Paso del Norte Luis López Levi
From Colorado, the river flows south. Then, at the westernmost tip of Texas, it begins to define north from south. Two thirds of the way from San Diego to Brownsville, from Tijuana to Matamoros, the fence gives way to the river, which takes the baton and continues for more than 800 miles, until it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. The river is best known by one of two names depending on what side you’re on. Both names are in Spanish. The naming difference comes as a result of translations from different indigenous languages, but it’s irresistible to think that these names have defined the attitudes towards the river. From the north looking south, it is the Rio Grande: the big buffer, the moat next to the fence. From the south looking north, the río Bravo: the indomitable beast, the uncooperative adversary. At the westernmost tip of Texas and the northernmost point of Chihuahua, right where the river becomes the border, lie two cities. They started as one city, Paso del Norte, back when all that divided them was a body of water. The border was nowhere near the settlement when it was founded in 1659 as a Spanish mission. In fact, there was really no border at all. Not the way we think of it now, just land remote enough to be anyone’s land. Someone was already on that land, of course, but that’s not how the settlers saw it. In 1848, 189 years after the founding of Paso del Norte and two years after the beginning of the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
ended the military conflict between both nations and decreed that the U.S.-Mexico border would run along the deepest channel of the river. From then on, the border has forever sliced the population into two cities, each of which remains inextricably linked to the other. Both names are in Spanish. On the north side is El Paso. On the south side is Ciudad Juárez. And through the middle, a line divides them. The line itself is invisible, at least to the common people on either side, who wouldn’t be able to easily identify exactly at what point of the river they become foreigners. But in the century and a half since it was legally established, everything around it has made it glaringly obvious. Barbed-wired fences cover the American side. Armored SUVs patrol the riverbed. Even the international bridges that go over it inevitably accentuate its existence. Cars and trucks can wait for hours under the scorching desert sun to cross to the U.S., waiting to get their documents checked by a Border Patrol agent, while street vendors sell ice-cold water bottles and sunshades for car windows. Crossing the same 1,000 feet or so back to Mexico, in contrast, takes only a few seconds. On June 7, 2010, 162 years after the river became the border, in a culvert under a railway bridge about four miles past the point where the river starts defining the border, three bullets forever link Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent Jesús Mesa Jr. and 15-year-old high school student Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca. A grainy, shaky cellphone video captures the moment when Jesús and other CBP agents, who were patrolling the river on a bicycle, get into an altercation with a group of teenagers whose story varies depending on what side you’re on. From the north looking south, the kids are throwing rocks at the agents, though the video refutes that claim. From the south looking north, the kids are
playing around, wading the ankle-deep waters to see if they can get away with placing their hand on the fence on the other side and running back without getting caught. The cellphone video shows the agent apprehending one of the kids on the American side while Sergio jolts past him and starts crossing back into Mexico. Sergio, who is right next to the fence, skids past Jesús, who is just next to the river; the closest Sergio ever gets to Jesús is about three or four feet, before the teenager starts running away from him, into the river. Sergio’s feet are still underwater when he stops, maybe to check on his friend, who is still apprehended by Jesús. The officer then raises his gun and shouts a warning to Sergio, though this isn’t audible in the video. Nine seconds later, he shoots him twice. The moment the shots are fired, the cellphone footage, which was later broadcasted and edited for a news story in Univision, marks the border with a yellow line, not unlike the one used to mark the first down in an NFL game. Sergio was just a couple of feet south of the border by the time the first two bullets reach him, one in his head. Seven seconds later, after Sergio limps to the edge of the river and lays on his side right next to a concrete pillar, no more than 15 feet away from the borderline, Jesús fires a third shot at him. Two dates are inscribed on that concrete pillar, under Sergio’s name: September 29, 1994 – June 7, 2010. Below them, a cross, and the words “Mamá y hermanos te recordamos.” Not long after Sergio’s death, his family started their decade-long struggle with the courts. After going through the first judicial levels, the case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019, under the name Hernández
v. Mesa. Both names are in Spanish. The justices started hearing oral arguments on November 12 of that year, and on February 25, 2020, nearly 10 years after Jesús killed Sergio, and 172 years after the river’s deepest channel became the border, the court decided, in a 5-4 vote, that Sergio, who was standing a couple of feet south of it, could not be protected by the U.S. constitution, as he was on foreign soil at the time of his death. As this case made its way through the courts, the Mexican government also weighed in, urging the Supreme Court to allow the family’s lawsuit and filing an extradition request for Jesús. The U.S. government did not comply, and a decade later, the agent is still not formally convicted. In the text for the formal Majority Opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, he claims the case “implicates an element of national security.” He says 850,000 people were apprehended attempting to illegally cross into the U.S. in the previous fiscal year, and that “powerful criminal organizations operating on both sides of the border present a serious law enforcement problem for both countries.” The kids, however, are not a part of any drug cartel at the time of the shooting. They’re just kids fooling around, daring each other. After Sergio’s death come the inevitable blames. They shouldn’t have been horsing around at the border. They shouldn’t have crossed it illegally. They shouldn’t have been throwing rocks. But equal counterpoints are made. An agent has no need to shoot an unarmed kid, even if he crosses illegally, even if he’s throwing rocks. Being careless shouldn’t come with a death sentence. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, author of the formal dissent, states that “Hernández’s location at the precise moment the bullet landed should not matter
one whit,” and that, per the Border Patrol agent’s lawyer, Sergio’s family would have legally been able to sue had their son been just a couple of feet north of the line, on American soil. He would have been there illegally, but he would have been under constitutional protection. He would still be dead, but his family would have a chance, not at justice, because nothing can bring Sergio back, but at the dignity of acknowledging the truth: that a boy was murdered for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is not the only irony that the case brings to surface. Sergio, along with all the other teenagers who are there at that moment, is pushing to see how far he can go, to try to prove that he can lay a hand on the other side and come back to safety, to try to make himself present in a space where he is very much unwelcome. And his punishment for this perceived intrusion is, in itself, another intrusion, not with hands, but with bullets. In an interview with the El Paso Times, María Guadalupe Güereca, Sergio’s mother, says her son got good grades and loved playing soccer–he had a framed poster of Chivas de Guadalajara in his room. She says she did everything she could to keep Sergio, the youngest of her six children, away from trouble. That’s no easy task in Juárez, the city with the highest murder rate in the world in 2008, with constant inter-cartel conflict and with more than 800 women murdered and 3,000 missing from 1993 to 2005, many of them low-income workers between 15 and 25 years old who had to drop out of high school to work in maquiladoras. There’s little to no information in the news about Jesús. All that the CBP released about him, apart from his name, was that he was 31 years old at the time of the incident, with seven years of experience as an agent. But it isn’t a stretch to
assume that he grew up not too far away from Ciudad Juárez, where Sergio was born, most likely on the El Paso side, in the same metro area, in the same city until the border sliced it. At some point he and Sergio might have been in the same shopping mall, in the same grocery store, in the same restaurant. At some point they might have tuned into the same radio station, watched the same TV news channel from home, or put on a sweatshirt at the exact same time as the sun sets and the desert chill arrives. Sergio might have grown up to go to college in El Paso. He might have eventually gotten a job there, raised a family, sent his kids to school there. And in any one of his daily crossings from Juárez into U.S. territory, Jesús might have been the agent who checked his papers and let him through. Had Sergio been alive for it, they might have both stopped whatever they were doing at the same time on August 3, 2019, to mourn the 22 people from both countries murdered by the gunman who drove 650 miles to El Paso to bring down as many people like Jesús and Sergio as he could find. Schoolchildren north of the river aren’t taught to fear the Border Patrol. Agents will regularly visit classrooms on career day, and many kids aspire to join the CBP when they grow up. The people north of the river who do fear the agency are undocumented immigrants and their families. After the 2016 election, as the White House begins to enable a more widespread anti-immigrant rhetoric, firstgeneration American children urge their parents to start their citizenship process, every day living in fear that ICE might arrive at their door before their Green Card does. From the north looking south, the Border Patrol deals primarily in fear, simultaneously feeling it and instilling it. Armed agents patrol their side of the river
constantly and line up apprehended people in visible spaces in a constant show of strength. Anyone who attempts to cross the border is a potential criminal and may be treated like one, even if they do nothing illegal, even if their worst possible offense is throwing a rock across the river. Officers learn to see brown male teenagers–many with long and foreign sounding names that often generate multiple A.K.A.s on a criminal record–as narcos in the making. The teenagers, in turn, learn that that is what they inevitably resemble to law enforcement. Some of them actually end up joining a cartel, making a local drug lord their closest male role model and aspiring to become him, to be just as rich and powerful. If they’re going to be mistaken for one, they might as well be one and reap whatever success they can from it. Sergio was, by all accounts, a “good kid” who didn’t “hang out with the wrong crowd,” but that doesn’t make him more deserving of due process than any other boy his age. There is also fear from the south looking north. When Mexicans visit the U.S., even just for one-day shopping sprees or family reunions, even after crossing through a legal port of entry and showing their passports and visas, they make an effort to be on their best behavior. Many fasten their seatbelts the moment they drive across the bridge. They use their turning lights for every lane change. They respect the speed limit, and completely stop at every stop sign. They know authorities will stop them on this side for things like this. But then, of course, there are differences. A shopper on a tourist visa has little to fear beyond a fine for speeding. An undocumented resident risks deportation. The border is an open wound that many people cross every day to go to school, to work, to shop, to dine, to be with family. It is also a line some people can
only cross once, living for years in fear of being forced to cross it again. It is a line that separates people with Spanish names on one side from people with Spanish names on the other side. It is a line that pits them against each other on both sides of the river, in the middle of a desert between two countries, neither of which fully represents them. Not everyone has an ideal picture ready for their sudden death or disappearance. After the shooting, Sergio’s family shares a few photos to the press, none of which are particularly flattering, all of which have been expanded and reproduced to the point of granularity. The few circulating photos of him show he wasn’t one to smile much. Perhaps he was just at the stage of moody teenager, the kind who prefers to sulk and throw a glance of slight embarrassment towards his mom as she takes his picture. But one particular photo of him stands out. In it, Sergio stands in front of another body of water, not the río Bravo, but what seems to be a large lagoon. A reporter took a picture of this picture, so his face isn’t very clear, but his body language–he is tilted slightly to the left, with his hands in his pockets and a hint of a smile–shows a sort of budding self-confidence, a sense that growing up can’t be that bad. Whenever Sergio’s family organizes a protest directly on the border with El Paso, they bring a printed canvas with another enlarged picture of their brother, where he’s wearing a baseball cap and avoiding a smile. Next to it is a message for him: “we are sure you will never die as long as we maintain the friendship that brought us together.” After the Supreme Court’s decision, it is hard to know what the family can do next. They have run out of options, but they keep protesting,
acknowledging, if no one else will, the truth: that a boy was murdered for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ten years later, Sergio’s blood continues to wash up on both sides of the river.