The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [89]
How many toys. How many phone bills. How much in the poor box at church. How much for pencils, steaks, charcoal, glasses, panties, bras, bikes, skateboards, concerts, Blockbuster, Monistat, Head & Shoulders, Listerine. AOL. Computers. Backpacks. Uniforms. Night school.
What of the Devil’s Highway itself, the tormented border in Arizona?
In June 2003, right in the heart and heat of the killing season, Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management, released a study. Sooner or later, everyone will release a study. But this one made the Mexican consuls of Arizona happy. No doubt Vicente Fox faxed it to the White House.
Thunderbird learned that Arizona “gets $8 billion in economic impact annually from the relationship” with Mexico. That’s profit, not costs. Mexico makes $5.5 billion. Reymundo and his son would have been stunned to know they were dying under a high tide of money. Critics will be stunned to learn that the United States makes more money in the deal than those wily Mexicans.
Thunderbird relates:
“Mexican immigrants paid nearly $600 million in federal taxes and sales taxes in 2002 … Mexican immigrants use about $250 million in social services such as Medicaid and food stamps … Another $31 million in uncompensated health care. …”
That leaves a profit of $319 million.
The Arizona Republic further quotes the report:
• The average annual wage for Arizonans is $28,355; for the state’s Mexican immigrants it’s $12,963.
• The total buying power of Arizona’s Mexican immigrants is estimated at $4.18 billion.
• The state’s Mexican immigrants spend an estimated $1.5 billion in mortgage payments and rent annually.
• Mexican tourists and visitors spent $962 million in Arizona in 2001, while state residents spent about $328 million in Mexico.
• Remittances from the state’s Mexican immigrants to their homeland reached $486 million last year, with those transactions generating about $57 million in fees to Arizona banks and financial institutions.
We not only gonna get it back, but we gonna pay for it, too …
The investigation over, the afternoon growing late, the light fades in the Tucson consulate’s office. The scented candles are guttering low now, but they still give up their scent. The death pictures of the Yuma 14 go back in their envelopes, to be filed and forgotten. Their bodies are long gone, gone and buried. Still, the smell of death floats in the room as the tainted papers and cardboard folders are sealed. It’s dark and leathery, smells like burned barbecue and old trash, at once tangy and flat.
A woman in stretch pants sits across the room. She has scuffed white shoes and holds a cracking vinyl purse with a faux-gold clasp in her lap. She wrings its tan shoulder straps in her fists. She’s sitting on the edge of the seat, and she has pins in her hair, and she is smiling and bowing her head, enacting the ancient pantomime of subservience that Mexicans of humble origin rely on to help them deal with people of power. Like consulate secretaries sitting behind big desks.
She has come to ask the secretary about a certain Juan García who walked into the Sonora desert a week ago and never came out in Arizona.
The security chief is saying, “They drink piss to live!”
“Excuse me, sir,” the secretary says.
“What is it?”
“This señora has lost a Juan García.”
“How long?”
“A week or more,” the woman offers.
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got him.”
She smiles.
“Yes?” she says.
“He’s dead. I’ve got him on the slab.”
The chief walks out. The secretary walks out.
The woman sits alone, staring at the desk. She looks up. “What do I do now?” she asks.
Just as the last file is going to go on the shelf,