'Where are the kids now? What happens to them later?" Those were the questions already being asked of us, especially by young readers of advance copies of Tunnel Kids, fascinated by the lives of a gang of their age-group living 6,000 miles away on and under the US/Mexican border. Maeve and I were looking for answers to these questions. It was nearly three years since our last visit and we were frankly apprehensive about whom and what we might find.
We drove through the gate at the familiar Nogales border: a flimsy wall of corrugated metal separating the First and Third worlds. Order on the northern side, a chaos of shacks, people and cars on the other, home to more than 300,000 who have come seeking work or to chase a dream in El Norte.
Though a typical border town, Nogales has one unique feature: a pair of cavernous drainage tunnels, each about three miles long and running like a secret, concrete urinary tract under the border, an attractive conduit for smuggling drugs and undocumented migrants. Among those benefiting from the tunnels was an infamous gang of adolescents who called themselves Barrio Libre - the Free Barrio.
Americans began to notice these kids when they started literally popping up to mug customers outside Church's Fried Chicken - a mile into Arizona - only to disappear into the scary gloom of the tunnel when pursued by police, who were understandably reluctant to follow. We first met some of them in 1995, at a day-shelter called Mi Nueva Casa. Maeve and I included a chapter on the shelter and kids in our book, The Road to Mexico, but could not get them out of our hearts and minds. We returned for a series of scorching summers to volunteer at the shelter and, as the idea took shape, to do a book about and with the kids. Maeve taught them photography and took their portraits, and I found my own way into their world - seeking to understand the shape of their lives as they saw and lived them. Certainly their lives, and the place, were dramatic:
The roads were gone, replaced by raging rapids three feet deep, black with muck and heaving sticks and plastic jugs into my legs as I staggered from one pole or building side to the next. I waded through a final swirling eddy, where a young woman clasping an infant to her breast balanced uncertainly on a battered shopping cart. Past the turnstile into the United States...I remembered the tunnel and tried to imagine what the rains had brought to it. I heard the story the next day from Chito, who, along with many others, had been too far inside the silent gloom to hear the thunder.
"We were deep inside, in the tunnel they call 'Los Vampiros' - the one that goes through Buenos Aires.
All of a sudden we heard noise, and some people came running; they had been crossing to the other side. And then we heard a wave behind them. They shouted, 'Here comes the water!'" Chito undulated his arms to imitate the flood waves. "And the next thing I knew, firemen, police, and la migra (border patrol) started coming, and they grabbed us and pulled us up"...Flushed into the United States.
Soon after that episode, the world of the kids opened further for me, when one of their number, "El Boston" noted that since I had a video camera we could make films together. He suggested he could be el reportero, and proceeded to write up a list of 44 remarkable questions that explored the most crucial aspects of their lives together: clothing, drugs, violence, fear of death. But the list included such potentially subversive questions as "If you were king of this world, would you allow there to be gang kids?
"You film, and I will ask the questions," he directed, and I found myself embarking on a journey of discovery. Not only through El Boston's highly unscientific interviews, but also by a developing friendship with him and the others that led us on adventures through the city and well beyond. As El Boston liked to say, "every mind is a world, and every world is a mind". But some months after that promising beginning, El Boston was arrested in Tucson for assault and "La Flor", a 15-year-old mother, replaced him as my chief assistant, as the precarious world of Barrio Libre gradually, and often dramatically, unfolded before us.
There were other setbacks, of course, because most of them continued to sniff inhalants (the drug of choice) and pursue a life of crime in the streets. But there were moments of great beauty as well, as Maeve and I reminded ourselves to buck up our courage, now three years later, as we re-entered Mi Nueva Casa.
'Hola Mah-aye-ba, Lorenzo!" It was Romel. "Did you hear, I am working here now!" We were surprised and thrilled to hear of the development. When we had last seen Romel he was 18, a veteran of the tunnels, but poised at the edge of possible change. "Yeah," he continued, "I am living in a shack up in Buenos Aires that I helped my father build when I was a kid. He died, you know, five months ago. I am having his name tattooed here." He pointed to the back of his neck.
"Is that the book about us?" he asked, reaching for the copy we had brought with us. I handed it to him and waited as he thumbed through, admiring the photographs, pausing when he recognised his name. He read what he could, ("Hey, when is it coming out in Spanish, man?") dragging a finger slowly under the lines of text that recounted a scene in the colonia of Solidaridad, where he and his then girlfriend, Vero, had been living at the time:
I was looking at the wrecked car on the slope below Vero's mother's shack, where this family of four was sleeping, when Vero said brightly, "Have you seen Romel's chicken? You can film that, too! And May-aye-ba can take photos!" Vero led us into her mother's shack, where Romel was napping on a narrow bunk bed. "Romel, show them the chicken. Lorenzo and Mah-aye-ba can take pictures!" Romel rose groggily from his bed and saluted us with a sleepy grin and the Barrio Libre handshake. He pulled a carton from under the bottom bunk bed and plunked it down. "Here she is," Romel said quietly, looking up at us with tender pride. "She's got some eggs." We all leaned over the box and peered in as if it were the Baby of Bethlehem. With great tenderness, Romel nudged his hand under the quaking bird, shifting her slightly and revealing the gleam of soft, white eggshells beneath. "Take her photo," he said.
I translated what he did not understand, and we all laughed about the good old days. "Nobody is in the tunnel for the moment," Romel told us, meaning the kids, "The Border Patrol and the Beta (Mexican border police) have fucked it up for us." He laughed. "But the drugs and migrants are still going through all right. Now all the migrants are staying in coyotes' houses up in the colonias. Like Solidaridad. That's one of the places I go to do my job here. I find the kids on the streets there and bring them down to the shelter. Do you want to come?"
Of course I did, and was rewarded by a bumpy truck ride through the city up into "Soli" to see the latest rows of cardboard and tin shacks, home to families shivering by scrap-wood fires, while frigid gusts whipped an Easter snowfall past blankets where doors should have been. Shawled mothers and children gathered for the handout.
When we returned to Mi Nueva Casa, we found Maeve repainting the frames of her portrait photos of the kids - the rogues' gallery of Barrio Libre. She offered to take another portrait of Romel, in time for his 21st birthday the next day. Just as she finished, the phone rang. It was La Flor, who had heard on "the bush phone" that we were there. She had been banned from the shelter some months earlier, when the house mothers realised she was turning tricks with men who drove right up to the door to pick her up. An enigmatic 16-year-old when we had last seen her, she had already been a mother twice. The first baby had died after a few months and her older sister was raising the second child, Davidcito. When we knew Flor, she had been the constant companion of Jes·s.
Their's was a romantic tale:
"How did you meet Flor?" I asked Jes·s. He gazed over for a moment at her gently sleeping form.
"We met at Mi Nueva Casa. At first I only looked, but little by little we spoke. Then she ran away from home for a week. She went to Negrita's house. I saw her there.
She told me that she needed diapers - so the next day I got six hundred pesos in the tunnel and bought clothes and diapers and all, and I went to Negrita's house.
The two of them were talking - Negrita y Flor - and Flor asked Negra who kisses better of the boys; the girls roll over several guys before picking one. And La Negrita said that I kiss better. So then the day after I came there again and brought the diapers to Flor.
She made the first move; she kissed me, and then I hugged her, and with that first kiss we stared to go together."
Tunnel Kids by writer Lawrence Taylor and photographer Maeve Hickey, is published by the University of Arizona Press (£16 paperback) and is available through the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, other outlets, and through amazon.co.uk A related exhibition presented by UCC Visual Arts is at the O'Rahilly Building UCC until Thursday