Life on the Line: In town known for migrant smuggling, suspicion of neighbors runs high
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.
Brianna peeked through the blinds but didn't recognize the figure creeping through the mesquite brush. Her grandmother asked where the person went. Into the garage, the girl replied calmly, accustomed to strange figures passing at all hours.
The Border Patrol had just changed shifts - prime time for smuggling. Other than the dogs, the only sound was the drone of cicadas. The loudmouthed chachalaca birds once were natural sentries, but most had been shot by the son of a neighbor whom Rios suspects of smuggling. Sultry river breezes stirred the palms, sending shadows flitting across parked cars. Rios guessed the creeping figure was her sister who lives nearby, but didn't want to risk stepping into the street.
"You can't tell who's who," she said.
For Rios, 60, and others in the riverfront colonia, or neighborhood, border life is marked not so much by violence - that tends to stay
