Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (18 page)

It was Carlos’s Uncle Cándido who came up with a solution for us. After church one Sunday we went to visit him at his tiny, wood-framed duplex. If Carlos could be regarded as the American newcomer and Martín as a medium-term resident, Uncle Cándido was the old-timer. Arriving as a
bracero
in the 1950s, he had worked all over California, mostly in the fields but also in an auto body shop, until it was discovered six years ago that his kidneys were failing and he needed regular dialysis. Fortunately for him, the body shop’s insurance policy covered him. To comfort him, his wife arrived, with two children, Emilio and Alejandra. They then had two more, born in Los Angeles, Alex and Erica. “
You didn’t give them Mexican names?”
I asked him. Cándido shrugged.
“They’re American,”
he said.

Breakfast was another cross-border mixture: pancakes, white Mexican cheese, and scrambled eggs with peppers and
salsa.
Even in a city with a Hispanic population as large as Los Angeles’s, it was clear that the road to the American way of life wasn’t very long.

“
Do you ever think of yourself as American?”
I asked Cándido.

He shook his head.
“I’m a Mexican, through and through. ”

“
Will you ever go back to Mexico?”

At this, Cándido laughed. He showed me the marks on the inside of his arms where the dialysis machine was connected and disconnected twice a week.
“If I go back to Mexico,”
he said,
“I will die.”
A poor man could not afford dialysis in Mexico.

As the men sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee after breakfast, Cándido shared an idea he had for us.
“Around the comer,”
he said,
“is an apartment building run by a man I know. I have talked to him about you. He says if we can come up with the deposit, he will wait a month before requiring your first month’s rent.” “A place of our own!”
said Carlos.
“But uncle
—”

"I will lend you the money for the deposit,"
said Cándido. The building manager, as it turned out, also had a friend who was a small trophy manufacturer and needed a trainee engraver. Pay was minimum wage, but Carlos snapped it up. Victor found part-time work with a friend doing construction for an Anglo teacher who was fixing up his house. And two other young Mexicans with jobs joined us in the small one-bedroom apartment, to help make ends meet.

It was a turning point. As I had found with Alonso in Texas, the employers of these Mexicans were not interested in hiring me. Even when they had openings, it was easier for them just to hire another Mexican: why take a risk with a white guy, willing for some strange reason to work for so little pay—among Mexicans, no less! It sounded suspicious. And sitting around the apartment all day alone was not my idea of a good time. So with handshakes, several sheets of addresses in rural Mexico, and some good memories, I prepared to return to Phoenix.

To my surprise, the airport limousine service I called the evening of my departure told me they didn't service our neighborhood. The cab fare, I knew, would be exorbitant, so I tried another. Forty minutes before the flight, however, they hadn't shown up either. The neighborhood apparently was worse than I thought. So I rang up Dogie on Cándido's phone. He was there in ten minutes, and I made my plane. In L.A., if you're Mexican—or with Mexicans—I guess you rely on your friends.

WHEN I RETURNED TO
the orchards outside Phoenix, it was almost Christmastime. Routine and regularity were now a way of life at camp: the trimmed-down labor force meant work every day for every man except the sick or injured, followed by evenings of exhaustion and lassitude. Though some of my former students inquired about more classes, much of the momentum had been lost. Also, education had gained an enemy: a black-and-white television now presided over the living room of the ramshackle old house, establishing a claim on the men’s leisure time. Every night thirty or forty eyes fixed on the fuzzy picture of Phoenix’s weak UHF Spanish-language channel, catching up on
Leonela,
the Venezuelan soap opera, or other dramas like
Weddings of Hate
and
You Are My Destiny.

The prospect of five days' break at Christmas—now less than two weeks away—was a further distraction. It promised a chance to blow off some steam, a break from oranges, and, for a few, even brief visits home. Most men could hardly wait. But a core of workers was impatient about vacation for a very different reason: they wanted to earn more money. Heavy rains had made work impossible several times since I had left, as soggy orchards swallowed ladders, tractors, and shoes. Besides, they felt, when you came this far to work, who needed Christmas vacation? Some of these ambitious men were preparing to head to Florida, where the wages were lower but where longer hours made up for it, where the citrus season lasted not only till May but well into the summer, and where, they had heard, jobs were still available. The talk of travel was contagious—without my friends there, Phoenix seemed a less interesting place—and I started looking into rides to Florida myself.

For most of the men, there were two choices: form a group, pool your money, and buy a car; or form a group, pool your money, and negotiate with a
coyote.
Unfortunately for me, most of the groups I knew about had a surplus of members already. Cousins, brothers, and buddies all wanted to join in when one or two men announced their intention to leave. I checked with four or five groups who had made it to the money-pooling stage, but none had openings. And even if they had, one man confided to me, members would be worried that once a
coyote
learned I was coming he would get nervous and, like the animal, would disappear without a trace.

Matilde, the neighbor of Fortino and Rebeca, had an idea:
“Why don’t you become a coyote?”
she asked.
“One of my husbands did that once. He rented a U-Haul, filled it up with men, and then tied a bunch of bicycles to the back door so it would look like he was moving house. Then he drove to Chicago and let them all go. He made three thousand dollars!”
I had to answer that smuggling wasn’t quite my line. But a few days later it did give me an idea.

Twenty more men arrived from Querétaro, the home of many already working at the camp. As was traditional, the orchard became their way station, a stop on the underground railroad: while the next phase of their travel was being arranged, they slept out under the trees, relying on the workers for advice and an occasional meal. Immigration and the ranch owners were aware this happened, of course, but because the new arrivals usually came and left within a matter of days, and because they stayed hidden deep in the woods, there was little that could be done about it.

These new arrivals, however, had unusual difficulties. They discovered that, because it was high season for travel to Florida, three of the area’s well-known
coyotes
were already out on jobs. A fourth had a sick daughter he wouldn’t leave. I visited the men in the orchard, and was in El Mirage pondering their situation one day when a contact told me of a Florida-based
coyote
who had arrived in town the night before. He was looking for a load of
pollos
to take back home with him, he said.
“Can you arrange for us to meet?”
I asked my acquaintance. He thought he could, and the next night I waited for the
coyote
known only as
La Víbora,
“The Viper.”

I was in a booth at
El Sombrero,
the Top Hat bar, when a man walked in, about an hour after the time I suggested. It was a weeknight, late, and we were the only customers. Though curious, I concentrated on my cigarette and tried not to look up; if he were La Víbora
,
he would know who I was. The man, dressed in dark clothes and a dark cowboy hat, sat first on a bar stool near the door. Though across the room, I could almost feel him scanning, sniffing, deciding whether to remain or to quietly back out. Several minutes later I heard the sound of boots approaching on the wooden floor. I looked up; he had committed himself. He was Hispanic, with a long, droopy mustache and black circles under his quick eyes. Without a word he began to sit down across the table from me, his hat still on; perhaps to see what he was made of, I half-stood as he did so, thrusting out my hand.

“Ted Conover,” I said.

The man shot a glance at the bar and looked profoundly uncomfortable. He ignored my hand. “
La Víbora
,” he returned.

I had to stifle the urge to smile. For other people to call you something like that was one thing; to use the nickname on yourself was another. It reminded me of professional wrestling; it was like me calling myself “Thor” or “The Exterminator.” Lupe Sanchez had told me of a smuggler he once knew called
“El Vénomo,”
the Venom. How could you take seriously anyone with a name like that? “The Viper”? A small wave of relief passed over me.

The waitress called out from behind the bar, and we ordered two Buds. “Just into town?” I asked after a while.

La Víbora looked at me distastefully. “Where are you from?” was his reply. He glanced over my shoulder, searching for the trap. He was a
coyote,
through and through.

“Here. Or from Colorado, really. I came to teach some classes at the camps. I was thinking maybe we could help each other.” The beers came. La Víbora didn’t say anything.

“See, I need to get to Florida for Christmas. But I don’t have the bucks. Now, I heard you’re looking for some guys to take. And I know where some are. I’ll put you in touch, but in return I want to go with them to Florida, for free.” The experience, I still thought, would be worth the risk of doing business with La Víbora.

La Víbora took a swallow. “Let’s get something straight. It’s not me looking for the guys, okay? It’s somebody I know—a friend.” His pause was long and dramatic. “Now, how many guys is there?”

“About twenty.”

“Well, all he got is a pickup. He can’t fit twenty in there.” “Camper top?” I asked. La Víbora nodded. “Well, he could take some of them, then. Maybe he’ll want to come back for the rest. They got a place to work in Florida?—if they don’t have all the money, you could work it out with the rancher.”

“When do they want to leave? Right away?”

“Right away.”

La Víbora took another drink. “I’ll need to talk to them. Why don’t we go have a chat? We’ll go talk to ’em. See what we can work out.”

My respect for La Víbora dropped a couple of notches. Did he really believe I would fall for that? Their location was my only bargaining chip. There was no way I was taking La Víbora to the orchard. “I’ve got a different idea,” I said. “Meet me here in the parking lot tomorrow at this time. I’ll bring a couple of them with me. We can talk.”

La Víbora nodded. Hat still on, he rose to leave; I offered my hand again just to annoy him, and this time we shook. I watched as he moved toward the door. Even if he cut a deal with the men, there was nothing to prevent him from pulling a knife on me at the last minute, or twenty miles out of town, and making me get out of the truck. I knew he didn’t trust me, and that was yet another reason not to trust him. On the other hand, it could be a fascinating ride to Florida, for me the ride of a lifetime: how would undocumented migrants negotiate such a vast distance, deal with the unexpected? Travel was stressful, and when people were under stress you could learn a lot about them. I walked to a window of the bar and noted the license number of the beat-up pickup truck as La Víbora climbed in—one more thing I knew about him. Then I drove back to camp, slogged through the orchard, and talked with the prospective
pollos.
It was good to have a possibility, they said; wet, filthy, and cold, they were eager to get out soon.

The next morning I went back to visit with a large pot of hot coffee—and discovered they were gone! Beans, wrappers, and various clothes and utensils were scattered about the mud, but no sign that any of them remained. Wondering if they had moved elsewhere in the orchard, I ran to where a crew was picking and asked Mariano, a relative of several of them, where they had gone.

“
The coyotes came last night,”
Mariano said. “They’re probably on their way to Florida now.”

“What coyotes? Did they have a pickup truck?” Had La Víbora beat me to it?

“
No, I think it was a van. Horacio, what kind of car did they leave in?”

“
Two vans,”
shouted the man two trees down.

“
Do you know which coyote?”

Mariano shook his head. Nobody knew. Two men apparently had dropped by the previous afternoon, strangers. No, neither wore a mustache. They returned unannounced in the night. The guys hadn’t known what time they would come, or even if they would come at all.

I slogged back to the house, back where I’d started, my attempt at brokerage a failure. Noting my despondency, Mariano came up later that day and told me that some men from near his town in Mexico, who worked at a nearby orchard, were buying a car and soon would be leaving. With no better leads to go on, I set out yet again to see if I could persuade a group to let me come.

The ranch was known as Smith’s—an unfortunate name for an orchard worked by Mexicans, as almost none of them could pronounce it—(es-SMEET, they said). Old Man Smith lived down the road from it, in an expansive one-story house. Surrounded by carefully spaced palm trees, and with an American flag waving from a tall pole out front, it bore a great resemblance to the visitors’ center at a state park. But he housed his workers in trailers. Since the small trailer park, chiseled into a corner of the orchard, was situated right at an intersection of county roads, plainly visible to traffic, he had surrounded it with a six-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The purpose, I was told, was to prevent early-morning raids by Immigration; but one couldn’t help notice the resemblance to a prison work camp. By the time I arrived that evening, the main gate had been shut. I got out of my car and called to a couple of guys having a cigarette just inside.