentines atop.
You had noticed this about school soccer fields as well: they never leave the nets on the goals during the weekend. The soccer fever is so intense, any passable field with good goals will be overwhelmed in days, maybe hours.
Your legs and lungs hold up, but your touch and decision-making have never been suited to indoor with walls. Too much sprinting and no breaks in the rhythm of the game. You have a few nice touches and a golazo from half court near the end, but you aren’t surprised when your teammates for a night and Paco ignore you.
You stunk up the pitch. And Paco confirms this to you, albeit politely, via text message.
Yet he passes your number along to another buddy with a LigaMASA club in the very bottom tier.
You swear off the Friday night Pizza Patrón and show up at 12:30pm Saturday afternoon at Bicentennial Park not far from the eerily all black Federal Court building near downtown McAllen. The self identified “Couch José”
You watch some of the games and the field and jerseys are immaculate. The players are mostly tall, fast, and elite dribbling with silk first touches. Couch José has even asked you your size and you can just imagine the pristine new jersey. You love to hear the crunch of well watered and manicured Bermuda grass under foot.
The refs and linesmen are fully uniformed and in reasonably good shape even. There are benches full of fans – mostly family members – shouting and clapping. A man pushes a blue cooler on a car and his sign indicates the sale of gatorade, bottled water, and even cacahuate garapiñado.
Couch José texts you. You text back. Across the field, you see a slightly overweight, middle-aged man who is bald and wearing glasses. He drags a large white duffel bag behind him in one hand, glances at his phone with the other. He looks up and uses the phone as a visor. He smiles at you.
You see a tall, broad-shouldered man with a buzzcut trail behind Couch José. He wears a long sleeve black Nike t-shirt and gray basketball shorts. You see him bounce a yellow Adidas ball a few times and you recognize the familiar grace of an athlete.
You will learn his name soon enough: Gabriel.
THESE GODDAMN SPICS!
You sit down at your desk and sip some dark coffee from a navy blue mug when your office phone lights up. The number is unfamiliar but a 956 area code so you pick up. You immediately recognize the raspy voice of Marta, Gabriel’s wife.
You had explained to her that Gabriel had been picked up for a D.U.I. and that assuming he had no legal immigration status, his options were severely limited. You explain that though he has given lofty speeches, in advocate circles Barack Obama has become known as “The Deporter-in-Chief.”
Nobody has bought his “we focus on criminals” schtick because most states have about sixteen different grades of felonies, even for minor offenses, so for ICE it’s pick your flavor.
Even after you referred her to nonprofits and private attorney friends, she can’t come up with the $500 deposit of a payment plan. You talk to your supervisor and she says you can take any pro bono case you want, and even double dip-if you have to drive out to Willacy County to visit Gabriel you can maybe come up with a work reason and get mileage reimbursed.
You are super grateful. You know Gabriel’s case is hopeless, the law is one sided, but you can’t stop thinking about his young daughter. He would always show you pictures of her on his phone and she is barely two years old. You remember growing up with just your mom, your dad in and out of rehab and moving state to state seemingly on a whim. You desperately want to help Marta and Gabriel.
A few days later you check county records online and see the D.U.I. charge has been dismissed against Gabriel. You want to jump for joy and shout and call Marta, but take a breath. Instead, you call an immigration attorney friend named Carlos.
Carlos explains that once a “detainee” gets transferred from a county jail to ICE and they have pending charges, it usually means they have a prior order of deportation and if the charges are not a felony then the local DA would rather just dismiss and wash his hands of the matter.
So Gabriel having his charges dismissed is not a good thing; rather, it means he has been deported before. Possibly several times.
You finally are able to add money to Gabriel’s commissary account and he calls you a few days later, and confirms he has been deported four times, but two of those times were under his brother’s name and with his brother’s Mexican passport and before the digital fingerprint era. You realize that he thinks this makes a difference in his current case. You explain that that was a pretty clever idea, but he is still in hot water.
You ask if he has had a chance to speak with his wife or daughter. He pauses and says that no. He has tried calling but the number is disconnected. You find this strange; you spoke with his wife the other day. You explain that his only hope is a long shot, but a legal marriage to a US citizen and a US citizen daughter will help his case. You know that common law marriage in Texas is legal and legitimate for immigration purposes, and are relieved when he answers the related questions affirmatively. Even sans a marriage certificate, you can argue a marital bond in court.
The phone call ends after only a few minutes which is odd because you put over $50 on his commissary. Still, you immediately call his wife and are relieved to hear they did do a civil marriage. You tell her to bring all family documents and birth certificates to your office the next day.
You drink two cups of coffee that next morning as 8:30am turns into 9:00am then 10:00am. Marta finally shows up at 10:20am. It is summer and you are surprised she did not bring her young daughter, but maybe an abue or tia is watching her at home. You revise the documents she brought you: her own birth certificate in Cameron County. Her marriage certificate to Gabriel in Hidalgo County. And she even has Gabriel’s Mexican matrícula consular.
Then you recall: their daughter’s birth certificate. You are embarrassed to have seen so many pictures of her on Gabriel’s phone and heard him babbling on and on about her each Saturday but you can’t remember her name.
You return to your office and hand Marta the originals of the documents. You sit down and talk with her about the nuts and bolts of immigration law and detainee defense, but the name simply will not form in your head. Finally, you just ask vaguely: and the birth certificate for your daughter? She asks back what hija. You mouth wants to form a smile but you bite your tongue.
You give her a confused look, like when you are holding a pair of Kings but want to bluff your opposition into a bigger pot in a game of poker. You apologize for your confusion, you have many cases, it must have been some other teammate who mentioned a young daughter.
You can see that your lies have had zero efficacy by her glare. She abruptly picks up the documents, thank you for your time, shakes your hand while looking at the floor, and walks briskly out of the room. A few minutes later, your assistant comes in and asks about the lady in the parking lot who is crying.
You stare at the ceiling of your office and recall your own father who fled the nest to start a new franchise with a young woman in another state. And then a third time.
You curse yourself for being so naive, for not being more rigorous in your questioning. You would likely have needed his wife as a witness to appear at any hearing, but that ship seems to have sailed.
The next morning, your office phone beeps red with several voicemails. Apparently, she had gone to visit him at Willacy right after talking to you. The ship has definitely sailed but Gabriel still wants to see you.
And you know that with a bond hearing upcoming and despite low odds of success, you owe it to your friend to speak face to face.
THESE GODDAMN MEXICANS!
The night before your trip to visit Gabriel at the immigration detainment center in Willacy County, you get lost in an online rabbit hole. The war between the Zetas and Cartel del Golfo had been raging for a little over a year, and the Dallas Mornings News has just published a reported story about five people deported to Laredo and almost immediately kidnapped by organized crime gangs. The gangs allegedly worked with local police to get tip offs to when people are dropped off by ICE and then extort family members in the U.S. for thousands of dollars.
You Google around, and the DMN story is one of dozens, possibly hundreds. You see similar stories from recent years in the McAllen Monitor, the Brownsville Herald, and even the El Paso Times.
You know that Gabriel’s odds of staying in the US are a longshot. More likely than not, in a few weeks or months he’ll be boarding that ICE bus for a midnight trip to Matamoros. Gabriel and other deportees will be walked across the bridge chain-gang-style with only the clothes on their backs and a small bag of personal belongings. Orange-shirted Mexican officials from Grupo Beta will wait to receive them, load them into trucks ostensibly to prevent kidnappings, and then dump them at the city bus station to buy a ticket elsewhere or spend the night.
You know that the lucky ones will buy a ticket anywhere outside of Northern Mexico, first trip available, while the unlucky ones may have to risk a short walk to the nearest Western Union to get money from a family member. And a halcon may tip off superiors, and the risk of a plagio is all but assured.
You open a new tab in your browser; you log into the dispensary account for Gabriel and deposit another $50. You also make a mental note to pull out $100 cash to ask the guard at Willacy to put in his personal effects for that trip if it’s allowed.
The next day you wake up at 7am and make the long trek from Edinburg to Willacy. On Google Maps the drive looks short, but it feels so damn long. You speed past huizaches and mesquites and billboards for speedy car aseguranza.
Well before you arrive you recognize Willlacy, known as “tent city” by advocates. It looks like a cross between the roof of the Space Mountain roller coaster at Disney World and a Medieval caravan. A Barnum & Bailey big top but with humans-not exotic animals-in cages.
The “detention facility” consists officially of ten massive “springing structures” aka white tents that are hundreds of feet long and two stories tall, all surrounded by chain link fences topped off by concertina wire. The tents had no A/C whatsoever or even fans, so it’s said that inmates take turns laying on the ground and draping their foreheads with a wet rag. You had heard there were ten persons to a tent subunit with a sink and just two hand towels per sink.
You exit off the highway and find the parking lot easily and also spot the auxiliary single story brick building for attorney-client conferences and guards to change shifts. You show your Bar card as you step through the metal detector and also your driver’s license. You are ushered to an attorney-client cell and an hour later Gabriel is escorted in with a guard.
He smiles ear-to-ear and is wearing an orange jumper but no handcuffs. The guard walks off and you two hug.
You sit down, he sits down, an awkward silence lasts a minute or two. You go right to the point, and start to apologize for ratting him out to his wife when he cackles and waves away your concern with his hands. Gabriel is sure that she already had an idea.
Gabriel asks about the soccer team in great detail, and is very sad to hear the team lost the most recent match 0-2 with Los Tecos and tied the game before that 3-3. Still, he grins, it must have been a partidazo.
You don’t know if he’s stalling or just chatting, but you revert to attorney mode and give him a frank and brutal assessment of his legal case. Again, he cackles. He of all people, he explains, is aware of his prior orders of removal. And he leans in and confides that he’s lucky he used his brother’s passport before the digital prints era or he’d have quite a few more.
Another silence and pause in the chat occurs, you are a bit speechless at how nonchalantly he is taking things. This time you lean forward and ask him if he’s heard about the kidnappings, if he’s not the least concerned.
He blows to make his lips tremble like a balloon hissing as it deflates. He then gives you the stank eye. He tells you he has two brothers that live and work in Matamoros, both of whom he has spoken with already, and both of whom have connectes that will call him when the ICE bus reaches the Brownsville side of the bridge. He’ll have a truck waiting for him, engine running, and those useless Grupo Beta mamones que chingar sus pinches madres.
You dare to ask, does he plan to try to come back? What are his plans for his daughter?
This time he takes a deep breath and pauses before answering. His first order of business will be to visit his elderly parents in Ciudad Victoria. His dad owns a refaccionaria and tlapaleria and is desperate for decent help that won’t steal from the register or merchandise. He plans to send whatever money he can to his baby mama in Mission and WhatsApp with his daughter when he can.
And if he can put together the $1,000 to $2,000 he needs, he knows a pollero in Piedras Negras that can get him across guaranteed.
You make an offhand remark about how cheap that is. He chuckles and remarks that you get a serial customer discount, especially if you know the right people.
You recall a soccer game six months ago when half your team didn’t show up. They had gotten busted by ICE; apparently, they had gotten persuaded to let traficantes keep bricks in their truckbeds and under their trailers for $1,500 a month. ICE had gotten tipped off because a few of them had bought brand new F-350s and one of them had gotten in a fender bender with a neighbor.
Gabriel and you had run your asses off in 100 degree temperatures and a brutal sun, playing the entire 90 minutes with 8 men and no substitutes vs a full squad. You had lost 0-4, worse than the 0-3 scoreline for a forfeit, but Gabriel had only been upset about your teammates. For him, $1,500 a month was way too cheap. Uno tiene que saber su propio valor en este mundo.
You and Gabriel swap stories and talk LigaMX soccer until a guard comes around and it’s time to part ways. Gabriel grins at you, and you mention the $100 dollars but he again waves away the offer. He does borrow a pen and paper from you and writes down the name, phone number, and address of the baby mother and one of his brothers in Matamoros. He asks you to loan his baby mama $500 for him by the end of the week, and then he will find a way to pay you back.
You promise to do so and by that weekend you will have done so. Even if a few weeks later when you call the phone number in Matamoros its disconnected and you never see a trace of Gabriel on WhatsApp or Facebook ever again.
Still, after you embrace one last time and you walk out that door you yourself can’t help but smile at your own naivete. Foolish, foolhardy you. You may be chicano, you may have visited Juarez in your summers, but you’re more gringo than you’d care to admit. Or at least a stranger to the 956 and the ways of life and love in Tamaulipas and South Texas.
You had viewed a pending deportation as a life-ending and altering tragedy, you had viewed Northern Mexico and Matamoros as a gringo would, rife with danger at every corner.
But these were just the facts of daily life for Gabriel and hundreds of thousands of other people who make Northern Mexico home. You will only do one other immigration case, years later, and your Honduran client will say something that reminds you of Gabriel.
Si me deportan hoy, regresaré mañana.
Elliott Turner is chicano and cishet. His short stories and reported features have appeared in Azahares, Apogee Journal, The Blizzard (UK), Latin American Literary Review, The Acentos Review, and the Guardian (US). His short story “Chuey and me” was a Longform pick of the week and he was a Goodman Institute reporting fellow for In These Times. He is an editor at Latino Book Review. Check out his award-winning novel The Night of the Virgin. He has a soccer riff Substack.