The Migrant Trail 2009

Sásabe, Sonora, México to Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.

25-31 May 2009
75 miles over 7 days

I have called many places home, though I may use the term loosely at times. Calgary is my hometown, France is like a second home, and Michigan is where I have a house of my own. But my adoptive home of Arizona is more home to me than anywhere else I have lived. All the members of my immediate family live there, as do many dear and life-long friends. My heart is drawn there over and over again because of this. Yet it is also the landscape of Arizona that tugs me homeward. Though I love “my” mountains of Western Canada and Central Pennsylvania, the Sonoran Desert claims me as its own, its cholla (as much as I hate to admit it), mesquite trees, quail, and tortoises are my floral and faunal next-of-kin.

The Sonoran Desert is one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America. It runs from Baja California Sur north and east through Baja California, the state of Sonora, and across the border into Arizona and California. The otherworldly Chihuahuan Desert lays claim to these borderlands as well, but the Sonoran desert is the one I know most intimately.

I grew up at its northern end in the Phoenix metropolitan area. As a young transplant from Canada, I quickly learned not to walk barefoot in the summer for fear of scorching my feet on the hot pavement, to drink more water than I ever had up north near the Canadian Rockies, and to stay away from most desert plants and their thorny offshoots. Later, I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, an old presidio of the Spanish empire and part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. There, during the summer monsoon season, I’d watch the lightning crackle through the forests of saguaro cacti and the Santa Catalina Mountains, marvel at the short-lived miracle of too much water, and breathe in the earthy perfume of the creosote bush. My home sweet home.

Since my desert childhood, I have traveled to the towns close to or straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, each one belonging in its own way to the Sonoran: Ajo, Ambos Nogales, Arivaca, El Golfo de Santa Clara, Puerto Peñasco, San Luis Río Colorado, Sásabe, Sonoyta, Tubac, Tumacácori, Tucson, Yuma. Whether in the U.S. or Mexico, these places proved to be no less exotic than they had once sounded to my young Anglo-Canadian ears. I remember my first trip to Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. It was full of all the usual gringo-going-south-of-the-border clichés: cries of young kids selling chiclets, offers of free tequila shots at the entrances to trinket shops, rides on zebra-striped donkeys (a knock-off tourist trap from Tijuana), and the purchase of a gaudy, besequined sombrero and a technicolor poncho. Our family went no farther, if I recall correctly, than a couple of blocks into Nogales to do our visiting and shopping. The ad-libbed metal patchwork of a border wall (and therefore our U.S. home) was never too far away. On later trips to Nogales, we would watch a bull fight, sample the delicacy huitlacoche (a corn-ear fungus) at one of my favorite restaurants, and add to our collections of the stamped-tin farolitos. We have enjoyed other trips deeper into the state of Sonora, the highlights of which included gazing out over the waters of Puerto Peñasco during alfresco lunches, searching for agates in the shadows of the Pinacate volcanic mountains, and collecting shells and sea glass on the beaches of the Sea of Cortez.

This is the extent of my Mexican travels to date, and they are nothing but pure tourism. Many tell me I have not been to the real Mexico, that there is much beyond those desert lands. No doubt there is. I contend, however, that the border states and towns are just as much a part of Mexico as are Guadalajara, Puebla, and Toluca. That same sort of logic would also peg Tucson and Yuma as not real American cities, our own American borderlands rejected for their lack of cultural purity.

Nation-based cultural homogeneity (whatever that might mean) is not what you’ll find in the Sonoran Desert. The state of Sonora (and with it Mexico) reaches into Arizona, and Arizona wanders right back southward. Roadside grottos to the Virgin of Guadalupe can be found not only on Sonoran highways 2 and 8, but also in Arizona on Hunt Highway outside of Queen Creek and in the barrios of South Tucson. The latest catches of fish and shrimp from the Gulf of California are hocked up north to native and snowbird Arizonans alike. In the Reserva de la Biósfera el Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar, along the new carretera costera connecting Puerto Peñasco to El Golfo de Santa Clara, signage about the desert is in both in Spanish and English. Arizona’s state tree, the blue palo verde, is ubiquitous in Sonora. Indigenous nations like the Tohono O’odham, there long before any current political boundaries were drawn, have deep roots on both sides. The differences between our here and their there are blurry. Odd chimeras though they may be, these borderlands do share the grammar of the Sonoran Desert—wispy white-and-blue skies, blazing agave blooms, mesquite bosques, and caliche clay.

In recent years, I have traveled my desert borderland home in a very different way—on foot, through the spiky brush and grasses, without air conditioning or protection from the unrelenting sun. Three times now, I have journeyed 75 miles over seven days from the Mexican border town of Sásabe, Sonora to Tucson, Arizona on the Migrant Trail. It has afforded me the opportunity to watch this land up close, to see in detail the outlandish beauty of a (relatively-speaking) lush desert. Each year, I have pulled cholla cactus spines out of too many body parts (of my own) to mention. With fellow walkers, I have watched amazing sunrises, sunsets, and falling stars in the almost cloudless skies. The wildlife that surrounds us—red-tailed hawks gliding overhead, cardinals trying to rival their ocotillo-perch’s fiery blossoms, mule deer flitting through Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge—always surprises the nature lover in me. It is a privilege to walk purposefully and without daily distractions in this land.

I walk through this desert place that also holds the collective hopes, dreams, and, too often, tragedies of many who travel here from farther the south. The siren song of the Sonoran Desert calls out with promises of better wages and a surer life for loved ones. The men, women, adolescents, and even infants who come from the non-deserts of Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Central America hear hopes for brighter days ahead on the other side, often not knowing that they must first cross an unforgiving desert. Many of them never make it. And this ultimately is why I walk.

The estimates of deaths (terrible deaths from overexposure to climate extremes) in Arizona range from 2,000 to 5,000 over the last fifteen years, a direct result of governmental changes to controlling the waves of migrants who have always traveled northward. To add insult to the injury of fiscal policies that undermined local economies in Mexico and Central America in the early 90s, the U.S. government followed suit with a disastrous U.S.-Mexico border strategy, purposefully funneling migration to our lethal deserts and away from safer urban locales like San Diego and El Paso. The mounting death toll of migrants has been, in effect, collateral damage of the effort to secure our borders, a sort of detached, yet purposeful execution of those we know are coming. We shrug our shoulders, saying things like “It was their own choice,” or “We didn’t force them to walk through our deserts.” In reality, the U.S. is largely responsible for these deaths. Much of this blood is on our hands. There’s more than enough blame for both sides of the political aisle; successive governments have failed to address or change the crisis. And the tragedy continues to escalate each year.

Though I consider myself to be someone of strong political persuasions, this walk is not in support of one party or of one party’s platform on immigration. I walk to call attention to the grave concerns for human rights and life in the Sonoran Desert. I walk so that I may talk about fellow human beings who are traveling in and through a land I call home. I walk to remember those who have lost their lives in my desert, leaving behind loved ones who may never know what happened to their friend or family member who went north. I walk to underline the striking differences between my own migration across the Canada-U.S. border to and through these same deserts and those migrations of my counterparts to the south. I walk to bear witness to the horrific ecological consequences of treating our borderlands like a war zone: a fence that prevents the northward migration of the jaguar, Border Patrol vehicles that tear up an already fragile ecosystem, and security cameras and helicopters that disrupt the peace of a quiet nature reserve. Ultimately I walk with the hope for much needed changes in the Sonoran Desert’s killing fields.

Deserts have always been places of danger, the Sonoran Desert—for all of its strange beauty—being no exception. I am reminded of this each year along the Migrant Trail. My own body grapples with the climate and the many miles I ask it to trek, even though I walk with infinitely more water, food, shelter, and medical care than the migrants. As I walk, I see the discarded backpacks, clothing, shoes, hair barrettes, and water containers of migrants passing through before me, wondering all the while if they have survived their journey. I am quietly reminded of their perils with each step I take. In such a way, it becomes a mental, emotional, even spiritual struggle.

For me, the desert has always been a “thin place,” a space in which there is little separating the divine from the world, and where I can listen more intently to God and creation. As I face the desert, I am drawn within and without. Certainly, in English, French, and Spanish, the very word desert/désert/desierto carries a notion of aloneness or abandonment. I look outside of myself to God in my loneliness out there. In Russian, the word for desert, pustynia, is closely related to the adjective pustoi or “empty.” For me, the Sonoran Desert is definitely not a place empty of life, but rather a place empty of outside chatter, a place where I am compelled in silence to examine my own soul.

Since my teenage years, I have loved to drive and photograph the desert alone, especially the old highway 79 between Florence and Tucson. In the car, I send my awkward prayers out to the beyond and listen intently to what it has to say to me. I marvel at the wonders of this unique creation, of the miracle of all the weird and wonderful life in the desert. It is time for a reflection on my own personal deserts (as my friend and fellow walker Pedro would say) and those of my loved ones and friends.

The Migrant Trail has only magnified this for me. It is the thinnest place I have ever experienced. It is no wonder that many great religions grew out of desert places, religions that emphasize the importance of food, water, and shelter, especially for the traveler. In my own journeys on the Trail, I have learned of the small gifts of food, water, a loving touch, even the ceremony of foot washing, all of them simple acts of caring that move me to tears when my body is at its worst. I have come to see the walk as a spiritual calling, as a pilgrimage that reminds me of my duties to care for the stranger in our midst, to speak up for those who cannot or could not, to fight to save human lives. As I walk through this desert, I hear God’s clarion call as bright and as clear as the Sonoran Desert’s sun.

During this year’s walk, that spiritual requirement translated into action. A friend and I encountered a migrant as we returned south from a trip into Tucson for supplies for Trail participants. On the side of the road, the man looked tired and worn out. In spite of the fact that we were two women alone, the call to compassion and hospitality in the desert meant pulling over to help a complete stranger. We offered what help we could within the limits set by law. My friend asked after the man’s condition first. He looked awful—scratches covered his body, presumably from walking through the desert’s needled brush; his eyes were bloodshot. We gave him all the water we had with us, and scrounged around—to no avail—for any food in the car. He did not request medical care, but asked instead for a ride and a phone call. We could not legally give him a ride, and my friend declined this request on more than one occasion. She did, however, allow him to call a number in Arizona on her cell phone. To make a long story shorter, our encounter with the migrant (who could have been a coyote or even a drug smuggler) ended badly: he ran off the side of the road into the brush, stealing my friend’s phone. Once we realized what had happened, both of us were fuming and shocked. To say that we felt our trust and compassion were betrayed is obvious—this is not the ending that we had intended or foreseen. But, in subsequent discussions, we both decided that we would not change what we had done or what we would do in the future. Extending one’s hand to offer food, drink, or medical care to those in potential need is an action, maybe even a risk, which, in the end, is a moral imperative. I am now more convinced of this than ever.

Meeting that migrant in the middle of his march northward gave me a more personal perspective to my walk in the desert. But it did not end here. One of my closest friends on this year’s walk was a man named Pedro. We met on last year’s walk, but he is shy, and we only exchanged a few conversations over the course of a week. Already last year, I sensed a certain heaviness in him. Again this year, he was quiet, and reserved, maybe lost in thought. I’m not sure how we began chatting together again, but Pedro began to tell me his story.

He is the gentlest, most selfless man I think I’ve ever met, a man with a gorgeous soul. Originally from Mexico, Pedro came to the U.S. in 1989. He crossed near San Ysidro (not far from San Diego), crawling under the fence and walking for hours. Once in the U.S., he paid a coyote for transport in a truck where he and many others were squished together like sardines. He made it, and worked to make a better life for himself and his family. He has since become a legal resident of the U.S., and lives in Texas with a family of his own. His job has been one that supports others in his adopted home, working with the communities of New Orleans and Houston as they recover from the fallout of recent hurricanes. Though his journey to a life in the U.S. was not an easy one, this was not what was bothering him.

Later during the walk, he told me of his brothers’ more recent journeys through the Sonoran Desert. One disappeared for almost three weeks, and Pedro and his family were sick with worry. In the end, he was fine and both brothers survived, but the trauma of this still rests inside his heart and mind. To add to this anguish, Pedro has younger family members who, knowing of the North’s promise, are planning to make the same trip, one they will likely make through the Arizona desert and not San Ysidro. As our walk drew to a close, Pedro began to name the paralyzing fear that they might die a similar death to all those we were remembering this year, that their names might be called out as names of the dead in future Migrant Trail walks. His tears said everything he could not. In that desert, I knew exactly what he meant.

***

I am home now, far from the desert. I am surrounded by water here in Michigan, water for which I am that much more grateful after a week of wandering in dry Arizona. I say little prayers of thanksgiving every time I shower. My friend Pedro, back in Texas, has shared with me the joys of sitting in the cool waters of “El Capitán,” a pool he built with one of his brothers in his backyard. We have both returned safe and sound to friends and family. But the Sonoran Desert has marked us again in a way that is difficult to explain to others. I, for one, cannot get out of my mind the man I encountered on the side of the road. What has happened to him? Pedro is still haunted by the ghosts of future migrants. In the comforts of home, we find it hard to navigate the remaining deserts of what we experienced and thought about on the Trail, deserts that have followed us home.

That is why I write—to explore that desert publicly, to help my readers understand what is going on in a place I call home, to advocate for change, to respond to God’s call to help the migrant. For many who do not live in Arizona (and even for those who do, but who lead their daily lives in a safely climate-controlled world), the Sonoran Desert’s brutal reality is the stuff of the Scriptures. It is not a place they can know or grasp. My hope is that this will help others to understand and to willingly respond with simple acts of hospitality in our borderlands. I will continue to walk and write until change is no longer needed, until my Sonoran Desert is able to reclaim itself and heal up those killing fields with its own feisty, peculiar versions of life, cholla spines and all.

All photos are the author's, taken somewhere between here and there in the Sonoran Desert.

--Christi Brookes, 8 June 2009