'Let's see some papers': in El Paso, looking Latin is a crime.

• Position: El Paso, Texas

If you live in El Paso, Texas, and you're Mexican-American, you'd better make sure you're not seen walking north near the Rio Grande River. You'd better not have "the look," as one local writer calls it--attire that shouts "illegal alien" to the Border Patrol, like polyester pants, loud makeup, or cowboy boots with slanted heels. And you'd better carry your identification at all times. Taking all these precautions won't necessarily protect you, though; it won't stop La Migra from pulling you over sometime: Slow down there, Tio. Where you from, boy? Let's see some papers.

At least that's what it was like when I was growing up in El Paso in the 1970s and early 1980s. For Mexican-Americans, such harassment was a way of life, part of the price we were expected to pay for living in the United States.

I never really thought about the massive five-mile fence that stretched behind downtown El Paso; it was just part of the landscape. I don't recall being shocked by seeing men, women, and children--a look of desperation in their eyes--sliding down a concrete embankment on the Mexican side and resurfacing on our side, then squeezing through holes in that fence. And I don't remember questioning the presence of the men in the green Suburbans, or their right to detain my family members, their right to interrogate and intimidate people I had known all my life.

Coming home to El Paso last December for the longest visit in ten years, I felt at first that nothing had changed. The men in green suits still stop and grill Mexican-American citizens and legal residents. Some of them still physically abuse the Latinos they detain; a few months ago, the local newspaper reported that several El Paso apartment dwellers witnessed a Border Patrol agent verbally abusing and battering two Mexican women--one of them clutching her grandson--who had crossed the border illegally.

But my reaction is different nowadays, and so is that of many others in El Paso. After years of being humiliated by the Border Patrol, by "cavity searches," threats, and beatings, some Mexican-Americans are rewriting the history of this town.

It's ten days before Christmas in El Paso, and the weather is biting cold, colder than I remember. Inside an auditorium at Bowie High School, though, there's a feeling of warmth. While a mariachi band belts out the old familiar rancheras to an appreciative audience, about thirty students and faculty members are celebrating their long-fought victory over an agency that has touched all of their lives, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Two months ago, seven Mexican-Americans--including students, recent graduates, and faculty members--from Bowie High School united to sue the Border Patrol, charging that agents had stopped and harassed them. They ended up telling their stories to Federal District Judge Lucius Bunton, and he believed them. Simply because the plaintiffs were Hispanic, he wrote in his December decision, they had been "repeatedly stopped, frisked, searched, questioned, detained, and arrested without legal cause," as well as subjected to degrading verbal and physical abuse. Bunton issued a stern injunction warning the Border Patrol to stop detaining people just because they looked Hispanic; he also cleared the way for a class-action suit against the agency. This ruling, known as Murillo v. Musegades, INS, was a decisive victory for Mexican-Americans in border towns and cities across the United States.

Among those celebrating tonight is high-school coach Ben Murillo, who in November 1991 suddenly found himself looking down the barrel of a Border Patrol agent's revolver while driving two of his football players to a game at rival Jefferson High School--my old school, in fact. A jovial man with a stocky build, Murillo is wearing a Bowie High baseball cap and school sweatshirt, much like what he was wearing the day he was stopped.

"I pulled into a Dairy Queen parking lot, thinking that maybe I had a taillight out," says Murillo. "But one of my students said, |Coach, they think you're a wetback.' Then I turned around and saw the muzzle of the officer's revolver pointed at my face."

Murillo was extremely frightened, but told the officers that he was a varsity football coach at Bowie High School. "|I have two varsity players with me, and I'd appreciate it if you'd shoulder your gun,' I told the officer. And he said, |I'd appreciate it if you'd shut up.'" The officer, Murillo says, was holding the gun in two hands, with his arms fully extended, an account confirmed by several witnesses.

After questioning the coach and his players for several minutes, the Border Patrol agent told them they were pulled over because spotters on a nearby bridge had seen an "illegal alien" picked up in a car similar to Murillo's. The agents then quickly left. But the ugly experience would haunt the coach. And the more people he talked to, he says, the more surreal life began to seem in El Paso, Texas, U.S.A.

In "El Chuco"--Chicano slang for El Paso--almost everyone has a tale about the Border Patrol. So do several human-rights groups. In the past five years, Border Patrol agents in my hometown have shot eight people, killing five of them, according to newspaper accounts. In that same period, agents in El Paso have been sued for a range of abuses, including the shooting of a Mexican teenager and the alleged beating and deportation of a Latino high-school student (a legal resident of El Paso) whose "crime" was failing to carry ID. Agents were also sued recently over the death of a Mexican border crosser who drowned when Border Patrol agents helped overturn his raft, despite his pleas that he couldn't swim--an action that resulted in a $210,000 Federal court judgment against the U.S. Government.

In El Paso and other places, in fact, reports of Border Patrol abuses are so widespread that a recent Americas Watch study compared human-rights violations on the U.S.-Mexico border to those seen in the most repressive foreign countries. Racial taunts and beatings of...