Last night we joined two of Davi’s friends for beers at a local brewery. Both women are now full-time residents of Mexicali, but living in the border town for the sake of their engineering careers in the United States. Special SENTRI passes allow them to commute back and forth every day. We woke up early to see the drama that unfolds at their Mexicali-Calexico port of entry every morning.
We biked to the border to find long lines of people waiting for entry into Calexico. A woman standing in line said the hour-and-a-half wait she expected was relatively short compared to most days. Those hoping to cross stand in one of two lines, depending on what kind of documentation they have—the old style “green cards,” or the new visa cards. It’s all very organized. Everyone shuffles forward quietly under the watchful eyes of the federales.
Just outside the port it’s a different story. It’s where everyone without proper documentation is biding their time, within a stone’s throw of the United States but unable to enter. People come from everywhere—Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti—but are all referred to as bordistas. The streets here are ugly and mean. Our host at the Chinese medicine hospital warned us that muggings are common close to the port because there are so “many people with broken dreams.” He allowed us to leave everything we have of value with him temporarily. We took just our bikes and cameras.
Several people directed us to the Hotel del Migrant. It’s not actually a hotel. According to Jacob, the guard who gave us a tour, the owner of the building originally planned to open a hotel but gutted the place and transformed it into a “casa de migrante,” a type of shelter for bordistas which is common throughout Mexico. You’d never find the place unless you knew where to find the door, crammed beside a strip club. Walk up a short, well-trod staircase, and you find rooms, subdivided by blankets that provide a minimum of privacy between rows of bunk beds. The blankets are labeled with “room” numbers, like in a hotel.
We talked with three men who had traveled from Honduras. They rode “La Bestia,” the train lines that connect north and south Mexico and double as an unofficial highway for migrants from Central America. For three straight days they rode the trains, and went without sleep during all that time. Two members of their original group had made the mistake of sleeping and they lost their legs falling from the cars. The Mexican cartels, police, and military all stalk the trains to prey on the migrants, and this trio says they were ambushed multiple times during the course of their journey. They’ve traveled some 3,000 miles, and now they are stuck in Mexicali. Their families are depending on them, the say, and they have invested all of their money in getting them to the United States. They say they cannot go home, and to a man they tell us that they swear that “if they die, it will be crossing the border.”
