Photographs by Paul Stachelek & Jon Nakano

Alvarado Street, Los Angeles

Even when he had more with him than just the pair of blue-and-white shorts he wore when the border patrolman and five classified-duty Marines found him, he wouldn’t have had an ID. Crossing, you’re anonymous. If you’re caught, you’re like Odysseus before the Cyclops, you call yourself nobody. But when the man collapsed four miles east of the closest road, three miles inside the U.S. border, namelessness may have become his permanent state. His body was helicoptered out of the mountains east of San Ysidro at 4:30 p.m. on August 13 this year, six hours after that secret detail found him.

It was 102 degrees then, according to their report, another in a series of hundred-degree days. That’s why the report speculates he died of exposure to environmental extremes, hypothermia, and why the cause of death remains, officially, “undetermined due to decomposition.” Dr. Brian Blackbourne, San Diego County’s chief medical examiner, flips once through the man’s file, setting aside a stack of Polaroids before handing it over to me. “We did get fingerprints from this one,” he remarks, not very hopefully.

Fingerprints, unlike voices, ears, retinal eye patterns, and most of the other so-called biometric indicators that distinguish us, survive death for several days. But Mexico maintains few fingerprint files, and here in the U.S. they’ll only be useful if the man has been up and down many times before or acquired a criminal record. The medical examiner’s office first asks San Diego police or sheriff s deputies to run the prints through the Cal ID computer, and if that turns up nothing, they try AFIS, a Department of Justice system that links sheriffs’ departments throughout the West. But for this case, neither file had a hit, says Blackbourne. Now the FBI has the prints, and their report can take four or five months. Our cases, he comments dryly, “aren’t very high priority.”

For now, he’s John Doe. Because eight others in the San Diego County morgue share that name, including five whose folders Blackbourne’s staff flagged for me as possible undocumented immigrants, he also has a number. The bodies will be held until coroner’s investigators run out of leads, then they’ll be released to the county administrator, who assigns them on a rotation basis to area mortuaries for burial. Already this year, this has happened in five cases Blackbourne suspects weren’t legal residents. A total of ten cases in 1994, in fact, makes this a slow time. Dr. Blackbourne estimates 20 or 25 undocumented immigrants become John Doe cases in an average year. In 1993, the worst he can remember, 19 anonymous bodies had been brought in by the end of February from the flooding Tijuana River.

The San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office gets these cases because death is one of two human events that must be certified. The other is birth, which determines nationality. Since nationality makes no marks on a body, Blackbourne can’t be sure that a person who bears no ID wasn’t, say, a U.S.-born transient. In the case of our John Doe, Blackbourne’s guess is based on the place the body was found. If no fingerprint match turns up in the FBI files, the only way he’ll ever be certain is if a relative comes in and identifies him. But for this case, they can’t do that by looking at the remains, which are “no longer viewable,” but by his rosary or what Blackbourne calls, sliding it across the table, “the old-clothes photo,” a grim Polaroid of personal articles spread flat, in human form, on a table. In this case, with just the blue-and-white shorts, it is especially mournful.

Most likely we’ll never know. We only know of him at all because he was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the continuing success of undocumented immigrants at getting in and finding work has us asking not only the cultural question of who we are, but the more pressing, how do we prove it?

The place to get documents in Los Angeles is Alvarado Street, a two-block run starting at the southeast comer of MacArthur Park and rising to around Ninth. In this area, a confederation of immigrants has constructed a giddy, organic economy based on straightforward needs. Between storefront clinics, swap meets, discount mueblerías, you find stall businesses so specialized and small it’s as if some street vendors had ducked into the doorways during a rain and decided to stay there, deeding the sidewalk to the document merchants. They’d have their own shops by now, too, if their work weren’t illegal.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gone looking for what Spanish speakers call documentos chuecos. Chueco, opposite of derecho, suggests something wrong, crooked; lefties are chuecos, and zigzagging drunks are walking chueco. When I was in college and a state law raised the majority drinking age, the school artisans went into business altering ID cards. For those of us born in 1959, the process was simple: slice the raised 9 off the year with a razor, invert it, and glue it back on. It was crude, you only had to turn the card over to see the impression of the original number, but it got us past the campus bouncers. The bouncers enforced laws that directly conflicted with their employers’ financial interests; since 1986, when Congress passed IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, this was more or less the same predicament faced by employers in industries that rely on undocumented workers.

In the story I have prepared to obtain my cards. I’m Canadian, another visa jumper who wants to work illegally. But I don’t even need a story. I haven’t gone a block before someone steps out from a storefront and asks, frankly, “ID?” Buki, as he’ll introduce himself, is in his early 20s, extremely dear-eyed, with cropped, stylish hair and a gold earring. He wants me to walk with him while we talk (it’s “bien caliente” with the police, he tells me), but he hardly seems worried. In fact as we walk we draw forth a dozen more. He greets some of them, while others call to me and promise to undersell him. Several, like Buki, wear immaculate, long white T-shirts over sharp jeans. There’s something in the way they walk, the age, maybe, an easy quickness, alertness — the sense they’re set to break away — I actually think of angels.

Counterfeit documents obtained by the author

I ask to see my choices. Since it would be as stupid for them to be caught with counterfeits as with their own IDs, one set of samples circulates from runner to runner. After seating me at a lunch counter around the corner and ordering me a Coke, Buki goes to retrieve them. The restaurant’s two workers, one tending eight huge kettles on the stove and the other blending fruit drinks, are the first ones who seem to regard me warily.

He returns immediately with five samples: a Social Security card, two versions of the California ID, and two forms of la mica. The Social Security card looks real enough to me — how do I know, in fact, that this one isn’t? It’ll run $30, Buki says, watching me. The California ID, or if you prefer, a driver’s license, is $50 for the older, pale-yellow version and $100 for the new one, white, with holograms. Of the five documents, the newer ID looks the most dubious, its colors grayed, the print fuzzy, with a lousy faked hologram. Though Buki warns me it’s more suspicious to employers, I opt for the older version, and we move on to the INS documents.

Called la mica for their lamination, dozens of different cards have been issued by the INS to resident aliens. The “green card,” valid for life and conferring permanent-resident status, hasn’t been green for years. The current version, the I-551, has a pink pattern on its face and bears the owner’s photograph and fingerprint. The forgery will cost me $80, or I can have a similar temporary-resident document for $60. With just the right polite hesitation, Buki accepts my offer of $125 for a package with the I-551, the older driver’s license, and a Social Security card that he promises will carry a valid number.

Goat's Canyon, Mexico--waiting for a chance to make a run across the border

He then leads me through an alley and back out onto Alvarado, turning at a sidewalk sandwich board advertising passport photos, and into a new, largely unoccupied shopping arcade. He enters the photo store talking, ordering both driver’s license and green card photos as he crosses straight through the bare lobby into the back studio. The proprietors, an aging Asian couple, hardly bother to greet him. On the counter where they’re working are a piece or two of photographic equipment, plus a hair dryer, a paper cutter, and a month-old schnauzer puppy standing in a box.

Three square backgrounds hang along one wall, two blue and one white, and Buki slides me onto the stool in front of a blue one. The woman waits until I’ve been positioned before she even comes over, and she’s clearly irritated when, already bending to the viewfinder, Buki jumps in to remove my glasses. I move in front of the white panel for the green card photos. He trims the first pair of pictures while she dries the second set with the hair dryer. I pay her, and Buki scavenges a scrap of paper for me to write down my chosen name and address, height, weight, eye and hair color, and a date of birth. I sign above his hand-drawn line, and he sends me back to the restaurant, where my half-finished Coke is still sitting on the counter.

Alvarado Street, Los Angeles

Out on the sidewalk someone had given me a flier for the immigration service next door, specialists, it says, in all kinds of INS documents, DED, TPS, ABC, work permits, political asylum, and providers, too, of photos, fingerprint services, notarization — in short, todos servicios migratorios. Like thousands of such businesses, some legitimate, many predatory, this one owes its existence to the fact that immigration law, for reasons that are at times humane and at times economic, is elastic — undocumented today doesn’t necessarily mean eternally undocumented. For now, though, whenever a car pulls to the curb (like this yellow Toyota with the baby seat in back), the man distributing the fliers points drivers to the group of young runners at the corner.

Late by just five minutes, Buki calls me out of the restaurant and into a parking lot off the alley. He hands me the documents. If these indeed meant work for me, I’d be satisfied with the Social Security card and the license and not so pleased with the mica. What I had intended as a middle name has been run as a surname, and the signature, evidently traced from the one I’d written, seems shaky. Buki assures me it’ll satisfy my boss; it’s the old driver’s license someone might question, he again chides me. I tell him I do want one of the new licenses, but a real one — but since the state now verifies legal residence, how am I going to do that? Reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a U.S. birth certificate, he offers, for $100 more, to get me started.

Like all major INS offices, San Diego’s facilities at 555 Front Street, downtown, suggest a kind of domestic arrangement. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt, by executive order, married the Bureau of Naturalization to the Bureau of Immigration; and now, depending on which floor you’re on, you’re feeling the influence of one or the other partner. Downstairs, where the usual patient line curls out into the main lobby, is like a last echo from Ellis Island. Upstairs, there’s almost no effort to appear welcoming. The window in an unmarked door next to the Federal Employee’s Credit Union frames a ficus, but the waiting room inside is severe. Above a secretary’s desk inside the glassed reception area hangs a poster-sized photo of the badge of the Immigration Special Agent, with the motto “Pride in the Mission, Pride of the Service.”

Steve Shanks

I’m meeting with Steve Shanks, who for the past four years has supervised the San Diego region’s anti-fraud unit. Early 40s, blue-eyed, sandy-blond hair and mustache, he looks like someone you’d be glad to see trotting out of a bullpen, someone with a name like Shanks, or better yet. Jack Fletcher, which for some reason is what it says on the nameplate on the desk he’s sitting at.

“IRCA really put the turbo to document fraud,” Shanks dives in. “All of a sudden we’re in 1987, and employers are required to start proving that their employees are legally present. The employer’s not obligated to be an immigration officer and say, ‘No, this is a phony document and this is a good one.’ They’re just supposed to see something. Of course, if you come in with a picture of me on your card, and they accept it, that’s patently not okay, but if it’s a picture of you.... So, boom! It’s gotten to the point, and it’s been like this for several years, where you can actually rent a card long enough to fulfill the I-9 requirements, and then you bring it back.”.

Most forgeries are readily detectable by INS and Border Patrol agents, “50-footers,” they call them, for the distance from ' which they can be spotted. The colors are poor, the lettering fuzzy, the bird on the INS seal more like a chicken than an eagle, says Shanks. On the back, the encoded information may not make sense. In addition to what’s printed on the paper itself, cards now have security features built into the laminate — embossed lines and what a 1989 memo to employers terms an “optical variable ink pattern” that reads “I-551 ” when the card is tilted at an angle. The back, from top to bottom, should have a pink-to-blue “rainbow effect.” Although the card I bought on Alvarado has no such features. Shanks is right, the employers I spoke to confirmed it would get me work.

Shanks won’t tell exactly how many agents he supervises, but he will say the unit, which polices both San Diego and Imperial counties, hasn’t grown much in the last five years and that their resources right now are “pretty shy.” While activity in L.A. may be concentrated on Alvarado Street, here it is dispersed throughout the region. In the last year or so. Shanks says, the anti-fraud unit has “taken down” counterfeiters and distributors in North Park, the Logan Heights area, and North County. Prices are higher than in Los Angeles, ranging from $100 to around $300 in El Centro, where vendors make runs into L.A. to secure cards for their clients.

Illegal documents collected by Shank's office

“When you think of organized crime, you think of the mafia, but this is not nearly as tightly knit or organized," he tells me. “A lot of these people are solo. It’s organized in that a guy who produces the blank forms will have a network of people who are manufacturers in their own right; he’ll supply them with the bulk blanks, and then they put in the names and the birth dates, and then do the laminate. The street-corner vendors are guys who are just shilling for the manufacturer. They run back to him with the photos and the bio data, and the manufacturer goes like that,” he says, slapping his hands together like he’s working a tortilla, “and gives it back to them, and off they come.”

Shanks estimates that his unit has made 15 arrests in the last year, from false-document users through producers, but their target is always, as he says, “the mill.” Building federal criminal cases is slow work, and though the counterfeiting organizations are less formal, anti-fraud investigators rely on the same strategies that are used in drug investigations. “You can’t just get an end user and work it from there. You’ve got to start up a little higher than that if you want to really get the players.

“We get leads, we have informants working the streets. We’ll send an informant or an undercover agent in to make a buy or two or three, and then get our search and arrest warrants, and go kick the door in and arrest people.” Earlier this year, when INS investigators, together with Chula Vista police and the Secret Service, raided a house in Chula Vista, they seized a rare prize: a printing press, “the printing press that you always dream about finding.” While Shanks believes that most of the bulk-stock printers are in L.A. and Tijuana, this was a forger who, according to their information, was supplying L.A. middlemen with blanks.

Shanks takes me to the evidence room, about the size of a La Jolla walk-in closet, behind a locked black door blocked by several plastic file tubs he has to heave aside. Among some 20 boxes storing applications submitted under IRCA’s agricultural workers program, there are 4 filled with the evidence from two recent fraud cases. Three of these contain blank baptismal and ordination certificates and some 70 individual files, the evidence from what Shanks calls “the last really nice benefits fraud case we did. Benefits fraud is where someone gets legitimate INS documents under false pretenses. There’s a new visa class for ministers, and here was a case where a legitimate minister in the Free Pentecostal Movement down on Newton, I think, was making people ministers for three grand a pop.

“And this one,” says Shanks, hauling the fourth box down and lifting its lid, “is one of the better doc cases we’ve taken down this year.” He produces, in Baggies, a syringe, a Saturday night special, and a black plastic appliance about the size of a hair dryer, a “mini-pouch” laminator. Then come samples of bulk blanks this manufacturer would complete — sheets with eight or ten blank forms on each for the old California ID, the I-551 green card, and an older maroon version. Finally, Shanks lifts a sheet of blank Social Security cards aside to reveal an absolutely ordinary electric typewriter. Not in the box, but largely responsible for the relatively long 16-month sentence this producer received, were two AK-47s Shanks says his investigators found at the scene. “The judge frowned on that,” he remarks.

When I ask whether, in the face of what he suggests is profligate counterfeiting, he sees any effects from their efforts, he is unexpectedly upbeat. “We’re not going to kill it outright,” he concedes, “but we can hurt it real bad. It’s a cost-benefit thing in the mind of anybody that’s going to come here illegally — is it going to fly? Is the effort of coming up here, finding these phony documents, paying $300 to get smuggled in the trunk of a car through San Clemente, living in a little butthole apartment in East L.A. or whatever — is it worth the benefit? And if it’s going to be real hard to get a job because phony documents don’t fly anymore, that will put the cost-benefit ratio in our favor.”

He lifts the file box back onto the shelf. “It’s like crime in general. Are we going to solve it, ever? Of course not. We could put a good hurt on it, if we do X and Y and Z, perhaps. You’re not going to stop crime of any type. The issue is to control it.”

I ask him if there isn’t a difference between the counterfeiters and the purchasers of the documents who are motivated by the desire to work. “The motivating factors are clear to everybody, I think. But the bottom line is, they’re party crashers. They weren’t invited. This country was built on immigrants— it was built on legal immigrants. It was not built on illegal immigrants.

“I was talking about this with a guy from the European Economic Community in my office yesterday. If you start off in a country illegally, your perspective on that country will be forever skewed compared to someone who comes here legally. You will always look at it differently. Your commitment and your responsibility to the rules of the country will always be different if you started off bad. I really believe that. I’ve seen these guys for decades. I’m a third-generation immigration officer; we’ve seen it as their generation came through, and it never quite repairs itself. You never get past the ‘I started off in the dark, in the shadows.’ You don’t get beyond that.”

Shanks, it turns out, was born in Chula Vista. His grandfather joined the Border Patrol in 1924, the year it was formed, and his father signed on in Chula Vista in 1946. As we walk back to the office, I ask him to talk about how his work is different from theirs. Do they trade stories?

Border Field State Park, looking south

“Oh, Dad tells me how to do my work all the time,” he says with a laugh. And then, seriously, “No, when Grandad was in, if you caught — this was working the line, the same line that we work today — if you arrested four a month, you were a hero, an absolute, freakin’ hero. They would get on their horses, ride the backcountry for weeks at a time, arrest these guys that were wandering through the brush, sleep with them and feed ’em while they continued their patrol, and then, at the end of a couple of weeks, he’d come back, turn the guys in, and off he went.

“The next generation, if Dad caught ten a month, he was a hero. They had patrol cars then, and the bracero program was in effect, so by and large the people they were catching were people who weren’t qualified for the bracero program. Pretty much everybody who wanted to come up and work in the fields here, it was like, shoo,” his hand glides across an imaginary border, “there you go, and you’ll go back home when you’re done. It was a good program, in my opinion.

“When I was in the Border Patrol, we used to go up and help San Clemente on Sunday nights, when they would shut it down and check everything. The point would be up for four hours, and we’d catch 800. Once, two other agents and I were assigned to sit and check the 24 bus that runs from downtown up to the V.A. hospital in La folia. We sat there for a shift on Midway and caught 105.

“What used to be a gentlemen’s game has degenerated into a skirmish,” he says, adding that the immigrants themselves have changed. “Now they’re all 19 years old, they all have attitudes, and they have no roots to anybody anywhere. They have no ties, they feel no responsibilities. They’re all just punks — not all of them, ‘all of them,’ of course, is a broad brush. But it’s gone from where the people that my father and grandfather arrested used the usted [polite] form [of speech] all the time. Never, ever varied from it. You do not catch an illegal alien anymore who uses the usted form. It never happens.”

Back in the borrowed office, Shanks shows me evidence from one last case, a stack of credit cards and a valid Social Security card and California driver’s license. “Several years ago, we raided a hotel. We encountered this guy who claimed to be a U.S. citizen born in — I can’t remember, but his pronunciation [of the city name] was classic. Anyway, we figured he was a false claim, but we couldn’t figure out what the deal was really, couldn’t do anything with it. I did all the background on it, put all the documents together, and went and found him again. He’s working at a Polio Loco in Escondido.

“I’ve got my file with me, and I’ve got a copy of his birth certificate. I said, ‘Are you this guy?’ ‘Yeah, that’s me. I was born on that date. That’s me, that’s my mom’s name, that’s my dad’s name.’ I flipped the page, showed him a death certificate. He’d been run over by his drunken father in a pickup truck when he was five years old. I said, ‘What’s this?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I says, ‘Mr. Simmons, it’s a death certificate. You’re dead.’ He throws up his hands and goes, ‘Okay, okay, I was born in Mexico.’ ”

Shanks says he suspects he had just done “the routine” — went to some cemetery, found the grave of somebody born about the same time he was. After acquiring a copy of the birth certificate, he gradually compiled other identification and, ultimately, a host of credit cards. When I suggest that his success raises the interesting issue of how we establish identity, he answers matter-of-factly, “Well, it was never really an issue until all this nonsense started. I mean, people didn’t deal with that, did they? You were John Smith, you did your thing as John Smith all your life, and that was the end of the story.”

Luisa Reyes laughs when she calls her mother a coyote, at the irony, mostly, but there’s a political edge. With three children of her own and two graduate degrees, Luisa can pass for American without the certificate that records her birth in California in 1963. But she knows of at least five others who, for a few crucial moments, used the document to pass for her. “Never. It never seemed like we were doing something wrong,” she’ll tell you if you ask her. “On the contrary, it felt good. We were helping people.”

“I’m no coyote,” her mother Isela insists. “If you’re a coyote, that’s your job. For me it was just a thing of bringing over family who needed to come.” Isela, who is in her 50s, speaks only Spanish, and we’ve been talking for nearly an hour before I learn that she, too, is a U.S. citizen by birth. “My parents worked on a ranch in Texas, and I was born there,” she happened to mention. I pressed her for details. She remembers vividly the scene at the border the day in 1945 when her family returned to their own small dairy farm in Nuevo Laredo when she was five. “In those times, you didn’t need papers or anything. People just crossed by walking across the river, came to this side, and then went back. I remember that day seeing many, many people crossing this way, easy, in the middle of the day. There was la migra, sure, but they just let you pass.”

At age 19 and married, she and her U.S. citizen husband crossed north again, joining the braceros as fieldworkers. They followed the harvests west through the border states and up and down California, from San Diego to San lose, for three years, living in the camps, picking tomatoes, chilis, strawberries. In 1962 she settled in Southern California, working 6 years in one factory and the next 20 in another on the graveyard shift, saving money on babysitters. Except for the happenstance of her birth, her life has differed little from the lives of the indocumentados with whom she has always worked and socialized. Through the ‘70s, though, as factory raids became more common, she had more and more use for the blue birth certificate she carries in her wallet. Luisa remembers her mother arriving home from work one morning, badly shaken and bitterly angry, after a pre-dawn raid had removed — temporarily, Isela says — many of her friends.

The border after sundown during the first week of Operation Gatekeeper

During those years, Isela made repeated trips to the border, bringing across perhaps a dozen children on her own children’s birth certificates. Although Isela’s brothers and sisters had the same binational childhood, most of them had been born in Mexico and started their own families in Mexico. Her runs were simple, humane missions to reunite families, she says, insisting she never brought anyone who didn’t already have a stable place waiting for them here in the States.

For her nieces and nephews and the children of her own who accompanied her, the crossings were complicated rituals of pretending. “I remember once when we went to pick up a young man with my brother’s birth certificate,” Luisa tells me. “Coming back I was so nervous. When we got to the line, the agent shined his flashlight in the car and started asking me a lot of questions — where I was born, what school I went to, the color of the flag — and I remember thinking, ‘Why are you asking me all these questions? It’s him, he’s the one you want!’ ”

That agent, swinging his beam between the pair of birth certificates in his hand and the two schoolchildren in the back seat, was confronting what classical philosophers termed the problem of unity: How can I know that something that changes so much through time is still the same thing it was before? How do I know the children before me are the same as the infants whose births are attested by these documents? To prove the girl in front of you is Luisa, the philosophers decided practically, you either have to know that this person’s body is the same one the infant Luisa possessed or that this person has the memories and experiences that the person who grew out of that infant would possess. Unable to prove the first, the agent was, in effect, testing the latter.

Robert Schneider

It’s an archetypal scene. A border guard with a flashlight, barking “Papers," studying them, and, suspicious, questioning and questioning until, finally unable to break what he’s sure is deception, he gives up and lets you pass. The way this plays in the movies, to defraud is heroic; the document provider is a quiet savior, while the user, who by clever improvisation sustains the impersonation, proves the power of the individual in the face of the state. In a world where states control and issue identity documents, fraud is the first step to freedom. It’s a stereotype based on reality. In 1991 a 22-year-old Liberian escaped a prison camp after four months of torture and walked 90 miles into Ivory Coast. Contacting an aunt in Maryland to borrow money, he bought a forged passport from a janitor at the Liberian Embassy and flew to the U.S., where he requested political asylum. At his hearing, INS attorneys argued that he should be excluded from the U.S., since he had tried to enter with fraudulent documents. The judge disagreed and granted the man’s petition.

If most of the fraud used to enter the United States is more mundane and less obviously moral, it’s now less archetypal. No one can even begin to guess how many people have entered the United States under false pretenses, with falsified or borrowed or purchased documents in their own names or posing as another. For these, too, fraud was a means and is still a means to enter. Pretending is an act of creating a new future.

Along the border, for those who can afford it, fraud is simply one of several options for crossing, I learned from Javier Valenzuela, who, until last year, headed Grupo Beta, the special Mexican immigration unit in Tijuana. You can try on your own for nothing; $100 buys la brinca, where a pollero guides you close to the checkpoint and tells you when to run for it; $300 gets you a guided trip through the canyons; but if you want to cross tranquilamente, $600 will secure you documents so you can cross through the port of entry.

Mexicans who want to visit the U.S. need a passport and a visa, which they receive only after demonstrating they have the kinds of jobs and assets that will pull them back to Mexico. The visas used to be stamped inside the passports. Forgers working with stolen or purchased passports could easily substitute another’s photo. Now the U.S. visa itself is a laminated photo ID card that accompanies the passport. After that change, Valenzuela told me, Grupo Beta saw fewer and fewer forgeries. Instead, the action shifted to a document that takes advantage not only of the problem of unity of bodies through time, but also the thornier problem of national identity itself — la mica fronteriza, as it’s known in Mexico.

Border-crossing cards are the U.S.’s concession to the fact that individual economies extend across international borders. Issued to residents of border communities, the computer-readable cards allow their bearers to pass back and forth for life. To get one, you first have go to a Mexican immigration office and secure the Forma Trece, which certifies the person as both a Mexican citizen and a long-term border-area resident; the Forma Trece, in turn, is presented to U.S. officials at a crossing office, along with evidence of employment, assets, and residence. In my conversation with Valenzuela, I mentioned I’d heard someone say a pollero she knew in Tijuana was going to get her a valid crossing card for $300, but Valenzuela was skeptical — not that this could happen, but that it could happen for that price.

“A few times we’d go into the houses of polleros and find manufactured Formas Trece, and every once in a while 10 or 20 of the forms and an official stamp would disappear from our offices,” he granted. “But it’s not just a matter of having the Forma Trece. You’d still need the cooperation of a U.S. employee.” Valenzuela seemed convinced there were such arrangements. He mentioned a case he’d heard of where two or three agents from Mexican immigration and two or three of our agents worked as a team. But such a document would be expensive — more than $1000, he estimated, the kind of money international smugglers, of Chinese for instance, pay to secure passage for clients across the U.S. border.

Instead, what Grupo Beta most often finds now in their raids are scores, sometimes a boxful, of documentos derechos — real, unadulterated border-crossing cards that have been purchased from border residents or found or stolen. Polleros, in effect, rent out these cards, matching each client with the card of a person close to them in age and appearance. The client walks alone through la linea, with the pollero following. Once through, the pollero approaches, reclaims the card, and collects his fee.

These are not, Valenzuela wanted me to understand, vast organizations, but rather small, familial enterprises. An important operation might have a collection of 400 cards to choose from, 8 to 10 workers, plus perhaps a couple of Mexican immigration agents and maybe 1 U.S. employee. Rings like these aren’t uncommon, but because of their fees, they are not the heart and soul of the smuggling business, which “is not what people think,” Valenzuela stressed. “Most polleros work alone. Many are part-timers, students, workers in the maquiladoras who, maybe two or three times a week, will do a brinca to make ends meet.” Of the ones who devote themselves exclusively to leading people across the border, Valenzuela said, most are so poor he’d be ashamed to detain them.

It has been more than a decade since someone posing as Luisa Reyes entered the U.S. at San Ysidro. Like Luisa and her brothers, all the children Isela conveyed across the line are now adults, with jobs and children and, thanks to the amnesty I RCA granted, legal status. At least seven have become citizens, Isela reports. “All of them say to me, ‘Tía, if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here now.’ ” Luisa, meanwhile, says she still marvels at how easily one can impersonate another — an issue that has deep resonances for, what she tenaciously continues to call herself, a mejicana confronting issues of assimilation. When she was around eight, a cousin who was in her mid-teens came across using Luisa’s birth certificate. “I remember thinking, how can she pass for me when she’s so much older?”

But beyond the posing and pretending at the border, IRCA’s requirements for employment-eligibility verification have pushed the process further inside the country. Seven years ago, someone Luisa doesn’t know gave her name and Social Security number to an employer in San Diego. Now, instead of a moment of pretending, the impersonation had become invasive, precipitating, among other things, an IRS audit. “I was mad,” she says when I ask her how she felt. “I had to gather a bunch of documents to prove I was in school, that I was a senior at UCLA, and I couldn’t possibly have been cleaning houses for a real estate agent in San Diego.”

Luis really wants to believe this is destiny, my coming up to him in Chicano Park when he most needs it and asking about documents. But he’s sure I’m not Canadian. As clusters of men watch and traffic climbs overhead toward Coronado, he stabs the grass twice with the toe of his sneaker, combs it over, stabs it once more, and asks almost helplessly, “Is it true?” I abandon the lie, and soon we’re driving downtown for photos and a bank machine.

On the way, he delivers an apology. He grew up, he says, in Colonia Libertad, not far from the Tijuana airport and a block from the border. When he was old enough, about eight, he thinks, he began crossing over by himself to come to the zoo — he loves the San Diego Zoo. By the time he was 14 and someone asked him, he was more than ready to guide his first group of 20 into the U.S. “I’m telling you this so you’ll know how someone like me comes to be involved in these activities,” he says, leaning forward in his seat and turning to face me. He wants me to see again the neat hair and mustache, the bright eyes, and profoundly deep crow’s feet. If he were wearing a suit, people would automatically think licenciado.

“It’s not a question of feeling like a criminal or choosing to be this or that,” he tries to explain. “This life is in your blood, it’s in your blood,” he says, staring into his palm. Some recent personal crisis has forced him back into the business, he hints — and he wants me to understand that is luck for me. “I’m not chueco. What I do, helping people cross, getting them documents, that’s chueco, making money from the people, true, that’s chueco. But I’m honest. I don’t cheat people.”

What he’s promising me is a mica, another I-551, but one good enough that I could go back and forth across the border. I’ve shown him the card I bought on Alvarado, and he recognized the type, “Thirty dollars in L.A. and $50 here,” he quoted. His will be superior. Instead of the obviously glued-on photo, the picture will be reproduced on the card itself; the encoded information on the back will make sense; the laminate will have the correct security features. I want to know how that’s possible. “It’s too early to tell you that,” he says, again wary. “Maybe after we meet a few more times and I know you better.”

It’s going to cost me $200 — $75 now, which he says the manufacturers in Chula Vista demand because so many people order cards they never collect, another $75 for the manufacturer tomorrow morning, plus his cut, $50. He asks me again if I’m an investigator and won’t get out of the car when I stop to use a bank machine in a parking lot kiosk or when I run down the block to a photo shop I spotted.

The shop’s gray-haired owner, a talker, is already dressed for an island vacation, but his airy, day-before mood fades when I ask for green card photos. He sits me down and, irritated that I can’t keep the hair off my right ear, a requirement of the photo, pulls it back himself. He takes the pictures, but when he asks why I want them and I say I’m researching a story, he stops peeling the sheet from the film he’s just yanked from the Polaroid.

“No way,” he reddens. “I got arrested for that.”

“Oh?” I say.

“Yeah, a couple of years ago. Son of a bitch agent with an attitude comes in here and arrests me. They charged me along with eight Mexicans I’d never seen before.” He insists there was no case at all, and in the end the INS dropped the charges against him and most of the others; the two they tried were acquitted. “I’ve got a lawsuit against them now,” he declares, reaching for a briefcase he keeps under the front counter.

He pulls out legal correspondence, the complaint, and a mounted eight-by-ten photo of his storefront and the adjacent buildings. “They said they’d had me under surveillance and observed a constant stream of Mexicans entering and leaving.” He looks at me, enraged to speechlessness, his finger tapping the picture of the clearly marked building that’s two doors away. “Of course they did,” he finally sputters. “Back then, this building right here was the Mexican Consulate!”

When I drop Luis back at the park, I hand over cash, two photos I finally commissioned from a shop considerably less shy of immigration business, and the necessary invented personal data. He will drop them off in Chula Vista on his way across to meet someone he’s to bring over tonight, pick up the card in the morning; we’re to meet at 8:30. Over the last hour, I’ve sensed Luis darkening, and by now his fatalism seems absolute. This time when he asks me if I’m an investigator, he doesn’t even wait for an answer. If it turns out I am, he says simply, they’ll kill me.

Because today is the third day of Operation Gatekeeper, I drive down to look at the border after dark. A block-long line of the old green and the new gleaming Border Patrol vehicles is parked outside the gate of Border Field State Park. Another pair waits just north of the bridge over the river. The floodlit hills look dead. The soundtrack is a squadron of helicopters on night maneuvers on a field near Imperial Beach. The ground’s throbbing. Two hundred dollars for a card that’ll walk you across the border, I see now, is an impossible bargain.

I was working illegally when I taught English in Madrid to a group of executives at Iberia Airlines, and to the children of two earnest, struggling couples, and to the playboy son of the late generalissimo’s orthopedic surgeon. It didn’t bother me then, and it only came back to me as I reviewed a printout of my lifetime FICA earnings at a branch office of the Social Security Administration. Paid in cash, a thousand dollars maybe, those overseas earnings don’t appear on the list, of course. Curiously, though, I’ve been credited with some $10,000 it says I earned the next year at Iberia’s offices in Miami, Florida.

This was the second list the clerk had pulled up for me. A remark at the bottom of the first, a simple year-by-year statement of total earnings, had flagged a “possible duplicate posting” in 1983. A printout, intimidating in its detail, followed — an employer-by-employer listing of my jobs from 1981 to 1984, down to the one I’d held for half a day. “See?” the clerk pointed, her hypothesis confirmed, “The Iberia amount matches your earnings from this place in New York. You worked there, right?” I did. “An error on our part, then,” she admitted candidly, giving me a form to fill out to correct the statement of earnings.

She also processed my request for a duplicate Social Security card. A week before, my wallet had been stolen. Class B California driver’s license, ATM card, a handful of department store and major credit cards, library, video store, Vons — a host of documents, applied for separately and over the course of a decade, yet all connected through the number printed on the one unprotected piece of paper among them. I’d been left with a driver’s license, an I-551, and a Social Security card, all in a name I invented by combining an uncle’s first and middle names and my mother’s maiden name. I told the clerk the story of the false documents and asked, while we were at it, if she could verify whether the Social Security number I’d been sold was a valid number.

It is, she confirmed. But she warned me good-naturedly, if I use it to get work, I won’t get by with it for long. In a year, two or three certainly, my employer will receive a notice that the account number doesn’t match the name I’ve chosen, requesting that it be corrected. For employers in the habit of ignoring its correspondence, the Social Security Administration has begun tacking $50 fines onto follow-up notices. At the same time, none of my earnings would be posted to that stranger’s account. Instead, they go into what she called a floating account. So many workers using cards like mine, I mused, must amount to a substantial reserve fund that the administration could tap. “We can’t touch that money,” she answered, injured. “We can’t touch it any more than the money in any individual account.” What happens to those contributions? They wait, she answered, for their earners to come back some day and claim them. After amnesty, thousands of people, now possessing their own cards and accounts, were able to recapture their floating contributions, she told me.

The practice illustrates how, despite the tremendous amount of information that now is indexed by Social Security number, the administration itself stubbornly adheres to its role as guardian of individual pension accounts with the government. Since 1937, when it was created, the agency has issued some 350 million of the possible 1 billion 3-2-4 number combinations it uses. For three decades it managed to keep its numbers to itself. Fraud was rare; who would want to donate to someone else’s account? But this changed as the agency was asked to share its numbers with other, less popular government agencies like the IRS, for taxpayer identification purposes, and the Department of Defense, to keep track of draft-eligible men. When Congress decided in 1992 that all foreigners authorized to work in the U.S. must have Social Security numbers, the card that until recently bore a “not for identification purposes” disclaimer had begun to function like a national ID.

It happened gradually and, to the great discomfort of the Social Security Administration, ostensibly because these numbers are the only unique thing each of us possesses besides our fingerprints. And yet it almost seems inevitable that in our culture we’d end up identifying ourselves by account numbers — numbers originally designed to keep track of worker contributions in order to determine entitlements. Obscure to us, maybe, this link between accounting and identifying has become painfully clear to the undocumented recently, as their economic contributions have come under increasing scrutiny. The subject of economic identity comes up in every conversation I have these days with undocumented immigrants. I speak with a Mexican woman named Carla at a trolley stop for no more than five minutes before I know that several years ago she left her husband working here and returned to Mexico for six months to give birth to a daughter.

“At the time, we lived near San Francisco, and I was working as a housekeeper for a professor at Stanford,” she says. “When I told her I was expecting a baby, she said, ‘Wonderful! It’s great your child will be born here.’ I told her, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going back to Mexico.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”

Not only did Carla refuse, as she puts it, to have a record of owing money to a hospital in the United States, but when she rejoined her husband she would not accept her employer’s offer to falsify letters establishing her arrival date so she could apply for amnesty along with her husband, who had come a year before her. “She called me and said, ‘I can give you the letters you need because you’ve worked for me for a long time.’ But I thought, better to wait for the day they give them to me. I’m not going to give a lawyer $3000 and have him come back a little later and say there’s nothing, or who knows what?”

Three years ago her husband submitted an application for her, and a letter from the INS acknowledging receipt of the application is what she carries as identification, though it grants her no legal status. “I’ve worked the whole time I’ve been here as a housekeeper and nobody has ever asked me for papers,” she asserts. “When people hire me, they check my work. They say your work is excellent, you’re a trustworthy person, you’re a person I can trust with my house, a huge house in La Jolla. Everyone knows the quality of Mexican labor. They value their work. An American woman isn’t going to clean the bathrooms for a rich person in La Jolla. She isn’t going to make the beds and clean four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, clean the kitchen, wash and fold the laundry — for $45 a day? But for me, that’s excellent.”

With plenty of work, relatively good wages, and employers who pay her in cash, Carla knows she is lucky. “You can’t get an ID card now without presenting your documents first. But suppose you’re working. Your employer pays with a check. What do you say to her? Don’t give me a check, pay me cash instead? Because she can’t cash it — or else she’ll go to a check-cashing place, and the guy there will say okay. I’ll cash it, but I’ll take out $10, so if your check is for $35 — that’s right, $35, for eight hours or more of work — you don’t end up with that. Many of my friends are in this situation, where they have to give the check cashers money. They even take that cut from the ones who come in with computerized payroll checks listing their deductions and everything.”

Near the end of our conversation, watching a trolley take on passengers, she tells me this story. “One time an agent stopped me on the bus in La Jolla and asked if I had papers. I told her I don’t have them yet. She was a Mexican. She says, ‘Do what you have to do to arrange them, because if you don’t, I can detain you.’ ‘What a job!’ I said.

“Finally, she said she was going to let me go. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘thank you, thank you.’ And then I thought about it, and I said, ‘Maybe someday — well, I guess you’ll never find yourself in the situation I’m in, because you’re already an agent. But .it looks to me like you’re an indocumentado from way back, just like me.’ ‘How do you know my life?’ she says to me. ‘I don’t know your life,’ I said, ‘but if you’re Mexican, your parents were Mexican, and they came to the U.S. You were probably born in Mexico and you just grew up here, and they were able to arrange your papers so you could study for the job that you have now. Just pray that your papers don’t change someday and you end up in another country doing the same thing that I’m doing here.’ ”

“She says, ‘Why are you saying this to me? You’d better watch it — I can still detain you.’ I said, ‘No, why would you kick me out now? You gave your word, you already told me you’re going to let me go, and I believe it.’ She looks at me and she says, ‘Fine, that’s all right.’ Their van was already full, and she says, ‘Once I get so many people, I can do what I want.’ ‘That’s perfect,’ I tell her, ‘perfect. I, on the other hand, clean one house, go to my house, collect my daughters, set myself to making dinner, bathe them, get them ready for bed, read to them. That’s my job. And in comparison to your job, mine is fun.’”

When I first became a lawyer back in ’64, the criminal law was simple. It was easy stuff,” says Robert Schneider, a self-described “boy from Missouri” who, in the years since, has served as a Missouri state prosecutor, an economic-crime enforcement attorney in the Justice Department and an assistant United States attorney. Since 1988 he has been one of Five administrative law judges in the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, two of whom are stationed in San Diego. OCAHO, as it’s called by the few who know of it, is an obscure consequence of I RCA. If you look for its offices on the eighth floor of the First National Bank building, you’re likely to end up, confused, inside the Executive Office for Immigration Review. But they’ll tell you to look for the other seal, the brown one visible through the open double doors at the end of a short hall, and then the unmarked door to the right.

“When I came here in 1988,I basically had jurisdiction over two IRCA statutes,” Schneider explains. “The employment-sanctions provision and the section dealing with allegations of discrimination. The cases I normally would get would be people who were hiring illegal aliens, either knowingly or unknowingly, or people who, by not hiring people out of fear of hiring illegal aliens, were indirectly discriminating against people.

“Now, this was frustrating for the employment community. It was hard to understand what to do and not to do. Often an employer would try to do what was right over here,” he holds up one large Midwestern hand, then counters with the other, “and end up in trouble with this statute.” As a result, says Schneider, nervous employers began demanding to see more documents than they were entitled to, demanding in particular to see a green card, though a green card isn’t always necessary to work in the States. Congress went back to work, devising the I-9 form, which specifies the various acceptable combinations of documents that can be presented to establish employment eligibility.

“The result,” he says, “has been a massive amount of fraudulent document production which, in my opinion, has enriched the criminal.” Fraud is the specific province of the Justice Department’s economic-crime enforcement attorneys. In his years in their Kansas City offices, Schneider prosecuted dozens of cases involving attempts to defraud several government agencies, and he falls back into the role easily. “I mean, obviously the problem is massive. It’s so open because they’re not afraid of anything. Why wouldn’t they be afraid? Well, they’ve got to catch me, they’ve got to prosecute me. In some ways it reminds me of when I’m on a highway, and I’m going 55, and everybody’s madder than hell at me, and they all keep passing me going 70 and 80. Well, the law says you can only go 55; why are they going 75 and 80? Because you know they can’t enforce the law. There are just too many violators.”

There’s not a lot of jury appeal, says Schneider, in a run-of-the-mill document fraud case. “What you really want to get in the criminal cases is the guy that’s putting them together, that’s running the ring. But the real puppet masters, the real criminals, the ones that are orchestrating all this fraud, they’re not stupid. They’re carefully hidden behind layers of people who don’t know doodle from dip. If you can show that the guy who lives in the U.S. made thousands and thousands of dollars from year to year by engaging in this conduct, there’s a case the U.S. attorney would be interested in prosecuting. But for you to bring them a case involving one buy...they just can’t handle those hundreds and hundreds of cases.”

In fact if those cases are heard, they are likely to be heard by Judge Schneider. In 1990 Congress added a new civil statute, what Schneider refers to as the C Section, giving INS attorneys the option to prosecute document fraud cases in civil rather than criminal proceedings. There are important differences between the two. In hearings before an administrative law judge, the respondent isn’t entitled to a public defender, hearsay evidence is admissible, and INS attorneys don’t need to prove their cases beyond a reasonable doubt, but only by a “preponderance of the evidence.” And because there is no jury, “They don’t have to worry about convincing 12 people of their case,” says Schneider, “just one.”

Although Judge Schneider calls civil prosecution the “lighter route,” he notes that the penalties a civil decision carries are, in some ways, “almost worse” than for a criminal conviction. First time offenders using false documents, if they are prosecuted under the criminal statute, face fines and up to two years in prison; those charged with civil violations, if a final order is entered against them, face fines, deportation, and permanent exclusion from the United States.

The penalties are patterned after those Congress enacted earlier to counter visa fraud abroad. When those regulations went into effect in 1989, the U.S. Attorney General sent a memo to overseas State Department employees who would be bringing these cases, emphasizing the severity of the penalty. “Shutting off the opportunity to come to the United States actually is a crushing deprivation to many prospective immigrants. Very often it destroys the hopes and aspirations of a lifetime, and it frequently operates not only against the individual immediately, but also bears heavily upon his family in and out of the United States.”

Although Section 274C, the civil document fraud statute, has been on the books for more than three years, INS agents began applying it in earnest only last year. So far, the agency has issued around 2000 Notices of Intent to File to people it has found, usually through audits of employers’ I-9 files, to be using fraudulent documents. The first cases are just now reaching Schneider, but he says he wouldn’t be surprised if the new law has already had an effect. “The basis for the statute is to act as a deterrent to these people who come here,” he tells me. “The way to do this is to say, look, you may get here, you may slip through the borders, it’s not that hard, and you may also be able to get the documents you need to get work illegally, but if you’re caught, here’s what’s going to happen.”

Several immigrants’ rights attorneys I spoke with, however, contend that very few people understand the new penalties they are facing. The problem, they say, is in the complicated notification process the INS uses. People don’t understand the Notice of Intent to File, which they receive only in English, and don’t know that if they admit to document fraud and waive the right to a hearing, a final order will be issued by the INS that leaves them permanently ineligible to return to the U.S. Only about 20 people out of the 2000 that the INS has issued notices to have requested an OCAHO hearing, although the worst that could happen by doing so is what would automatically happen if the right to a hearing is waived.

Schneider has not yet ruled on the only case he has heard so far, though he did deny an INS motion for a default judgment in the case, citing the immigration consequences such a, judgment would automatically carry. He has four more cases pending before the end of the year and predicts OCAHO will soon see a lot more document abuse cases. He also predicts the cases will produce some interesting legal arguments. He won’t share them, he says with a smile, because that isn’t his job, but he can foresee a number of challenges to the statute itself.

I ask him if a call-in database system like the one the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform is advocating, which would allow employers to verify work eligibility without seeing documents, might not soon make these cases obsolete.

“As I told somebody once who wanted to be a lawyer,” Schneider replies, “if you go into criminal work, you’ll always have work. I don’t care how many laws they make. I’ve never seen a statute involving fraud that some bright, intelligent criminal cannot figure a way around.

If what they’re proposing is like the check-off system used with credit cards, I’ll just say that from my own experience as a fraud prosecutor, one of the most fraudulent areas that I ever worked was credit card fraud.

“How busy I’m going to be is going to depend on how much manpower the INS allocates to C cases and to the other two areas, employer sanctions and discrimination. The only thing that could affect this job,” he adds confidently, “is if you repeal the statutes.”

Ray spreads my application one-handed on the condiment shelf of a hot dog cart, pockets the $300, uncounted, with the other hand, and instructs me to check. No, I’ve never applied for a license before. “It’s like this is your first time,” he counsels.

Ray himself claims three valid California IDs and five working Social Security numbers, plus a mental book of others like the one he’s now dictating, pretty convincingly, to me. They’re all good, he told me earlier; he brought them with him from Georgia. Whatever journey would land him today on a sidewalk outside an L.A. County Services building must have included other characters like me, who show up out of nowhere and say, in effect, they don’t want to be who they are anymore. “Lost your license, right? What, DWI?” was the extent of the interrogation I faced. Before zipping my application in a briefcase, he flashes a sheaf of papers, riffling them reassuringly. “Homegirl does all my documents,” he says. “She set me up with these.” Homegirl, I’m given to believe, works at the DMV.

This is a market I’ve been hearing about for weeks. A friend in Los Angeles mentioned it first, telling me how her undocumented brother-in-law had managed to get a driver’s license in spite of the DMV’s new legal-residency requirements. She described an elaborate, Cold War, East Berlin kind of process that began when he met someone outside a DMV who gave him a phone number. When he called, he was told to wait on this corner at this time the next morning. As appointed, a car pulled up. He was driven not to the local motor vehicles office, but to a branch about an hour and a half away and pointed to a certain clerk. Afterwards, he paid the driver $300 and a week later received the license, in the proper way, through the mail. The word was around Alvarado Street, too, that this is possible. And, I began to gather, Ray isn’t the only merchant doing business in South Central.

“Remember, you’re from Atlanta, if anybody asks,” Ray reminds me, handing me his pager number. I’m to call him in three days, when he will have the DMV computer-generated permit in my new name. Then, following his instructions, I can paint my right thumb with clear fingernail polish, go into my neighborhood DMV, have my picture taken, and press what Ray promises will be my now-unrecognizable thumb to the electronic fingerprinting pad. If I’d like, I can make an appointment to do this. Then I’ll take my driving test like all other first-time applicants.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “tamper-proof” ID cards, but all the security features in the world can’t touch this simple kind of fraud — official corruption. It exists in all government agencies at all levels, and there’s no lack of it at the INS. Among all Justice Department employees, INS workers have the worst record for corruption; only one out of five Justice employees works for the INS, but they account for more than half of those arrested for official misconduct and corruption. INS chief Doris Meissner acknowledged the problem last month to a New York Times reporter. Outdated computer systems and poorly paid staff who, by tapping a few keys or losing a file can change a person’s life forever, create a climate for abuse there that doesn’t exist in other agencies, she admitted.

In one spectacular case, eight employees of an Arlington, Virginia INS office were arrested between July 1992 and December of 1993. Working through immigration service “brokers,” the group had sold more than 4000 work permits to ineligible immigrants for as little as $ 100 apiece, and some 1000 green cards. Here in California, meanwhile, William Tait, a deputy assistant director of the San Francisco office and 22-year veteran of the INS, is currently being tried for selling green cards. Arrested by the Office of the Inspector General this July in Texas, Tait is accused of selling cards for $20,000 apiece since 1983, amassing more than $300,000 from the trade.

According to the New York Times, recent Justice Department investigations and arrests across the U.S. put the street prices for legitimate INS documents at $350 for a border-crossing card, $500 for an employment authorization card, and $5000 to $6000 for a green card. It’s even possible to buy the ultimate solution to immigration problems, a certificate of naturalization, for $40,000 to $50,000, way beyond the reach of most indocumentados, but well within the means of others who may have far less benign ambitions.

In Los Angeles, I look up Javier Valenzuela again, the former head of Grupo Beta and currently Consul de Protección at the giant Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. Valenzuela, now living solo in a small apartment a few blocks from the consulate and commuting to Tijuana to spend weekends with his family, looks after all the Mexican nationals, documented and undocumented, in the L.A. area. He brings to his post both the understanding of the mechanics of undocumented immigration that he gained during his time in Tijuana and a profound appreciation of the problems those on the margins face, which he acquired as an anthropologist working among indigenous groups in Nuevo Laredo in the early 1980s and, from 1986 through 1989, in Oaxaca and Chiapas.

On our way to lunch in an East L.A. restaurant, we talk about the Zapatista rebellion and its great identity mystery, the masked Comandante Marcos. Despite his work in the area, which, he says, prompted a serious request for support from the then-coalescing movement, he has no clue as to who the comandante is. Neither does the senior Mexican official he worked under at the time, an anthropologist, too, who had spent far longer in San Cristobal de las Casas and who had walked every path in the state, as Valenzuela puts it. “Not long after the first of the year he called me and asked me who the hell was this guy Marcos. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ I asked him.” He called again about a month ago, still in the dark — an unnerving position for a government to find itself in, especially now that it must certainly know who he isn’t.

As head of Protección, Valenzuela faces his own thorny identification problems, both when attempting to contact undocumented Mexicans living submerged in L.A. on behalf of their families and in establishing the actual identities of those who surface only after they die. Although consular officials estimate that three out of four undocumented Mexicans live under their given names, it isn’t uncommon to discover contradictory documents at death. When that happens, Protección works through friends, neighbors, and relatives in L.A. to ascertain the given name so that it can notify the family in Mexico. The family, in turn, must contact the mortuary to request that the body be returned for burial and prove their relationship.

“It can get very complicated, especially if money is involved,” says Valenzuela. “The only solution we’ve found that the mortuary people will accept is to use the name on the mica as his real name and list his real name as an alias. So the parents reclaim their own son or daughter under the assumed name.”

I recount my recent experiences in acquiring IDs and ask whether more stringent document requirements won’t just raise the level of corruption while driving the undocumented dangerously underground.

“That’s the Mexican government’s reasoning,” he tells me. ‘Two years ago when I was with Grupo Beta, the Mexican government initiated a regularization program to try to bring all the migrants in Mexico — and there are many — out of the shadows. Anyone who had been in Mexico a certain time, a year, could receive legal status. For Asians it was even less; for them, it didn’t matter how long they’d been there. The idea was that we wanted to know who the migrants are and where they are. This was especially important with the Chinese, who were this mystery population; there were all kinds of rumors and popular legends about thousands of Chinese living in tunnels under Mexicali, for example.

“Well, after the regularization program had registered people, what we found was that the numbers weren’t at all what people had imagined,” he says. Instead, what officials discovered was that living in the margins facilitated brutal exploitation of the migrants, often by members of their own communities. Grupo Beta documented numerous labor violations and found many children who were not being allowed to go to school. “In fact,” Valenzuela remembers, “one of the biggest challenges of the regularization program was to find a way to offer the migrants this without going through the intermediaries, the people who had control of their lives. One of the ways we did this was to make it clear to everyone that it’s absolutely prohibited to pay anything for the program. If someone asks you for money, and if you pay, then you’re running the risk of deportation.”

We return to the consulate, Valenzuela running ahead to his office while I park. The Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles these days looks like a city-state under siege; depending on whom you talk to, the five or six guards and the guardhouse and huge iron gate are either a response to the recent embassy bombing in Argentina or to the Proposition 187 atmosphere. I have nothing to show the brown uniforms when they ask for ID.

“As long as you don’t have papers,” Valenzuela had just finished telling me, “you can be whoever you want, except who you are.”