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Border Street: Reporter Lady finding no easy answers

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 4, 2006 at midnight

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The Reporter Lady first appears on Border Street in April. It is the children of the street who give her the name, who first begin recognizing her car, a 9-year-old sedan which apparently never made the acquaintance of a car wash.

The kids watch her drive past and they call out and wave. They are curious and when there are no adults around, they pepper her with questions. They want to know where she lives and how old she is and if she has any kids, and they are surprised when she says she has two young children. Wow, they say, you're an old mom. My mom had me when she was 15, says one. My mom had me when she was 17, says another. My mom had me when she was 19, says the Reporter Lady.

"Are you rich?" one of the girls asks. No, the Reporter Lady says, not even close. You look rich, the girl says. It is summer by then, and the girl, 12 years old and lovely, is wearing low-slung jeans and a halter top. She sits upon a mattress lying on the dirt in the front of the subsidized apartment into which she will be moving.

Later, her mother will come out of the apartment to shout at the Reporter Lady from the stairs. "Were you talking to my kids?" Yes, the Reporter Lady says. "Don't you ever do that again," the woman yells. Her children line up on the stairs behind her. "We're private people. Who do you think you are walking up and down this street? Get the hell out of here!"

The encounter leaves the Reporter Lady rattled. She shouldn't have been. All neighborhoods, no matter how dysfunctional, find their own equilibrium and the Reporter Lady, with her endless questions, disturbs that balance.

About the same time, the Reporter Lady runs into the frustration of another Border Street resident, the Fed Up Neighbor. The Fed Up Neighbor stopped taking the Reporter Lady's calls, wouldn't come to the door when she knocked. The Fed Up Neighbor has her own name for the Reporter Lady. She calls her that Doggone Reporter. When she is feeling expansive, she will call her that Doggone Reporter Who Won't Stop Asking Me Damn Questions.

"I don't want to hear about the lives of my neighbors," the Fed Up Neighbor says, when she starts speaking to the Reporter Lady again. "I don't care. I want someone to pay attention to this neighborhood. I want someone to do something. Why aren't you helping us?"

"That's not why I'm here," the Reporter Lady says, which she knows sounds callous, but is true. The Reporter Lady comes to Border Street not to be its crusader, but to see what happens at the intersection of legal and illegal, Spanish and English.

It occurred then to the Reporter Lady that to the residents of Border Street she represented The Establishment. The older residents expected her to respond to their complaints about noise and trash and lawbreaking neighbors. The younger residents, particularly among the American renters in subsidized housing, wanted her to leave them alone because the arrival of The Establishment usually meant trouble.

If the illegal immigrants of Border Street have any expectations of the Reporter Lady, they never express them. They answer her questions. They tell her stories of coyotes and family members left behind. They tell her where they work and produce pay stubs, fake Social Security cards and past income tax forms when she asks. They talk because the Reporter Lady offers them anonymity and says she will not reveal the true name of the street.

A few of her readers question this decision. They say they have a "right to know" where Border Street is. The Reporter Lady has been a journalist for 18 years. She understands their skepticism given the occasional journalism scandals, the plagiarists, the works of fiction masquerading as news. She is nonetheless irritated. "I'm not stupid," she says.

The Reporter Lady believes that without anonymity she would get neither the access nor the candor needed to tell the story. She tells her husband one night that it is one of the most challenging and depressing projects she's ever worked on. Illegal immigration is not undermining this street, she says. Poverty is. It's the lack of education, the lack of voice, the chaos that comes with poverty. Illegal immigration is a problem to the degree that it contributes to that poverty.

It does not take long for the Reporter Lady to see that although fences have been built on Border Street between U.S. citizens and Mexican nationals, the two had become intertwined. "It's like a web," the Teacher's Mother says.

On Border Street, an American woman is married to an illegal immigrant. On Border Street, an illegal immigrant works under his willing American citizen friend's Social Security number. On Border Street, illegal immigrants bear American citizen children. On Border Street, an American boss helps provide bail money for an illegal immigrant worker.

The Reporter Lady is an optimist, an idealist. In the first seven months, she is brought to Earth multiple times. By 15-year-old Maria the younger who has a 26-year-old boyfriend, by the stubborn silence between the Hispanic American neighbors and their Mexican neighbors, by the manner in which people, American- and Mexican-born, abandon their lives, walk out of apartments, leave behind ransacked disaster, and by the realization that unless something, someone, shows that 12-year-old girl sitting on a mattress in the dirt that worlds exist outside her own, she will face a life as difficult as her mother's.

By the time the Reporter Lady steels herself to knock on the door of 12-year-old girl's angry mother, it is too late. They are gone. The neighbors tell the Reporter Lady the family was evicted.

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