Pedro now found himself in another chapter of powerlessness different from the one he had faced back in Mexico. He lived his life like a fugitive. He couldn’t rent a house because his name couldn’t be on record. And even if he could rent a place from someone who would do it off the record, he would have to decide between his family’s survival and his own. If he rented a house and paid the bills and got groceries, nothing would be left over to send them down in Mexico. So Pedro hopped from place to place, staying with people according to their proximity to each job site that he worked on. No matter how hard he worked, he could never make enough to pay the price for someone to transport his family across the border to be with him. It had taken him three years to pay off the coyote that had brought him. And even if he could, it was too dangerous.

Pedro didn’t have a spouse, parent or sibling living legally in the United States, so no one could sponsor him to get a green card. Even if he had, the price of becoming legal, as set by the American government, was more than $20,000, which was more money than any member of his family could ever dream of accruing. And whoever sponsored him would need to prove that they had an income of more than $30,000. No employer would pay him salary and insurance plus the legal fees necessary to legitimize him for work. And the American government would not recognize him as a refugee in need of asylum. With no options, Pedro had been living his life between the cracks of American society, wiring money to his family back in Mexico whenever he could.

So many men, like Pedro, had left to find work that many of Mexico’s towns and cities had been reduced to ghost towns. Only old people and wives with children remained. Deprived of life and the animation of commerce, the dust of the desert was eating them away. Crime was a last resort for people who had no other way to make a living, and like roaches, men looking to make a living on that crime inherited the forgotten towns. Consuelo was Pedro’s younger brother. Being too young to leave with Pedro to begin with, he had stayed in Mexico to help take care of the family, including the wife and children Pedro had left behind. When he was old enough to work, Pedro concocted a plan to get Consuelo to the United States so that together they might make enough money to bring the rest of the family across the border.