Los Angeles: City of Angels, City of Immigrants
Rosecrans Baldwin on Border Crossings and Anglo Mythologies in Southern California
By Rosecrans Baldwin
June 24, 2021
Early one morning, driving south, James Cordero described his grandfather’s crossing story in terms of the Mexican Repatriation, the 1930s forced mass deportation from the United States of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Robert A. Cordero had originally crossed in the ’20s, part of one of the first waves pushed out, but he kept coming back. Cordero said his grandfather would sneak in, get caught, sneak in, get caught, same location, same agent, until the agent finally said, “If you do this one more time, you’re going to be locked up for good.” So his grandfather found another way in: he enlisted in the U.S. Army, kicked some ass, killed some Nazis. “And back then it was automatic,” Cordero said. “You got your naturalization when you left the military.”
On the highway, the early sunlight was so bright, cars around us looked like gold bricks. Cordero and his colleague Jacqueline Arellano, riding shotgun, told me they often spent their weekends doing their own sort of border crossing, not so much crossing as skirting. The two of them were trackers who scouted migrant trails in California’s southern wilderness (I was asked not to reveal where) on behalf of a nonprofit organization called Border Angels that, among other activities, frequently led volunteers on aid missions into the mountains, to leave behind stores of water, food, and clothing to prevent people from dying from heatstroke in the summer, hypothermia in the winter, or dehydration year-round.
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