Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (23 page)

Emilio finally returned, and in his arms were two grocery bags filled to brimming. His main purchase was a vast quantity of barbecued beef. To go with it there were loaves of white bread, cans of green
serrano
chiles, Coca-Cola, and beer. And napkins, for, as he realized, this was going to be a mess. You could smell the barbecue as he set the bags down on the hood of the Squire, a delicious aroma that made your mouth water. We tore the bags apart and then ate, ravenously, endlessly, filling the emptiness of days of doing without. The result was a long period of silence, and euphoria.

“
Did you see your girlfriend in town?”
his younger brother asked Emilio.

“
Which one?”
Emilio said, smiling.

“
The one with the big car, the rich blonde.”

“
Hey, Ted,”
interrupted Moises.
“What does this mean in English:
‘Hi, baby, I Moses, you verrry pretty want to come to home with me?”

I told the others, since Moises apparently knew. There was a request for other English phrases you can use to get women into bed with you, since Moises swore to them that his worked for that purpose. I confessed, at the risk of appearing a wimp, that I didn’t know any.

“
But you do know lots of gringas, don’t you?”

“
Some, and when I see them next, I’ll send them your way.” “Just make sure they don’t charge!”
said Chucho.

It was a day to laugh, to relax and recover. There would be precious few like it in the next weeks and months: Orange picking in Florida was considerably harder than in Arizona. The hours were longer, the rates lower. Pedro, Arturo, and Pancho, the newcomers, would see that the ladders they were to use were wood, not aluminum, and therefore half again as heavy; the bags were heavier, the air suffocating. In the orchard there would be tensions with the Haitians, Cubans, and other Caribbean immigrants who also did the work, as well as with the few dirt-poor Americans, blacks and whites, that still held on to jobs there. Arizona picking requires a degree of skill and finesse, for most of the oranges were table oranges, not to be bruised or battered; but most of the Florida oranges they would pick were juice oranges, stripped off the tree and dropped to the sandy ground with the greatest speed possible, later to be collected in huge "ten-box" tubs which unlikely tractors known as "goats" would anonymously collect all day long. The work was more machinelike than ever, but there was lots of it.

Gutierrez’s wife, who was a kind of unofficial real-estate broker, would find housing for about half the guys in a project near the shantytown. Of course, federal housing was intended for American citizens, so rent was paid to the Puerto Rican family that it was officially rented to, with a kickback to Señora Gutierrez. She found a trailer for the rest of the guys, which lacked windows and a locking door but at least had water in the sink and a sound roof. Until Emilio, Pedro, and Moises were caught by Immigration and deported, all seven carpooled to work every day. Later Pancho had to drop out; he fell sick with an intestinal parasite that doctors supposed he’d brought from Mexico. Though, given the conditions in which they lived and worked, it was hard to be certain.

All in all, they picked enough oranges to put juice on the breakfast tables of a small city. They would leave Florida at varying times, tired but, by their standards, richer. Except, that is, for Arturo, who developed a taste for consumer goods, including the
putas,
or hookers, that frequented camps on payday. Because he had never had enough money to save, he had a hard time learning how to do it. He went home older and broke.

On that sunny day, though, it was a feast for all the senses. We talked and talked, joked and drank and smoked and slept. Quiet, timid Pancho asked me at one point if I believed in the Virgin.

“
No,”
I answered,
“my family is Protestant.”

“
What is that?”

“
It's like the Jews,”
answered Chucho authoritatively.
“They don’t even believe in Jesús.”
Pancho looked apprehensive.

“
No,
that's
wrong,”
I explained.
“Protestants are Christians, we do believe in Jesus. It's just that back in Europe, some Catholics had a disagreement with the Church, and decided to become slightly different.”
The Reformation, in twenty words or less.

Pancho was a devout man. He took out his wallet and passed me his plastic laminated picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. The pictures were sold by vendors all over Mexico.

“
You should have one of these,”
he said. I asked how many of them did. Five others took out their wallets or reached into shirt pockets and held up their pictures of the Virgin. Only Moises lacked one.

“
If you pray to her, she’ll protect you,”
explained Pancho.

“
Yes, she protects us from La Migra!”
Chucho joked, to much laughter.

Pancho remained fairly serious.
“I’d like you to have this,” he said.

I was moved. I took it and looked at it, leaning back as I did against the crumpled right front fender of the Squire, then turning to carefully disengage my shirttail from a sharp snag. Poor car—headlights taped on, front doors unusable, taillights smashed, hood crunched down as though by a wrecking ball—she had been through the war. The truly remarkable thing was that she—we—had made it, somehow squeaking by against all odds. It was more the style of Mexicans than of old American cars.
“Milagroso,”
Máximo had called it when we arrived— miraculous. I knew, by now, that he did not mean it figuratively. And the experience had made me begin to wonder whether he might not be right ... all the more reason not to accept the picture of the Virgin.

“
Thank you, that's generous,”
I told Pancho.
“But I think you’d better keep it. I’m afraid you guys will be needing her more than I.”

THE WHITE ARROW
pitched wildly around a hairpin turn on its descent into Ahuacatlán. The road was a ledge, chiseled into the steep mountainside; a deep valley, a vast volume of air, separated us from the other valley wall, more than a mile away. It was easier to look at those far mountains, golden green in the afternoon sun, than at our own; everything nearby seemed either way above us, up unscalable heights, or far below. Instead of guardrails around the hairpins, there was most often a series of little shrines, of whitewashed brick or stone or cinder block, knee high, with a candle or a madonna or plastic flowers inside, and letters scratched on the outside bearing the name of the deceased: “Raul Anaya P., 12-5-62.” Flew off this crazy height and into the great beyond. His Chevy’s still down there because no junk man wants to risk his life winching it back up. You can see it if you get close enough to the edge ...

The White Arrow was a glorified school bus, painted up, years before, to resemble a regular coach. It had been relegated by the forces of supply and demand to the hinterlands of Querétaro state, just north of Mexico City. From Querétaro City, the capital, to Ahuacatlán, high in the Sierra Gorda, was eleven extremely uncomfortable hours. The bus left once or twice a day, depending. To find its bay at the station, you asked at every counter until you came to White Arrow’s: no one else had ever heard of Ahuacatlán. White Arrow, however, serviced two of them, Ahuacatlán de Guadalupe, and Ahuacatlán de Jesús. The clerk asked which I wanted. Barely able yet to pronounce Ahuacatlán by itself (ah-wa-cot-LON), I shrugged in resignation. It was in a high valley, I said, several hours away; that was all I knew. She chose Ahuacatlán de Guadalupe for me and I hoped she was right. Riding the White Arrow required certain leaps of faith.

Another leap had to do with the tires. Because two were bald, two spares were tied to the roof, along with any other cargo that wouldn’t fit through the door: trunks, crates, pieces of furniture, sacks of feed, lumber ... even a casket.
“Is there somebody in that?”
I asked the bus driver, a tired-looking, bewhiskered man, when at last he appeared.
“I believe so,”
he said, flicking down his cigarette and staring at it. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, just stared. I thought about that tired bus driver, about those bald tires, about that body, dying twice, as the Arrow took the sharp curves.

The first seven or eight hours were through poor farmland that gradually gave up and became desert. Then the desert took on contours: dunes grew out of the scrub-covered flatlands and then solidified into sandy foothills; these in turn yielded to full-scale, arid mountains of considerable grandeur, a landscape evocative of something between the Sahara and the moon. Though, always, something came along to remind you you were in Mexico—dogs, puffed up and dead in the road, their legs stretched stiffly toward the sky. Or burros so blasé they might not budge unless the bus actually nudged them. The evidence all along the way of the fate of dogs and other smaller animals that failed to yield the right-of-way did not dissuade the burros. I stared at two such burros as the bus driver slowed to a crawl and leaned on the horn. Seeing my surprise, the old
campesino
seated next to me nudged his friend across the aisle. "
The burros are smarter in the United States, ¿verdad?"
he said to me, with a toothless grin.

I had felt safer on that part of the journey, the journey up: the old school bus engine strained to do even fifteen or twenty miles an hour on the steep grade, with obstacles and the need occasionally to stop and let off passengers conspiring to keep the driver from getting up a good head of steam. Where these passengers went was a considerable mystery to me—there were no settlements in sight at all, not a single house or lean-to. As far as I could tell the darkly tanned and deeply wrinkled old men and women with their bundles walked off into the middle of nowhere. Apparently somewhere in the vast rippled distance, from the deepest creases between parched piles of dirt and slate, water seeped out, and things could grow.

Up and up the bus climbed. The turns got tighter. We passed two shut-down mines which the old man next to me said had once produced mercury. Cut from the rib of one mountain, presumably with considerable effort, was a dirt soccer field, yet who was there to play on it? and if the ball were kicked out of bounds, what kept it from falling hundreds of feet? Near the top of our ascent, a painted sign advertised
"petroleo,"
and one next to it
"leña,"
or firewood, and there it was, stacked in tall cords ... thick firewood, probably pine—where had it come from? As the Arrow finally wheezed through a mountaintop defile fifty feet deep, I realized we had reached the summit ... and more. For as we began our descent, the more remote side of the range slowly began to turn green. Tall trees—live oak and eucalyptus—abounded; the ridge tops were rough with shrubbery and woolly with clouds, no longer bare; and sewn between woods on the mountainsides was an uneven patchwork quilt of tended fields. The summit, in other words, was also a sort of grand meteorological fence. On this side, water fell; on the other side, it did not. The land wasn't lush, but people could live.

The high valley we were descending, the Moctezuma River valley, had ancient human origins. When Hernán Cortés arrived in the New World in the 1520s, Ahuacatlán (literally "land of avocados") and the valley's other villages had for hundreds of years been home to the Otomí Indians. Though relatively near Mexico City—the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which was the Spaniards' first target—the Otomí were among the last peoples to be subdued by the Spanish conquistadors. Their inaccessibility and their fierceness, legendary in Spanish chronicles of the time, were two reasons, but they also were protected by their lack of organization: where Cortés had effectively paralyzed the Aztecs by imprisoning their ruler, Moctezuma, the same strategy was ineffective in dealing with the tribal Otomí. In the end, it was Franciscan friars, and a large detachment of Spanish soldiers, and European disease that finally succeeded in subduing the valleys in the 1690s. The century after saw the natives forced—upon pain of death—into constructing the first links in a chain of missions that Father Junípero Serra eventually would extend up Mexico's west coast, all the way to present-day northern California. Impressive looking Churrigueresque churches were one result. But a century of pain and death, memorialized by such reminders as the "Avenue of the Massacre" in a town we passed in the bus, and the ruins of cut-stone Otomí temples, in secluded forests unknown to guidebooks, spoke of the cost.

I wanted to go to Ahuacatlán because there was something missing, I had felt, in my travels with Mexicans in the States. That something was a context—the missing pieces of family life, of women, of children, of animals, of town plazas, of
fiestas.
The Moctezuma valley area, including Ahuacatlán, was the home of the men whom I had driven to Florida, the home of Victor and Timoteo, who had accompanied Carlos to Los Angeles, of Mariano and others at the Martinolli ranch—including those who had waited in the orchard while I was looking for
coyotes.
From what I could tell, it was typical of many of the Mexican feeder villages to the States: it had the poverty of southern Mexico, the remoteness that lent an extra Shangri-la luster to the image of the United States, the hardscrabble agricultural base that took kids out of school at a young age, unprepared for any profession but enthralled by a get-rich-quick scheme called
El Norte,
the United States.