to the future. Here, they look to the past. Wrongs beget by wrongs, so many wrongs over so many years, that there will never be a right. Not on the border.'
Lindsay turned and looked north toward the wall in the distance. Then she turned back to the river.
'The wall is there and the river here.'
'Yes, we are on the American side of the river but the Mexican side of the wall.'
'These people, they're trapped by the river and the wall.'
'They are trapped by much more than that.' He held a hand out to the colonia. 'They fled Mexico, hoping for a better life in America. But the wall blocks their path into America. And that is their dream, Mrs. Bonner, to live beyond the wall. But for now they must live here in this no man's land, neither here nor there-neither Mexico nor America.'
The congressman took her arm and escorted her toward the colonia as if leading her into a fine restaurant. He was thirty-four years older than her with thick white hair that contrasted sharply with his wrinkled brown skin and thick in the middle and short, but she felt secure next to him, like a girl with her grandfather.
'Come, you are safe with me.'
He pulled his coat back to reveal a gun in a belt holster.
'You carry a gun?'
He shrugged. 'Of course. It is the border.'
The congressman led the governor's wife into Colonia Angeles. Ranger Roy made a move toward them but retreated when she held up an open hand to him. They walked down the dirt road past shacks and shanties, small and odd-shaped and pieced together with corrugated tin sidings and cinder blocks and scrap wood with black plastic tarps for roofs and wood pallets stood upright for fences and seemingly held together with wire and gravity. They continued past lean-tos and huts with thatched roofs, lopsided travel trailers embedded in the dirt with sheet metal overhangs, and abandoned vehicles that lay as if they had been shot from the sky and left to die where they landed. A yellow school bus sat buried in the dirt up to its wheels; it was now a home. Clothes hung over droopy lines and flapped in the dry breeze. They heard babies wailing and Spanish voices. Small children splashed in dirty water that had pooled in low gullies, women and girls cooked and washed outside, and boys played soccer on a dirt field.
'Don't they go to school?'
'No. The buses do not come to this side of the wall. The bus drivers, they are afraid to come in here, and the mothers, they are afraid to take their children out there, afraid they will be detained and deported if they go into Laredo.'
'Don't the truant officers come looking for them?'
The congressman chuckled. 'No, they do not come into the colonias.'
'But there are so many children.'
'Yes, the colonias are like child-care centers, except no one cares about these children.'
The congressman pointed at large drums sitting outside some residences.
'Water tanks. Fifty-five gallons. The water truck comes each week. They buy non-potable water-they call it 'dirty water'-to wash clothes and cook, and clean water to drink, in the five-gallon bottles.'
'They don't have running water?'
'Oh, no.'
'How do they take baths?'
'In the river. But it is contaminated, with raw sewage. That is what you smell.'
The air was as dry as dirt, and the stale breeze now carried a foul stench.
'Raw sewage? From Mexico?'
'From both sides. There is no sewer system in this colonia, so they dump the waste in the river. And many of the American-owned maquiladoras, the factories on the other side, they dump their industrial waste into the river.'
'But that's illegal.'
'In some parts of the world. But as I said, Mrs. Bonner, this is another world entirely. Cancer rates are quite high, and the children, they always have the open sores and many illnesses from the river-hepatitis, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, even dengue fever. You have had your shots?'
'My shots?'
Lindsay Bonner had seen poverty before, in the rural counties and the inner cities. But she had never before seen anything like this. Colonia Angeles looked like a scene from one of those 'feed the children' commercials on Sunday morning television. But this wasn't Guatemala or Africa. This was America.
'How did all this come to be?'
'These colonias, they began appearing along the river back in the fifties and sixties. But during the eighties and nineties, the population exploded with the immigration boom, some say because Reagan granted amnesty and citizenship to the Mexicans already here, so more followed, also hoping for citizenship-if not for them, at least for their children born here. They know the law, too.'
'My husband, he calls those children 'anchor babies.' '
'Yes. He does. Anyway, this is flood plain land, worthless for regular development. So the owners sold off small lots to Mexican immigrants, just pieces of dirt, with no roads or utilities. They built their homes with whatever scrap material they could salvage, piece by piece, what the sociologists call 'incremental construction.' Not exactly the American dream, as you can see. But it is all they can afford.'
'In Austin, these places would be bulldozed as unfit for human occupancy.'
'This is not Austin, Mrs. Bonner. This is the border. Travel up and down this river, and you will see nothing but colonias outside the cities, two thousand at last count. The state says four hundred thousand people live in the colonias, but I think there are many more, perhaps one million. How can the state know for certain when the federal government cannot even get an accurate count for the census?'
'So they live without running water, sewer…?'
'Electricity.'
'I thought the state had funded services for the colonias? '
'Yes, ten years ago, the state issued five hundred million in bonds to provide utilities to the colonias, and about half now have them. This colonia does not.'
'So when will these people get utilities?'
'They will not. The money has run out. Most of these people will die without ever having turned on a light or flushed a toilet.'
'We need more money.'
'But, Mrs. Bonner, your husband vetoed more money for the colonias.'
'He did? Why?'
'He said the federal government should pay for the utilities since these people are illegal immigrants. Squatters, I think he called them.'
'They're human beings. And they shouldn't have to live like this.'
'Tell your husband.'
'I will.'
'But to be fair to the governor, we need billions, more money than the State of Texas can provide, to keep up with the people coming across the river and the children born here. The borderlands, it is both the poorest and the fastest growing population in all of America. That is why we must count them for the census, so the borderlands can get its share of federal funds.'
'But they're not citizens.'
'That does not matter. The census counts everyone living in America, legal or not. Funds and seats in the House are divvied up by population, not citizenship. If only these people will fill out the forms and be counted, Texas will get three, maybe four more seats in Congress and billions more in federal aid. Each of these residents is worth fifteen hundred dollars, if we can get them counted.'
'My husband wants to send these people back to Mexico, but he sends me down here to get them to fill out the census reports so Texas can benefit from their presence here?'
'Odd, is it not? But we need federal money to do what the state cannot afford to do. The problem is, we are asking these people to come out of the shadows and be counted while ICE conducts raids right here on the border. They do not trust the government. And, of course, they did not receive the census forms.'
