“I just have to get there, I just have to get there” (to America) to make enough money to come back, marry his girl, and everything to be alright. Of course it’s a total dream, but it’s all a dream and it’s a dream like the fever dream of the dying in the desert who see crystal cities and demons. But you only have to be starving just a little bit to believe the American dream.

$1700 @ 15% interest is $255. It doesn’t say if that’s monthly (probably) or weekly (unlikely, but the world is cruel enough that it’s very possible). At a minimum wage job in America at the time was $5.15 /hr. If you worked 40 hours a week (and it’s unlikely they had it this easy) they would make $206 /wk before taxes (however that works for illegals) but let’s say it’s $175 /wk X 4 = $700 – $255 = $455 /mo. Jesus.

That’s heartbreaking about Enrique sending his boots back to Octavia and when she sees them she hugs them and cries because she knows he’s gone to try to get into America (and that he’ll probably die trying).

He compares the backtracking they did when lost to an inverted ‘V’ shape or a ‘U’ shape, as if they are making letters in the desert for the border patrol to read. And of course it’s all nonsense words because they are lost and dying and ready to strip naked because wearing clothes is actually painful when you’re about to enter heat stroke.

“Nobody looked at the occasional buzzard that eyed them with its infernal optimism”. I wouldn’t look up either knowing a buzzard was just waiting for me to die.

Who really is to blame? Everyone? No One? Seems like there is plenty of blame to go around.

“Pale yellow is the Evian of urine” The gallows humor in this is great but also makes it even more sad.

Interesting how he compares crossing the literal border with each successive border crossing of heat exhaustion: first it’s Heat Stress, then Heat Fatigue, then Heat Syncope, the Heat Cramps, then Heat Exhaustion, and finally Heat Stroke. I’ve gone as far as borderline between Heat Fatigue and Heat Syncope, which is an unusual feeling of disorientation. To go beyond that is just terrifying.

“The land tried to hide him and keep him for itself”.

The desert, even just a few hundred yards from the safety of a camp and RV is just brutal. You can get lost so easily and the heat cooks you as fast as a microwave.

Reading the tracks like it’s the grooves in a vinyl record is pretty fascinating that they can read each person’s track, what they were doing, who they were with, recreate the whole journey.

The incident with the lights is interesting. What did they see? Did a border patrol’s lights see them but not the agent in the Ford? Lights in the desert do weird things, especially since rain was coming so you never know with light reflecting off clouds or lightening. But I’d be spooked too.

While probably not as bad as the Great Sand Dunes National Park, hiking in sand is a bitch. It’s hot, your legs hurt almost immediately climbing, and you really do slide back half a step for every step forward you take I can’t imagine doing it for 2-3 days – damn near wiped me out when I was in my late 20’s, healthy, and only was at it for a couple of hours.

It’s sort of amazing how unprepared everyone of the walkers are. Granted, if I went hiking here in Rocky Mountain National Park I’d probably do not much better, but these people are drinking Pepsi’s – and it’s the Pepsi’s that sort of gauge how well everyone is doing: the warmer the pepsi, the worse they are doing.

In a lot of way seeing Mendez getting ready to take the walkers across the border is like someone getting ready for work – he’s tired, he needs coffee and breakfast, he says goodbye to his girl, he calls his people when his co-worker isn’t there. If they weren’t doing something dangerous and illegal, it would just be another day in the office.

“High spirits were a bad precedent. This wasn’t a vacation”. The whole trip on the bus sounds depressing, but also weirdly beautiful in a way that everything is so strange, but also so run down. The heart of Mexico is both alive and dead, happy and sad, the names are unusual and don’t mean anything but also mean everything, like the rabbit tattoo.

Groups of 30 or less were what went across the border, any more than 30 and it was too large of a group to control. But 30 is still a lot of people, that’s like a whole classroom of students, and even half of that size can be hard to keep everyone doing what you want or need. 30 is like a teacher feeling her class is overcrowded, and so the coyotes feel the same way probably.

Interesting juxtaposition between the US Geological survey maps against the hand drawn maps the coyotes draw in ball point pen in a notebook. One side has all the technology, but the other side is clever and daring and resourceful.

When it’s described just how many different groups and people there are in the desert doing border patrol work, it almost seems as if it’s crowded out there between the US Military, the agents, the civilians, and then the walkers themselves.

It’s not just the pop culture that is tied into how people think about immigration and being a coyote / gangster, but also how religion and culture play a role in that by being a coyote you are, in a way, acting like a “civil rights activist” taking back the America that was stolen from you at gunpoint. This argument is, for sure, far more enticing than anything else.

I mean it’s no wonder people are attracted to being a guia, when you have no money anything sounds better than being broke and having no respect. I’m not saying it’s right, but it is reality.

Jesus, these people are fed drugs – cocaine or diet pills – to make them walk faster? So you’ve got a group of poor (malnourished probably) people in the desert with no shelter, water or provisions, and they’re all on speed. So if you’re going to die out there in regular circumstances, the drugs are just going to make it worse.

I keep finding interesting how the Indian population is at odds with the migrants because the walkers are creating an environmental nightmare with ll their trash (and corpses) on the land. We always think of this as a white American vs poor Mexican conflict, but it’s far more complicated than that.

A lot of mention of popular media, such as the film Traffic, the TV show The Sopranos, and even the cartoon character, Chespirito. All of this seems to add up to a sense that popular media informs how reality works, how the coyotes use these media tropes to maintain power and elicit fear in not only their “clients” but also in the people who investigate them.

The absurdity continues as we learn the Mexican patrols had been giving the walkers water and food and condoms, but the Americans, not concerned with the lives of Mexicans, were concerned for the lives of American women who they thought (propaganda; they didn’t actually think it) were coming to have sex with their women.

There are probably a lot of Don Moi’s around, all of them taking advantage of the poor and hopeful. I always wondered how people afforded the huge cost of getting to America if they had no money ” loans from loan sharks who worked with the smugglers and took a bug % of future earnings (not that there’d be much so they were basically serfs living in America).

The economics of scale – “It was easier for a Sinaloa farm to get the beans to California than to Veracruz – and more lucrative”. The workers starve as they are surrounded by all that food – water, water everywhere (and reserved for the dead who died of thirst)

“In one of the million ironies of the desert, those who die of thirst become waterproof” and so the dead have to be hydrated to get a fingerprint. The dead don’t need water, yet here we are giving the dead water, sometimes for days, just to get a fingerprint.

I didn’t know Chinese and Russians were also crossing the border – these (as well as central and south Americans) are the OTM’s. Also crazy to think about the vacuum of opportunity in this part of the world has allowed for al Qaeda to come in and spread their message, teaching little kids Arabic and training them to fight in camps in Brazil.

They come here with literally nothing in their pockets in hopes that they will get a job plucking chickens for KFC who will then also use them to cook the chickens in their restaurants. This is juxtaposed with the total lack of opportunity in Mexico and inability to get the government in order to make anyone’s lives at least better than risking a journey across the border to puck chickens for KFC.

Reference to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which makes sense since that was about each of the soldiers’ individuality and what they prioritized, and since this also like a war, it’s a way to identify the combatants, so to speak.

Sad, but also sort of funny tho think people are sneaking around the desert with foam on their feet to avoid being detected. It’s all so absurd while also being a matter of life and death. When did the world become so surreal?

Yeah, it’s probably mean, but the story of the jackrabbit is pretty funny. It also adds to the mythic legends of this region while also reminding us that the origin of a lot of great stories was probably just some bullshit or a prank that got out of hand until now the legends scare the hell out of everyone.

He juxtaposes the mythic spirituality of death and dying in the desert with the banality and boredom of being a Border Agent. While the migrants are dying in the scrub, the agents patrol 150 miles at 30mph with the AC on. The disparity is wider than the distance across the border.

Funny how the horse has been replaced with a 10,000 pound Ford Explorer.

Interesting, “Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a relatively compact portion of the Tuscon sector, was withering under two hundred thousand walkers passing through every year”. 200,000 – I had no idea that many people were passing through just one corridor.

OTM = Other Than Mexicans.

“Cops tend to asses a situation at first glance – people are always up to something” and so he could just as easily beat these people or give them water. There isn’t a lot of humanity out here because “in the desert, they were often involved in some form of dying”

He’s setting up the spiritual aspects of this land, the superstition, the religion, and how it’s a land full of death, not life. Everything here is hard and barbed and you will die slowly over 20 days while the flies lay eggs in you and the dogs pace around you waiting for you to die – or maybe not even waiting that long.

I also like how he equates the Nazca style lines to that of the highways.

I like how he sets the scene as if it is part of a mythic epic where men battle against the forces of the gods who are then made manifest in the husks of abandoned army tanks, like a terracotta army memorial. Beautiful, but also terrifying and beautifully strange, like much of the North American Southwest