BORDER TOWN.

* Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the Texas border at Brownsville, the road is hard, dry, and littered with white dust, a byproduct of the neighborhood hydrofluoric-acid plant. This white dust is spread on the roads to keep the dirt down, but little bare feet suffer from contact. "If that plant were to explode, a virulent plume would rise a half mile into the sky and spread a deadly poison--the winds, which bring rain, would also bring death to all in this vicinity," says Mike, an old friend and priest I am visiting here. He stops the car, removes the kid gloves he has been wearing since I arrived, and throws them into the back seat next to me.

Half-naked children scurry across the road followed by the kind of little brown mutts found roaming the streets of cities like Mumbi, Saigon, and Matamoros. These mongrels breed at will and after hundreds of years, begin to look alike. Cardboard, tin, and wood dwellings extend beyond the horizon, bordered by a runoff canal from one of the hundred maquiladoras (a term used to describe the tariff-free factories along the border) that line "Chemical Row." The canal sparkles with industrial waste.

Low wages ($1-$3 a day), tax exemptions, and lax environmental regulations attracted companies to the border long before NAFTA. Southern Mexicans have flocked to the plants in search of a better life. Because a city built for fifty thousand is now home to ten times that number, much of the drinking water in Matamoros comes from the open canals that run near the hydrofluoric-acid, pesticide, and furniture-making plants. Solid toxic waste is burned openly.

In 1993, sixteen Texan families whose children were stillborn with a rare condition known as anencephaly (the partial or complete absence of a brain) sued forty maquiladoras for plant emissions that are thought to be a factor in the high rates of this condition--as well as juvenile cancer and respiratory and skin problems--on both sides of the Rio Grande. The companies settled out of court for $17 million. A similar suit filed in the United States on behalf of Matamoran families is pending. As a result of the suits, some of the worst corporate offenders have simply abandoned the factories.

We visit the home of Evangelina and her children, Miguel and Maria. As we sit in a circle in the yard, a soccer ball flies over the fence. Miguel places it in my hands. I roll the ball toward his feet and he kicks it back into my hands. It makes a kind of hollow "poink" sound across the dirt. When he next kicks it out of my reach I feel I should retrieve it, saving him the effort, but I am too slow. This child's small eyes pull me into the consciousness of a human whose depth is no less than my own, no less than any human, and who probably will never have the time to explore the beauty and mystery of life because it will be short and consumed with survival. What he will suffer only God and his fellow Matamorans can understand. Again he kicks, and after a short chase returns the ball to my hands. This child is alive! I think stupidly. All that have the gift of life will fight to keep it.

The will to live is the divine in this universe. We must recognize this to grow into our inheritance as humans; we must respect it or claim respect for nothing. The will to live brought these Matamorans from farmland to wasteland. Their desire for a better life now chains them to the maquiladoras. The factories are harnessing and exploiting nothing less than that will, that most precious gift of God, most revealing of his revelations.

On Sunday in Matamoros, Mike paused in his celebration of the Mass to explain to me in English what those present are offering as prayers. Most pray for their families--in whom they find the strength to carry on. Little children dance around the gathering. A dust devil whirls up on the street near us and reaches into the sky like a long forbidding finger. I watch it whirl off into the nothing whence it came.

Chris Wright, S.M., is a scholastic with the Marist Fathers of the Atlanta Province.