This Love Is Not for Cowards (15 page)

“They call us
frontchis
,” says Saul Luna. Saul was born in El Paso, to a Mexican family. “I wanted to stay in Juárez, but my parents were caught up in the American Dream and all that. I'm really proud that I can speak two languages, but when I was young I was embarrassed about it.” Weecho tells me that when he was in high school—not that long ago—one of his teachers told him that, as a Mexican, he shouldn't want a Starbucks to open in his barrio.

“I'm like, Fuck that, man,” he told me. “I love coffee every day, man.”

Weecho is an American who literally fights to promote his Mexican heritage. When he talks, his words slip from English to Spanish, probably without his even realizing it. He loves premium American coffee and he also follows a Mexican soccer team with a losing record. His feet straddle two cultures, like so many people living along the border. Cultures that are often violently divided. Which is why I love the intentionally misspelled name he currently wrestles under: Fussion.

THEY BURY THE boy in a cemetery up in the Juárez hills. On the television news, red and white ribbons flutter on wooden crosses marking dozens of other fresh graves. I watch his parents sob in grief. A glass window cut into the lid of the coffin reveals the boy to be wearing a soccer jersey. His friends wear T-shirts that state, in English, IN MEMORY OF KEKO. A couple days before the funeral, the boy's aunt walked down to the river with a broom and a pail of soapy water. She washed the bloodstains off the concrete canal where I'd jogged back on that early-morning run. We're calling this dead body
el joven Juarense
, the boy from Juárez. That's a rare honor, to be named. Usually we try to wash the murders from our minds as quickly as possible. Almost seventy more people have been murdered in the week since he was shot by the Border Patrol. The officer who shot him has not been named, much less charged with a crime. (His name has since leaked out in court documents, as has the disquieting fact that he continues to patrol the border.)

Not long after the funeral, I walk over the Free Bridge to watch Weecho wrestle once again. Marco has taught me not to drive across the line if I can avoid it. Instead of waiting up to two hours for my car to clear customs, it's easier—and dirt cheap—to just park in the secure lot near the bridge, walk across, and have the El Kartel shuttle service come pick me up. Usually that's Weecho or Saul Luna or Saul's close friend Angel. Tonight when I reach the narrow parking lot on the Texas side of the bridge, I find a rusty Malibu waiting for me. I see Weecho in the passenger's seat, but I can't tell who is driving. Only when I get right up to the car do I realize it's Arson Loskush behind the wheel. I throw him a fist bump and climb in the backseat. “Big night tonight, Fussion,” I say to Weecho.

“Hey man, I'm not supposed to acknowledge that,” he responds. Weecho—I mean Fussion—is headlining at the Wild Wild West Ball Room. It's his official public return to the ring after his knee injury, an occasion advertised on fliers posted on both sides of the river. Daddy Yankee thumps on the stereo as Arson steers east past the Ascarate Drive In and the Chevron refinery, continuing until we come upon a squat and square warehouse that is the ballroom. Arson finds a space in the crowded gravel lot. Weecho raises his duffel bag, signaling that he must head over to the back entrance to maintain the
luchador
illusion. The rest of us walk toward the front door, passing a bronze statue of a buffalo before we slip inside.

Sofia's already here, standing next to her sister and her father, Rigo. Mike the Capo, legally trapped in El Paso, hovers nearby in a pack of six or seven other Karteleros. We have to pay to join them, ten dollars each. Any tickets Weecho might comp would come out of his modest purse. I hand over my money happily, proud to support the wrestling arts. I wave to Sofia as I enter the ballroom, blinking my eyes as I adjust to the darkness.

“We've been laughing so hard,” Sofia says, kissing me on the cheek. “We were joking that when the
lucha libre
ends, then the
quinceañera
begins.”

The Wild Wild West Ball Room has the feel of an underground fight club. Bare concrete walls, linoleum tiling the floor, a ceiling so low they had to remove the blades on two overhead fans before setting up the ring. Sofia's joke that the wrestling will be followed by a coming-out party for a fifteen-year-old girl is not far off the mark. There will be a wedding reception here tomorrow afternoon. In a dark corner I spy a giant paper heart, arrangements of white plastic flowers, and several folding tables covered in white paper tablecloths, all to be pulled out as soon as the ring is broken down. For now, metal folding chairs fan out on all four sides of the ring, almost every chair occupied. Little girls blow bubbles and tap on tambourines illuminated with glow-stick technology. A man rests his arm on his wife's shoulder as their son shadow-wrestles, aping the moves the pros execute in the ring.

The undercard is under way. A seemingly endless supply of
luchadores
parade forth, fight, and are dispatched back to the dressing room. I watch four
luchadores
dance around a fat referee costumed in the mandatory black-and-white stripes. One wrestler sports leather pants embroidered with the word NASCAR. A small man in a blue mask grapples with an even smaller man in a silver mask decorated with what look like red wings over his eyes. Two female
luchadores
leap over the top ropes and tumble into the ring, the traditional entrance. A trio of bumblebees—wrestlers in black singlets and yellow masks—buzz around the action. There's a sonic, cymbalic crash every time a
luchador
falls to the canvas, wooden boards under the thin mat clanging on a steel framework. The ring is loud by design, each crash intended to rise above screams that are predominantly high-pitched, female, and preadolescent.

Every kid in the ballroom swarms into the ring during the breaks between fights, just like they did after the backyard birthday party. The music rotates from Spanish to English, cumbia to Nirvana, banda to Eminem. A tremendous cheer erupts for a
luchador
in a pink tank top, which makes me suspect all of us in the audience might be friends and family of the many fighters on the card. I'm pleased to see that Mike the Capo has smuggled in an eighteen-pack of Bud Light. He hands me a can just before Weecho enters the ring.

He's the tallest
luchador
by far. The largest, too, though his frame is softer than those of his opponents; he really does need to cut down on the weed. He's wearing the same black leather pants with the green lightning bolts. He's also wearing the same black cape he wore when he entered the ring at the backyard birthday party. There is one change for tonight's show: When Weecho lets his cape fall to the ground, he reveals a chest not covered in tight black spandex, as before. This time he's wearing a red Indios jersey. We go crazy. He turns to let us see the number on the back: 915, the El Paso area code.

“Fussion! Fussion! Fussion!”
At the backyard birthday party, Weecho was the heel, the villain reviled until he pulled off his amazing backflip. Tonight he's the hero, the well-known veteran returned to the ring after a long absence. He starts the fight by ricocheting off the ropes, rocketing back across the ring to slam into his opponent, who wears a red mask.
Lucha libre
looks completely scripted. I'd figured Weecho spends hours sketching out his routines. Turns out that's not the case at all. He had never met Punisher before that first backyard fight I saw, not even under any of Weecho's previous wrestling identities. Experienced
luchadores
—the only kind Weecho will wrestle—communicate via subtle signals, telegraphing, and intuition. It's a dance—no one is really being slugged in the head—but the choreography is improvised. And physical. And dangerous.

The crowd screams for blood. A high school teacher who moonlights as Weecho's coach bleats encouragement from a ringside seat. The referee, as integral to the drama as any of the fighters, counts and cautions and separates clutching opponents when necessary. Two more wrestlers waiting in the corners tag into the match. Then, unexpectedly, two more arrive and join the fray. Six wrestlers now clog up the ring, with still more streaming in from the dressing room. Eight wrestlers, then ten. In the chaos, two of the wrestlers tumble under the ropes, continuing their fight in the crowd. They overturn folding chairs as they barrel toward where we're standing. Mike the Capo pulls the Bud Light out of harm's way. Sofia snaps photos. I find myself grinning stupidly. It's so funny.

“Is this a real fight?” someone asks.

“That man just hit a woman,” says someone else. “Should we do something?”

Fussion slips out of the ring and runs toward us, picking up a metal folding chair along the way. He uses the chair to slap down the man who had just hit the woman. Okay, that wasn't real domestic violence earlier, just part of the theater.
This is improv to put Second City to shame.
The woman-slapping man scurries back into the ring, as if he were a
luchador,
which he obviously is. Weecho chases after him, catches him, and body-slams him down on the mat, hard. The man wriggles on his back, apparently incapacitated. Weecho climbs the ropes. I know what he's going to do. I'm ready for it this time.

Weecho again pulls off the backflip, to complete pandemonium.

“THAT MAY HAVE been the best night of my life,” I say at the after-party at Sofia's house. Everybody's still talking about the backflip. “As a life experience, it tops my birth.”

Sofia's father, Rigo, has turned his backyard into a nightclub complete with every amenity but a state liquor license. The U2 Bar, he calls it, established in 2005 after a road trip to see Bono and the Edge play Phoenix and San Diego. Posters of Irish arena rockers are augmented with pictures of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix and more than a few Indios team photos. There's classic bar neon and also a Pink Floyd wall clock. Two TVs, one of them a very big screen, broadcast highlights of a soccer game played earlier. Cases of Bud Light chill in a refrigerator, the blue cans embossed with outlines of the state of Texas. Sofia's mother sets out bowls of tortilla chips, plates of picked jalapeño slices, and a Crock-Pot bubbling with orange melted cheese. Incongruously, at least to my sensibilities, bottles of Perrier sit in ice buckets atop the bar. Also on the bar are a tray of chicken wings and the lemons and Tabasco sauce necessary to make Bud Light palatable. I'm handed a shot of tequila. Arson points to the swimming pool in the backyard. “Get in, Robert! It's not cold.” Mike the Capo runs into the house to borrow a pair of swimming trunks.

The pool is the only part of the backyard nightclub that Rigo didn't design and build himself. He's lived in this house for twelve years, though neither he nor his wife nor even Sofia or her sister is an American citizen; all are here on temporary visas. When he was a boy growing up in Juárez, Rigo used to cross on the weekends to mow lawns for five dollars each. His mom crossed too, to clean houses for fifteen dollars a day. He says he might return to Mexico when he's done with the El Paso warehouse he runs. Until he does return,
if
he ever does return, he and his family remain Mexican citizens living fully American lives.

Saul Luna drops by with his girlfriend, a teacher here in El Paso. When he sees me at the bar, he points to one of the many license plates Rigo has nailed to the walls. The lettering on the bottom of old Chihuahua plates spells out FRONT, for
Fronterizo
, and CHIH, for Chihuahua—the genesis of the derogatory label “
frontchi
.” Saul asks for my take on the Border Patrol shooting. I say there was no excuse for the officer to fire his gun. Saul agrees. Weecho has studied criminology and he thinks the officer was totally in the right.

“The kid was throwing rocks,” Weecho shouts over to us.

“And for that he was shot in the head?” Saul asks.

“They said he might have been a coyote, too,” Weecho adds. Coyotes smuggle Mexicans across the border for a fee.

“And for that he was shot in the head?”

Weecho says someone on the Santa Fe Bridge captured the shooting on a cell phone, and the video has been posted online. “All you have to do is look at the video, man,” he insists. Saul and I still doubt him, so Weecho finds a laptop and pulls up the footage on Univision.com. The officer can be seen arriving on his bicycle, on the American side of the river. Several kids who had been trying to cross into El Paso scurry back over the dry riverbed, to what they must have presumed was the safety of the Mexican side. The officer steps off his bike, pulls out his gun, and fires. No rock throwing is visible. If the officer is under any threat whatsoever, it is not apparent.

“Sorry, Weecho,” Saul says when the video concludes. “That's disgusting.”

I agree. Even Weecho agrees. The evidence is damning. The
luchador
folds up the laptop. I head out to the lawn that circles the pool. I lie on my back and look up at a moon that is waxing. Thin trails of clouds rush across the dark sky. I'm a little drunk, and my head is spinning. Until he saw the shooting video, Weecho—
hecho en Mexico
—had taken the side of the Border Patrol. Saul Luna, born in the United States, living, working, going to school, and dating on the American side of the river, sided with the murdered Mexican.

Chapter 10

Immigration

Last day of february, a sunday. The Indios are scheduled to play down in Toluca against a club called the Red Devils. “It's the hardest place to play,” Marco told me before the team left for the airport. “The altitude there is something like nine thousand feet, their fans are intense, and it's a small stadium, so those fans sit right on top of the field.” The Red Devils are playing well this season, good enough that they've become my favorite to win the title. Marco says it's going to be hot in Toluca, a mountain town forty minutes southwest of Mexico City. It's far from steamy back in Juárez, where I've stayed behind. The hints of spring that have been floating for a couple weeks have yielded to a last spasm of winter, one of those wet, gray, and all-around nasty days where all you want to do is stay in bed. I've pulled myself up to the river to put in a run before the eleven A.M. kickoff, but I'm having trouble getting started. I linger in my car listening to Morning Edition on the radio. My American cell phone picks up a signal, so I check my e-mail. I send my nephew a text. I read the top stories in the
New York Times
. While I'm procrastinating, a red pickup truck pulls into the stadium parking lot. I flick on my wipers to remove a coat of sleet clouding my view of the El Paso railyard.

Three men step out of the truck. I watch them speed-walk toward a hole in the fence that rings the stadium lot. They're wearing cowboy boots and denim jackets and they move low to the ground in a sort of duckwalk, as if a helicopter were approaching. Instinctively, I realize they're making a run for the border.
They're trying to break into Texas!
This gets me out of my car. I bring my cell phone, which I use to snap a photo of the trio, already on the American side of the canal and leaning against a concrete curb below the first of several fences, presumably out of sight of the Border Patrol. I notice for the first time a series of strike-zone-size patches in the fence, places where migrants must have breached the chain links in the past. I feel conspicuous watching the men—
keep your head down, stay on the line, etc.
—so I scurry back to my car. I'm tucking my phone into the glove compartment when the men come running back toward their truck. They dive into the cab and fire up the engine.

Guess they were spotted.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION REMAINS a hot border issue, even more so in the depressed economy. An unemployment rate in Juárez above 20 percent provides a strong incentive to sneak into El Paso, a city almost untouched by the recession, thanks to Fort Bliss and UTEP and all the displaced Mexican investment that El Pasoans quietly praise as a gift from heaven. In regional cities where the downturn is taking a greater toll, Mexicans crossing to “take our jobs” have become a popular scapegoat. Arizona has passed legislation that would require police to check the papers of anyone who seems as though they may, possibly, be in the country illegally. Civil libertarians—and just about anyone with brown skin—are challenging Arizona's activism. DO I LOOK ILLEGAL? asks a T-shirt I've seen in El Paso. Yet the bill has its supporters in Texas, the governor among them. Illegal immigrants are targeted in at least forty bills winding though the state legislature. One of those would require El Paso police to check papers during traffic stops.

“It doesn't make sense to put this burden on local officials who already have plenty of work to do,” El Paso County sherriff Richard Wiles protested in an interview with Fox News Latino.

Marco Vidal's father first crossed into the United States illegally, in 1983. The first place he tried to cross was Ciudad Juárez. Both Marco and his father have remarked to me about the similarities of their life stories, as if they're living mirror images of the same journey. Both are soccer obsessed. Marco's father thought he could have played professionally if he hadn't needed to help out his family. When Marco started playing, his father screamed from the sidelines with such intensity that Marco's oldest sister, Claudia, stopped watching games with him. When Marco first washed out at Tigres and moved back to Dallas, his father refused to give up on his son's Primera dreams. He would wait up until Marco got home from work at midnight. They'd jog down to a neighborhood park and together they'd put in a workout under the moonlight. Both men married their wives only months after meeting them, initial couplings that both occurred mere days after they'd broken up with serious longtime girlfriends. Marco moved from Dallas to Juárez for the opportunity the city gave him. His father snuck into Dallas for the same reason.

Marco's father told me his story when I visited him at his house in DeSoto, a Dallas suburb of wide lawns and green public parks.

“I was born in Mexico City in 1958. I have three brothers and two sisters. I was the second oldest. My father, he had a lot of problems. He used to work at a textile company until he had an accident and cut off his hand. That happened right when I was born. So my mom had to work. She used to make clothes in a factory, and sometimes at home. She bought two sewing machines, and she would sew shorts and sell them in the neighborhood. We were poor. It was hard.

“I've been working since I was eight years old. My grandmother had a little store, and I used to help her. She sold candies from a window. She gave me twenty pesos a week and I'd give all the money to my mom. It was the way I helped out. When I was ten, my oldest brother got married and he left the house. So I was the oldest. I understood that I had to work. There was no money to go to school. I worked in the big store like Wal-Mart that we have in Mexico. I was stocking the groceries. I used to start at seven in the morning and I left at eleven at night. I worked the whole day. All the money I brought to my mom.

“My older brother was [an auto] body man and painter. When I was thirteen years old, I went to help him. I learned how to work on cars. That is how I got an opportunity at General Motors. Somebody had recommended me. I started in the kitchen. Really! I was serving all the employees and bringing them sodas. I was washing dishes and cleaning the ovens and the stove. I wanted to work on the cars, so I took a test and I passed. We were making Malibus and Impalas. That was a good job. I had health insurance, vacation, everything. But there was an engineer, a bad person, a very bad person. A bad boss. I was tired of him, so I quit. I used to make big money when I was working there. I quit a good job.

“I thought I was going to drive my own taxi, but that didn't work out. The car I bought was bad. I spent all my time in the shop, in the mechanic's room. My taxi idea was just a bad idea. I had a headache daily because my daughter Claudia, she was two years old, and we just had my second daughter, too. The taxi wasn't a solution. That's when a friend in the neighborhood, he told me, ‘Let's go to the United States.'

“He just really wanted to go. And he wanted somebody to go with him. We had all heard stories about the USA. I had some aunts who lived in Los Angeles, and every time they would visit us in Mexico, they always had money. I thought if I come to the United States and I work for one year, I'll get so rich that when I come back I won't have to work in Mexico. I didn't talk about it with my mother, only with my wife. It took me two or three days to decide. When I left, my mom was in bed. She was sick. I left her crying. I left my wife crying, too. It was difficult.

“My friend had another friend, and the three of us went to Ciudad Juárez together. It took all our money just to get to Juárez. We didn't have any more money to cross. So I said, ‘Let's go and get jobs in a body shop.' The owner of the shop said he would pay us a thousand pesos a week. He charged us fifteen pesos a week to sleep there and for food. At the end of the first week, he paid us two hundred pesos and said he'd pay us the rest in the future. At the end of the second week he said the same thing. At the end of the month he said he didn't have any of our money, and he didn't have any more work for us. We were trying to save money to cross, but in the end we only had enough money to take a bus back to Mexico City.

“It took a couple weeks before we could try again. This time we went to cross in Piedras Negras. There is a little town next to it called El Moral. At that time we came with a coyote. We were nine peoples. We walked about three hours in Mexico until we finally found the right place on the Rio Bravo. There were stairs on the other side. Sometimes the river is too high, so we had to wait until we could see the bottom stair before we could cross. We stayed for, like, eight hours waiting for the river to drop. I was just watching the coyote. When he said okay, we all took off all our clothes so we wouldn't get them wet. We held them over our heads and we crossed. All nine of us like that, with our clothes over our head. There was a waterfall on one side. It was
peligroso
, dangerous.

“So we cross and we start walking. We walked the whole night. We walked about three nights more. In the day we hide and in the night we walk. All we had was just our clothes and water and a little
comida
, food. We end up in La Pryor, a little town north of Laredo. If you go driving to La Pryor, it's twenty minutes from El Moral. And we take three days walking! So when we get to La Pryor, the coyote, he calls somebody from Austin. And the guy came to pick us up. He had a big ranch. We paid him with three days of work. Then he brought us to Dallas.

“Soon as I get here I have a job, because of my friends. We arrived at our friends' house at one o'clock in the morning. And at four thirty in the morning they took us to their work, and we were hired
inmediatamente
. So we started working the first day. At that time I used to make $350 a week. Better than at the body shop. I used to work a lot, fourteen to sixteen hours a day, but it was good money for me. I used to send a thousand dollars a month back to Mexico. A thousand dollars a month!

“After a year and a half, I was ready to go back. I missed my family and I thought my wife had saved enough of the money that I could live in Mexico without working. When I came back, I bought a refrigerator and I bought some other things and I didn't work for three months. And that used up all the money! So I told my wife, ‘I gotta go back! We all gotta go back.'

“The second time I came to the U.S. was with a passport and a visa. I told my wife to let me go first. Then she and Claudia and Maribel came the same way, with visas. Marco was born in Dallas in 1986. When he was born, my passport was about to expire. So I saw my son alive for one day and then I gotta go to Mexico! I have to renew my passport. I went to Mexico City, but they didn't give me my passport back. They discovered that I never serve in the military. So my family is legally in Dallas and Marco is born in Dallas and I'm stuck in Mexico.

“I talked to my friends. I said, ‘Hey, let's go to the United States.' I did what my friend had done to me the first time we ended up in Ciudad Juárez. I convinced them to accompany me. I had to do it illegally again. But this time I was the coyote. I remembered how we did it the first time and I did the same thing. We go to Piedras Negras again. We waited until we could see the first stair and then we crossed. Soon after I get back to Dallas they pass a law giving everyone amnesty. So I've been legal ever since.

“We all lived together in Dallas, in a Mexican neighborhood. At the time we used to live with two of my brothers and their families—about sixteen people in a little two-bedroom house. I was the first in my family to come to the United States, but all three of my brothers, they follow me. When I came back the second time, I got a job with my oldest brother in a body shop. And then after a year he said, ‘Hey, let's open our own shop.' That was in 1987. I never did retire. I still have to work!

“That law in Arizona is racist. It's
mal
, bad. The people who want the law are racist people. The United States was built on immigration. It wasn't easy to leave Mexico and come to a totally different country by myself. But now all the opportunities my children were able to get because of it, I don't regret it one bit. I still feel Mexican, 100 percent, but I don't think I'll return to Mexico. I am an American citizen. My family is here. This is my home.

“And Mexico, it is a dangerous country now.”

I LOVE TO read
El Diario
on Fridays. That's when the paper publishes a special section of things to do over the weekend. Notably, the section is entitled Escape. Also notably, the first page of the section recommends movies to rent and watch at home. That's followed by a full page listing the movies to be broadcast on cable. In the nightlife section—The Night Is for Pleasure—only seven bars are suggested as safe places to go for drinks, and all of the bars are located inside major hotels. There
are
cultural events in Juárez. I've been to book readings and to more than one play at the university. A symphony orchestra and a desert opera come around in the summer. Touring musical troupes regularly bring the Disney brand to Juárez toddlers. But more and more of the culture
El Diario
spotlights, I've noticed, is taking place in El Paso. In their attempts to promote leisure activities on the southern side of the river, the paper's editors sometimes must really stretch. The lead story one Friday was headlined “Robert Downey, Jr. Returns to Juárez.” What? A Hollywood actor coming to Murder City, and not for the first time? The article turned out to be about Downey's latest movie, which was opening at the Misiones Mall cineplex; the actor himself would not be present at the screening. Another week, the featured “nightclub” was Applebee's. “All week long, Applebee's is the place for friends, food, and parties—all your enjoyment in one place.”

I watch the Toluca game at an Applebee's, just because of the paper's recommendation, which amused my snobbish sensibilities. I pick the branch of the restaurant across from the Rio Grande Mall, opening the door to find it stuffed with Troy Aikman and NASCAR memorabilia and dozens of fans in Indios jerseys. The waitresses wear Indios jerseys, too.
Applebee's really is the place.
Because I was so late starting my run, I've missed most of the first half. Thirty-five minutes have elapsed, and the Indios are down 1–0. As I head to the only free seat I see, at the bar, I notice the Indios' radio crew broadcasting from a corner table, watching the same satellite feed as the rest of us. I wave hello, turning back just as the referee calls a penalty on an Indios defender, in the box, which means an automatic free shot on goal from only twelve yards away. A sure thing. This'll make the score 2–0 at the half when … but wait! Christian blocks the shot! Our goalie is the best. Marco flies over to congratulate Christian, pumping his fist while screaming with emotion. It remains only 1–0 at the half, a margin the Indios may be able to overcome.