Big Dreams (69 page)

“Look there,” he said, and I looked and saw five people crouched at the edge of Otay Mesa Road.

Nuñez killed the Blazer’s headlights, downshifted into first, and glided toward them. He was absolutely calm. The maneuver was as familiar to him as brushing his teeth.

The migrants were so preoccupied that they didn’t see the Blazer until it was almost upon them. Then one of them yelled, and they all spun on their heels and ran.

“Halt!” Nuñez shouted.

They did. No show of force was needed. The migrants complied immediately, slumping to their knees and putting their hands on their heads with perfect expertise, as their
coyote
had doubtlessly instructed them to do.

The
coyote
was a burly professional. He had been caught before and would be caught again. The bust was a minor inconvenience to him, something he would shake off at a cantina tomorrow, a bit of misfortune that was bound to come sooner or later to anybody who played the game.

His clients were three men and a woman in their early twenties. They were far less sanguine about their predicament. They had never crossed the border before. The moonlit mesa must have seemed immense to them, and California still as distant as a star.

Nuñez called for a van to pick them up. Then he frisked them all. He found a handkerchief tied to one man’s leg, hidden under
his trousers. The man made a keening noise, as though the handkerchief held precious gems. Nuñez unrolled it and out fell ten faded dollar bills.

“Where are you from?” Nuñez asked in Spanish. He projected sympathy. The circumstances were embarrassing, really.

The oldest migrant cleared his throat. He kept looking at the
coyote
, wanting to strangle the bastard.

“Oaxaca,” he said.

Oaxaca was about sixteen hundred miles away. I thought of the bus rides and the scrimped meals and the nights spent sleeping in alleys or on floors. Oaxaca, where the soil was so depleted that it scarcely supported a corn crop anymore. Sixteen hundred miles, sore legs, an empty belly, and there you were slumped on your knees on Otay Mesa. Eldorado was nothing but dust and a black sky.

“Why did you cross?” Nuñez asked.

The man shrugged. “To work,” he said.

Trabajar
, to work. Throughout the night, whenever Nuñez asked his question, “Why did you cross?,” he got the same reply. People crossed the border to work, and they didn’t care what the work was like. They would do all the things I’d seen them doing—swab floors, swim in pesticides, harvest sea urchins, and pick grapes. They’d pour hot tar for roofs, handle beakers in meth labs, mow lawns, deliver circulars, and clean sewers. They would do anything at all.

The night dragged on. About eleven o’clock, Nuñez got a radio call about some Salvadorans who were being rounded up. He sighed. Central Americans were a pain in the ass. They required about forty-five minutes of paperwork each.

The Salvadorans would all insist that they were victims seeking political asylum, and by the time a court date was arranged, they would all be working somewhere. If they couldn’t find any work, they would go home.

Nuñez’s shift would stretch into the wee hours. He had accepted such hitches as part of his job, but some agents couldn’t tolerate the tricky metaphysics of their situation. They had signed up to be heroes,
but they were just spinning in a revolving door and developed stress-related illnesses and marital problems and problems with booze.

Out on the mesa, they sometimes got terrible headaches when they realized that no one could tell for sure where California ended and Mexico began.

O
TAY MESA
was a different story in the morning. There were no illegals to be seen. Earthmovers were digging up the ground near Pacific Rim Boulevard and Maquiladora Court, two streets that had fire hydrants and electrical cables but no buildings yet.

Trucks in a steady caravan went through the port of entry, more than a thousand a day, carrying freight into Mexico and to the Zona Industrial of Tijuana. Businessmen reported for work at the American and Japanese corporations that operated assembly plants on the other side—Casio, Sanyo, Sony, Maxell, General Motors, Honeywell, and so on.

A hundred years ago, German settlers had dry-farmed barley on the mesa. Siempre Viva was the first town. It had a post office, a saloon, and a horse-racing track that pulled in customers from as far away as San Francisco, but it died in a recession, in 1893. Speculators drilled a useless oil well in 1928, and miners took bentonite clay from open pits through the 1940s.

An amusement park called “Captain Nemo’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” had once been targeted for the mesa, but it never made it past the planning stage.

Only now was Otay Mesa being fully exploited. Its developers had lobbied to have it included in a U.S. Foreign Trade Zone that gave all sorts of economic incentives to firms willing to locate there and take part in the
maquiladora
scheme, and they had succeeded.

Tijuana had more than five hundred
maquiladoras
at present. The workers earned much less than an American or a Japanese worker would earn for doing the same job. They were primarily young women, and they spent about half of their wages on a place
to live and another sixth on transportation. The average
maquiladora
had a high rate of employee turnover, up to 25 percent a month.

In the Zona Industrial, the air smelled of exhaust fumes and was so thick with dust rising from dirt roads that I felt I could grab a handful of it. At the Maxell plant, the
maquila
girls were coming out of their fenced compound on a lunch break. They bought food from quilt trucks and carts—sandwiches, fruit, cold drinks. They were done up as though for a night on the town, lavishly powdered and lipsticked, their hair teased and pomaded and a fetching look in their eyes.

A handsome boy selling melon slices was about to wilt under their attentions. They were killing him with their perfume. Romance was dangerous in the
maquila
world and could strike at any minute.

I talked with a Japanese supervisor, who was sipping coffee and sucking on a cigarette. He had been transferred to Tijuana from L.A. He didn’t mind it at all, he said. His wife was petite like many Mexican women and had enjoyed great success in shopping for clothes.

Then the break was over, and I drove over washboard streets back to Otay Mesa on the California side. There was no Joe’s by any of the industrial parks, only a Chevron Station and a McDonald’s. I bought a Big Mac and sat on a lawn outside a corporate building to eat it. You win, Derrel Ridenour, Jr., I thought, stretching out on the lush grass and looking up at the circling birds.

AY, ¡CARAMBA!
I couldn’t stop traveling. I followed California into Mexico, crossing the border again at San Ysidro port of entry on a Saturday afternoon, in the company of some moon-faced Lambda Chis already halfway drunk and some nuzzling couples soon to be enveloped in the margarita haze at Rosarito Beach Hotel. There were gigantic coeds flexing their volleyball muscles, secretive bald men after bargain-basement Rogaine, and dorky little poontang hounds who kept the strip joints in the Zona Rosa in business.

Now I understand the blandness of San Diego. For a century, its citizens had looked to Tijuana as the place to act out their passions. Mexico embodied all the honest life that was missing from their city. They craved its spicy cuisine and the fire in its loins. They, too, needed an occasional taste of blood.

Thousands of cars poured over the line. Californians were riding in donkey carts on Avenue Revolución and having their pictures taken in serapes and sombreros. At Hussong’s and Popeye’s they were pounding beers and tequila shooters and dancing in joyous stupidity to mariachi bands. Their hips moved as never before. The demons were coming out of their closets. Tongues would touch other tongues, and untoward liaisons would occur. Guilt could wait until tomorrow, resurrecting itself on the other side.

By midnight, the streets were wacky with reeling collegians all sunburned to a crisp and throwing up in unison. The
maquila
girls were just hitting their stride, arriving at discos with the flare of starlets on the verge of a breakthrough and trailing their killer perfume. I pitied the poor youths who were the target of their lingerie. Someday they might wake up as husbands in a new house in a yet-to-be-built subdivision, Mismo Acres, up Chula Vista way.

Sunday morning, there were church bells and atonement. I kicked at garbage as I walked through the
centro
. A kid with a shoeshine box gave me a shine. The
maquila
girls had finished their dreaming and had put on mantillas.

Tijuana was a city of 4 million people. There were at least three thousand applicants for any job. Grand homes sat on a hillside above the dusty air and were favored with views of a golf course, just as in
El Norte
. I saw pizza parlors, video rental stores, fancy dress shops, and fine Italian and French restaurants, but most people lived in
colonias
such as El Florido on the blanched earth at the edge of canyon country.

El Florido had not existed five years ago. Now it was home to fifty thousand, many of them
maquiladora
workers. They built their houses slowly, brick by brick and board by board. Compared to other
provinces in Mexico, Baja California was the land of opportunity. Tijuana was at the center of a Mexican Gold Rush.

I bought a Coke from Lino Gonzalez Alvarez, a refugee from Guadalajara. He kept the sodas on ice in a metal drum. His
tienda
had a plywood counter and the usual complement of flies that could not be avoided in the city.
Maquiladora
workers were his main customers, and he made the equivalent often thousand American dollars a year, more than he’d ever made before.

Street musicians from Oaxaca played on the boulevards. The tourists were packing up to depart, forming a long line at the port of entry and squandering their last pesos on hideous ceramic dwarfs and neon-bright piñatas that would serve them forever after as a reminder of the time they were a little crazy down in Mexico and did some things they’d never do again.

J
ESS HARO HAD MADE A SMALL MISTAKE
. Hotel El Rosal in Ensenada was Las Rosas Hotel by the Sea. It was Mexico sanitized, a playground for San Diegans and Angelenos, but I didn’t care. I took a room with a balcony overlooking the Pacific and kept writing in my notebooks and eating fish tacos and drinking Coronas.

The swimming pool was spectacular, indeed. It was situated on an incline so that the negative edge appeared to flow into the ocean. Whenever I swam in it, I felt as if my body were weightless and floating into a new and unblemished world. That was my new dream.

Afternoons I sat at the bar saying,
“Mas Corona, por favor,”
and watching the San Francisco
Gigantes
and their pennant race on TV. I was postponing the inevitable, of course, the demise of my own little paradise.

Ensenada stank of fish-processing plants. I thought about Crescent City—so long ago, on another planet. The city had its share of
maquiladoras
, too, and also a Louisiana-Pacific mill.

One day, I drove aimlessly into the countryside to Agua Caliente, a hot springs resort seven miles down a dirt road into a canyon. An
old man was sitting on a chair outside a bungalow at the resort, implacably patient, as if he knew I would come, as if my arrival were preordained.

“You like to go into the baths,
señor
?” he asked.

I looked at the pools, but the water in them could not be said to beckon. Old car seats were arranged around them, and there were motel units that the Joads might have been hesitant about staying in. I had a sense that creatures really owned the place, rats and mice and scorpions. Or maybe time did.

I said to the old man, “Just a cold
cerveza, por favor
.”

The next day, still aimless, I took another dirt road to the settlement of Ojos Negros. There were some farms, some horses in pastures, and some onion fields. Hawks rested on the graying wood of fence posts. On the horizon, I saw two figures about a half-mile away and watched them grow bigger as I got closer, going five miles an hour over the ruts and the bumps.

An old woman and her granddaughter. The old woman had kind eyes and an Indian face. The little girl clutched at her grandma’s fingers, not knowing what to make of a gringo in a Taurus. I slowed to a crawl to keep from burying them in dust, and the old woman flagged me down and made gestures indicating that she’d like a ride back to the houses at Ojos Negros.

“Get in,” I said, and they did.

They sat together in the backseat, my two mysterious passengers. I could see the old woman in my rearview mirror, smiling contentedly at this unexpected gift. The little girl wouldn’t let go of her hand. The car was as big as the world to her, and she loved it and was frightened by it and hoped only that it would take her home.

The old woman asked to be let out in front of a house. She shooed the little girl inside it, then came around and leaned against my door. She was still smiling. I thought that she’d probably been smiling like that for eighty years, smiling because she knew a secret.

“Gracias, señor,”
she said, touching my arm, and I watched her go into the house and then drove home myself, to California.

T
HE AFTERNOON
of October seventeenth was unusually warm and muggy in San Francisco, and the Giants, our miracle children, were about to host the Oakland A’s in a World Series game at Candlestick Park. On Twenty-fourth Street, I heard somebody say, “Earthquake weather,” but I paid it no mind. In the city, people were always talking about an earthquake, the epochal one that was going to rip apart the turf and raise up Nostradamus with his final predictions.