What I Learned as an EMT at the Border Wall
The call came in around 10:45 a.m. Over the loudspeaker, the city’s 911 dispatcher instructed Medic 1 and Engine 3 to respond to the area west of the Mariposa port of entry for a 30-year-old female with traumatic injuries from a fall. As an EMT and a paramedic, I had treated many injuries, whether from vehicle rollovers or drive-by shootings, but this was the first patient I saw as a volunteer emergency responder at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lying supine on the strip of concrete that stretches parallel to the rusty metal fence was a young woman, whom I will call Araceli. (I agreed not to use real names as a condition of my research as an anthropologist and my care for patients as an EMT.) She had climbed a ladder on the other side of the steel border wall, but was unable to hold on to the structure and fell down from a height of about 24 feet. We were told that she had been lying there for two hours when a Border Patrol agent found her.
“Ay, mis piernas!” she shouted, grimacing from pain in her legs.
The rescuers acted quickly. At the direction of JLo, an energetic bilingual paramedic, they removed her sneakers and cut off the bottom part of her jeans to expose her fractured ankles; they cleaned Araceli’s feet with normal saline, and bandaged and splinted them using cardboard and tape. A cervical
