114 October 2019_Esquire
and people enjoyed being around him,” Flynn
says. “He was good at having fun and being
goofy, but also knowing when it was time to
settle down.”
Life was normal for the Gonzalez children.
They barely discussed the fact that they were
legally considered undocumented immigrants,
and Zaira says their status had no real effect
on their lives other than the occasional glitch
it caused with school paperwork. They didn’t
really remember Mexico and didn’t speak En-
glish with accents. All those years, Zaira says,
“I didn’t know I had come to a place where a
lot of people didn’t want us here.”
This sometimes meant that they didn’t under-
stand just how little room they had for error.
In 2009, two years after Christian graduated
from high school, he was at home playing with
a Crosman air rifle when it went off, hitting
a younger boy from his neighborhood in the
torso. The pellet lodged under the boy’s skin,
requiring a trip to the hospital—and prompt-
ing a visit from the police. Christian insisted
that this was an accident and that he did not
know the gun was loaded. It didn’t matter.
Christian was charged with aggravated assault.
For an undocumented immigrant, any en-
counter with law enforcement—even a traffic
ticket—becomes a giant clock ticking down.
On that afternoon in May 2012, when Chris-
tian told his sister he had to go downtown be-
fore taking their mother to the grocery store,
he was responding to a call asking him to re-
port to his local probation office.
He went.
According to Zaira, Christian Gonzalez was
arrested that afternoon by Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of an ap-
parent sweep of undocumented immigrants
who had convictions on their records. Chris-
tian signed the forms necessary to get himself
out of jail and onto a bus headed for Reynosa,
Mexico, just across the border.
Within two weeks, he was back in the coun-
try of his birth with a few hundred dollars and
the duffel bag of clothes his family had packed
for him since his arrest: Ariat jeans, Ariat cow-
boy boots, and a tooled leather belt he wore on
special occasions. Zaira stuffed her brother’s
Nintendo DS game console into one of his
boots, along with some Pokémon games.
In Mexico, which to him was essentially a for-
eign country, Christian tried his best to adjust
to the way things worked. He moved in with
an aunt and uncle in rural Tamaulipas, not far
from Monterrey, and picked onions for about
a hundred dollars a week. But shortly after he
arrived, members of the local cartel kidnapped
Christian’s uncle, a farmer who had recently
been diagnosed with cancer, and held him for
ransom. Though the family paid the money,
they never saw or heard from the uncle again.
They never received a body to bury.
Christian’s parents then bought him a bus
ticket to Monterrey, where he stayed with rel-
atives and found work in a factory. Zaira mes-
saged her brother regularly and mailed him
items she hoped would cheer him up, like a new
iPhone and a pair of black and blue Nikes she
bought at the Bealls department store across
the street from their high school.
Still, Christian told Zaira he found it difficult
to fit in. Without the support of the friends and
family he had grown up with, he grew lonelier
and more desperate. “The scariest thing about
distance,” he wrote on his Facebook page, “is
that you don’t know whether they’ll miss you
or forget you.”
In July, Christian began telling friends that
he would be back in Palestine by his birthday,
August 13. When they asked how that was
possible, he told them not to worry about it.
His friend Lizz and her mother, Mendi, both
worked at the Palestine Police Department, so
he went particularly light on the details with
them. “I think he respected what we did for a
living and didn’t want to put us in a bad posi-
tion,” Lizz says, though she now wishes Chris-
tian had let her know he was planning to cross
the border. Lizz remembers Christian sound-
ing upbeat the last time they spoke—“but he
wasn’t one to open up and tell you when things
were bad, especially knowing his family was al-
ready hurting.”
His birthday came and went. So did the
first days of September. Then, a little after
9:00 A.M. on Thursday, September 6, Zaira
says, Christian’s father answered a phone call
from an unfamiliar number. You need to talk
to your son, the man on the other end of the
line told him in Spanish. He’s being stubborn.
He needs to get moving.
Christian had found a coyote to help him
swim across the Rio Grande. After resting for
a few days at a stash house in McAllen, Texas,
they were now somewhere near Falfurrias, and
as the coyote put it, the two were “bumping
heads.” He was giving Christian one last chance
to pick up his pace before leaving him behind.
The man put Christian on the phone. He
sounded sick, shaky. I don’t think I can make
it, Papa, he said. I can’t do this anymore.After Christian went missing, a hole opened
up in his family that seemed to have no end.
The coyote had warned Christian’s parents
not to call the police, or they too might be ar-
rested, according to Zaira. They didn’t file a
missing-persons report, at least not then. Their
son’s deportation had been traumatic enough,
but the anguish of not knowing where he was,
or what had happened to him, washed over
them like a black wave. Christian’s father sim-
ply couldn’t talk about it. His mother refused
to celebrate Christmas until her son was home.
When Zaira graduated from high school the
following spring, all she wished was that herbrother could be there to see it. His disappear-
ance had shaken something loose in her. She
stopped fighting with her parents and stepped
up as the family caretaker, the role Christian
once played. Sometimes she would open his
old bottle of Hollister cologne just to remem-
ber how he smelled.
Bolstered by the security of a new program
called Deferred Action for Childhood Arriv-
als, or DACA, which temporarily protected
her and her younger brother from deporta-
tion, Zaira vowed to keep searching for Chris-
tian and asking others for help. He couldn’t
have just vanished. Someone had to know
something. But five unobserved Christmas-
es passed with no word from anyone about her
brother’s whereabouts.
In late July 2017, Zaira received a mes-
sage from her cousin, who had come across a
Spanish-language Facebook page with entries
for several John Does who had been found in
south Texas. There were no photographs of the
men, only dates and long strings of numbers, so
Zaira didn’t know what to make of them. But
any scrap of information was a start.
After getting off work at a Medicare call
center that evening, Zaira began plugging
the ID numbers into Google and pairing them
with search terms. “Missing person Texas.”
“Missing man Texas border.” “Missing
migrant Mexico.”
A government database called NamUs
popped up.
Zaira started scrolling through all the en-
tries of recovered remains in Brooks County.
Part of her prayed that every click would be
the one that gave her some answers, and part
of her still held out hope that maybe Christian
was alive somewhere and just couldn’t call. She
had lived for so long without an end that she
didn’t know what might happen if the end was
finally in front of her.
She did this until almost 1:00 A.M.
Exhausted, she decided to check one more
entry and call it a night. She clicked on the
link for NamUs #UP14039 and waited for the
images to load.
There was Speed Stick deodorant and some
disposable contacts.
There was a pair of boot-cut Ariat jeans,
size 33x34.
There was a riveted black leather belt, em-
bossed with a star pattern.
There was a black iPhone, cracked, and a
Mexican-flag bandanna.
There were two faded Pokémon game car-
tridges for a Nintendo DS.
But the moment she started feeling a heavi-
ness in her chest was when she saw the shoes.
Black and blue Nikes with neon green insoles,
size 11. The same ones she had bought at Bealls
and texted pictures of to her brother to make
sure he liked them.
Zaira didn’t even need to see the other items