Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (3 page)

I joined Alonso at the window cracks, which afforded a view of the cooking area of an adjoining shack. A teenage girl was out there, trying to cook over a smoky wood stove while a teenage boy, one of the smuggling crew, flirted with her. He would reach from behind for the front of her body and, smiling, she’d hit him with a spoon. She was maybe fifteen, and very pretty. A group of prostitutes we passed outside a store on the morning’s drive out here had been pretty too. Naively, I had not expected beauty in this town made of rough-hewn planks and corrugated tin.

Tired of spying, we returned to our respective walls to sit and wait. Alonso whistled a tune through his teeth for a while.
“El Gringo y el Mexicano, ”
he announced finally, reminding me of the popular
corrida
—or Mexican ballad—we had discussed the night before.
“Remember what happened to the gringo?”
The gringo of the title was a Texas rancher. He admired the young wife of one of his Mexican ranch hands, stole her away from him, and killed the Mexican for good measure. She was already pregnant with the Mexican’s son, however, and the boy, learning of his father’s fate, waited only until he was big enough to fire a gun to shoot and kill the Texan. Alonso was grinning.

“
Very funny,”
I said to Alonso, who, with his perpetual good spirits and high energy, was as fine a person as existed for breaking the tension in a situation like ours.
“By the way, when are you going to introduce me to your girlfriend?”

“
Ha! Never! One look at the size of your North American wallet, and you’ll have a wife. ”
Thus reminded, I moved my roll of cash to my shirt pocket, inside my sweater, because the
coyotes
had seen it in my sock.

“
They told me not to trust you,”
he said,
“back when you left the restaurant to get the money.”
This was nothing new—other Mexicans, seeing a countryman traveling with me, had issued him similar warnings:
“He may seem nice, but he’ll fuck you over. That’s how gringos are. ”
This was, in fact, the first of three warnings Alonso would receive while we were together. I looked at him closely in the dimness, listened for more, to see how he had taken it. But he was silent. Finally I had to prompt him.

“
And? ... ”

“
And nothing, ”
said Alonso.
“I’m here, right?”

“
Yes. You and I are here.”
Silently I thanked God he was there. I’d be going crazy if he weren’t. A long silence.

“
My God,”
he exclaimed suddenly,
“who ever would have thought I’d find myself in a coyote’s shack with a gringo? My parents’ll never believe me!”

*

Alonso and I had been traveling partners for only three days, but in the difficult circumstances of those days, trust had already saved us from some fixes. We met for the first time while waiting to board a northbound bus in San Luis Potosí, in central Mexico. Besides us, only one other passenger, a middle-aged businessman, waited on the platform outside the nearly empty
Tres Estrellas de Oro
coach from Mexico City that afternoon.
“And where are you two young men going?”
the businessman asked politely.

Alonso, young and slight, was smartly dressed in jeans, a light blue snap-up cowboy shirt, and a sturdy leather belt that widened in the front to form its own buckle, interwoven with lanyard and lots of studs. His black, pointed-toe cowboy boots had the Mexican-style heel that angles rakishly forward, sometimes giving the wearer a peculiar rolling gait. He looked about twenty, and had jet black hair and strong Indian features—except for the very un-Indian grin, with which, nodding, he invited me to answer first.

“
I’m going to Monterrey, to talk to some people at Radio XEG
—
do you know it? ‘La Ranchera de Monterrey?’ ”

The men nodded. It was one of Mexico’s—probably North America’s—biggest radio stations, beaming 100,000 watts of
ranchera
music to AM listeners twenty-four hours a day.
Ranchera,
with its accordion, bass, and guitar, is Mexico’s country music, especially popular in the north. I had tuned it in a couple of times on my car radio while driving across the American Midwest at night.
“I’m a writer, interested in ranchera songs about the indocumentados who travel north to work in the United States.”

“
Ah, los mojados,”
said the businessman—the wetbacks. “And you, young ma—”

“
Well, hey, that’s me,”
interrupted Alonso, beaming.
“Yo voy de mojado. ”
I’m going as a wetback.

I couldn’t believe it. In the States you might know a Mexican for weeks before he would make an admission like that. The older man looked uncomfortable.
“Are you serious?”
I said. There seemed to be no coyness about Alonso, no irony.

“
Sure. I’m headed for Texas. Got to stop off in Monterrey first to see if some friends want to go. ”

On the bus Alonso and I sat across the aisle from each other. I gave him my card, which he placed in his wallet with great care. Maybe if I was a writer, he said, I could help him learn to speak English. He had already crossed into the States
“three or four times,”
he said, and picked up a little: “plees, fren’,” “no got money,” “no speak Engliss,” “you got beer?” “one momen, plees,” “money order,” “house.” He knew some of the numbers from one to ten but had difficulty with the others, his tongue and lips contorting into awkward, impossible shapes.

Did he spell it A-l-o-n-s-o or A-l-o-n-z-o? I asked.
“Whichever you like, ”
he reassured me.
“It’s the same either way. ”

“
But which way do you spell it?”
He shrugged and looked out the window at the desert.

All afternoon we talked. I learned that Alonso had only finished fifth grade, and was just a beginning reader. His parents, small farmers, gave him money to go away to secondary school,
“but some friends and I used it to get to Texas. We wanted an adventure.”
He was fourteen at the time. He and his friends crossed the Rio Grande at Reynosa, skirting its sister city of McAllen, Texas, and avoiding apprehension in the dangerous border zone by walking four days over the hills and desert to Pharr, Texas, carrying only water bottles, a few sandwiches, and a compass.
“The only time I made it without getting caught,”
said Alonso glumly.

From his accounts I judged Alonso to be clever and resilient. Like most Mexicans who cross, though, he was not book-smart. His ignorance of science and geography was astounding—but not, for him, a cause for shame.
“Why does it snow up north, but not here?”
he asked. I tried to explain about the tilt of the earth and the angle of the sun, but didn’t really believe I’d made him understand. Texas itself, he believed, was larger than Mexico. Big cities confused him; he would much rather live in the country, where the air is clean. The
“negros”
in places like Houston, where he worked last, scared him—much more than the
gabachos
(whites), whom he told me were nice. Just about everything about America, Alonso was convinced, was better than Mexico—the economy, the law-enforcement system, the general way of doing things, the
people. “English is a better language, isn’t it?”
he asked me.

I was the first
gabacho
he had ever had a real conversation with; he stared at me as I spoke to him, as though amazed that we were actually talking. It occurred to me that, having finished college, I was perhaps the most highly educated person he had ever met. But I didn’t want to seem like a professor; I was here to get an education from him.

We stared out the window at the arid Mexican northeast, and he named for me the passing cactuses—the
palmas, garambullos,
and
nopales carbón,
the tall, thin
ocotillos
that some desert villagers plant close together in rows to grow into green fences around their small homes. The bus had the inevitable flat tire of any long haul on a Mexican coach, and noisily hobbled off the highway at one of the thousands of
vulcanizadoras,
or tire-repair shacks. Taking refuge from the harsh sun in the shade at the side of the bus, Alonso and I watched the driver and the thin man from the
vulcanizadora
change the tire. Alonso bought us Pepsis. Cars shot past on the narrow two-lane road, and we squinted to avoid the dust. A few of the vehicles had the foreign license plates of my country: tourists, heading down from Texas. We caught brief glimpses as they passed: inside the big cars they looked cool, relaxed, sometimes blond.

I talked cars with Alonso. Yes, I told him, I did have one, though not a very good one. Any car would be okay with him, he said, but a Corvette was his first choice. That, or a pickup truck. We stood there for a long time, in the shade of the bus, watching the cars and not talking.

“
The dreams we have here can be reality there,”
said Alonso suddenly.

“
What?”
The remark seemed to come from out of the blue.

“
You asked why I go to cross the river.”

“
Yes.”

“
Well, that’s why.”

“
Oh, I see. You’re still talking about cars.”

“
No, it’s not just cars. It's not just money. Look, it’s everything. Cars, jobs, women, music. Everything. Everything you’ve got is better. If you can make it in El Norte, you’ve got it made.”

Shiny cars sped past. Meanwhile, the driver and his thin assistant were battling with a huge, nearly bald spare tire that seemed reluctant to be put back into service. Infuriated, the driver blamed the problems on the thin man and recruited a couple of passengers to help position the tire on the rear axle. Still it didn’t fit. With a great rumble of profanity the driver landed his boot on the tire, raising a small cloud of dust. Why, he asked the Virgin, why him?

*

All night we sat in the Nuevo Laredo bus station. Scores of earlier arrivals had claimed the available benches for sleeping, and the floor was too dirty to stretch out on. Two cups of coffee were our excuse for occupying a pair of molded plastic chairs in the cafeteria section of the big room. Blasts of cold air whenever anyone entered or left the station reminded us of how chilly the desert nights could be in springtime. With the steam from my coffee cup warming my face, I looked out over all the prone bodies.

“
Guess not too many buses leave at night, huh?”
I surmised to Alonso.
“All these guys waiting for connections in the morning.”

“ ’
Mano
[brother],
they’re not waiting for other buses,”
he said.
“These men have arrived. Would
you
want to cross the river in this cold?”

“
What—all these guys are going to cross? How do you know?”

“
Well, they’re not on vacation. See how they’re dressed? They’re going to work.”

On closer examination I saw that the men were farm men—with straw cowboy hats, canvas pants, dirty feet in worn
huaraches
(sandals), tough-skinned hands and weathered faces. No luggage to speak of, just fiber
costales
(woven sacks) and sometimes a blanket and a coat. But I was not convinced. Such a massive concentration of about-to-be fugitives allowed to congregate here in this obvious way? Couldn’t they be going to work in Mexico?

“
I don’t think so,”
said Alonso, who knew no other way to convince me.
“Look tomorrow and you will see.”

But his point was proved before then. Less than half an hour after we had sat down at the small cafeteria table, a skittish, uncombed man with a flushed face sat down in the seat next to Alonso. “Where are you going?” he asked, and his breath smelled of liquor.

“Oh, just here,” said Alonso, trusting no one.

“Aaah,” said the man, lighting a cigarette. He took a few deep puffs and sent his exhalations my way. Apparently I was not meant to be a part of this conversation. “Well, if you meet anyone who wants to cross to the other side, I have some friends who can take them there.”

My heart leaped; but I tried to effect a look of boredom. This was the sort of encounter I was always hearing about. Bus stations like this were supposed to be a principal recruiting ground for
coyotes,
the smugglers who helped aliens across. Somehow, though, I had expected someone who looked not only sneaky and shifty eyed but, well ... competent. I didn’t want to miss a word, but tried hard not to stare at the smelly, hairy man across the table from me: any inordinate attention on the part of the
gringo
would surely kill the deal. In fact, I was surprised that anyone was approaching Alonso with me along. That evening, however, four more would be along—probably only half, said Alonso, of the number that would’ve come by had I not been there. Business must have been lagging.

Alonso, for his part, reddened as the man made his intentions clear; I too felt uncomfortable. This man was exactly what we had been looking for, was the sort of connection we would need in order to cross. Yet, besides being an opportunity, this was also a threat: to say you were interested was to say you had the cash. To say you had the cash was to make yourself a target for robbery. At 3:00 A.M. in a border-town bus station, no one should know how rich you are.