On the Texas-Mexico border, no one knows who's smuggling the border crossers. Everyone's a suspect
ROMA, TEXAS -- It was 11 p.m. when her six dogs started barking on the patio, a sign Maria Guadalupe “Lupita” Rios had come to recognize. Immigrants were passing through her street a block north of the Rio Grande.
From her leather couch facing an oil painting of the river, Rios called to her 5-year-old granddaughter, Brianna, who was monitoring security footage on a large screen in the master bedroom. Rios’ husband installed half a dozen $300 security cameras around their ranch house last year after she grew nervous about him leaving 11 days at a time to work the south Texas oilfields.
“Who is it?” Rios asked. “Your cousin? A mojado?”
That’s what residents of Roma, most with roots that stretch across the river to Mexico, call border crossers: wetback, a word stripped of its vitriol in Spanish. Some even use the diminutive mojadito.
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