The Crystal Frontier

9. Río Grande, Río Bravo

fathered by the heights, descendant of the snow, the ice of the sky baptizes the river when it bursts forth in the San Juan mountains, breaks the virginal shield of the cordillera, abruptly becomes young, youthfully challenges the canyons and open cuts of land so that the stormy waters of May can pass on to sleepy June tides

it then loses altitude but gains the desert, wastes its maturity generously leaving liquid alms here and there amid the mesquite, parcels out its luxurious old age in fertile farmlands, and bequeaths its death to the sea

río grande, río bravo,

let me ask you:

did the thick aromatic cedars grow with you, since the dawn of creation, and then become the wood for your cradle? did the plants that roll across the desert merely announce your arrival, always defending you from the spines and bayonets of yucca and palo verde? were your loves always perfumed by the incense of the pine nut? did the white poplars always escort you, the spruces disguise you, the olive-colored waves of your immense pastures always rock you? was your death avoided by the nervous nursing of wild thistles, did the black fruits of the juniper announce it, the willows not weep your requiem? río grande, río bravo, did the creosote, the cactus, the sagebrush not forget you, thirsty for your passage, so obsessed by your next rebirth that they have already forgotten your death?

the river of shifting floors now travels back to its sources from the coastal plains, their fertile half-moon a cape of swamps; the valley drops anchor between the pine and the cypress until a flight of doves raises it again, carrying the river up to the steep tower from which the earth broke off the very first day, under the hand of God:

now God, every day, gives a hand to the rio grande, rio bravo, so it may rise to his balcony once more and roll along the carpets of his waiting room before opening the doors to the next chamber, the step that brings the waters, if they manage to scale the enormous ravines, back to the roofs of the world, where each plateau has its own faithful cloud that accompanies it and reproduces it like a mirror of air:

but now the earth is drying and the river can do nothing for it but plant the stakes that guide its course and that of its travelers, for everyone would get lost here if the Guadalupe mountains were not there to protect the river and drive it back to its womb, rio grande, rio bravo, back to the nourishing cave it never should have left for exile and death and the blinding hurricane that awaits it again to drown the river again and again …

Stopped for the night by the river’s edge, Benito Ayala was surrounded by men who looked like him, all between twenty and forty years old, all wearing straw hats, cheap cotton shirts and trousers, sturdy shoes for working in a cold climate, short jackets of various colors and designs.

They all raise their arms, spread them in a cross, clench their fists, silently offer their labor on the Mexican side of the river, hoping someone takes note of them, saves them, pays them heed. They prefer to risk being caught than not to advertise themselves, declare their presence: Here we are. We want work.

They all look alike, but Benito Ayala knows that each of them will cross the river with a different bagful of memories, an invisible knapsack in which only their own memories fit.

Benito Ayala closed his eyes to forget the night and to imagine the sky. Through his head passed a place. It was his village, in the mountains of Guanajuato. Not very different from many other Mexican mountain villages. A single street through which the highway passed. On both sides, houses, all one-story. And the shops, the hardware stores, the restaurant, the pharmacy. At the entrance to town, the school. At the end, the gas station with the best bathrooms in town, the best radio, the best chilled soft drinks. But to use the bathroom you’ve got to arrive by car. The staff knows the people from the vicinity. They order them to shit in the woods, they laugh at them.

Behind the houses, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, the creek. All the walls painted over with beer ads, propaganda for the PRI, announcements of the next or last elections. All things considered and despite everything, a good little town, a sweet village, a village with history and with what the past bequeaths its descendants to make a good life.

But the town didn’t live off any of that.

Benito Ayala’s village lived off the workers it sent to the United States and off the money they sent back.

The old and young, the few businesspeople, even the political powers became accustomed to living off that. The money was the principal, perhaps only income the village had. Why look elsewhere? The income represented hospital, social security, pension, maternity benefits all in one.

His eyes closed, his arms spread, and his fists clenched, Benito Ayala, stopped for the night on the Mexican side of the river, was remembering the generations of this village.

His great-grandfather, Fortunato Ayala, was the first to leave Mexico, fleeing the revolution.

“This war is never going to end,” he declared one day just before the battle of Celaya, fought there in Guanajuato. “The war is going to last longer than my life. When we all united against the tyrant Huerta, I stuck it out. But now that we’re going to be killing our own brothers, I think it’s better I leave.”

He went to California and tried to open a restaurant. The problem was that the gringos didn’t like our food. Putting chocolate into chicken nauseated them. The restaurant folded. He looked for a factory job because he said that if he was going to bend over to pick tomatoes he’d be better off in Guanajuato. But no matter where he went, the answer was always the same, as if they’d learned a catechism lesson.

“You people weren’t made for factory work. Look at you. You’re short. You’re close to the ground. Bend over, pick fruit and greens. That’s what God made you for.”

He rebelled. He made his way as best he could (mostly by hiding in freight cars and not paying) to Chicago, where he didn’t give a damn about the cold, the wind, the hostility. He found work in steel. Almost half the workers in the steel mill were Mexicans. He didn’t even have to learn English. He sent his first few dollars to Guanajuato. In those days, the mail service still worked and an envelope containing dollars reached its destination at the district capital of Purísima del Rincón, where his family went to pick it up. Twenty, thirty, forty dollars. A fortune in a country devastated by war, where every rebel faction printed its own money, the famous bilimbiques.

Before mailing his dollars, Fortunato Ayala would stare at them a long time, caressing them with his eyes, imagining them made of satin or silk instead of paper, so shiny and smooth. He held them up to a light and stared again, as if to assure himself of their authenticity and even of their green beauty, presided over by George Washington and the God’s eye of the Huicholes. What was the sacred symbol of Mexican Indians doing on the gringo dollars? In any case, the triangle of the divine eye meant protection and foresight, although fatality as well. George Washington looked like a protective grandma with his cottony little head and false teeth.

But no one protected Great-grandfather Fortunato when U.S. unemployment led to his and thousands of other Mexicans’ deportation in 1930. Fortunato departed in sorrow, too, because in Chicago he left behind a pregnant Mexican girl to whom he’d never offered anything but love. She knew Fortunato had a wife and children: all she wanted was his name, Ayala, and Fortunato, resigned to being generous, gave it to her, though somewhat fearfully.

He left. He established a tradition: the town would live off the money sent by its emigrant workers. His son, also named Fortunato, managed to get to California during World War II. He was a farmhand. He had entered legally, but his bosses told him his situation was precarious. He was just a step away from his own country. It would be easy to deport him if things started going badly. It was good he had no interest in becoming a citizen. It was good he loved his own country so much and wanted only to return to it.

“It’s good I’m a worker and not a citizen,” Fortunato the son answered, and that did not please his bosses. “It’s good I’m cheap and reliable, right?”

Then his bosses commented that the advantage of the Mexican worker was that he did not become a citizen and did not organize unions or go on strike, the way European immigrants did. But if this Ayala guy started getting uppity, he’d have to be isolated, punished.

“All of them get uppity,” said one of the employers.

“After a while they all find out about their rights,” said another.

It was for that reason that, when the war was over and the bracero program with it, Salvador Ayala, the young grandson of old Fortunato, found the border closed. Workers were no longer necessary. But the little village near Purísima del Rincón had got used to living off them. All its young men left to look for work up north. If they didn’t find any, the town would die, just as an infant abandoned in the hills by its parents would die. It was worth risking everything. They were the men, they were the boys. The strongest, the cleverest, the bravest. They went. The children, the women, the old folks stayed behind. They depended on the workers.

“Here there are men alive because there are men who leave. Nobody can say that there are men who die here because no one leaves.”

Salvador Ayala, Benito’s father, the son and grandson of the Fortunatos, became a wetback who crossed the river at night and was caught on the other side by the Border Patrol. It was a gamble for him and the others. But it was worth the risk. If the Texas farmers needed man power, the wetback was brought back to the border and left on the Mexican side. From here he would immediately be admitted — his back now dry — onto the Texas side, protected by an employer. But every year the doubt was repeated. Will I get in this time or not? Will I be able to send a hundred, two hundred dollars home?

The information made the rounds in Purísima del Rincón. From the little plaza to the church, from the sacristy to the tavern, from the creek to the fields of prickly pears and brambles, from the gas station to the tailor’s shop, everyone knew that at harvest time the laws were meaningless. Orders are given to deport no one. We can go. We can cross. The police don’t go near the protected Texas ranches even though they know all the workers there are illegal.

“Don’t worry. This thing doesn’t depend on us. If they need us, they let us in, with or without laws. If they don’t need us, they kick us out, with or without laws.”

No one had a worse time than Salvador Ayala, Benito’s father and the grandson of the first Fortunato. He caught the worst repression, expulsions, border cleanup operations. He was the victim of brutal whims. It was the boss who decided when to treat him as a contracted worker and when to hand him over to Immigration as a criminal. Salvador Ayala had no defense. If he alleged that the boss had given him work illegally, he implicated himself without having proof against his boss. The boss could manipulate the phony documents to prove that Salvador was a legal worker, if necessary. And to make him invisible and deport him, if necessary.

Now was the worst time. Benito — grandson of the younger Fortunato and the son of Salvador, descendant of the founder of the exodus, the first Fortunato — knew that any period is difficult, but this more than any other. Because there was still need. But also hatred.

“Did they hate you too?” Benito asked his father, Salvador.

“The way they’re going to hate you? No.”

He didn’t know the reasons, but he felt it. Stopping for the night on the Mexican side of the Río Bravo, he felt the fear of all the others and the hatred on the other side. He was going to cross, no matter what. He thought about all those who depended on him in Purísima del Rincón.

He stretched his arms in a cross, as far as he could, clenching his fists, showing that his body was ready to work, asking for a little love and compassion, not knowing if he was clenching his fists out of anger, as a challenge, or in resignation and despondency.

this was never the land without men: for thirty thousand years the people have been following the course of the río grande, río bravo, they cross the straits from Asia, they descend from the north, migrate south, seek new hunting grounds, in the process they really discover America, feel the attraction and hostility of the new world, don’t rest until they explore it all and find out if it’s friendly or unfriendly, until they reach the other pole, land that has a placenta of copper, land that will have the name of silver, lands of the hugest migration known to man, from Alaska to Patagonia, lands baptized by migration: accompanied, America, by flights and images, metaphors and metamorphoses that make the going bearable, that save the peoples from fatigue, discouragement, distance, time, the centuries necessary to travel America from pole to pole:

I will not speak their names, only those who know how to listen to silence know them,

I will not recount their deeds, only the dusty stars of the paths repeat them,

I will not recall their sufferings, the hurricane of birds shouts them,

I will not mention their calendars, they are all a river of ashes,

only the dog accompanied them, the only animal friendly to the Indian,

but then they tired of traveling so long, let loose their dogs in ferocious wild packs, and they stopped, decided that the center of the world was right here, where their feet were planted that instant, this was the center of the world, the land of the río grande, río bravo:

the world had sprung forth from the invisible springs of the desert waters: the underground rivers, the Indians say, are the music of God,

thanks to them the corn grows, the bean, the squash, and cotton, and each time a plant grows and yields its fruits, the Indian is transformed, the Indian becomes a star, oblivion, bird, mesquite, pot, membrane, arrow, incense, rain, smell of rain, earth, earthquake, extinguished fire, whistle in the mountain, secret kiss, the Indian becomes all this when the seed dies, becomes child and grandfather of the child, memory, bark, scorpion, buzzard, cloud, and table, broken vessel of birth, repentant tunic of death,

becomes a mask, ladder, rodent,

becomes a horse,

becomes a rifle,

becomes a target:

the Indian dreams and his dream becomes a prophecy, all the dreams of the Indians become reality, incarnate, tell them they are right, fill them with fear and for that reason make them suspicious, arrogant, jealous, proud but horrified of always knowing the future, suspicious that the only thing that becomes reality is that which should be a nightmare: the white man, the horse, the firearm,

oh, they had stopped moving, the great migrations were over, the grass grew over the roads, the mountains separated the people, languages were no longer understood, the people decided not to move anymore from where they were, from birth to death, but to weave a great mantle of loyalties, obligations, values in order to protect themselves

until the river caught fire and the earth moved again

Thin and pale but muscular and agile, he bragged that even though he lived on the border he never exposed himself to the sun. He had the pale complexion of his European ancestors, immigrants who were badly received, discriminated against, treated like garbage. Dan remembered his grandparents’ complaints. The savage discrimination to which they were subjected because they spoke differently, ate differently, looked different. They smelled different. The Anglos covered their noses when they passed those old people who were young but looked old, with their beards and black clothes smelling of onion and sauerkraut. But the immigrants persisted, assimilated, became citizens. No one would defend their nation better than they, Dan thought as he stared across to the Mexican side of the river.

“Seen Air Force yet?” his grandfather Adam Polonsky asked, and since Dan was too young to have seen World War II pictures, the old man gave him a video so he’d see how the air force was made up of ethnic heroes, not only Anglos but descendants of Poles, Italians, Jews, Russians, Irish. Never a Japanese, it’s true; he was the enemy. But never a Latino, a Mexican. A few blacks; they say the blacks did go to war. But never Mexicans. They weren’t citizens. They were cowards, mosquitoes that sucked the blood of the USA and ran back home to support their lazy countrymen.

“Seen Air Force yet? John Garfield. His real name was Julius Garfinkle. A kid from the ghetto, like you, the son of immigrants, Danny boy.”

They gave their lives in two world wars and also in Korea and Vietnam. They almost equaled the sacrifices of the Anglo-Saxon generations of the previous century, the conquerors of the West. Why didn’t anyone ever say so? Why did they still feel shame at having an immigrant past? Dan felt proud looking at a map and seeing that the USA had acquired more territory than any other power in the last century. Louisiana. Florida. Half of Mexico. Alaska. Cuba. Puerto Rico. The Philippines. Hawaii. The Panama Canal. A stream of little islands in the Pacific. The Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands! That’s where he’d like to go on vacation. Just for the name, so seductive, so sexy, so improbable. And for the challenge. To take a vacation in the Caribbean and not get a tan. To come back as white as his grandparents from Pomerania. To conquer color. Not let himself blacken for any reason, not by contact with a Negro or a Mexican, not by the sun.

He requested night duty for that secret reason, which he communicated to no one — he was afraid of being ridiculed. There was a cult of the tan. A man with such white skin even seemed suspect. “Are you sick?” another officer asked, and the only reason he didn’t punch him was because he knew the consequences of attacking an officer and Dan Polonsky did not want for anything in the world to lose his job — it satisfied him too much. From the moment when they positioned the equipment to detect the nighttime passage of illegal immigrants across the Rio Grande, Dan requested and was granted assignment to the details that saw the night world illuminated through movie-style robot glasses, night-scopes that spotted illegals as if they glowed, heat detectors that picked up the warmth of the human body … The bad thing was that so many Border Patrol agents, even if they were Texans, were of Mexican origin and Polonsky sometimes made mistakes; looking through his infrared goggles he would spot someone dark-skinned and it would turn out the person was carrying Border Patrol ID, even if he had the face of a wetback … The good thing was that it was easy to sucker those Tex-Mex agents, exploit their divided loyalties, demand they prove — Let’s see — that they were good Americans and not Mexicans in disguise… Polonsky laughed at them. He felt pity for them but manipulated them like laboratory rats.

One thing that did bother him, though, was the need to insist that the USA was always moral and innocent. Why did the politicians and the journalists pretend that they had no ambitions or personal interests, that they were always moral, innocent, good? That exasperated Dan Polonsky. Everybody had personal interests, ambitions, malice. Everybody wanted to be somebody. He stared intently through his night-vision glasses, which rendered the dry, hostile landscape of the river clear without the sun; he stared at an intoxicating red landscape, like a glass of Clamato and vodka. For Dan, the United States had saved the world from all the evils of the twentieth century: Hitler, the kaiser, Stalin, the Communists, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, Uncle Ho, Castro, the Arabs, Saddam, Noriega …

His list of enemies ran out, and all he was left with was one central, angry justification. It was necessary to save the southern border. The enemy was entering through there. Today the nation was being protected there, just as it was at Pearl Harbor or on the Normandy beaches. It was all the same.

There they were, provoking him indecently, grouped up on the Mexican side, showing their arms open in a cross, clenching their fists, saying to the other side: You need us. We come to the border because without us your crops would rot. There is no one to harvest them, there is no one to help in hospitals, take care of children, serve in restaurants unless we lend you our arms. It was a challenge, and Dan’s wife told him so with a brutal joke: “Listen, I need a nanny for the kid. Don’t tell me you’re going to turn Josefina in? Don’t be stubborn. The more workers that enter, the safer your job is, buster … I mean, darling.”

When his wife, Selma, became tedious, Dan would invent a trip to the state capital in Austin to lobby for more money and influence for the Border Patrol. He wanted to convince the legislators: If you don’t give us money, we can’t protect the country against the invisible Mexican invasion. He focused his night-vision glasses. There they were. Incapable of taking off their hats, as if even at night the sun were shining. He felt a furious need to urinate. He unzipped his fly and looked at himself in the phosphorescent light. His liquid was white, too, without color, like a flow of Chablis. He disliked the idea that grapes ripen and harden under the sun. But he consoled himself thinking of the farmworkers who harvested them in California.

He tried to resolve his contradiction. He wasn’t a man of contradictions. He detested the illegals. But he adored and needed them. Without them, damn it, there would be no budget for helicopters, radar, powerful infrared night lights, rocket launchers, pistols … Let them come, he said, shaking his penis to rid himself of the last pale drops. Let them keep on coming by the millions, he begged, to give meaning to my life. We have to go on being innocent victims, he said, absolutely certain that no matter how many times he shook the thing the last drop inevitably fell in his shorts.

the horse, the hog, the cattle came

steel and gunpowder came

the bloodhounds came

terror came

death came: fifty-four million men and women lived in the vast continent of the migrations, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, and four million north of the rio grande, rio bravo,

when the Spaniards came

fifty years later, only four million lived

on the whole continent and the lands of the river almost turned into what they said they had always been:

the land where man never was

or almost ceased to be, decimated by smallpox, measles, typhus,

where the survivors took refuge in the highlands, seeking help and a will to resist

when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado came one fine day with three hundred Spaniards, including a mere three women, poorly rationed, six Franciscans, fifteen hundred horses, and a thousand Indian allies brought from the lands of Cohahuila and Chihuahua, in search of the cities of gold, the passage to the fabulous orient, another Mexico and Peru:

they found nothing but the death that preceded them, but they left their sheep and goats, chicken and burros, plums, cherries, melons, grapes, peaches, and grain, scattered like their Castilian words, with the same facility, with the same fertility, on both banks of the río grande, río bravo

Every day she crossed the border from El Paso to Juárez to supervise the workers in a plant where television sets were assembled. Sometimes she wished she could talk about something else, but the job sucked out her brain, as her grandma Camelia said, and Margarita had long since decided that her only salvation was work. She found her dignity, her personality, in work; she respected herself and made herself respected. She had developed a hard, intransigent character: sure, there were nice girls, sweet, even sentimental, and also serious, professional workers, but all you needed was one bitch — and there was always more than one — to screw everything up and force the supervisor to be mean, put on a sour face, say harsh words …

Now, at night, she returned. It was Friday and all the women were going out to have fun. Margarita wouldn’t miss it — it was her only concession to relaxation, okay, to probable abandon, when she could look less uptight and go to the discos with the girls. After all, she could mix with the crowd there, where women were allowed to exercise some fantasy in their outfits. You saw them all: Rosa Lupe with her mania for making vows and dressing like a Carmelite, Marina, who was dying to see the ocean, the fool, as if any of them after they get here ever see their dreams come true— what illusions! — Candelaria, who must think she’s Frida Kahlo or something, dressed like a perfect peasant, and the one who didn’t dance anymore, Dinorah, mourning her kid who strangled himself because there was no one to take care of him — who asked her to be an unwed mother, the idiot, and live way the hell out in Buenavista? Better to cross the river every day, live in a suburban house in El Paso, even if it was in a black neighborhood. At least you were assimilated there. Let them see that she was assimilated — she didn’t want to be seen as a Mexican or a Chicana. She was a gringa, she lived in El Paso; in Chihuahua her name was Margarita but in Texas she was Margie. From her school days in El Paso on, she was told, Listen, you’re white, don’t let them call you Margarita, make them call you Margie. Pass for white— who’s going to find out? — don’t speak Spanish, don’t let them treat you like a Mexican, a Pocha, a Chicana.

“How do you get along with your family?”

“They’re unbelievable. I can’t go out on a date without my mother chasing after me asking, Is he from a good family? Is he from a good family? It makes me want to go out with a black so they have a fit.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Just go out with blonds. Never admit you’re Mexican.”

She rebelled by fighting to be a majorette at her high school. She told her parents that she was joining the school band, that they were going to play at the football games. But when they saw her in the fall wearing skimpy shorts, her legs bare, showing her thighs — thighs nothing! — showing her ass, the thing I sit on, said Grandma Camelia — she never said ass—showing you know what and tossing around a baton that looked like a phallus, they knew they’d lost her. She left home, and they warned her, No decent boy will want to marry you, you show your fanny in public, slut. But she didn’t have time for boyfriends, she didn’t think about them, she only went on Fridays to the Excalibur to dance the quebradita with men who were all the same — they all danced with their white hats on, they were ranchers, rich or poor— how could you tell when they were all identical? — and the longhaired guys who wore bands tied around their heads and fringed vests, those were tough guys or pimps, no one took them seriously. It was all just a respite, a way to lose yourself and forget the grandfather who didn’t make it, paralyzed in his wheelchair, sweet Grandma Camelia who never said ass, her parents who were around there someplace, her father working in Woolworth’s, her mother in another assembly plant, her brother making burritos at a Taco Bell, and her powerful, incredibly rich uncle, the self-made man who doesn’t believe in family charity. I’m supposed to support that pack of lazy relatives? Let them work the way I work, make their own fortune. What are they, crippled or something? Money only tastes good if you earn it, not when someone gives it to you, or as the gringos say, There’s no such thing as a free lunch. She, Margarita Margie, she was ambitious, disciplined, and what did it get her? Stuck there on the border, trying to get through that mess of a demonstration that’s interrupted everything, eager to leave Mexico every night, bored crossing over to Juárez every morning past iron skeletons, cemeteries of skyscrapers left half-built because of Mexico’s repeated bad luck: money’s all used up, the crisis has arrived, they’ve locked up the investor, the government functionary, the top dog, but not even then does the corruption stop, fucked-up country, screwed country, desperate country like a rat running on a wheel, deluding itself into thinking it’s going somewhere but never moving an inch. There’s nothing to be done though — that’s where her job is and she’s good at her job, she knows the assembly line from A to Z, from the chassis to the soldering to the automatic test to the cabinet to the screen to the warm-up to see if all the parts work and to make sure there’s no infant mortality, as the Italian assistant manager jokingly calls it. She knows about the alignment that insulates the television set and keeps the earth’s magnetic field from causing interference, what do you think of that? She tries that one out on her dance partners, who immediately lose the beat because she knows more than they do. They don’t like her and leave her to herself because she talks about testing the TV in front of mirrors, about the plastic case, the Styrofoam packing, and the final shipping box, the television set’s coffin, all ready for Kmart. The whole process takes two hours, eleven thousand TVs per day, not bad, huh? Does this chick know her shit or what? And if it was her job that day to check that each phase was carried out correctly, sticking green stars on the TVs with problems and blue stars on those with none, she deserved a great big gold star on her forehead, right on her forehead, like the good girls in nuns’ schools, like the drum majorettes who twirled their batons and showed their panties when they marched and disguised themselves as colonels to lead the parades and were whistled at by the boys, who called her Margie and said she’s not Pocha, not Chicana, not Mexican, she’s like you and me …

the shipwrecked, the defeated, the man dying of hunger and thirst, the man in rags,

from whom if not that man could come the impossible dream of the wealth of the river, disposable wealth as in Eden, golden apples within easy reach of hand and sin: who but a delirious shipwrecked man could make such an illusion about the río grande, río bravo believable?

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca of Extremadura, fleeing from the sleepless stone as most of the conquistadors fled (Cortés from Medellin, Pizarro and Orellana from Trujillo, Balboa from Jerez de los Caballeros, De Soto from Barcarrota, Valdivia from Villanueva de la Serena, men from the borderland, men from beyond the Duero), wanted, as they did, to transmute the stone of Extremadura into the gold of America, took ship at Sanlúcar in 1528 with an expedition of four hundred men bound for Florida, of whom forty-nine remained after a shipwreck in Tampa bay, wading through the swampy lands of the Seminoles, painfully marching along the Gulf coast to the Mississippi river, building boats to try the sea once again, squeezed in so tight they couldn’t move, now attacked by a storm from which only thirty escape alive, this new shipwreck in Galveston, the march west to the río grande, río bravo, defending themselves from Indian arrows, eating their horses and sewing up the hides to carry water, until they reach the lands of the Pueblo Indians north of the river,

but the distance, their ignorance of the land and the people are nothing compared with the hunger, the thirst, the exposure, the nights without cover, the days without shade, their bodies more and more naked, darker, until the fifteen Spaniards left can’t be told from the Pueblos, the Alabamas, and the Apaches:

only the black servant, Estebanico, is darker than the others, but his dreams are luminous, golden, he sees the cities of gold in the distance while Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca looks at himself in the mirror of his memory and tries to see himself reflected there as the hidalgo he was, the Spanish gentleman he no longer is; the only mirror of his person are the Indians he finds, he has become identical to them, but he misses the chance to be one of them, he is equal to them but does not understand the opportunity he has to be the only Spaniard who could understand the Indians and translate their souls into Spanish:

Cabeza de Vaca cannot understand a history of wind, an endless migratory chronicle that takes the Indian from the hot hunt of the plains to the tepee of the snows, from the tanned and naked body of summer to the body wrapped in blankets and skins of winter,

he does not want to rule over this world; nomadism attracts him but he denies it because here no one moves to conquer but simply to survive,

he does not understand the Indians, the Indians don’t understand him: they see the Spaniards as shamans, witch doctors, sorcerers, and Cabeza de Vaca acts out the only role assigned him, he becomes a cut-rate medicine man, he cures by means of suction, blowing of breath, laying on of hands, Our Fathers, and abundant signs of the cross,

but in reality he fights, horrified, against the loss, layer by layer, of the skin and clothes of his European soul, he clings to it, pays no heed to the advice of his internal voice: God brought us naked to know men identical to ourselves in their nakedness …

which God? Cabeza de Vaca wanders the corridors and bedrooms of the great houses of the Pueblos, sees a god he doesn’t recognize fleeing from floor to floor up hand ladders that at night it pulls up in order to isolate itself as it pleases from the moon, death, the stranger…

eight years of wandering, of involuntary pilgrimage, until he finds the compass of the río grande, río bravo and takes again the road from Chihuahua to Sinaloa and the Pacific and inland to Mexico City, where he and his comrades are received as heroes by Viceroy Mendoza and the conquistador Cortés:

only four survivors are left of the four hundred who departed Sanlúcar for Florida — Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and the black servant, Estebanico:

they are celebrated, they are questioned: where did you go,

what did you see, what do you promise?

Cabeza de Vaca, the two Spaniards, and the black tell not what they saw but what they dreamed,

they were saved to tell a mirage,

they were given turquoises and sumptuous skins torn from the backs of the strange gray cattle of the plains, the buffalo, they glimpsed the seven cities of gold of Cibola,

they heard word of the incalculable wealth of Quivira, they propagate the illusion of Eldorado, another Mexico, another Peru, beyond the río grande, río bravo,

an immortal dream of wealth, power, gold, happiness that compensates for all our sufferings, for the thirst, the hunger, and the shipwrecks and the Indian attacks,

they survived in order to lie,

death would have fused them with the truth of the desert,

poor, hostile, underpopulated lands,

life gave them the opulent wealth of lies,

they can fool everyone because they survived:

río grande, río bravo, frontier of mirages from then on

where men survive so that they can lie

Mr. Stud, that’s what they called him from the time he was a kid because of his shiny black hair like patent leather and his long eyelashes, but he called himself Mr. Shit because that’s how he always felt, growing up surrounded by the mountains of garbage in Chalco, dedicated since childhood to digging around in the disfigured mass of rotten meat, vomited beans, rags, dead cats, scraps of unrecognizable existence, giving thanks when something kept its form — a bottle, a condom — and could be brought home. An acrid cloud accompanied Serafín from his earliest days, and when he left the cloud of refuse, the smell was so sweet, so pure, that it made him dizzy and even a little nauseated: his country was the mud streets, the puddles, the children with screwed-up knees, unable to walk properly, stray dogs fucking, affirming their lives, telling us in barks that everything can survive despite everything, despite the pushers who get eight-year-old kids started on drugs, despite the extortionist cops who kill at night and then turn up by day to count the bodies and add them to the gigantic rolls of urban death, forever overcome by the fertility of the bitches, the rats, the mothers. Everything can survive because the government and the party organize corruption, allow it to flourish a bit, and then organize it as improvement so everyone will accept the notion that it’s the PRI or anarchy, which do you prefer? By the time hair had sprouted in Serafín’s armpits, he already knew everything about the evil of the city, no one could teach him anything. The problem was survival. How do you survive? By giving in to the masters of thievery, voting for the PRI, attending meetings like a jerk, seeing how the kings of the garbage got rich — what the fuck — or by saying no and joining a rock band that dares to sing about what a pisser it is to live in Mexico, D.F., in an underground network of rebel kids, or by speaking up even louder, refusing to vote for the PRI, and running the risk, as he and his family did, of having to take refuge in a half-built school, almost a thousand of them huddled together there, their shacks demolished by the cops, their miserable possessions stolen by the cops, all because they said, We’re going to vote the way we feel like voting?

At the age of twenty, Serafín headed north. He told his people, Get out of here, this country is beyond salvation, the PRI alone is more than enough reason to leave Mexico. I swear I’ll figure out a way to help you up north. I’ve got relatives in Juárez, guys, you’ll hear from me …

On this night of clenched fists and arms opened in a cross, Serafín, now twenty-six, expects nothing from anyone. He’s spent two years organizing the gang that crosses the border almost every night, thirty armed Mexicans who pile up wooden boxes, old scrap iron, roof tiles, and abandoned car bodies on the tracks of the Southern Pacific in New Mexico, change the switches, stop the train, steal everything they can to sell it in Mexico, then fill the cars with Mexican illegals. How many nights like this does Serafín Romero remember as he drives off in his truck from the train stopped in the desert, the truck filled with stolen goods, the train filled with peasants who need work, the stolen goods all brand-new, still in their packages, shiny — washing machines, toasters, vacuum cleaners, all brand-new, none turned yet to garbage that will end up on a mountain of trash in Chalco … Now he really is Mr. Stud, now he really has stopped being Mr. Shit. And Serafín Romero thought, leaving the stopped train behind, that the only thing missing for him to be a hero was a whinnying stallion … and oh yes, the night air of the desert was so dry, so clean.

no one lives more opulently in opulent Mexico City than Juan de Oñate, son of the conquistador Cristóbal of the same name, who discovered the Zacatecas mines, infinite hives of silver, a man who reached the Villa Rica de la Veracruz without a doubloon and now is able to bequeath to his son one of the greatest fortunes in the Indies, an inexhaustible vein of silver that allows Juan de Oñate to be named price regulator in the capital of New Spain, to roll through that city in the best carriages, surrounded by the best women, the best pages, to be attended in his palace by squads of majordomos and priests praying all the livelong day so Oñate will end up in heaven:

why does this man leave all his luxury, shake off his indolence, and go off to the unknown territories of the río grande, río bravo?

was he so stuffed with old silver that he wanted new gold?

did he want to owe nothing to his father?

did he want to begin like him, poor and defiant?

or did he want to show that there is no greater wealth than that which we cannot attain?

look at Juan de Oñate plant his black boot on the brown bank of the río rande, río bravo:

he’s fat, bald, moustachioed, a turtle with an iron shell and Dutch lace frills at his neck and wrists, a robust potbelly and weak feet and between the two the indispensable sac of his scrotum so he can pee whenever he pleases amid the conquests and battles, his indispensable silver helmet, topped off with a crest, proclaims:

he comes to the rio grande with a hundred and thirty soldiers and five hundred settlers, women, children, servants:

he founds El Paso del Norte and claims Spanish dominion over all things, from the leaves on the trees to the rocks and sand in the river: nothing stops him, the founding of El Paso is merely the springboard for his grand imperial dream,

fat, bald, moustachioed, fortified by steel and softened by lace, Juan de Oñate is a private contractor, a businessman who believed Cabeza de Vaca’s lies and paid no heed to the expeditions of Pray Marcos de Niza or to the death of the ill-fated, stubborn black Estebanico, who disappeared in a quest for his own lie, the cities of gold: Onate came not to find gold but to invent it, to create wealth, to discover what’s left to discover of the new world, the mines yet to find, the empires yet to be founded, the passage to Asia, the ports in both oceans: to realize his dream he embarks on a campaign of death, he reaches Acama, the center of the Indian world (center of creation, navel of the universe), and there he destroys the city, kills half a thousand men, three hundred women and children, and takes the rest captive: the boys between twelve and twenty will be servants: the twenty-five-year-old men will have a foot chopped off in public:

this is a matter of founding, in truth, a new world, of creating, in truth, a new order, where Juan de Oñate rules as he pleases, capriciously, not owing anyone anything, intent on losing everything as long as he’s infinitely free to impose his will, to be his own king and perhaps his own creator: here there was nothing before Oñate arrived, here there was no history, no culture: he founded them

but here there was distance, enormous distance, and distance, after all was said and done, defeated him

Polonsky told Mario that tonight more illegals than ever would try to cross the river, taking advantage of the squabble about the bridge, but Mario knew very well that as long as a poor country lived next to the richest country in the world, what they, the Border Patrol, were doing was squeezing a balloon: what you squeezed here only swelled out over there. There was no solution, and even though Mario was amused by his job at first, almost as if it were a kids’ game like hide-and-seek, exasperation was starting to get the better of him because the violence was increasing and because Polonsky was implacable in his hatred of Mexicans. If you wanted to stay on his good side, it wasn’t enough to act professionally; you had to show real hate and that was hard for Mario Islas, the son of Mexicans, after all, even though he was born on this side of the Rio Grande. But that fact aroused the suspicion of his superior, Polonsky. One night Mario caught him in the tavern saying that Mexicans were all cowards, and he was on the verge of punching him. Polonsky noticed. It’s likely he had deliberately provoked him, which is why he then took the chance to say, “Let me be frank, Mario, you Mexicans who serve in the Border Patrol have to show your loyalty more convincingly than we real Americans do—”

“I was born here, Dan. I’m as American as you. And don’t tell me the Polonskys came over on the Mayflower.”

“You’d better watch your mouth, boy.”

“I’m an officer. Don’t call me boy. I respect you. You respect me.”

“I mean, we’re white, Europeans, savvy?”

“Spain isn’t in Europe? I’m of Spanish descent, you’re of Polish descent, we’re Europeans …”

“You speak Spanish. The blacks speak English. That doesn’t make them English or you Spanish.”

“Dan, this conversation doesn’t make any sense.” Mario smiled, shrugging his shoulders. “Let’s just do our job well.”

“Not hard for me. For you it is.”

“You see everything like a racist. I’m not going to change you, Polonsky. Let’s just do our job well. Forget that I’m as American as you.”

During the long nights on the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, Mario Islas told himself that maybe Dan Polonsky was right to have his doubts about him. These poor people only came looking for work. They weren’t taking work away from anyone. Was it the Mexicans’ fault the defense plants were closed and there was more unemployment? They should have continued the war against the evil empire, as Reagan called it.

These doubts passed very quickly through Mario’s alert mind. The nights were long and dangerous and sometimes he wished the whole Rio Grande, Rio Bravo really were divided by an iron curtain, a deep, deep ditch, or at least a simple fence that would keep the illegals from passing. Instead, the night was filling with something he knew only too well, the trills and whistles of nonexistent birds, the sounds the coyotes, the men who guided illegals across, used to communicate with one another. Though they gave themselves away, sometimes it was all a trick and the coyotes used their whistles the way a hunter uses a decoy duck; the real crossing was taking place elsewhere, far from there, with no whistles at all.

Not this time. A boy with the speed of a deer came out of the river, soaked, dashed along the shore, and ran right into Mario — into Mario’s chest, his green uniform, his insignia, his braid, all his agency paraphernalia — hugging him, the two of them hugging, stuck together because of the moisture of the illegal’s body, because of the sweat of the agent’s. Who knows why they stayed there hugging like that, panting, the illegal because of his race to avoid the patrol, Mario because of his race to cut him off… Who knows why each rested his head on the other’s shoulder, not only because they were exhausted but because of something less comprehensible …

They pull apart to look at each other.

“Are you Mario?” said the illegal.

The agent said he was.

“I’m Eloíno. Eloíno, your godson. Don’t you remember? Sure, you remember!”

“Eloíno isn’t a name you can forget,” Mario managed to say.

“The son of your pals. I know you from your photos. They told me that if I was lucky I’d find you here.”

“If you were lucky?”

“You’re not going to send me back, are you, Godfather?” Eloino gave him an immense white smile like an ear of corn shining in the night between his wet lips.

“What do you think, you little bastard?” said Mario, furious.

“I’ll be back, Mario. Even if you catch me a thousand times, I’ll be back another thousand times. And one more for luck. And don’t call me a bastard, bastard.” He laughed again and again hugged Mario, the way only two Mexicans know how to hug each other, because the border guard couldn’t resist the current of tenderness, affiliation, machismo, confidence, and even trust that there was in a good hug between men in Mexico, especially if they were related …

“Godfather, everybody in our village has to come to work over the summer to pay their debts from winter. You know it. Don’t be a pain.”

“Okay. Sooner or later you’ll go back to Mexico the way all of you do. That’s the only advantage in this thing. You can’t live without Mexico. You don’t stay here.”

“This time you’re mistaken, Godfather. They told me it’s going to be harder than ever to get in. This time I’m staying, Godfather. What else is there to do?”

“I know what you’re thinking. Once upon a time all this was ours. It was ours first. It will be ours again.”

“Maybe you think that, Godfather, because you’re a man of sense, my mother says. I’m here so I can eat.”

“Get going, Godson. Just figure we never saw each other. And don’t hug me again, it hurts … I’m hurt enough already.”

“Thanks, Godfather, thanks.”

Mario watched the boy he’d never seen in his life run off. He was no godson or goddamn anything else, for that matter, this Eloino (what was his real name?). He’d read Mario’s name on his badge, that’s how he knew it, no mystery there; the enigma lay elsewhere, in the question of why they lived that fiction, why they accepted it so naturally, why two complete strangers had lived a moment like that together..

but the territories were lost even before they were won

the lands did not grow

the population did not increase

the missions grew

the long whip of the Franciscans grew, the whip of implacable colonizers moved by the philosophy of the common good above individual liberty, the letter arrives with the whip, the word of God is written in blood, faith arrives as well,

whip for the Pueblos because the brothers previously used it on themselves, doing penitence and inflicting it: but

the rebellions increased,

Indians against Indians, Pueblos against Apaches,

Indians against Spaniards, Pimas against whites,

until they culminated in the great rebellion of the Pueblos in 1680, it took them two weeks to liberate their lands, to destroy and sack, to kill twenty-one missionaries, burn the harvest, expel the Spaniards, and realize they could no longer live without them, their crops, their shotguns, their horses: Bernardo de Gálvez, a little more than twenty years old and with the energy of more than twenty men, established peace by means of a ruse:

the technique for subjugating the wild Indians of the Río Grande is to give them rifles made of soft metal with long, flimsy barrels so they’ll depend on Spain for their replacement parts, “The more rifles, the less arrows,” says the young, energetic Río Grande peacemaker and future viceroy of New Spain, Gálvez of Galveston,

let the Indians lose the ability to shoot arrows, which kill more Spaniards than badly used rifles:

“Better a bad peace than a pyrrhic victory/” says Gálvez for the ages,

but just plain peace requires inhabitants, and there are only three thousand in the río grande, río bravo, they invite families from Tenerife, they give them land, free entry, the title of hidalgo, fifteen families from the Canary Islands come to San Antonio, exhausted by the voyage from Santa Cruz to Veracruz, colonists come from Málaga, exhausted by the voyage to the Río Grande,

and the first gringos arrive:

the territories were lost before they were won

Juan Zamora had a nightmare, and when he woke up to find that what he’d dreamed was real, he went to the border and now he’s here standing among the demonstrators. But Juan Zamora doesn’t raise his fists or spread his arms in a cross. In one hand he carries a doctor’s bag. And under each arm, two boxes of medicine.

He dreamed about the border and saw it as an enormous bloody wound, a sick body, mute in the face of its ills, on the point of shouting, torn by its loyalties, and beaten, finally, by political callousness, demagoguery, and corruption. What was the name of the border sickness? Dr. Juan Zamora didn’t know and for that reason he was here, to relieve the pain, to give back to the United States the fruits of his studies at Cornell, of the scholarship Don Leonardo Barroso got for him fourteen years earlier, when Juan was a boy and lived through some sad loves …

On his white shirt, Juan wears a pin, the number 187 canceled by a diagonal line that annuls the proposition approved in California, denying Mexican immigrants education and health benefits. Juan Zamora had arranged an invitation to a Los Angeles hospital and had seen that Mexicans no longer went there for care. He visited Mexican neighborhoods. People were scared to death. If they went to the hospital — they told him — they would be reported and turned over to the police. Juan told them it wasn’t true, that the hospital authorities were human, they wouldn’t report anyone. But the fear was unbearable. The illnesses too. One case here, another there, an infection, pneumonia, badly treated, fatal. Fear killed more than any virus.

Parents stopped sending their children to school. A child of Mexican origin is easily identified. What are we going to do? the parents asked. We pay more, much, much more in taxes than what they give us in education and services. What are we going to do? Why are they accusing us? What are they accusing us of? We’re working. We’re here because they need us. The gringos need us. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t come.

Standing opposite the bridge from Juárez to El Paso, Juan Zamora remembers with a grimace of distaste the time he lived at Cornell. He doesn’t want his personal sorrows to interfere with his judgment about what he saw and understood then about the hypocrisy and arrogance that can come over the good people of the United States. Juan Zamora learned not to complain. Silently, Juan Zamora learned to act. He does not ask permission in Mexico to attend to urgent cases, he leaps over bureaucratic obstacles, understands social security to be a public service, will not abandon those with AIDS, drug addicts, drunks, the entire dark and foamy tide the city deposits on its banks of garbage.

“Who do you think you are? Florence Nightingale?”

The jokes about his profession and his homosexuality stopped bothering Juan a long time ago. He knew the world, knew his world, was going to distinguish between the superficial — he’s a fag, he’s a sawbones — and the necessary— giving some relief to the heroin addict, convincing the family of the AIDS victim to let him die at home, hell, even having a mescal with the drunk …

Now he felt his place was here. If the U.S. authorities were denying medical services to Mexican workers, he, Florence Nightingale, would become a walking hospital, going from house to house, from field to field, from Texas to Arizona, from Arizona to California, from California to Oregon, agitating, dispensing medicines, writing prescriptions, encouraging the sick, denouncing the inhumanity of the authorities.

“How long do you plan to visit the United States?”

“I have a permanent visa until the year 2010.”

“You can’t work. Do you know that?”

“Can I cure?”

“What?”

“Cure, cure the sick.”

“No need to. We’ve got hospitals.”

“Well, they’re going to fill up with illegals.”

“They should go back to Mexico. Cure them there.”

“They’re going to be incurable, here or there. But they’re working here with you.”

“It’s very expensive for us to take care of them.”

“It’s going to be more expensive to take care of epidemics if you don’t prevent diseases.”

“You can’t charge for your services. Did you know that?”

Juan Zamora just smiled and crossed the border.

Now, on the other side, he felt for an instant he was in another world. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of vertigo. Where would he begin? Whom would he see? The truth is he didn’t think they’d let him in. It was too easy. He didn’t expect things to go that well. Something bad was going to happen. He was on the gringo side with his bag and his medicines. He heard a squeal of tires, repeated shots, broken glass, metal being pierced by bullets, the impact, the roar, the shout: “Doctor! Doctor!”

the gringos came (who are they, who are they, for God’s sake, how can they exist, who invented them?)

they came drop by drop,

they came to the uninhabited, forgotten, unjust land the Spanish monarchy and now the Mexican republic overlooked,

isolated, unjust land, where the Mexican governor had two million sheep attended by twenty-seven hundred workers and where the pure gold of the mines of the Real de Dolores never returned to the hands of those who first touched that precious metal,

where the war between royalists and insurgents weakened the Hispanic presence,

and then the constant war of Mexicans against Mexicans, the anguished passage from an absolutist monarchy to a democratic federal republic:

let the gringos come, they too are independent and democratic,

let them enter, even illegally, crossing the Sabinas River, wetting their backs, sending the border to hell, says another energetic young man, thin, small, disciplined, introspective, honorable, calm, judicious, who knows how to play the flute: exactly the opposite of a Spanish hidalgo

his name is Austin, he brings the first colonists to the Río Grande, the Colorado, and the Brazos, they are the old three hundred, the founders of gringo texanity, five hundred more follow them, they unleash the Texas fever, all of them want land, property, guarantees, and they want freedom, protestantism, due process of law, juries of their peers, but Mexico offers them tyranny, catholicism, judicial arbitrariness

they want slaves, the right to private property,

but Mexico abolished slavery, assaulting private property, they want the individual to be able to do whatever the hell he wants

Mexico, even though it no longer has it, believes in the Spanish authoritarian state, which acts unilaterally for the good of all

now there are thirty thousand colonists of U.S. origin in the río grande, río bravo, and only about four thousand Mexicans,

conflict is inevitable: “Mexico must occupy Texas right now, or it will lose it forever,” says the Mexican statesman Mier y Terán,

Desperate, Mexico seeks European immigrants,

but nothing can stop the Texas fever,

a thousand families a month come down from the Mississippi, why should these cowardly, lazy, filthy Mexicans govern us? this cannot be God’s plan!

the pyrrhic victory at the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad: Santa Anna is not Gálvez, he prefers a bad war to a bad peace,

here are the two face-to-face at San Jacinto:

Houston, almost six feet tall, wearing a coonskin cap, a leopard vest, patiently whittling any stick he finds nearby, Santa Anna wearing epaulets and a three-cornered hat, sleeping his siesta in San Jacinto while Mexico loses Texas: what Houston is really carving is the future wooden leg of the picturesque, frivolous, incompetent Mexican dictator

“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” another dictator would famously say one day, and in a lower voice, another president: “Between the United States and Mexico, the desert”

Sitting on his Harley-Davidson on the Yankee side of the river, José Francisco watched with fascination the unusual strike on the Mexican side. It wasn’t a sit-down but a raising up — of arms displaying the muscle of poverty, the sinew of insomnia, the wisdom of the oral library of a people that was his own, José Francisco said with pride. Perched on his bike, the tip of his boot resting on the starter, he wondered if this time, with the fracas going on on the other side, both patrols might stop him because he looked so weird, with his shoulder-length hair, his cowboy hat, his silver crosses and medals, and his rainbow-striped serape jacket. His only credible document was his moon face, open, clean-shaven, like a smiling star. Even though his teeth were perfect, strong, and extremely white, they, too, were disturbing to anyone who didn’t look like him. Who’d never been to the dentist? José Francisco.

“You must go to the dentist,” he was told in his Texas school.

He went. He returned. Not a single cavity.

“This child is amazing. Why doesn’t he need dental work?”

Before, José Francisco didn’t know what to answer. Now he does.

“Generations of eating chiles, beans, and tortillas. Pure calcium, pure vitamin C. Not a single cherry Lifesaver.”

Teeth. Hair. Motorcycle. They had to find something suspicious about him every time in order to admit he wasn’t odd, simply different. Inside he bore something different but he could never be calm. He bore something that couldn’t happen on either side of the frontier but can happen on both sides. Those were hard things to understand on both sides.

“What belongs here and also there. But where is here and where is there? Isn’t the Mexican side his own here and there? Isn’t it the same on the gringo side? Doesn’t every land have its invisible double, its alien shadow that walks at our side the same way each of us walks accompanied by a second ‘I’ we don’t know?”

Which is why José Francisco wrote — to give that second José Francisco, who apparently had his own internal frontier, a chance. He wanted to be nice to himself but wouldn’t allow it. He was divided into four parts.

They wanted him to be afraid to speak Spanish. We’re going to punish you if you talk that lingo.

That was when he started singing songs in Spanish at recess, until he drove all the gringos, teachers and students, insane.

That was when no one talked to him and he didn’t feel discriminated against. “They’re afraid of me,” he said, he said to them. “They’re afraid of talking to me.”

That was when his only friend stopped being his friend, when he said to José Francisco, “Don’t say you’re Mexican; you can’t come to my house.”

That was when José Francisco achieved his first victory, causing an uproar in school by demanding that students— blacks, Mexicans, whites — be seated in the classroom by alphabetical order and not by racial group. He accomplished this by writing, mimeographing, and distributing pamphlets, hounding the authorities, making a pain in the ass of himself.

“What gave you so much confidence, so much spirit?”

“It must be the genes, man, the damn genes.”

It was his father. Without a penny to his name, he’d come with his wife and son from Zacatecas and the exhausted mines that had once belonged to Oñate. Other Mexicans lent him a cow to give the child milk. The father took a chance. He traded the cow for four hogs, slaughtered the hogs, bought twenty hens, and with the carefully tended hens, started an egg business and prospered. His friends who’d lent him the cow never asked him to return it, but he extended unlimited credit for as many “white ones” as they liked— out of modesty, no one ever referred to “eggs” because that meant testicles.

There, here. When he graduated from high school they told him to change his name from José Francisco to Joe Frank. He was intelligent. He would have a better time of it.

“You’ll be better off, boy.”

“I’d be mute, bro.”

To whom if not to himself was he going to say, as he gathered the eggs on his father’s little farm, that he wanted to be heard, wanted to write things, stories about immigrants, illegals, Mexican poverty, Yankee prosperity, but most of all stories about families, that was the wealth of the border world, the quantity of unburied stories that refused to die, that wandered about like ghosts from California to Texas waiting for someone to tell them, someone to write them. José Francisco became a story collector.

he sang about his grandparents, who had no birth date or last name,

he wrote about the men who did not know the four seasons of the year,

he described the long, luxurious meals so all the families could get together,

and when he began to write, at the age of nineteen, he was asked, and asked himself, in which language, in English or in Spanish? and first he said in something new, the Chicano language, and it was then he realized what he was, neither Mexican nor gringo but Chicano, the language revealed it to him, he began to write in Spanish the parts that came out of his Mexican soul, in English the parts that imposed themselves on him in a Yankee rhythm, first he mixed, then he began separating, some stories in English, others in Spanish, depending on the story, the characters, but always everything united, story, characters, by the impulse of José Francisco, his conviction:

“I’m not a Mexican. I’m not a gringo. I’m Chicano. I’m not a gringo in the USA and a Mexican in Mexico. I’m Chicano everywhere. I don’t have to assimilate into anything. I have my own history.”

He wrote it but it wasn’t enough for him. His motorcycle went back and forth over the bridge across the Río Grande, Río Bravo, loaded with manuscripts. José Francisco brought Chicano manuscripts to Mexico and Mexican manuscripts to Texas. The bike was the means to carry the written word rapidly from one side to the other, that was José Francisco’s contraband, literature from both sides so that everyone would get to know one another better, he said, so that everyone would love one another a little more, so there would be a “we” on both sides of the border.

“What are you carrying in your saddlebags?”

“Writing.”

“Political stuff?”

“All writing is political.”

“So it’s subversive.”

“All writing is subversive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About the fact that lack of communication is a bitch. That anyone who can’t communicate feels inferior. That keeping silent will screw you up.”

The Mexican agents got together with the U.S. agents to see just what it was all about, what kind of a problem this longhaired guy on the bike was creating, the one who crossed the bridge singing “Cielito Lindo” and “Valentín de la Sierra,” his bags filled, they hoped, with counterfeit money or drugs, but no, it was just papers. Political, he said? Subversive, he admitted? Let’s see them, let’s see them. The manuscripts began to fly, lifted by the night breeze like paper doves able to fly for themselves. They didn’t fall into the river, José Francisco noted, they simply went flying from the bridge into the gringo sky, from the bridge to the Mexican sky, Ríos’s poem, Cisneros’s story, Nericio’s essay, Siller’s pages, Cortázar’s manuscript, Garay’s notes, Aguilar Melantzón’s diary, Gardea’s deserts, Alurista’s butterflies, Denise Chávez’s thrushes, Carlos Nicolás Flores’s sparrows, Rogelio Gómez’s bees, Cornejo’s millennia, Federico Campbell’s fronteras … And José Francisco happily helped the guards, tossing manuscripts into the air, to the river, to the moon, to the frontiers, convinced that the words would fly until they found their destination, their readers, their listeners, their tongues, their eyes …

He saw the demonstrators’ arms open in a cross on the Ciudad Juárez side, saw how they rose to catch the pages in the air, and José Francisco gave a victory shout that forever broke the crystal of the frontier …

the frontier is not yet the río grande, río bravo, it’s the Nueces river, but the gringos say nueces — nuts — to a frontier

that keeps them from carrying out their manifest destiny:

to reach the Pacific, create a continental nation, occupy California:

the railroad cars full, the wagons, people on horseback, cities packed with pioneers, seeking deeds to the new lands, thirty thousand gringos in Texas on the day of the Alamo, a hundred and fifty thousand ten years later, the day of the War, Manifest Destiny, dictated by the protestant God to his new Chosen People, to conquer an inferior race, an anarchic republic, a caricature of a nation that owes money to the whole world, with a caricature army, with only half of the forty thousand men it says it has, and those twenty thousand, almost all of them, Indians marched down from the hills, conscripts, armed with useless English muskets, dressed in ragged uniforms:

“There’s a Mexican garrison that hasn’t been able to show itself in Matamoros because the soldiers have no clothes” was the American army any better?

no, say the enemies of Polk’s war, they only have eight thousand men, cannon fodder who have never been in a fight, disloyal criminals, deserters, mercenaries …

let them set us on the gringos, they shout from the Mexican bank of the río bravo in Chihuahua and Coahuila, we’ll beat them with our natural allies, fever and the desert, with the freed slaves who join up with us,

do not cross the río grande, say the American enemies of Polk’s war, this is a war to help the slave owners, to expand the southern territories:

río grande, río bravo, Texas claims it as its border,

Mexico rejects it, Polk orders Taylor to seize the bank of the river, the Mexicans defend themselves, there are deaths, the war has begun,

“Where?” demands Abraham Lincoln in Congress, “will someone tell me exactly where Mexico fired the first shot and occupied the first piece of land?”

General Taylor laughs: he himself is the caricature of his army, he wears long white filthy trousers, a moth-eaten dress coat, and a white linen sash, he’s short, thickset, as round as a cannonball,

and he laughs seeing how the Mexican cannonballs bounce into the American encampment at Arroyo Seco, only one Mexican cannon shot in a thousand hits the mark: his guffaw is sinister, it divides the very river, from then on everything is a stroll, to New Mexico and California, to Saltillo and to Monterrey, from Vera Cruz to Mexico City: Taylor’s army loses the torn trousers of its commander and wins the buttoned-up dress coat of Winfield Scott, the West Point general the only thing that doesn’t change is Santa Anna, the man with fifteen nails (he lost five when he lost his leg), the cockfighter, the Don Juan, the man who can lose an entire country laughing if his reward is a beautiful woman and a destroyed political rival,

the United States? I’ll think about that tomorrow

he chews gum, buries his leg with full honors, orders equestrian statues from Italy, proclaims himself Most Serene Highness, Mexico puts up with him, Mexico puts up with everything, who ever said that Mexicans have the right to be well-governed?

looted country, sacked country, mocked, painful, cursed, precious country of marvelous people who have not found their word, their face, their own destiny, not manifest but uncertain human destiny, to sculpt slowly, not to reveal providentially: the destiny of the underground river, río grande, río bravo, where the Indians heard the music of God

To his cousin Serafín he said, when Serafín turned up still smelling like a garbageman, that here in the north there were jobs for everyone, so Serafín and Gonzalo were not going to engage in a territorial fight, especially as they were cousins and especially as they were working to help their countrymen. But Gonzalo warned him that to be a bandit on the other side of the border is another thing, it’s dangerous— nobody’s tried it since Pancho Villa — but being a guide like Gonzalo, what they call a coyote in California, is a job that’s practically honorable, it’s one of the liberal professions, as the gringos put it: meeting with his colleagues, some fourteen or so young men like him, around twenty-two years old, sitting on the hoods of their parked cars, waiting for tonight’s clients, not those deluded types in the demonstration over at the bridge but the solid clients who will take advantage of this night of confusion on the border to cross over then and not by day, as the coyotes recommend. They know the Río Grande, Río Bravo by heart, El Paso, Juárez: they don’t go where it’s easiest to wade across, the river’s narrow waist, because that’s where the thieves lie in wait, the junkies, the drug pushers. Gonzalo Romero even has a flotilla of rubber rafts to carry people who can’t swim, pregnant women, children, when the river really does get grand, really requires bravery. Now it’s calm and the crossing will be easy; besides, everyone’s distracted by the famous demonstration— they won’t even notice. We’re going to cross at night, we’re professionals, we only get paid when the worker reaches his destination, and then — Gonzalo told his cousin Serafín — we still have to split the profits with drivers and people who run safe houses, and sometimes there are telephone and airplane expenses. You should see how many want to go to Chicago, to Oregon because there’s less checking there, less persecution, no laws like Proposition 187. An entire village in Michoacán or Oaxaca chips in their savings so one of them can pay a thousand dollars and fly to Chicago.

“How much do you make out of all this, Gonzalo?”

“Well, about thirty dollars a person.”

“You’d be better off in my gang,” laughed Serafín. “I swear by your mother: that’s the future.”

The confusion of the cold, urgent night allows Gonzalo Romero to bring fifty-four workers across. But it was a bad night, and later in his house in Juárez with Gonzalo’s children and wife, all weeping, cousin Serafín noted that when everything seems too easy you’ve got to be on guard, for sure something’s going to fuck up, it’s the law of life and anyone who thinks everything’s going to go right for him all the time is a jerk — meaning no offense to poor cousin Gonzalo.

It was as if that night the Texas employers, stirred up by the raised-arms demonstration and by the sight of the fifty-four people gathered by Gonzalo Romero next to a gas station on the outskirts of El Paso, had agreed to screw the people who’d come across. From their truck, the contractors first said that there were too many, that they couldn’t contract for fifty-four wetbacks, although they’d take anyone who would work for a dollar an hour even though they’d said they’d pay two dollars an hour. All fifty-four raised their hands, and then the contractors said, Still too many — let’s see how many will come with us for fifty cents an hour. About half said they would, the other half got mad and began to argue, but the employer told them to get back to Mexico fast because he was going to call the Border Patrol. The rejected men started insulting the contracted workers, who in turn called them stinking beggars and told them to hurry up and get out because there was a lot of bad feeling against them in these parts.

Romero began to gather all of them together — no way. He wouldn’t charge them, he only charged when he delivered the worker to the boss. That’s why he was respected on the border. He kept his word, he was a professional. Listen, he told them, I’m even teaching my kids how to be guides when they grow up — coyotes, as we’re called in California — that’s how honorable I think my miserable job is …

It was then that the desert night filled with the echo of a storm that Gonzalo Romero tried to locate in the sky; but the sky was clear, starry, outlining the black silhouettes of the poplars, perfumed by the incense of the piñons. Was the tremor coming from deep within the earth? Gonzalo Romero thought for an instant that the crust of mesquite and creosote was the armor plating of this plain of the Rio Grande and that no earthquake could break it up; no, the roar, the tremor, the echo arose from another armor plate, one of asphalt and tar, the straight line of the highways of the plain, the wheels of the motorcycles calcifying the desert, motors ablaze, as if the bikes’ lights were fire and their riders warriors in an unmentionable horde. Gonzalo Romero and the group of workers saw the arms tattooed with Nazi insignia, the shaved heads, the sweatshirts proclaiming white supremacy, the hands raised in the Fascist salute, the fists clutching cans of beer, twenty, thirty men, sweating beer and pickles and onion, who suddenly surrounded them. They formed a circle of motorcycles, screaming, White supremacy, Death to the Mexicans, Let’s invade Mexico, might as well begin now, we came to kill Mexicans. And at point-blank range each fired his high-powered rifle at Gonzalo Romero, at the twenty-three workers. Then, when they were all dead, one of the skinheads got off his bike and checked the bleeding head of each body with the tip of his boot. They’d aimed well, at the Mexicans’ heads, and one of them put his cap back on his bare head and said to no one in particular, to his comrades, to the dead, to the desert, to the night: “Today I really had the death faucet wide open!”

He showed his teeth. On the inside of his lower lip was tattooed WE ARE EVERYWHERE.

and then disguised as a French lawyer, Benito Juárez sent Santa Anna packing, was attacked by the French, and took refuge in El Paso del Norte because the French left him nothing but that bend in the río bravo, río grande, to defend his Mexican republic:

he arrived with his black coach and his wagons filled with papers, letters, laws, he arrived with his black cape, his black suit, his black top hat, he himself as dark as the most ancient language, like the forgotten Indian language of Oaxaca, he himself as dark as the most ancient time, when there was no yesterday or tomorrow,

but he didn’t know that: he was a liberal Mexican lawyer, an admirer of Europe betrayed by Europe who had now taken refuge in the bend of the río bravo, río grande, with no other relics for his exodus than the papers, the laws he’d signed, identical to the laws of Europe,

Juárez looks at the other side of the river, at Texas and its growing prosperity, there where Spain left only the footprints of Cabeza de Vaca in the sand and Mexico, translating that name word for word, was only a cow’s head buried in the sand,

gringo Texas founded commercial towns, attracted immigrants from all over the world, crisscrossed its territory with railroads, increased its wheat and cattle, and received the gift of the devil, oil wells, with no need to make the sign of the cross:

“Texas is so rich that anyone who wants to live poorly will have to go elsewhere, Texas is so vigorous that anyone who wants to die will have to go elsewhere”:

look at me, Juarez says from the other side of the river, I have nothing and I even forgot what my grandparents had, but I want to be like you, prosperous, rich, democratic, look at me, understand me, my responsibility is different, I want us to be governed by laws, not tyrants, but I have to create a state that will see to it that laws are respected but that won’t succumb to despotism:

and Texas did not look at Juárez, it only looked at Texas, and Texas only saw two presidents cross the bridge to visit and congratulate each other, William Howard Taft, fat as an elephant, seeing him walk on the bridge made everyone fearful the bridge wouldn’t hold, immense, smiling, with roguish eyes and ringmaster moustaches, Porfirio Díaz light and thin under the weight of his myriad medals, an Indian from Oaxaca, sinewy at the age of eighty, with a white moustache, furrowed brow, wide nostrils, and the sad eyes of an aged guerrilla fighter, the two of them congratulating themselves that Mexico was buying merchandise and that Texas was selling it, that Mexico was selling land and that Texas was buying it,

Jennings and Blocker more than a million acres of Coahuila, the Texas Company almost five million acres in Tamaulipas, William Randolph Hearst almost eight million acres in Chihuahua,

they didn’t see the Mexicans who wanted to see Mexico whole, wounded, dark, stained with silver, and cloaked in mud, her belly petrified like that of some prehistoric animal, her bells as fragile as glass, her mountains chained to one another in a vast orographic prison,

her memory tremulous: Mexico

her smile facing the firing squad: Mexico

her genealogy of smoke: Mexico

her roots so old they decided to show themselves without shame

her fruit bursting like stars

her songs breaking apart like piñatas,

the men and women of the revolution reached this point,

from here they departed, on the bank of the río grande, río bravo, but before marching south to fight

they stopped, showing the gringos the wounds we wanted to close, the dreams we needed to dream, the lies we had to expel, the nightmares we had to assume:

we showed ourselves and they saw us,

once again we were the strangers, the inferiors, the incomprehensible, the ones in love with death, the siesta, and rags, they threatened, disdained, didn’t understand that to the south of the río grande, río bravo, for one moment, during the revolution, the truth we wanted to be and share with them shone, different from them, before the plagues of Mexico returned, the corruption, the abuse, the misery of many, the opulence of a few, disdain as a rule, compassion the exception, equal to them:

will there be time? will there be time? will there be time? will there be time for us to see each other and accept each other as we really are, gringos and Mexicans, destined to live together at the border of the river until the world gets tired, closes its eyes, and shoots itself, confusing death with sleep?

What had Leonardo Barroso been talking about a minute before? He was almost spitting into the cellular phone, demanding compensation for the losses these gangs of thieves— these end-of-the-millennium Pancho Villas! — attacking trains were causing him, piling up debris outside the terminals, robbing shipments from the assembly plants, smuggling in workers: did Murchinson know what it cost to stop a train, investigate if there were illegals on it, fuck up the schedules, replace stolen merchandise, get the orders to their destinations on time — in a word, to fulfill contracts? What had Leonardo Barroso been thinking about a minute before? The threat had been repeated that morning. Over the cellular phone. Territories had to be respected. Responsibilities as well. In matters related to drug trafficking, Mr. Barroso, only Latin Americans are guilty, Mexicans and Colombians, never Americans: that was the crux of the system. In the United States there can never be a drug king like Escobar or Caro Quintero; the guilty parties are those who sell drugs, not those who buy them. In the United States there are no corrupt judges — they’re your monopoly. There are no secret landing strips here, we don’t launder money here, Mr. Barroso, and if you think you can blackmail us in order to save your skin and be proclaimed a national hero in the process, it’s going to cost you plenty because there’s millions and millions involved here — you know that. Your whole way of operating is to invade territories that aren’t yours, Mr. Barroso; instead of being content with the crumbs, you want the whole feast, Mr. Barroso … and that just cannot happen …

What did Leonardo Barroso feel a moment before? Michelina’s hand in his as he feverishly sought the girl’s familiar heat without finding it, as if a bird, long caressed and consoled, had suffocated, dead from so much tenderness, tired of so much attention …

Where was Leonardo Barroso a minute before?

In his Cadillac Coupe de Ville, being driven by a chauffeur supplied by his partner Murchinson, he and Michelina sitting in back, the chauffeur driving slowly to get past the booths and obstacles U.S. Immigration had set up so immigrants couldn’t run through and cause a stampede, Michelina making who knows what small talk about the Mexican chauffeur Leandro Reyes who crashed in that tunnel in Spain, crashed into that foolish nineteen-year-old boy driving in the other direction …

Where was Leonardo Barroso a minute later?

Riddled with bullets, shot five times by a high-powered weapon, the driver dead at the wheel, Michelina miraculously alive, screaming hysterically, clutching her hands to her throat, as if she wanted to strangle her shouts, immediately remembering her tears, wiping them in the crook of her elbow, staining the sleeve of her Moschino jacket with mascara.

Where was Juan Zamora two minutes later?

At Leonardo Barroso’s side, answering the urgent call— Doctor! Doctor! — he’d heard as he crossed the international bridge. He looked for vital signs in the pulse, the heart, the mouth — nothing. There was nothing to do. It was Juan Zamora’s first case in American territory. He didn’t recognize in that man with his brains blown out the benefactor of his family, the protector of his father, the powerful man who sent him to study at Cornell…

What did Rolando Rozas do three minutes later?

He spoke into his cellular phone to transmit the bare news — job done, no complications, zero errors — then passed his sweaty hand over his airplane-colored suit, as Marina called it, adjusted his tie, and began to stroll, as he did every night, through his favorite restaurants, through the bars and streets of El Paso, to see what new girl might turn up.

now Marina of the Maquilas crosses the bridge over the rio grande, rio bravo, and she’s holding the arm of a tiny old lady wrapped in shawls, protecting her, an unreadable old woman under the palimpsest of infinite wrinkles that cross a face like the map of a country lost forever,

Dinorah asked her this favor, take my grandma to the other side of the bridge, Marina, deliver her to my uncle Ricardo on the other side, he doesn’t want to come back to Mexico ever again, it makes him sad, makes him afraid, too, that they might not let him back in,

take my grandma to the other side of the río grande, río bravo, so my uncle can take her back to Chicago,

she only came to comfort me on the death of the kid, she can’t do it alone, and not just because she’s almost a hundred years old

but because she’s spent so much time living as a Mexican in Chicago that she forgot Spanish a long time ago and never learned English,

she can’t communicate with anyone

(except with time, except with the night, except with oblivion, except with mongrels and parrots, except with the papayas she touches in the market and the coyotes that visit her at dawn, except with the dreams she can’t tell anyone, except with the immense reserve of that which is not spoken today so it can be said tomorrow)

but on the other side, trying to cross the bridge amid great confusion, two naked men approach the immigration kiosks, a fifty-year-old, silvery hair, athletic physique but well-fed, dragging a scrawny simpleton by the arm, the simpleton screwed up beyond all screwing up, just skin and bones, dark, but the two of them together, pleading, they seem like lunatics, they didn’t let us leave through San Diego and come in through Tijuana, or leave through Caléxico and come in through Mexicali, or leave through Nogales Arizona and come in through Nogales Sonora,

where are they going to send us?

to the sea?

are we going to swim our way to Mexico?

with nothing on, stripped, cleaned out?

give us a place to rest, in the name of heaven!

don’t you realize that behind us, pursuing us, armed garbage,

death with deodorant, is approaching and that toward us is advancing once again the dead earth, the unjust earth, the law that says: Shoot fugitives in the back!

we want to enter to tell the story of the crystal frontier before it’s too late,

let everyone speak,

speak, Juan Zamora, bent over, attending a corpse,

speak, Margarita Barroso, showing your uncertain identity so as to cross the border,

speak, Michelina Laborde, stop screaming, think about your husband, the abandoned boy, Don Leonardo Barroso’s heir, imagine yourself, Gonzalo Romero, that the skinheads didn’t murder you but instead the coyotes that now surround your corpse and the corpses of the twenty-three workers in a circle of inseparable hunger and astonishment,

get pissed off, Serafín Romero, and tell yourself you’re going to attack as many damn trains as cross your path so that war can return to the frontier again, so that it’s not only the gringos who attack,

adjust your night-vision glasses, Dan Polonsky, hoping that the strikers dare to take a step forward,

pretend you’re stupid, Mario Islas, so that your godson Eloíno can run inland, wetback, young, breathless, intending never to return,

raise your arms, Benito Ayala, offer your arms to the river, to the earth, to everything that needs your strength to live, to survive,

toss the papers in the air, José Francisco, poems, notes, diaries, novels, let’s see where the wind takes the sheets of paper, let’s see where they fall, on which side, this one or that one,

to the north of the río grande,

to the south of the río bravo,

toss the papers as if they were feathers, ornaments, tattoos to defend them from the inclemency of the weather, clan markings, stone collars, bone, conch, diadems of the race, waist and leg adornments, feathers that speak, José Francisco,

to the north of the río grande,

to the south of the río bravo,

feathers emblematic of each deed, each battle, each name, each memory, each defeat, each triumph, each color,

to the north of the río grande,

to the south of the río bravo,

let the words fly,

poor Mexico,

poor United States,

so far from God,

so near to each other