Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (22 page)

Slowly, and with coaching from Máximo, Chucho got the knack of it. Against my better judgment, but trusting in Máximo, I fell asleep; probably against his wishes, succumbing to exhaustion, he did too. A couple of hours later, we both awoke with a start at the skidding and bouncing of wheels. Chucho had gone off the road—not on the right-hand side, but on the left—and was just wrestling the Squire back into its proper lane. We were going very fast.

“
What in the hell are you doing?”
screamed Máximo.

“
Fucking car won’t go straight!”
a shaken Chucho shouted back, stepping now on the brake and easing off the left-side shoulder.

“
Well, no wonder—look how fast you’re going!”
the speedometer was just coming down past the sixty mark as he spoke.

“
You said the limit. I was only going the limit.”

“
But the limit's fifty. Look
—
there’s a sign.”

“
No sir, no
—
there’s the limit. Eighty-three.”
Chucho pointed at a small sign designating the number of the county road.
“¡Hijo de la chingada, cabrón! What a fool you are!”

As word of what happened filtered to the back of the car, Chucho was ribbed mercilessly—even though, I thought to myself, most of the rest of them could easily have made the same mistake. Máximo took over the driving once again. Chucho, red faced, returned to the backseat. If nothing else, his training and gaffe had helped pass the time; we weren’t far now.

The central part of Florida, especially in the south, remains separate from the popular and well-known Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Divorced from coastal development, retirement culture, the service economy, and the national limelight, Florida's interior is a world unto itself. Humid, windless, and backwoods, it is a place of rust, old trucks, ceiling fans, and undergrowth, noisy more with the sounds of nature than of men. There are lots of dead things on the highways. The people you notice are often borrowed from images of the Deep South: middle-aged white men wearing billed caps, perspiring women in thin dresses, slow-moving, dirt-poor blacks. It seems a place the civil rights movement forgot to visit, a slow-paced backwater where much, you have the feeling, hasn’t changed in a very long time. Acreage producing the third most cattle of any state in the union is interspersed with still, murky swamps, secret worlds into which the “crackers” seem to have special insights. The change in scenery as we descended into the peninsula was dramatic. Expanses of bankless, shallow-watered lakes. Spanish moss on dead limbs. Whole woods of the same tree, the same mists. And, of course, agriculture—behind the alligator “farms,” vast fields of tomatoes, green peppers, melons, strawberries, sugarcane, and citrus—which were, of course, the sole reason we were here.

It was a long state, and the last few hours went the slowest.

For the first time since New Mexico, the car radio picked up a Spanish-language station, but, after the announcer’s introducton and a few bars of the first song, Emilio switched it off with annoyance.

“
¡Cubanos, pinche cubanos!”
he said.
“Even country-western is better than that stuff.”

“
You don’t like Cubans?”
I asked.

“
They’ll fuck you over, man,”
said Chucho, in the back.

“
Hey, give me one to fuck over,”
said Emilio.
“Give me one of those black ones with the tits and the long legs, give me twenty dollars.”

“
Just remember,”
said Moises in the far back,
“the twenty dollars is for
her.”

“
You hear that?”
said Chucho, addressing Emilio’s brother, Pedro, in the seat next to him.
“They come to the camps. They come on weekends. Save up a little money; it's worth it!”
As I turned around to see Pedro’s reaction, he reddened.

“
Eeehhhh, see, he’s thinking about it,”
said Emilio, causing the face to redden even more. Everyone was loosening up; soon we would be there.

We came to what I gradually realized was a vast region of citrus orchards. The many I had seen around Phoenix were nothing compared to this. It was late afternoon, and many men, tired and sweaty, were visible among them, evidently on their way home. The great majority were Mexicans—over the past twenty years, they, Mexican-Americans from Texas, and Haitians had been replacing a farmworker population that was once almost all American black. Estimates placed the number of undocumented Mexicans in central Florida at 25,000 to 30,000 during the citrus season. The guys in back devoted themselves to guessing where in Mexico a given group was from.

“
Oaxaqueños,”
opined Moises, pointing to a group of strikingly short men with Indian features emerging from one grapefruit grove.

“
No, no
—
they’re not from Oaxaca, they’re from Michoacán!”
asserted Chucho.
“Look at their hats. Look at those huaraches.”
The same way a New Yorker might discern a midwesterner, or a northern Californian a southern Californian, the Mexicans could place those from other parts of their extremely regional country. I knew the basic formula (the shorter and more Indian looking a Mexican, the greater the likelihood he was from southern Mexico)—it was the nuance that escaped me: the cut of the
huarache,
the turn of a hat, the manner of the individual.

We kept driving. By nightfall we had reached La Belle, our destination. The air was wet and heavy. Windows down, we drove along State Road 29, Bridge Street, the main drag of a town that looked like many others in the South. There was a white courthouse here, Baptist church there, little minimalls, park with a picnic table, motels. Down the side streets we could see well- kept neighborhoods, with lawns and streetlights, late-model American cars parked along the curbs. We continued through a zone of motels that looked rather worse for wear than the others, and soon after turned onto an overgrown lane away from the nice neighborhoods.

The paved road quickly became dirt, pocked with holes. There were no streetlights here, but in the moonlight were visible shacks and trailers of various kinds, standing pools of water, trash cans, stoops. Little looked trimmed or manicured, much was wild. Sitting in chairs on their lawn of dirt were two black men, enjoying a smoke; someone in the back of the car suggested rolling up the windows if we were to continue through
that
kind of neighborhood. But Emilio was looking for something: the house where a friend had lived last time he was here, he said, and possibly a place for us to spend the night. When at last he found it, though, it had someone else’s car in the yard, a stereo playing music not of Mexico. Emilio drove out of town about five miles, and then, without explanation, turned off the headlights, slowed, and pulled abruptly up a side road leading into an orange orchard. Here he paused and then slowly, adjusting his vision to the moonlight, he guided the Squire into the orchard. He kept one eye on the rearview mirror at first to see if we were being followed, but then lost himself in the task of getting to a remote place where we’d never be discovered.

Finally we were there—ensconced between two close rows in what seemed the very middle of a vast forest of citrus trees. Emilio shut off the engine. Slowly, achingly, people piled out until, for the first time since the Texas motel and only the second time since Phoenix, the car was empty. It was our fourth day. I looked up and saw the sky was filled with stars. Blankets came out of the car, and flat, protected sleeping sites were sought. The soil, I noticed, was sandy, a change from the more mulch-covered Phoenix orchards. Almost everyone lit up a cigarette, and I joined in. After a few moments of sitting in a road-induced coma, we were snapped out of it by Pedro, carrying a load of oranges in his outstretched shirtfront. The price was right, they were plentiful, and soon the air was filled with the tangy, acidic smell of peels, our dirty hands covered with sticky juice. Some men talked and joked for a while, but eventually we all lay down, the sight of the sky through leaves of the trees competing with the lingering image of white lines on dark roadway, etched in our eyes.

*

Still lacking a good meal, we drove first thing in the morning to a large industrial plant. The windowless concrete structure was set in a huge dirt lot surrounded by orchards on three sides and the state highway on the fourth; eight-foot chain-link fences ran alongside this exposed flank and met at the center in a set of large gates. We parked near the gates.
NO HELP WANTED
said a big sign affixed to the gate. I translated it for Emilio, but he ignored me and walked up to the gatehouse. Máximo and I tagged along. The guard spoke no Spanish, and Emilio seemed to be having difficulty getting his message across.

“
Tell him we want to speak with Gutierrez,”
Emilio said to me.

This was, I was about to discover, one of the places where being undocumented makes you an insider, gets you past the
NO HELP WANTED
signs. The man got on the phone, and presently—after having our shoes and trousers misted with alcohol to kill possible carriers of orange blight—we were allowed to pass. Emilio led the way to a trailer on the back side of the factory. Gutierrez met us at the door, immediately casting a suspicious eye on me.
“He’s a teacher; he came with us,”
said Emilio. They shook hands warmly, and Emilio filled him in on the situation.

“
How many did you say you were}”

“
Eight.”

“
And him?”
Gutierrez asked, pointing at me.

“
Well, seven without him. But he’ll work.”

“You will?” said Gutierrez in English, breaking into a large grin. I nodded, reminded of Máximo’s reaction when I said I’d like to travel with them. Only this time, because of the company I kept, I felt more secure.

“
Has he done it before?”
They nodded, and I did too. Gutierrez raised his eyebrows. “Well, okay. I’ll try anything once!” He had stolen my line.

We were to start the next day, picking juice oranges for the large juice concern that owned everything around us. Before then, we would need to buy the items which in Phoenix had been furnished us: gloves (a local 7-Eleven store, ever attentive to its market, had an entire wall-full), canvas sleeves to protect ourselves from thorns, and the full-size picking bags used in Florida (the Arizona kind, I discovered to my chagrin, was the more "humane" three-quarter-size bag), though the last could be purchased from the company and the expense deducted from our paychecks
("not the way you want to do it,"
Emilio advised me, indicating his distrust of the company). But before that, I discovered to my joy and surprise, it was time to eat.

Gutierrez had told Emilio we could sleep and park behind his house in town. It was a small, comfortable frame affair, up the income scale from the shantytown we had visited, but quite a ways beneath the nice middle-class houses we had seen on our first drive down Bridge Street. The backyard was screened from the neighbors by thick vegetation and sloped down to a small marsh. Emilio drove over the coarse lawn and around the house, parking under a large shade tree. We unloaded, and then Emilio, after taking a collection, went off to market.

*

“
They’re smarter than we are,”
opined Chucho.

“
No,”
said Máximo,
“they’re just better educated. The low things in their minds have been replaced by higher ones.”

We were all sitting and lying around the tree, shoes and sweaters off, cigarettes out, relaxing, waiting for Emilio. For once the guys who had been in back were getting a good look at me; I discovered, to my surprise, that they’d been burning with curiosity about me since first we left Phoenix, but had felt constrained from asking questions while we were driving. The subject of conversation was Americans, and I was something like a moderator.

“
They are more businesslike. They’re organized, they plan things out.”

“
But Americans don’t think about sex as much as we do, right?”

“
Well, I’m not so sure about that,”
I said.
“I guess we probably think about it as much, we just don’t let on sometimes.”

“
We Mexicans are hotter than Americans,”
offered Moises with a grin. Arms bent at his sides, he made a pulling motion to make his meaning clear. Máximo made a face and tsk-ed in disapproval at this disrespect, but others laughed at Moises’s audacity; despite the way I looked and no doubt smelled, they apparently had decided I was a person of culture and learning, from the class of person who, in Mexico, might be offended by such candid references to sex.

“
Except for American women,”
said Chucho, to more laughs.
“They’re pretty hot, too!”

“
Yes, las gringas!”

I was learning a lot. Mexicans seemed to look at American men in much the same way we often look at Germans: they were precise, efficient, somewhat cold, too serious. It was interesting because, impatient toward the end of the drive, that was how I had felt with them—I was pushing the speed to the Squire’s limit, not talking, maybe a little annoyed at how long it all was taking. The impatience seemed very American—but what, after all, was the hurry? Why was I so jealous of “lost” time? They were calling it pretty well.