Free Imperial by William T. Vollmann

illegally into the United States from Mexico over treacherous mountain and desert terrain in eastern California and Arizona, a toll in large part the result of tighter U.S. patrols along the border in the San Diego area. Yet as tragic as these events are, the patrolling policy, known as Operation Gatekeeper, is the correct one.
    I wonder what Serafín Ramírez Hernández would have made of that.
    Six weeks after his disappearance, I telephoned the Mexican consulate in San Diego in hopes that he had been found.—His brother Sofio he has been in contact with us so many times, the woman sadly said. We also check with our contacts here. He’s not in any hospital or detention center, or . . . The file is still open, and it will remain open until we find something.
    How often does this sort of thing happen?
    It’s unfortunately very often, she said. 9
    Meanwhile, the front page of the Calexico Chronicle had proclaimed: Border Patrol Unveils Public Service Announcements Featuring Widow of Smuggling Victim. The figurehead of these announcements was to be the twenty-five-year-old spouse of a pollo who perished with ten other illegals near El Centro when their coyote or coyotes ran away. Sector Chief Wacker was quoted as saying: I believe that Jackie’s plea is very clear . . . We hope that the message will make everyone fully aware of the smugglers’ priorities and of the dangers involved in entering illegally. —My government had figured out that it could use deaths caused in part by its own policies to make propaganda.

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    Of course Operation Gatekeeper could foil some of those bodies, so that Serafín Ramírez Hernández became in truth a dead or missing body; and others were apprehended or discouraged. All the same, even if Murray’s fantasy ever did come true, and the border became another Berlin Wall, it would never completely, much less permanently, contain the amazing boldness and determination of the pollos and solos. We were no match for them.
    I think of Pedro, who employed no coyote, just swam the river to Texas, asked somebody what to do, figured out how to hop a train, and got all the way to Houston.
    I remember Christofer, the slender, gentle, sad-eyed one with the cross around his neck and the New Testament in Spanish under his arm. His six-day deportation process from Los Angeles had concluded just yesterday, and already he was waiting at the fence on that cool fragrant dusk of flowers, considering whether to jump the fence in the place where I knew from Officer Murray that the video camera in the water tower was already watching us both, or else essay a ride on top of a railroad car—a more dangerous spot, to be sure, but he believed that the Border Patrol never checked it. Maybe he was correct there; I fear not. Fat Carlos had crossed six times on the train, but unfailingly found himself invited into a holding cell. (Last time I almost got by, he told me, but there was this big old rattlesnake on the road and it scared the shit out of me, man.) Christofer smiled quietly and told me that he had a feeling he would get through. His girlfriend, whose flesh was comprised of illegality equal to his, lived in Echo Park. He craved to return to her; he said that there was “no life” in Mexico (although it seemed to me that everything in Mexico was lower, dirtier, truer and above all more alive). We talked for perhaps half an hour, until it was dusk. I went back Northside, a journey accomplished in about ten minutes thanks to my United States passport, walked four blocks to my hotel, gathered up the tripod and eight by ten camera, and took a portrait of Christofer through the rusty bars where we had arranged a meeting. Day and night on the American side one can usually see somebody speaking softly and earnestly through these bars to another human being on the Mexican side. When it is very late, someone often wades through the humid night shadows to stand there looking across the border at