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Understanding 9/11tv The Coyotes Bicycle CSPAN January 8, 2017 4:03pm-4:17pm EST
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centennial in 2076, our work begins on the 13th of december, 2016. [applause] >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] thank you, ladies and gentlemen. >> i'm going to be down here at this table. any of that you want to come and see me about a signed book, or a donation, please come by and see me. if you'd like to come and talk about something, you can also do that. thank you, ladies and gentlemen. gentlemen. >> . >> guest: we're in balboa park in san diego, california where c-span is learning more about the city's literary scene. we take you to the mexico-california border to hear more about the book "the coyotes bicycle".
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>> it doesn't look like it, but it's a broad river valley. in the winter when we get rain storms, it can flood significantly. and i came down here in 2008 to do a story about thousands of car tires that washed into the united states from mexico during any significant rain. and the thing that was interesting about that, those car tires originated in the united states. when we buy a new set of tires we leave the old once at the dealer and we actually pay a fee to have them disposed of proper properly, but most often they're sold to mexican middle men and taken to baja to use. and when it rains they wash back into the united states for free. i was here talking to the tynans who operate the place about the car tires they were picking up at that moment and putting into a big dumpster. just on their part alone,
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hundreds of car tires after one storm. we're talking about the circularity of it. car tires coming to us from mexico and terry says it's just like the bicycles. >> and i said what are you talking about? >> he said come ride over here. we walk around the 200-year-old barn and he had a giant pile of bicycles. he said he collected a thousand bikes in the last six months and i said where did they come from? >> and he turned around and he pointed up this hill because tijuana is 300 feet higher in elevation than the american valley alone and he said the mexicans. it turns out every parcel along monument road i went to after that had a pile of bicycles from the state park to the gomez place down here. there's a county park, there's other ranches and the people of the valley were jucollecting
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bicycles abandoned by migrants. rarely did they see people on bikes, but it happened while people weren't moving. day after day bicycles were accumulating. their experience is very interesting because as i mentioned, it's very rural community, people are making money off of horse ranching, renting out stalls. there's organic farms, commercial farms and yet they're dealing with international issues rights on their back door. the whole story of migration follows economic patterns. so when we have a boom like we did during the housing, during our housing bubble. there was quite a bit of crossing.
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mexicans and central americans coming in to fill the low paying jobs at the time and down here, people have crossed in every imaginable way. and when they do they encounter regular americans who live right here and the people-- the locals are quite pragmatic, you know, i wouldn't say ideological. and they trade interesting story. in fact, this is a river valley and in the river, in the winter it often floods. and right over here, this rancher that lives in this parcel, actually, told me that he found a man who had crossed on the river on a boogie board and got stuck in a tree as the river retreated. there was a lot of serious bouncing around when i first came upon the abandoned bicycles in the river valley.
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some people thought it was just cosmetic, that the idea that someone would just casually cycle along would help a migrant blend easier. >> some thought it was for the speed because you could, you know, and you could cover the distance it would take you nine minutes and one minute. but it actually has to do with technology. every technology that the border patrol brings to bear on the border, be it laser trip wires or infrared cameras or the barriers themselves. every technology has a hack. they all have a weakness, for example, the laser trip wires, the infrared cameras, they go blind in our sea fogs that we get quite often here and just
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become utterly useless. well in the case of the bicycles, the hack had to do with a string of 18,000 seismic sensor the border patrol relies on. the-- as far as you can imagine, they detect earth shaking things, pounding, running, walking, and traditionally, it is the migrants who run and walk whereas the border patrol rolls in jeeps, on quads in trucks and the bicycle technique reversed that trend and suddenly, migrants were able to cross over ground that in the past they would have easily been detected. well, traditionally, the san diego sector was one of the busiest along the entire border
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and according to an author named joseph nevin, the experience here where you have the second dense mexican population set in traditionally white population in san diego, that lent the whole debate a certain politics. this has been one of the hottest in terms of crossing, but also politically. and so, this is the most enforced five-mile stretch of our 2000 mile border and we've had quite a big border patrol presents, in recent times, a lot of agents have been shifted to the desert, to arizona, but still, there's a huge presence here in san diego and you can see on a daily business sis, everywhere you can there's
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border patrol agents in trucks watching the boundary. you can see them in their jee jeeps, on foot. the name of the game in terms of smuggling is creativity. you know, agents will say that they're on the creative defense and the smugglers are on the creative offense. and sometimes it's just really fun the things that smugglers come up with. for example, the fence here, your average mile costs $3.5 million on average to build and if you go to youtube you can find a video of smugglers using a $24 carjack to back that fence up almost to the height of a man, and smugglers cross under the fence and then they
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kick the jack out and the phelps falls back into place and on the video, the smugglers are laughing the whole time. just the sheer creativity involved can make for some pretty interesting stories. this valley right here is called smugglers gulch and smugglers have been using this since the 1800's and they've been smuggling from at one point lacy undergarments were highly taxed and they smuggled underwear to everything else. i mean, alcohol during prohibition. even cattle at one time. and most often it's been people crossing. under the secure fence act of 2007, during the construction
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of this wall here, engineers filled in this entire valley with this giant berm. and totally changed the watershed here so that they could put a fence on top of it. it it's, i don't know how many cubic yards of dirt it is, but it's vast. the interesting thing about this though is that this-- there hasn't always been such fortifications on the boundary. over here in the bush, under a juniper tree, is a little plaque that the boy scouts put in place to celebrate the fact that father juniper aserra crossed from mexico into the united states through these valleys either here or just
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over-the-hill, and established what became the california mission system and basically san diego itself. so, our roots in travelling across this boundary goes to-- are ancient, in fact. i think when it comes to this debate about border enforcement, seemingly everyone is willing to have an opinion, but so few are willing to inform themselves and so one of the hopes i had for this book is when the leaders meet the characters, they're meeting people who live on the boundary, whether it's people who are involved in enforcement, people who just make their livelihoods here or people whose career it is to
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cross to border illegally. migration numbers have been down since 2008, negative even. so, more people are going back to mexico and central america than are coming across and also, studies say that people tend to cross in a person age range, say from your late teens to your early 30's. if you don't cross in that age then you're not likely to. well, mexico went through at that earlier in the century and people were crossing and now they've aged out of the ranges. i mention those two things, not only have we had negative migration numbers for almost ten years, but we're not likely to see another boom. so when we look at spending billions on defending this boundary that's not going to be crossed in the number that it has been, that money is our bridges and our roads. it's for our-- that's our schools and so, if
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we're just going to be pouring it in the desert. i think that people should be aware of what they're defending. >> you're watching book tv on c-span 2 with top nonfiction books and authorities every weekend. book tv, television for serious readers. >> and now, on book tv, lincoln scholar ronald white remembers the life of civil where general come president ulysses s. grant.
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