Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (17 page)

“
Teodoro, te adoro,”
she said. This was a timeworn pun among Spanish speakers.

“
I adore you, too,”
I said, laughing with the joke.
“What's your name?”

“
I’m Marisol.”

“
That's a lovely name.”

“
Are you American?”

The question caught me off guard; of course I was.
“What do you mean?”

“
Nothing. Oh, you know, a citizen.”

“
Oh, yeah, sure. Born and raised. Though, actually, I was bom outside the country on a military base
...” But something had caught her attention. It was Martín, holding up two fingers and pointing at his beer bottle and then at the two of us. She blushed slightly; it was becoming on her.

“
What’s he saying?”

“
He is buying two beers for you and me,”
she said. I winked facetiously at Martín. Marisol opened two more beers and drank hers from the bottle.

“
Do you have wishes?”
she asked.

“
What do you mean?”

“
You know, things you wish would come true?”

“
Well, sure I do.”
I take such questions too literally; I started giving it some thought, but she interrupted.

“
I’ll tell you what my wishes are. ... You know what I would like? What I would prize most of all? A green card!”
She beamed at me, at the thought.

But my bubble suddenly burst. Why had she said that? I had been enjoying the illusion that this was all about me, about her, about pure attraction. The idea that I might be sexy by virtue of being a citizen deflated me; who wants to be merely a means to an end? Not that I could blame her, if that was her agenda; being illegal changes everything. I understood that. But still ...

“
Ted—isn’t that your name? What is it you do?”

“
I’m a writer. ”

“
Ooh, a writer! You don’t say! Someday, will you write me a poem?”

Someday, I said, I would do that. She would want a love poem, and that’s what I would write. A sonnet, maybe, or something shorter, of an unexpected love in an unlikely place, of a poisoned circumstance.

*

The parts of Los Angeles we frequented were unlike any place I have ever been. Los Angeles, I had read, was after Lima, Peru, the largest Spanish-speaking city on any coast of the Americas. We always had a choice of several Spanish-language radio stations, we picked up Spanish-speaking television stations as clearly as the others, and we were offered Winston cigarettes and a host of other products on billboards in Spanish. There was no need ever, really, to speak English. Food stores carried everything they did in Mexico, and more. In a way, you could feel right at home.

The hospitality of Los Angeles caused problems for my friends, though. Word on the street was that it was so easy for a Mexican to blend in here, so easy for him or her to feel at home, that far too many had come. The labor market for undocumenteds was glutted. This observation was borne out by our experience: despite the many connections of Martín and the uncles, pavement pounding, and a willingness to do almost anything, my friends could find no jobs at all. Our first weeks in the city were a time of waiting, of killing time, of sloth. All morning, usually, we would watch TV—inane Mexican variety shows, breathless soap operas, gory news programs. It was one of the most difficult parts of my travels, much harder than picking oranges. I read welding manuals, English texts, old magazines, newspapers, the thick Mexican comic books known as
novelas
—anything to keep from watching TV.

To move outdoors was always a tremendous relief for me, as the welding shop had slowly become less a cozy sanctuary than a dark little prison. For the others, though, Martín’s place remained a safe haven. The street still held dangers, premier among them a racial one. Martín lived right on the border between a Hispanic and a black area. The main grocery store and variety store were deeper into the Hispanic side, but the nearest convenience store was right on the borderline. None of the guys ever went there alone, which I thought was silly until the first time I joined them. Three men were lounging around the door as we exited, waiting to persuade us to part with our change. They started out friendly enough, even using a little Spanish:
“Hey, amigo, ¿qué pasa?
Got any change today for a hungry man?”

“No espeak Ingliss,” Carlos said.

“Hey, that’s all right, man.
Cambio. ¿Tiene cambio?”

No, they said, and then the wolves got a little more threatening. These were not poor derelicts but healthy young adults, savvy to the fact that because Mexicans came to work, they usually made money; and that because they didn’t trust or were unable to use banks, they tended to carry it with them. The wolves stood up, came too close, demanded instead of asked, felt the pockets of those who said they had no change and asked, “All I find?” We moved off as a group, keeping our money because we outnumbered them. But the tales of larceny in that neighborhood were many. Chicano gangs, as well, were known to prey on the poor Mexicans, though apparently they didn’t operate near where we lived.

Besides visiting the convenience store, we went out to play basketball, to buy groceries, to visit acquaintances in other parts of town. They were surprisingly good at basketball, only slightly handicapped, like others from the south of Mexico, by their short stature. Never in my life, in fact, could I remember being the tallest person in a basketball game. We played on courts in public parks, in schoolyards on weekends, wearing street shoes and jeans, working up a sweat and having fun, putting together pickup games with other Mexicans we'd meet. Since we were in California, perhaps it makes some sense to think of these other Mexicans as a "support group": they would share job information, news of home
("Where are you from?" "Michoacán. How about you all?" "Guerrero." "Heard of any jobs?" "Well, my brother said they might need help next week on his roofing crew")
and tales of life in Los Angeles. It was networking, there on the grass after forty-five minutes on hot asphalt.

Grocery shopping was another diversion. As in Phoenix, it was an instance of men doing “women’s work” by necessity. But there were decisions that didn’t have to be made at home: do we buy Budweiser, or do we buy generic beer? Which brand of tortillas is the best? (At home, Mom made them by hand.) Are any of these
salsas
any good, or should we make one ourselves? Like many Mexicans I had met, they weren’t big on fruit or fresh produce, so I usually did my shopping for those separately. One day, though, when Carlos had joined me in the produce section, I heard him exclaim in surprise.
“Híjole!”

“
What is it?”

“
Look at this!”
He held up a mango.

“
What's wrong, is it bad?”

“
No, no, it’s from my state—look at the sticker.”
“Iguala, Guerrero,” it read—
“that’s only one hundred kilometers from my town. That’s where I went to college!”
Carlos looked at the mango as though it were an old friend.

“
Well,”
I suggested,
“let’s get it.”

Carlos looked at the price.
“Seventy-eight cents!”
I told him that seemed about right to me.

“
But at home, these cost
—” he calculated the exchange rate
“—three cents.”

“
You’re kidding!”

Carlos shook his head slowly.
“My father sells them to the grocer for about two cents.”

Another good break was going to church. Though there were calendars of the madonna on the wall in Martín’s, and Victor and Ismael wore crucifixes, they had never struck me as a particularly devout group. They were Catholics more by culture than conviction. But they learned of a bilingual church—the first service was in English, to blacks, and the second, in Spanish, to Hispanics—a short bus ride away, and began to attend every weekend. The white priest’s Spanish was horrible, the sermons stock and trite, but toward the end of the first service I attended, our presence made a little more sense to me. We were here to meet girls. When the priest said it was time to “share the peace of Christ,” my friends ranged up to five or six rows back to shake the hands of attractive young women. They had, I then realized, been scoping them out during most of the service. Church was the undocumenteds’ singles scene.

On our way out the door that first Sunday, a deacon passed out printed invitations, in Spanish, to a dance the next Saturday night. The timing, I thought, was clever—give them out before the service, and by the end half of the young people would already have left. But to my surprise, the man did not hand me one. Probably, he had thought that I was coincidentally walking among the group of Mexican guys, and was not interested in a Spanish-speaking dance. I stopped and walked back up to him. He looked at me as I held out my hand.

“
Could I have one, please?”
I said.

“
One of what, sir?”
he replied with a confused look, perhaps startled to hear the Spanish.

“
An invitation to the dance. Isn’t that what you’ve got there?”

“
You want one? Err, um, of course,”
he said, fumbling with the stack, trying to peel one off.

“
Thank you. ”

Something similar occurred on the city bus later that week. I preceded the group up the bus steps and discovered the transfer I had in my hand was from the day before. As I began to dig around in my pockets for the right one, the bus driver grumbled at me to get out of the way so the “other passengers” could pass through.

“They’re with me,” I said.

“What? Who?”

And then there was the time I was with the guys in a liquor mart. Carlos, Timoteo, Victor, and I were standing near the door, waiting for Ismael to get through the checkout line. The only person near us was a white security guard. I began saying something to Carlos, and was surprised to hear the guard interrupt by saying, “Pardon me?” The only other non-Hispanic in the area, he thought I was talking to him.

And so it went in L.A., a city of races and division. Later, back in Phoenix, I would relate the doughnut shop incident to a scruffy white farm hand I knew who was raised in Los Angeles. His words of consolation summed up the situation better than he probably realized: “Shit, you’re lucky you wasn’t with niggers,” he said. “If you’da been talkin’ to niggers, that guy that punched you woulda gone out and got his friends!”

*

One afternoon Martín spent on and off the phone, in long conversation with someone he apparently couldn’t hear too well. He shouted, then spoke softly, and for once didn’t pay any attention to us. That evening, as Luis cooked dinner, Martín came in, washed up with his dirty bar of Lava soap, snapped open a can of Bud, and leaned against the refrigerator with a big smile on his face.

“
Well?”
said Dogie.

Martín took a long swill, and then announced it quietly.

“
They’re coming. They’re coming next week.”

“
Really?” “Who?” “They’ll stay here?” “How old is the kid?” “How about her sister?”

Martín’s wife and son were on the way. It was a moment Martín had long awaited, a moment when he was secure enough in his business and his situation to send for his family. It had been six years in coming. He had left Mexico a year after marrying; his first son, whom he had never seen, had been conceived during a trip home three years later. Their firstborn, a daughter, had died of pneumonia soon after the marriage; it was frustration over his inability to afford a good doctor in the city and the transportation to get her there that led Martín to America in the first place, Carlos told me.

Dogie, with more than twenty border crossings to his credit, would take the truck down to San Diego to pick them up. He knew the Tijuana-Chula Vista area, its dirt roads and canyons, its reliable
coyotes.
The two would be in good hands. Martín handed out beers to the rest of us, but then Luis outdid him with a bottle of strong, clear mescal he had been saving. Ismael and Victor left to brave
los negros
of the convenience store and pick up some extra goodies for dinner.

It was a grand celebration. And there was an even grander one when, early the next week, the honking from Dogie’s truck, waiting to be let in the main gate, signaled the arrival of Martín’s family. Lupita, with Martín Jr. in her arms and the help of Dogie, descended from the truck and into their new home. Both looked strung out and overwrought, but Lupita, anyway, looked very glad to be there. Martín Jr.—or “Junior,” as he was soon christened
(“Yoonyor,”
they pronounced it)—met his mustachioed father for the first time, and, tossed a foot or so aloft, promptly burst into tears. This delighted Martín, who thanked the Virgin it was not too late to make him into a man.

There was celebration for the next several days, as all Martín’s friends and acquaintances came by to greet the newcomers. It was thrilling for me to see this change in Martín: his eyes, if possible, were even more animated than before, his step lighter, his diligence greater. But through it all Carlos and his friends must have realized something I did not: that the arrival of Martín’s wife would fundamentally change life around the workshop. The man runs the family in Mexico, but one domain still belongs to the woman: the household. Its operation is her responsibility, and it soon became clear that Lupita had not expected to find herself managing a hostel. She exercised her traditional right to clean the place up and, sensing the pressure, the boarders began one by one to leave. Martín just shrugged—he wasn’t to blame, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. The first of us to go was Timoteo, who over the past few weeks had become reacquainted with friends who worked at a downtown office building, where he, too, might get a start as a janitor. We also said goodbye to Ismael, who had a relative in an apartment building across town where he would be able to crash for a while. That left only Carlos, Victor, and me.