The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

areas of San Diego and El Paso, the flow of immigrants and contraband is pushed increasingly into the remote desert that lies between them. That trend has allow- ed several formerly isolated small towns to prosper. Altar Call Altar is a nondescript little town a few hours southwest of Nogales. Business there has boomed in recent years, with guest houses and market stalls catering to a new kind of tourist: undocumented immigrants heading north. The small square is filled with groups of intending immi- grants waiting for word from scouts ahead to begin mov- ing north. They lounge in the city square, make phone calls back home with instructions to wire money, and pur- chase dark backpacks or heavy clothing from the kiosks that line the square in preparation for their night walk through the desert. A sad, desperate air of fear and antic- ipation is everywhere. A Mexican Red Cross trailer is a feature in the square now, its personnel there to attend to the blisters and animal or spider bites sustained by those who have unsuccessfully attempted the crossing. Along one side of the square is a line of battered vans whose seats have been removed and replaced with nar- row benches that accommodate 20 or more passengers. These vehicles, marked “Altar-Sasabe,” depart sporadi- cally during the afternoon and then with increasing fre- quency as dark approaches. The vans depart and drive north along a dirt toll road on privately-owned ranch land toward the last stop in Mexico: Sasabe. The End of the Road Sasabe is many things. It is a no-man’s land with the look and feel of a frontier mining town before the law arrived. It is the immigration delta at the end of a river of desperate souls that begins in southern Mexico or even F O C U S 30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 A family waits outside a hotel in Altar for sunset, when the traffic to Sasabe picks up. Though the afternoon tem- perature is 70-80 degrees, they will need the heavy jack- ets for the frigid night walk ahead. Cash is collected and vans are loaded outside a cheap guesthouse in Altar for the 100-kilometer trip to Sasabe. In Sasabe, the gravity of what lies ahead begins to impress itself on prospective migrants, who are transferred to heavy-duty pickup trucks for the journey to the final drop-off points near the border. Benjamin Ousley Benjamin Ousley Benjamin Ousley