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instance, had passed fourteen months in Santa Nella. In Mexican prisons you got only one meal a day, a bowl of beans, so he liked Santa Nella better. Roberto said much the same. He was strong; he wanted to work in the American fields for three or four dollars an hour . . . They’d slept in the park that entire week. Whenever the police inquired their business, they replied: We’re waiting for night to get across, at which the police shrugged and left them alone. And they literally called themselves a family. Whoever found food shared it with his brothers, they said.
    Dan Murray, right as always, had said: See, we used to get a lot of groups, some female, some mixed. They go over, we chase ’em, they run back. This cat and mouse stuff, that’s what this fence will stop.
    Will the fence get any higher?
    Well, what we’ve done, we’ve stopped the females and the heavier-set individuals.
    For that reason Carlos was despondent, fearing that he’d grown too fat and old. He said: I am never goin’ there, man. Here I am in the park, eatin’ nothing. Where else can I go? Only people I know is these people. They gonna go tonight, but not me. I’m too heavy to get over.
    And as he sat with his temporary brothers, lurking in the darkness beneath those white-painted palm trees, a policewoman pedaled her bicycle up to them and stopped, dropping her booted feet to the ground. A line of brass cartridges was strapped across her broad back. She told the family that she’d arrest them all if they were in the park half an hour from now. Her partner also cycled up and began writing down their names in his notebook.
    Where else can I go? muttered Carlos, wringing his hands.

CANALS AND RIVERS
    Well, there was always the All-American Canal. Carlos had swum it only two weeks ago, carrying thirty pounds’ worth of supplies: bread and baloney, then water for two days. Once he’d crawled up into Northside, peeked through the bamboo, and crossed the levee road (Officer Murray’s colleagues must have been hunting elsewhere), he’d begun to walk. He walked for two nights, all the way up to Niland, and then he got caught. He didn’t mind so much. He’d been creeping into America ever since 1982, when coyotes charged only two hundred dollars from Tijuana, because there was no metal fence back then. 3 Now it cost twelve hundred dollars there—nearly the same as here. That corrugated steel wall of landing mat (some of it Air Force surplus from an easy little war of ours called Operation Desert Storm) presently extended three hundred and sixty-three feet into the ocean, then continued by fits and starts across all southern California. (We have so many gaps in this fence, lamented Gloria I. Chavez, the public affairs officer at Chula Vista. But these gaps are covered by agents.) Carlos saw no purpose in taking a bus all the way to Tijuana to gamble through one of those narrowing gaps. Sweating and stinking in the darkness, he told me that if his “family” went over without him, he might try the water route again. But his perils commenced even before he could drag his heavy, sodden body into Officer Murray’s jurisdiction. Robbers preyed on the solos. So on occasion did uniformed agents of Mexican dominion.
    In the clipped lingo of the Border Patrol, American sentinels were called Alpha, while their Mexican counterparts were Beta. Accurate as they undoubtedly were in their depiction of the power relation between the two nations, those designations scarcely overwhelmed me with their tact. Alpha pursued Beta’s nationals whenever, like Carlos, they tried to breach Northside; Alpha’s nationals swaggered around Southside like lords. And so Beta sometimes cooperated with Alpha in a less than enthusiastic spirit. In the grubby wilderness of freeways, warehouses and cut-rate stores between San Diego and Tijuana there is a municipality called Chula Vista, which like so many of its kind in California no longer exists as a distinct entity; its grid