For years now, I have failed to appreciate the Rio Grande River. My principal experience has been from its banks in the Chihuahita area of El Paso. That includes being on the El Paso side and watching migrants wade across to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol with asylum claims and also being on the Juárez side interviewing migrants, mostly Venezuelans, who were living in a tent city while hoping for the lifting of Title 42.
The river then seemed like a minor obstacle – shallow enough to wade through without any danger. I frankly didn’t connect Border Patrol reports of increasing drowning deaths with the El Paso area of the river.
Then Alvaro Enciso called from Tucson. He is the Colombia-born artist and Vietnam veteran who has placed over 1,400 crosses in the Arizona desert at sites where migrants have died. My wife, Sherry and I accompanied him and his team in December when they placed crosses at six sites in the Columbus and Deming area. It was a deeply emotional experience in stark desert terrain.
This time his goal was the Sunland Park area. He arrived with two members of his team – Peter Lucero and Bryce Peterson. Peterson is a genius with his GPS and can direct us to the exact sites. Also with us were two women associated with Arizona State University, Alyssa Quintanilla and Gabriella Soto plus a unique leader from the Deming-Palomas area, Sandra Magallanes.
Sandra, a Mexican national, first entered the US illegally on January 4, 1990. She crossed the border at tiny Las Chepas, some fifteen miles west of Palomas, then spent years struggling to obtain US citizenship and finally succeeded on June 25, 2021. “I am an immigrant like many are,” she says, “but the United States is truly my home. I still love my country of birth (Mexico) and I visit it regularly but I cannot deny that there are opportunities that the United States provides that were just not available where I grew up.”
Sandra is a key person in the Deming-Palomas area working with shelters like Colores United in Deming and Punto Beta in Palomas. I wondered, however, why she had come to El; Paso to be with Alvaro and his team.
To my surprise, we drove past the Sunland Park area that morning to the edge of El Paso and next to the river.
“A 15-year-old Russian girl and her father died here, “Alvaro said. “The Border Patrol tried to warn them not to attempt crossing this canal but being Russian, they didn’t understand the warnings.”
The canal I then saw was raging. Crossing would be suicidal. The girl’s body was recovered but the father was swept further down the river.
We then placed two more crosses under the overpass near the train line – one for a 55-year-old man from San Luis Potosí and the other for Manuel Anaya, age 21. The next was for a 22-year-old man named Sergio from Guanajuato who made it across the river but then died.
Then we returned to Sunland Park and, following directions from Bryce, drove to its southeast edge. “This is where Rigoberto Soto died,” Sandra said. It turned out that this 33-year-old man had been living and working in New Mexico but was without papers. Because of a family illness he returned to his hom town of Rosales, Mexico, a small town (pop. roughly 16,000) 50 miles south of the city of Chihuahua. When he returned to New Mexico, however, he had to cross illegally at Sunland Park and then died from exposure.
“Rosales is also my hometown,” Sandra said. “I am going to see my family there, but I have to see his also. I have to tell them what happened in Sunland Park.”
Even if you travel to the border as frequently as I do, even if this always involves assisting various migrant shelters like La Casa del Migrante and Respettrans in Juárez or Punto Beta in Palomas and Colores United in Deming, it is hard to keep in mind the enormity of the risks that those coming north to our country are taking, and not just because of the ugly ad deafening rhetoric about migrant life. It takes leaders like Alvaro Enciso and Sandra Magallanes to bring home this harsh reality.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by Morgan Smith, a retired lawyer and government official from Colorado who now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Smith writes regularly on border issues. He has been going to the border – mostly Juarez and Palomas – at least monthly for the last 13 years to document conditions there and assist a variety of humanitarian programs and, more recently, migrant shelters. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author. Smith can be reached by email via morgan-smith@comcast.net.
