Debbie Nathan

Back by popular demand (including repeated requests from my daughter, Sophy): a hard-to-find story I wrote years ago, after working four months as a telephone psychic. (Sophy remembers breaking high school curfew and coming home at 3 a.m. but Mommy not caring; I was much too involved with my headset, doing frantic, wee-hours tarot readings for insomniacs and ambulatory psychotics). This piece was published in various places, including Readers Digest and the 8/4/99 issue of Detroit’s Metro Times. Here’s the Metro version:

Fortune Tattling

The phone rang, and as usual I grabbed it as fast as I could. “Thank you for calling the Psychic Network,” I said, mixing my normal “come on kids do the dishes now!” voice with a breathy attempt to sound otherworldly.

“I’m Deborah.” (Deborah sounds more mysterious than Debbie.) “Can I have your name and your birth date?”

“Teneecia, July 3,” a small voice answered, and when she added the year, I saw she was 18 – the minimum age you must be to have your fortune read on the phone. I went into my spiel, which is designed to put the client in an accepting mood and rack up valuable minutes of 900-telemarketing time.

“Teneecia,” I started my singsong, “I’m a tarot reader. First I’ll choose a card to represent you, then do a general reading. I’m shuffling now; tell me when it feels right to stop. While I do the general reading you be thinking of specific questions to ask later on.” As usual, I made riffling noises with the cards without bothering to shuffle, much less deal. I heard a baby crying in the background. “Ready?” I asked.

But Teneecia (her name and month of birth have been changed to conceal her identity) didn’t want a general reading. “Please!” she begged. “My boyfriend got killed. My little boy’s father. We had words, and he left the house and got caught in a shoot-out. I never saw him conscious again. I need to tell him I love him. I need to know he don’t blame me for him leaving the house and getting killed. I need some last words. Can you hear him in the cards? Can you tell me what he’s saying? Otherwise I’m going to kill myself so I can talk to him.”

Job hunt

I was brooding in a motel room in a strange city the first time I saw a psychic infomercial. I wasn’t as interested in the incongruously glamorous celebrity flacks – Dionne Warwick, Billy Dee Williams and others – as I was in ordinary people testifying to their life-transforming psychic interventions. An office manager said that her psychic told her if she went to a Christmas party, the first man she talked to would become her husband; now they’re married and expecting a child. A housewife who lost her cat found it in the exact place predicted. “She knew everything about me!” gushed another customer about the reader who correctly told her she wanted to attend computer school. The satisfied customers – mostly women – didn’t look like they could afford to shell out $4.99 a minute, especially not for entertainment.

Afterward I learned that the biggest company, Psychic Friends, was taking in $150 million a year before it was bankrupted last year by competition from numerous smaller companies including Psychic Readers, Kenny Kingston and LaToya Jackson. By the late 1990s, these businesses had jacked the industry’s earnings up to at least $300 million annually. For this we can thank the Reagan administration; in 1984, the Federal Communications Commission lifted its 16-minute-an-hour restriction on TV advertising, paving the way for monster hourlong infomercials. Add to this a dramatic proliferation of 800- and 900-number marketing and computerized billing technologies. The result was an enormous “futures” market.

At the time, I was a struggling freelance journalist, so I decided to write about the industry after working in it. As someone who’s so skeptical of the paranormal that half the time I can’t remember my astrological sign, I thought it would be revealing if someone like myself could do a good job as a dial-a-clairvoyant.

Besides, my preliminary research revealed that the work paid $15 an hour and it was steady. That’s a lot more than you can say for freelance writing. After years of cranking out articles for starvation pay, I’d gotten an agent and received assignments from slick national magazines. But by the late 1990s, journalism was as crazy as the telephone-psychic business; people were buying and selling magazines the way the rich used to speculate in pork bellies. Amid the wheeling and dealing, editors would come on staff, buy pieces from writers like me, then move to other magazines, leaving unedited articles behind – which languished in new editors’ desks and never got published. I was sick of the business, and beneath my psychic-industry muckraker bravado, I was fantasizing a change of trade.

Shuffling cards

To get my career as a psychic jump-started, I signed up for a nine-hour class with Grace, a bulky, fast-talking blonde who has had three husbands and five kids and makes a good living reading cards at psychic fairs. The tarot deck harks back to the Renaissance, when tarot was a game with no more spiritual significance than the modern pastime of bridge.

During the 1960s, when tarot first became mainstream, the emperor card suggested willpower. The empress connected you with maternal forces. And there were the four suits: swords, representing conflict; wands, for work and competition; pentacles – or coins – for material affairs; and cups, for emotions.

But these days people don’t want abstract interpretations; they’re seeking quick answers to their $4.99-a-minute questions. So Grace reads the cards in a rivetingly concrete way. In class she slaps down the emperor and the naked lovers cards, surrounds them right and left by two “pages” – cards depicting medieval boys – and on either side of the pages, the four of swords, showing a person in bed; finally the pope.

“OK!” Grace instructed us. “You’ve got your old man, two boys and the bed. Check out the lovers. And the moon, which means secrets. When this comes up in a spread, you know your client’s involved with a pedophile!”

She taught us combinations indicating that your car’s fan belt is on the fritz, your son is dealing drugs and your daughter had an abortion.

At the end of the course I still felt like a hopeless novice. So to get prepared, I offered complimentary readings to my most skeptical friends, including a research psychologist who makes a career of debunking shibboleths like the Rorschach test. By the time I met with him, I’d studied up on the utterly unsupernatural reasons why tarot cards work. A group of Israeli researchers has suggested the resemblance between tarot readings and the compelling story lines of the world’s popular folk tales and myths. The Israelis are right. The first time I shuffled, I found that by laying out a few cards, you weave a narrative as seductive as the most enduring legend, with your client as the hero.

In any reading, there will always be some swords: conflict. And cups: emotion. There will be money problems, boredom with a relationship or a job. Temptations, weakness, insecurity, lust. Illness. Gambling, not necessarily with money but with someone or something you shouldn’t be taking a chance on. You’re involved with someone now, right? Well, I’m feeling lust around you. Meaning not necessarily that the sex is hot – in fact, lots of times it’s the opposite, right? – but that there’s an imbalance between your physical relationship and other forms of communication.

You’re keeping from each other. The unacknowledged feelings add to some of the boredom – are you feeling bored with each other? Hmmm … but this card shows you as a very strong, insightful person when you want to be. If you put your mind to it, you can make things better.

People are amazed at your “insight” because most are so narcissistic that they can’t imagine how much they have in common with the rest of the population. My psychology professor friend knew all about “cold readings” like this, and he chuckled as I laid out his cards and recited a shtick not unlike the one above. But soon his laughter faded, and later he told me he was so devastated by my “accuracy” that he went home early that day to think about what I’d said to him.

I figured I was ready.

I called a few of the companies, and Ft. Lauderdale-based Psychic Readers Network immediately mailed me an application. Soon someone from personnel called and asked for a reading. I recited pretty much what I had given the psychology professor. “Great,” she said. “You can start immediately.”

Work rules

Being a telephone psychic subjects you to the grueling pace and sadistic management style of a hamburger-flipping job at McDonald’s. My first day on the line, I had to memorize a long list of instructions: Always answer the phone by the second ring. Always say “Thank you for calling the Network, my name is Deborah.” Explain that I’m a tarot reader. Never answer specific questions before doing a “general reading” that’s essentially the same for everyone but takes up a lot of time.

If I did all these things, my employer said, the client would get “hooked” and stay on the line past the first two minutes that Psychic Readers offers free. Before automatically cutting off, the call could go on for as long as 55 minutes, which (after subtracting the two free minutes) translates into a phone bill of $264.47. If the conversation started winding down, I was supposed to keep it going by asking for a last name and address “so we can send you coupons for free and discounted readings.” And at the end I must never forget to say, “For adults and entertainment only.”

All this was reinforced via the recorded “daily message,” that I had to listen to each time I logged on to work. The Big Brother of the message is a Psychic Readers Network executive named Steve. He sounds like David Spade, minus the humor. “Come on, guys!!” he would whine. “You’ve absolutely positively got to get first name last name street name street number city name state and don’t forget zip code on each call! Otherwise you will be terminated! Remember, we have six callers monitoring you.”

I lived in low-grade terror, and I was only part time. Imagine people trying to make a real living at this job. I met several of them at psychic fairs and in Grace’s classes. The vast majority were women, and few had more than high school or a year or so of college. They were working 30 or 40 hours a week on the phone, often trying to care for small children at the same time. (”Absolutely no putting clients on hold to change diapers!” Steve warned.) For the $4.99 these women earned each minute for the company, they kept only 25 cents – with no benefits.

Cultivating calls

The easiest way to make money as a phone psychic is by talking to callers who don’t require much attention. The lotto players who want numbers, for instance. I obliged them by counting swords or cups on the cards, always warning them that if I could guarantee the numbers, I’d be in Vegas, not on the phone. Or teenage girls on three-way extensions, inquiring about who on a list of boys would be asking them out. And men – good-natured “Home Improvement” types – wanting to know where they’d meet their next girlfriend: a bowling alley or a bar? These people were watching their clocks, and if they didn’t hang up by the time their two minutes expired, they seldom stayed on much longer.

But the company makes you hate such callers’ thriftiness. Each week while I was working, a computer totaled up the average length of my calls, and if it dropped below 14 minutes, I was in trouble.

You also learn to cultivate another kind of caller: the ones who jack up your average as they take you through a wringer of crisis and loneliness.

They start phoning in the morning, when the kids are in school and the breakfast dishes done. The despair sets in then, and the balm is TV soap operas, with their strategically positioned psychic commercials. From 10 a.m. to early afternoon, my phone rang off the hook.

Darlene, from Alabama, was a typical caller. She lives eight miles from the nearest town, thinks she’s pregnant and has a drinking problem. She’s worried about its effects on a baby but can’t figure out what to do because she’s so isolated and her live-in boyfriend is also alcoholic. I asked Darlene if she’d been to the doctor to see if she was really pregnant. No, she’d rather have the cards tell her. “Well,” I said, “the cards show that very soon you’ll be going to a drugstore and buying a pregnancy test. I also see a car here – do you have one? No? Oh, you have a truck but it’s not running? Gee, I see the chariot card. It means you’re going to be asking your boyfriend to help you fix the truck. Because I see you doing regular traveling into town. I also see you seeking counsel there in dealing with temptation. Is an Alcoholics Anonymous nearby?”

But calls like Darlene’s are nothing compared to the midnight to 4 a.m. shift, when people all over America toss and turn with desperation.

Florinda, in Spokane, hemmed and hawed about her boyfriend not letting her see her friends. When I told her I saw violence around her, she broke into wracking sobs and confessed that the boyfriend was beating her regularly and savagely. Bobby, a tough, macho-sounding black man, had just found out who his real father was and was going crazy deciding if he should try to establish contact. “Please ma’am,” he said softly. “Can you write a love letter for me to my daddy?” I won’t tell you what I said to these people; it’s pretty much what any person with a modicum of perspective would have said. But I will say that after I mailed my letter to Bobby’s dad, I knew I was getting addicted to being a phone psychic.

I was utterly seduced by the chance to talk so intimately and tenderly to people whose lives are segregated from mine by sex, class and race. There were nasty ironies to this beauty, however. African-Americans, for example, comprised one in four of my callers, while they make up only one in eight of the national population. Is this any surprise, given that Dionne Warwick and LaToya Jackson act as psychic figureheads in exchange for royalties on each call? It’s just like how cigarette companies market tobacco to minorities.

But here I was, a middle-class white woman bonding with people I’d never have a chance to talk to in everyday life. I felt brave and sensitive. Cheap shot, my friends said: I was hearing such confidences only because I was passing myself off as a spirit with supernatural powers. No matter; I was hooked. I found myself thinking of becoming a full-time seer. Maybe getting some other women together, setting up our own 900 number, dispensing with the cards and renaming ourselves The Nonpsychic Advice Ladies. Meanwhile, I got an assignment from a slick women’s magazine to do a story about my new work. Soon after, I got my first call from Teneecia, a day after her boyfriend was killed in the shoot-out.

Working overtime

Hers was the most profound crisis I’d ever confronted on the line, and at first I was terrified. Then, without thinking rationally, I sprang into action.

“Teneecia! Your boyfriend’s in the cards! He’s saying he’s in a wonderful, peaceful place and that he knows how very much you love him. But Teneecia, he’s saying he wants you to stay where you are, alive, and be a mother to his baby. OK, are there people in the house with you? His family? You’re real close to them? Good. He wants you to stay with them all day. And spend the night with them. Understand? And I want you to call me anytime; here’s my home phone. Forget the psychic line, it’s way too expensive.”

“Really?” Teneecia responded. “Oh, thank you, you’re my psychic friend.” I hung up and wept.

She called many times in the next few weeks. Always, she wanted to communicate with her dead boyfriend. At first I obliged, telling her over and over that her lover hoped she would pick up with her life. But when she called late one night in terror that her boyfriend’s ghost was lurking at her bedside, I realized I needed to wean her from the cards and from me.

I called the hospital where the boyfriend died. A social worker said Teneecia could come in anytime for counseling. But Teneecia didn’t want to, she told me; she preferred the tarot. “The cards aren’t picking him up so well anymore,” I demurred. “He’s getting farther away. But I do hear him saying he wants you to work on getting a job.”

In fact, Teneecia disliked being on welfare. But she said that decent-paying jobs in her hometown, Grand Rapids, are far away from her house and she didn’t have a car. There was little to do, she said, except hang around the house and grieve for her dead lover.

I found out what she meant after the women’s magazine bankrolled a trip to meet Teneecia in person. Grand Rapids is heavily Dutch, highly prosperous, and the international headquarters of that icon of self-reliance, the Amway Corporation. Yet amid this heartland spick-and-span, Teneecia lived in a ghetto. In her neighborhood, a third of the predominantly African-American residents live in poverty, and the unemployment rate is more than four times higher than in the city as a whole.

Losing interest

Teneecia was still losing her baby fat. Her boy, now five months old, was a bundle of smiles and activity. Teneecia spent ages upstairs, putting on makeup and her best dress for a visit to the cemetery. I waited in a living room bravely furnished with cheap brass knickknacks. I stared at “The Young and the Restless.” A telephone psychic ad came on the screen.

I’d brought a tarot deck, thinking Teneecia could solve her unemployment by working at home as a phone psychic. It turned out, though, that she was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist family who think fortunetelling is satanic. “I don’t mind having you read for me long distance, but I can’t have this in my house,” she said.

She also lost interest in me – now a real person with a face, age, race and a tangible as well as decidedly earthly persona. Now we weren’t psychic buddies; she was a poor, unschooled black adolescent, and I was an assured, middle-aged white woman. I started feeling uneasy.

After the third day I figured it was time to go: time to get the devil card out of the house, Teneecia out of the cemetery and me back on an airplane.

The mailman came that afternoon with a letter telling Teneecia that Social Security would be sending the baby money from his deceased father’s account. Finally she was getting something real. “My psychic friend,” she said as she hugged me. “You’ve helped me so much.” Still, I hoped she’d never again call a psychic line.

Walking papers

I dialed Psychic Readers Network when I got home. I wanted to talk to them about their business and about people like Teneecia. Nobody got back to me. I sent a note informing them I was resigning.

So I went back to journalism. Even though the women’s magazine got bought by a magnate, my editor quit, and my story never got published.

Since then, fate has frowned on my old boss. Last year, Psychic Readers Network almost went belly-up, after some big long-distance companies started refusing to carry the psychic firm’s phone charges because of customer complaints about phony and inflated bills. As well, the Federal Trade Commission began investigating Psychic Readers for deceptive advertising.

Recently I ran into some of my former colleagues at a psychic fair. They told me the psychic talk field is depressed, so they’ve gone into another form of 900-telemarketing: phone sex. Same money, slightly different spiel. And the work, my friends say, is much easier.

Hey New York City! This Saturday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the feminist Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. I’m presenting my new book Pornography. It was published late last year by Groundwood, a Canadian children’s press.

Children’s press? Porn for Kids??

Officially, Pornography is part of a “social issues” series for older high school and younger college students, intended as a tool for writing research papers.

But a funny thing happened during writing and post publication: I noticed that seasoned adults, too, were intrigued when I described my research and later passed around my book.

That makes sense. Pornography is an easy, quick read (and it’s quite stashable in purse or pocket since it’s a little paperback). It’s current-eventsy and analytical. It takes up all the old pro- and anti- arguments from the 1960s to 1980s, updating them to the politics, personalities, genres and technology of today’s age of the hyper-commodity and Internet.

These homemaker pals from southern California manufacture and sell “Erotic Pornatas” — take offs on Mexican party pinatas — as a group hobby. I photographed them at an adult-entertainment trade show in Las Vegas in 2005 while researching my book Pornography.

Caveat: No pix in the book. But I did view lots of material for my research. Maybe that’ll save you the time to do other things. Or, if you’re into porn, you can compare your experience with my comments and interpretations.

Come by Bluestockings on Saturday (or just buy the book! Click here). Follow along as MILR (Mother I’d Love to Read) Deb debunks myths and adds nuance to claims such as:

• Porn is growing financially by leaps and bounds.
• Most porn workers were abused as children.

• Porn industry profit makers are all greedy shmucks.
• Porn endangers women, especially the violent shit being mainstreamed nowadays.

• Porn oppresses performers.
• Porn addicts men.
• Porn is liberating.
• Porn is fun.
• Porn is ruining sex for people in the real world.
• Porn pressures everyday women to get Brazilians and boob jobs.

• That girl Shalom Auslander and his wife saw before they changed to South Park was only acting like she was having a bad day.

• Gonzo. Bukkake. Gag Factor. Jenna Jameson. Nina Hartley. Twink. Robert Jensen.
• Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Join the blah and explore why there’s so much of it in the first place! Which may be the real point (also seriously discussed in Pornography).

Here are directions to Bluestockings:

On the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington - 1 block south of Houston and 1st Avenue.

By train: 1 block south of the F train’s 2nd Avenue stop and just 5 blocks from the JMZ-line’s Essex / Delancey Street stop. By car: If you take the Houston exit off of the FDR, then turn left onto Essex (aka Avenue A), then right on Rivington, and finally right on Allen, you will be very, very close.

This post has also been published as an article in the January 4, 2008 issue of El Paso’s Newspapertree.com. A version also appears in the Jan. 1-15 issue of CounterPunch. 

Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders that have happened there since the 1990s. Many who’ve heard have flown to the border to hold press conferences and make movies or put on plays and offer help. Especially women – including famous ones. Jane Fonda, J. Lo, Sally Fields, Minnie Driver, Eve Ensler – all know of the killings, or at least those involving long-haired adolescents who worked in maquiladoras and went to church and were good daughters before they ended up in places like Lomas del Poleo as anal-raped mummies and maybe a tattered bra.

Lomas del Poleo. Some Godforsaken desert spot on the Juarez fringe where at least a dozen bodies were found in the sand from 1996 to 2003. Most never identified, but one was Veronica Castro, a teen working at a big, foreign-owned assembly plant when she disappeared. The corpse of another girl, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, was found elsewhere near town, but at the time she was killed she lived in Lomas. Her mom, Paula Flores, is the first person who thought of blanketing Juarez utility poles with pink crosses to draw attention to the murders. As a result of such activism, the murders have come, internationally, to be known as feminicide. Embedded in that term is the idea that women are dying violently in Juarez precisely because they’re women. It’s a political concept, a theory, and thus awful but in its abstraction oddly comfortable.

The killing fields at Lomas del Poleo, on the other hand, are a hundred percent real, and straight-out scary to even think about. Don’t go there, the zeitgeist whispers: it’s isolated, desolated, gritty, scuzzy, a place only for cloak-and-dagger journalists, while the rest of us can just read about it and maybe march downtown with the stars, or sign Amnesty International petitions.

But now, something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, in the same area where Veronica et al were dumped. Yet few people in the US, or even El Paso, know or care about this new horror. And because they don’t, the murdered women of Juarez are being buried from consciousness.

How can they be resurrected? By digging into current events at Lomas del Poleo, where an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area’s females are blotted out.

A professor took me there years ago, when the feminicides was fresh news. She was studying the concept of border females as waste matter, in concert with the generalized phenomenon of illegal municipal dumping. Her theory included the fact that Juarez maquiladoras were organized and managed so the entire, mostly woman, workforce at the average plant would quit or be fired from their jobs – or “turn over,” the industry calls it — in less than a year. Massive turnover would quickly and efficiently dispense with labor once it was deemed worn out, or too expensive because of employers’ legal obligation after several months to give workers perks like health insurance and end-of-year bonuses. The professor felt that the maquiladora economy of female worker disposability was affecting the entire culture and that more and more in Juarez, all women were being defined as throwaways. That, she said, was fueling the brutal murders – and not just of scores of the long-haired, stranger-raped girls everyone talked about, but even of the many hundreds more victims who were being killed and dumped not by unknowns, but by their husbands, boyfriends, and neighbors.

This professor had ideas about why all those female bodies were ending up in the desert. She did not think it reflected some serial killer’s unique MO. Because municipal sanitation services are so lacking in Juarez, she said, everything unwanted – from household trash to human beings — gets thrown, sub rosa, in the outskirts. We poked with our eyes and some sticks in this parched, garbage-strewn place called Lomas del Poleo, where corpses had recently been discovered. We found only withered shoes, soiled Pampers, and bleached baby dolls. Not unexpected, the professor said. But what surprised me – I still remember after all this time – was the old man who ambled from behind a hill on a burro, herding goats and smilingly doffing his hat to wish us buenas tardes. “Where on earth did he come from?” I thought. Heretofore I’d assumed Lomas del Poleo was just some vacant, Boschian hell hole. Now I wondered if it was more inviting. Then I forgot the man, and Lomas. I moved away to the US interior.

But last month I was visiting El Paso for some winter fun in the sun. Another friend, a border community activist, took me to a meeting in a sparsely furnished green building across the river with no heat and everyone huddled in jackets and soberly talking in turn. Some were students from downtownish Juarez who had nice glasses and OK wardrobes. Others were “colonos” – the flea-market dressed residents of Lomas, many of who have lived there over 30 years. They’d walked a mile down from a mesa to reach the cold green building, because they are not allowed to hold public gatherings in their own neighborhood. Nor can they bring in friends or guests, for meetings or anything else resembling politics. To enter their own community for whatever reason, they must pass a guard house staffed by snickering male thugs with guns.

The thug checkpoint and all the rest of Lomas are enclosed by concrete posts, barbed wire and trained dogs. People cannot pass unless they live inside. Trucks supplying basics such as tortillas,

Photo by Detritus at Flikr.com

water and milk, are also disallowed. At the meeting in the green building, I talked with two women who appeared in their seventies. One was stringy and gnarled; the other squat, with white, lusterless hair like cheap twine. They both lurched slightly with old age or fatigue. They said there used to be many stores up in Lomas, but now hardly any remain. To get groceries each day, they must walk the mile downhill, then make their way back to the armed punks and wire and canines.

Sometimes when people leave the area to get food, or to work in maquiladoras, they return and find their houses razed to rubble by bulldozers. One of the women said this happened to her middle-aged son, and it made him so apoplectic and heartbroken that he died. She described such things and wouldn’t let me take her photo or use her name. She and her neighbor were terrified of reprisals. Their fear sickened me.

This is all going on a few miles from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Barnes & Noble, StarBucks, and the bikini waxing day spas of upper Mesa Street. What is happening in Lomas del Poleo is not unlike the logistics and doings of a concentration camp. Yet practically no one in the US – even those who’ve marched for and donated to and worried about the murdered women – seems to know. Or care.

The reason, perhaps, is that the barbed wire and dogs have nothing to do with how the feminicides are presented: as crazy, titillating speculations about serial killer conspiracies, rich-boy mafias, narco orgies, Satanic rituals and the black market vending of kidneys. Rather, the current disaster is connected to much greyer, more tedious speculation: the kind involving real estate. Plats, deeds and mortgages are not quite the stuff of Who-Done-Its. They turn even more arcane when combined with Mexican tenancy statutes. But these topics –

Photo by Antonio Zazueta Olmos, on flicker.com

land and law — are back story to the border’s little modern-day terrordrome. Because it’s closed to people like me, I haven’t actually set foot in it. But to understand the awful things I heard of and saw at that community meeting last month, I’ve explored the web, talked with people including Lomas residents and organizers, and watched documentaries on Youtube. This is what I’ve learned.

It goes back to 1945. That’s when the Mexican government seized thousands of acres of desert from a mining company just south of the border, not far from the West Side of El Paso and what is now the town Sunland Park, New Mexico. Shortly after this expropriation, corrupt, profiteering Mexican bureaucrats sold the property to private owners, though doing so was illegal. These owners sold to others. One eventual purchaser was a prominent Juarez businessman, Pedro Zaragoza, Sr.

Years later, in 1975, Mexico’s President Luis Echeverria declared part of this vast acreage to be federal land. Now things were really confused, because the boundaries of the national holdings were not surveyed: they were still mixed with areas that private buyers – including Zaragoza – considered his property. Even so, the problem seemed inconsequential. President Echeverria notified the private purchasers that if they wanted to argue he’d wrongly designated their holdings as federal land, they should file legal claims. No claims ensued. Apparently the buyers didn’t care one way or the other because the land was considered scrubby, remote, and of little worth.

But not all felt this way. In the early 1970s, fifty or sixty poor families came to a mesa they named Granjas Lomas del Poleo – Poleo Hills Farms — in search of country living. Most had earlier immigrated to Juarez from destitute rural areas farther south. They wanted to escape urban chaos and raise goats, pigs and chickens. Word got out about Lomas and one man appointed himself community leader. He helped new settlers pick out five-acre plots, where they built houses, grazed animals and tilled the land.

Eventually, Lomas boasted about a thousand inhabitants, a small church, a kindergarten, a grade school, and some ten stores. The community was still parched and desertified, and many homes were little more than hodge-podges of wood pallets, with rusted box springs for front yard fences. But the view was gorgeous: to the east a long range of mountains; on the west the Rio de Janeiran majesty of a peak topped with a giant statute of Christ. Residents knew there was an issue about exactly which land in the area was federal and which was already privately owned, but they weren’t much concerned. According to Mexican law since the Revolution, if land is unoccupied and undeveloped, poor people can gain title just by living on it a few years, as long as the owner does not dispute their tenancy. This is par for the course in Mexico. Indeed, according to those familiar with Lomas, many residents went to government agencies and courts and got papers recognizing them as owners of their tiny plots.

The affable man on the burro whom I ran into way back when was one of these Lomas people.

But in the late 1990s, big, private owners like Pedro Zaragoza’s widow and sons – one of them also named Pedro — realized Lomas was getting valuable. Real estate interests on both sides of the border were hatching grand plans for a new international port of entry and a NAFTA-esque, binational community. It would straddle the international line at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and include extensive manufacturing parks, as well as passage for cargo trucks and lots of brand new housing and stores.

As Juarez attorney Carlos Avitia has since explained to the Paso Del Sur community activist organization in El Paso, Mexican entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas decided their city’s growth would take place on outskirts that include Lomas del Poleo. “These are huge investors,” notes Avitia. “They plan to turn this into a suburb… All of a sudden they’re very interested in every last sand dune.”

Indeed, since the 1990s a highway has been built linking the Mexican state of Chihuahua west of Juarez to New Mexico’s Santa Teresa, where all that transborder development is set to take place. So far, very few people live in Santa Teresa, but its port of entry has been operating for years now. And in late 2007, part of yet another big road opened in northwest Juarez. Called the Camino Real, it has so far cost almost a million US dollars, and when it is done it will connect downtown Juarez to Santa Teresa. Right across from Santa Teresa will be a Mexican twin town called Jeronimo. The two will be be foreign trade zones with people living in them. The spanking new, binational development is currently almost uninhabited. But it’s projected to grow to 100,000 residents in the next decade or so.

The two main developers of Jeronimo and Santa Teresa are, respectively, Eloy Vallina – one of Mexico’s richest entrepreneurs — and Bill Sanders, a major international realtor (more here) who heads a controversial redevelopment plan for downtown El Paso. It aims to replace acres of historic but run-down buildings, mom-and-pop shlock shops

Bill Sanders lectures at Cornell U.

and poor residents with big box stores, mall-type businesses, and mixed-income housing that will not provide public rental subsidies for the many undocumented immigrants who currently live in the area.

Vallina is a member of Sanders’ development group for Santa Teresa. His son, Eloy Jr., sits on the board of private consortium which sprang the redevelopment plan on El Paso two years ago and has since provoked great controversy there. Vallina Sr.’s plans for the foreign trade zone Jeronimo are as strongly contested in Juarez as Sanders’ designs for El Paso are on the north side of the border.

Jeronimo opponents note that because the development is so dependent on massive infrastrucure – like the Camino Real highway — public taxes and resources are improperly being diverted from Juarez to one man’s private suburb. A major concern is the future of municipal water. The bolson that supplies Juarez is running out, and the only way to recharge it is from another aquifer, which sits beneath Jeronimo. But if that water is pumped by Vallina’s project, Juarez won’t get it and the city could go dry.

Also troubling is that anticipation about Jeronimo and Santa Teresa has led to fevered land speculation in Juarez, according to New Mexico State University’s Frontera News Service. Tiny lots not far from Lomas del Poleo have lately increased by 26 times their original price, with buyers offering as much as

International port of entry at Santa Teresa, NM

$39,000 for each parcel. The Juarez real estate explosion really took off when Bill Sanders bought 21,000 acres in Santa Teresa and announced his binational development project. This happened in 2003.

Perhaps not coincidentally, 2003 is the also year when formerly peaceful Lomas del Poleo – walking distance from the tidy, democratic United States of America - started to resemble an armed camp, a zone in the Palestinian territories, a World War II ghetto, a place of chilling violation of civil and human rights.

Two years ago, a soft-spoken, understated-looking guy named Bill Morton wrote a piece (here) for the online newsletter of Annunciation House, a church-based refuge for undocumented migrants in downtown El Paso.

Camino Real Highway (photo by DN)

Morton is a Catholic missionary and priest – thoroughly gringo – who at the time was pasturing a little church in Lomas. In his article, he describes hearing rumors there in 2003 that he at first didn’t think made sense.

Just a year earlier, the government had finally – after over three decades — supplied Lomas with electricity. Posts and wires had been installed, and each house had a meter. Now, residents were telling Morton they heard that all this infrastructure was slated to be removed. Morton pooh-poohed their worries. Why would the government take out what it had so carefully put in just months ago?

But the rumors were correct. Lomas residents and the Zaragoza family were already in court disputing who owned the land. One Zaragoza, Pedro Jr., recently told former Texas Observer reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Welsome (see here) that he considers Lomas inhabitants nothing but illegal squatters and land speculators. To up the ante and discourage occupancy of the area, the Zaragozas had gone to a judge and obtained a ruling to remove the utilities. Government trucks came in, accompanied by police. They pulled out all the posts and wires. Lomas was left without light, refrigerators, or fans.

The Zaragozas also obtained orders forbidding more building in Lomas so that new people wouldn’t there come to live, and current residents, unable to improve their homes, would feel pressured to leave. More ominously, existing housing was targeted for destruction. Soon after the electricity was removed, scores of menacing young men invaded the community. They were what Mexicans call guardias blancas, “white guards” -– privately contracted paramilitary goons. Their boss is a Catarino del Rio, who in the past has worked for the Zaragozas and is assumed to be on their payroll now. The thugs brought in heavy equipment, which residents assumed would be used to destroy their homes.

At first, people in Lomas dug ditches to block the tractors and demolition machinery. Complaints were also made to the Juarez police, who ordered the shock troops out. They left, but by spring 2004 were back, occupying a plot of land and building a camp with a watch tower, barbed wire, and a guard house. Ever since, Lomas residents have had to pass this checkpoint to enter their neighborhood – which is now completely fenced in by tall, concrete poles and wire. Many people complain that the guards have maced and kicked residents. They demolished a church and are said to have poisoned pet dogs. In the dark of electricity-less nights, they’ve prowled around and shone flashlights into houses. And people who leave to buy groceries or go to work come back to find their homes pulverized.

Some residents report that the guards carry AK-47s; others have seen rifles sticking out of their jackets. In Mexico it’s illegal for civilians to carry arms, never mind military-grade weapons. But when the Juarez police have been called they’ve done nothing. A resident got into a fight with Zaragoza’s thugs after a house was razed. He was fatally beaten. Not long afterward, a home caught fire. Two small children burned to death. Authorities and Pedro Zaragoza said the conflagration was due to a stove left lit when the mother went out, or to illegal electricity hookups connected to a line some distance from the house. Witnesses countered that the house had no power, and that goons had been seen walking around, possibly spilling gasoline, just before the home ignited.

Juarez’s city administration does nothing about these outrages except support the Zaragozas by encouraging Lomas’ shell-shocked residents to move. Many families have gone to another community downhill. Others have been relocated to a row of tiny, concrete structures that the city offers as alternative housing but which provide no land for the livestock raising and horticulture that residents practiced on

Photo by Rachel Falcone, Flickr.com

their own holdings. Juarez lawyer Avitia has noted that the Juarez politicians have a stake in supporting the eviction project. They are friends and associates of real estate entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas and Eloy Vallina. (Eileen Wellsome interviewed Juarez mayor Hector Murguia, who confirmed that he and Pedro Zaragoza are friends.) Eviction helps the magnates by freeing up land for development related to Jeronimo, Vallina’s golden goose just south of Santa Teresa.

Once poor but bustling, Lomas has lost three fourths of its population and almost all its stores since the goons came in. About 55 families soldier on, braving the constant threat of their houses being demolished, and the nerve-wracking sense that they and their community are being disposed of, and few care. Still they stay, insisting on their right to the land. They have lawyers and their suit against the Zaragozas. Attorney Avitia has worked extensively on the case. He says the law is on the Lomas residents’ side and eventually they will win.

But in an escalating battle of one-upsmanship, the better the legal proceedings go for Lomas del Poleo inhabitants, the worse they are pressured to leave. Lately, political groups and NGO’s from

Photo courtesy Bruce Berman

both sides of the border have been trying to help. Attempts to hold organizing events in the neighorhood several weeks ago were met with the paramilitaries and their weapons, dogs, pushing and shoving and threats.

At the meeting I attended in the green building downhill, I asked if someone would take me up to see things for myself. “We can’t,” I was told. “It’s too dangerous.”

Amid this state of seige, it also seems risky to discuss the one thing that has brought international human rights attention to Juarez: those murdered, thrown away women. The people I spoke with at the meeting were like everyone who’s held on in Lomas — militant, determined to make a stand. But they also appear so demoralized and desperate to save their homes that they are willing to renounce the dead girls dumped on their turf.

I asked both the old women I talked with about the female corpses found in Lomas starting in the late 1990s. “Oh, no!” one demurred. “Didn’t happen.” “Lies!” the other added sternly. “There were no bodies here. Ever.”

I recounted this conversation later with my friend the activist, who explained the old women’s reaction. So many things have been done by the pro-eviction forces to

Photo by Mark Paulda, Flikr.com

discredit Lomas, he said. Depicting it as crummy, slummy, and crime ridden. A dirty place that needs cleaning and vacuuming, even of its residents. What better way to bolster that claim than to talk of corpses in the sand? That’s one reason Lomas inhabitants deny the fact of the female dead.

My friend also pointed out that city and state government in Juarez and Chihuahua have for long been on a campaign to make people and social organizations feel guilty for speaking up about the murdered women and trying to connect their fate with other social problems. The old women, he said, “show how this campaign has permeated all walks of life.” Their silence is historically constructed, and understandable.

Understandable, but especially horrid, because to shut up about feminicide, Lomas residents must even mute their own blood. The white-haired lady I talked to: Early in our conversation, she said her son died after his home was demolished by Zaragoza’s thugs. Later, she grew more expansive. “It wasn’t just the house,” she confided. “It was also that his child – my 18-year-old granddaughter — disappeared four years ago. Went out one day with her boyfriend and was never seen again. The police found her ID card in the boyfriend’s pocket. But he works for the government. He was never charged or prosecuted. My son couldn’t do a thing. He lost his house and his daughter. Both losses killed him.”

We know what happened to the house. But how about the daughter? Like Veronica Castro, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez and so many others, was she tossed in the sand? Somewhere just a skip and a jump from Mesa Street, El Paso and Sunland Park, USA?

Please, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, J. Lo, Amnesty, and everyone who’s signed petitions, put on performances and marched for the dead girls of Juarez. Come back to the baggy-raggy border in your form-hugging clothes and fitting words. Come back and excavate the women by standing by their threatened neighbors – who also are being tossed and buried like garbage. Come back and dig up Lomas.

***

(For more resources about the repurcussions of Juarez and El Paso-area real estate development, including a feature-length video documentary, see here, here and here.)

Two thousand eight marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Billie Holiday’s great album, Lady in Satin. Add two years and you’re back to 1956, the year she sang “My Yiddishe Mame” at a rehearsal. Until recently, Holiday’s Yiddishkeit session was available only on Verve’s The Complete Billie Holiday: 1945-1959. But a Venezuelan guy recently put it on Youtube (you’ll have to sit through endless Barbara Streisand photos to listen, but it’s worth it). Here’s the link, un a gutn nayem (goyishn) yor dir (Happy New Year and we’re not talking Rosh Hashana)!

You can also visit this (click here) ex-pat Israeli hipster memoir attesting that “My Yiddishe Mame” was part of Holiday’s repertoire.

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