"What changed?"
"Drugs. All that was nice was washed away in the blood from the drug war. This is now un rio de sangre… a river of blood. Forty thousand Mexicans have died in the last four years. It is violence we fund, with our appetite for the drugs. One pound of heroin on that side of the river is worthless. On this side of the river it is worth one hundred thousand dollars. Our drug money has made Nuevo Laredo the bloodiest place on the planet. But we think, Oh, it is their problem. But it is just there, on the other side of this shallow little river. How long before the violence is here, on this side of the river?" He pondered his own words. "Six nations have flown their flags over this land, but it is the cartels that now claim sovereignty over the borderlands."
He squinted at the sky and seemed to contemplate the endless blue.
"We have put a Predator drone over the border, as if this is Afghanistan. Perhaps it is."
"This is not what I expected."
"No. The borderlands is not like the rest of Texas. The land and the people are brown, the language is Spanish, and the culture is Mexican. And we are burdened by history. In Dallas and Houston and Austin, people look 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."