In the Arizona desert, on the land of the Tohono O’odham, which the border cuts in two, water containers wait for those walking north; on a map, red dots mark the places where migrants have died. Further on, the West still belongs to those who live from road to road: the high-voltage linemen, the itinerant harvesters, the last buckaroos of Nevada. Not all are allowed to enter it in the same way.
In the United States, only five per cent of the land is paved or built on; the rest “is pretty much just desert or mountains”.South of Tucson, the border cuts in two the reservation of the Tohono O’odham and their families: the Tohono are now Mexican or American. Since retiring, Mike has been leaving water in the desert every week for the undocumented migrants from the Mexican state of Sonora who walk towards Phoenix. On his map, red dots: one thousand one hundred and thirty-eight migrants dead in all, seventy-five a year on average on Tohono O’odham land. It is the coyotes, the smugglers, who point out the water stations. At the first one, Mike leaves water for the last time: the migrants now cross further west. No one but the tribe may come here. “Because I grew up in a poor family, I understand poverty, I understand humiliation, I understand hunger, I understand despair.” It is also his faith, his cross. Three kilometres to the south, a border guard is there day and night; as members of the tribe, Mike and David cross the border and cross back again. A foreigner could go into Mexico, but not come back this way. The border guards, Mike says, do their job and let him do his. It is forty-two degrees in the sun.
For Mike, the United States is “an imperfect democracy, but our planet has no better system to offer us”.Near Tombstone, where you feel you have gone back a century, the meeting is set in a wood, a few miles from the border. Al belongs to the Minutemen defence corps, civilians who watch the border; around him, weapons, and faces that do not want to be seen. On the ground, clothes, bags, bottles: this is where the migrants who have come down from the mountains wait to be picked up, and where the coyote makes them leave everything behind before the long ride by truck. “There are thousands of places like this.” The name goes back to 1776, to an elite group trained to be ready in a minute. For Al, it is not only about territory, but about public safety, national security and respect for the law. That the migrants have nothing back home is not his problem: Mexico, he says, is the fifth richest country on the planet. The American dream remains open, as long as you follow the procedure. “You sign the guest book at the front door. As soon as that’s done, we open the door and you’re welcome.” Never mind the colour of your skin, so long as inside you keep the colours of the flag.
“Immigrants are welcome, we’re all immigrants,” Al insists; in Mexico, according to him, “nothing has changed” in 150 years.In Roy, a village of a hundred and twenty inhabitants, the only grocery has never sold so much beer: the linemen, the men who build the lines, have set up their caravans at the edge of the village. They build high-voltage lines, from job to job, often in the middle of nowhere. This one carries 230,000 volts and runs for seventy kilometres; they will stay three or four months, then move on. In his caravan, one of them, twenty-eight years in the trade in at least twenty-five states, goes home for ten days around the Fourth of July and the odd weekend here and there; his wife has stayed behind with the cows, the hens, the goats and the horses. “I’ll probably die on a job.” In Kansas, the itinerant harvesters work their way up the country with the wheat, from Oklahoma to the Dakotas, and come back in the autumn for the maize. A young Englishman of twenty-three, from a farm, finished at two in the morning the day before and started again at seven. Lance, the harvesters’ boss, has his children with him: they make friends all the way to the Canadian border and spend the summer in the fields. “We live like gypsies. Six months of the year, we sleep in caravans.”
The pilot comes from Wyoming, twelve hours away by car, six by helicopter; when the job is near home, he lands in his garden.
In the bucket, a journeyman and an apprentice, who learns the trade in three years, from job to job.
After this one, another job awaits the linemen: 130 kilometres of line, 345,000 volts, six or seven months on site.
A hundred and sixty hectares harvested in a few hours; in France, Christophe notes, it would take almost ten days.In Nevada, the only state to have legalised casinos and prostitution, Air Force Amy left home at fifteen and hitchhiked across the country for two years, from one petrol station to the next, picking the finest trucks, before joining the army. Today, it is the clients who travel the miles to her. Near Elko, the T Lazy S ranch belongs to the world’s largest gold mining company: across 1,600 square kilometres, gold is extracted, the hills are rebuilt and it all starts again next door; the rest feeds more than four thousand head of cattle. This is where the buckaroos work, the last cowboys of the West, whose traditions come from Spain: longer ropes, different saddles. In the evening, Dallas, the foreman, has some fifty horses lined up so they can be caught without anyone being trampled. The next day, in a corral more than thirty kilometres away, two men rope the calves, two others hold them down; a piece of ear drops into the bucket for each animal: eighty in the day. In six or seven years, the mark will tell the heifers’ age. Dallas has one grandson who is worse than the others: “He always has a bit of rope on him. Even when he goes to the shop in town, he never lets go of his lasso.”
The buckaroos are proud of their way with the lasso; one of them started at six or seven, with his father and his big brother.
It is branding season: each calf is numbered and vaccinated before being marked with the iron.“When it was hot, we went back into the mountains. These moves were made according to where we could find water.”Mike