The Diablos, who live south of the Rio Grande, have fought many of the biggest fires in the American West. Their work is “cross-border cooperation at its best,” a Big Bend staffer said. Even so, it is subject to immigration debates happening miles away.
In 1989, Big Bend National Park, at the southernmost tip of Texas, had an epic fire season, after an abandoned campfire sparked a blaze in the mountains that March. “Big Bend had, golly, forty fires that year, or something close to that,” John Morlock, who later worked as the park’s fire-management officer, said. There was no dedicated fire crew—“You’re a law-enforcement ranger, and you’re an E.M.T., and you also fight fire,” Morlock added, describing park-ranger duties.
A few years after Morlock was hired as Big Bend’s fire-management officer, in 1996, West Texas endured another intense fire season. “There was stuff happening all around us,” Morlock said. “We’re talking somewhere around thirty thousand acres of mountains on fire.” The Diablos were authorized to work only inside the national park, so Morlock appealed to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service office in nearby Presidio. “They had the authority to let Mexican residents come into the U.S.
The relationship had improved by the nineties, when the park had its first Hispanic superintendent, and the Diablos program was part of the thaw. There was a regular flow across the border at Boquillas, the largest and most accessible of the Big Bend border towns.
With Boquillas “like a ghost town,” Valdez said, he began processing candelilla, a shrub native to the Chihuahuan desert, whose leaves, when distilled, produce a waxy substance used in cosmetics. The job was hot and hard, and paid much less than firefighting. Then, in 2002, the West had another bad fire year. “They had firefighters coming from Russia and Canada and New Zealand,” Morlock said. “Everybody was trying to save California that year.
In 2014, Marisol Gama, a young archeologist from Michoacán, came to Big Bend to work on an archaeology project. When she learned about the Diablos’ situation, she was troubled. She remembered thinking, They can pass for work but not to go visit their mothers? Gama began to amass the documentation that the Diablos would need to apply for tourist visas. The task was daunting. In rural areas, no one was particularly fastidious with paperwork.
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