Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (24 page)

Lupe Sanchez had arranged for me to stay with the family of an old friend of his in Ahuacatlán, a former farmworker named Hilario Pacheco. It wasn’t only as a favor to me: Hilario coordinated the work in the valley of an agricultural cooperative that the Arizona Farmworkers Union had helped to found. His job required visits to farmers not only around Ahuacatlán, but also in the twenty or so isolated
ranchos
that dotted the valley—and Hilario didn’t like to drive the co-op’s ten-ton truck on the narrow curvy back roads. Coming from a mountainous place myself, I rather did. And so was born our arrangement.

Again the White Arrow yawed, tilting sharply into the mountain this time, the road passing over a small stream falling down one of the mountain’s dark folds. Butterflies danced in a ray of light that illuminated this green recess, entranced perhaps by the warmth, perhaps by the mist. The scene was enchanting, except for the quantity of papers and cans that littered the stream banks. It was trash of the Third World wilderness, a wilderness where people live.

Around the next curve, the bus slowed again; half of the road had crumbled and slid down the mountainside. A crew of men was working with shovels and planks and wheelbarrows of concrete to buttress it up again, among them one Rigoberto Orduña, Hilario’s brother-in-law and my landlord for the next four months. He was a quiet, humble, nondescript man, quite gainfully employed by local standards. I didn’t know how to pick him out yet ... but we were getting close to Ahuacatlán.

Soon we reached the valley bottom, and for the next half hour traced the route of the curving Rio Moctezuma, hot air rushing in from the advancing night. We skirted a small hamlet, nestled deep in the valley and visible from a distance by the white dome of its large church, and stopped at an intersection on the edge. Few were around to see me descend from the bus, but those that were stopped to watch. No one would be there to meet me, because they didn’t know exactly when I was coming. Besides, one could spend a long afternoon waiting for the White Arrow.

I walked up to one older, straw-hatted man on the nearest corner. He looked down, pretending not to see me as I approached, but then at the sound of my
“Buenas noches”
was extremely polite and attentive. Yes, he said, he knew the house of Hilario Pacheco. He would take me there.

*

Hilario’s wife, Lupe, handed six-year-old Juanito a sack full of empty soda botdes and tucked a one-hundred-peso note in his little pocket.
“Four Coca-Colas and an orange,”
she instructed her son, and he left the shade of the kitchen for the hot Ahuacatlán streets. There was to be a guest at the midday meal—an American —and cold soft drinks were to be served. He had a mission.

It was an errand he ran whenever a guest was served—last time it had been the priest—and he liked it because his mother always shared one of the Cokes with him. That was a rare treat. And what sweetened it was that his three older sisters usually didn’t get any. And they always complained.

Juanito headed toward the nearest of the three stores in town that had refrigerators—Don Beto’s, on a corner opposite the plaza. After the dark kitchen, he had to squint—the sun was bright and very hot. On days like this, Juanito’s brown crew cut reflected its blond highlights—though not a blond by American standards, already he was called
“Güero,”
or
“Rubio,”
by many in town.

There were not many sidewalks, so Juanito walked in the dirt road. It was not like in cities of the United States, where a parent would hesitate to send such a small child on errands. In a remote town of less than a thousand people, everyone knows each other. Harm a small boy, and not only were you put in jail, you were ostracized—which might be worse. The town’s law-enforcement system was its very smallness. Nor was traffic a problem, simply because few in Ahuacatlán had cars. What traffic there was was limited to the highway on the edge of town.

Rather than cars or creeps, what Juanito mainly feared were the pigs of Señora Eustolia, across the road from his family’s house. There were five in all, a sow and her brood of four piglets. As with the animals of other widows, or poorer families, they were part of public life in Ahuacatlán. Juanito lived in a concrete- and-plaster house, with corrugated plastic roof and stone walls around its two acres to keep the animals in. But Señora Eustolia had only her two-room bamboo hut. She couldn’t very well keep all her pigs tied up, so they just ran free. The pigs seldom got lost, as everyone knew them by their coloring, and, actually, they seemed among the happiest creatures in town. The sow led a sedentary life near the village dump and Eustolia’s door, her bristly back as high as Juanito’s nose. But the piglets were a marauding gang, snuffling around underneath kitchen windows, lying in mud by the river, on the run when playing or whenever one of the town’s sorry dogs found the energy to yap at them. They ran fast, sometimes in formation; and if you were small, like Juanito, they might not change direction for you.

Why the robust pigs of Ahuacatlán were afraid of the dogs is a mystery of nature, for the dogs of Ahuacatlán were pathetic creatures. You did not call over a villager’s dog and scratch it behind the ears—they were dirty. They expected you to hit them. People seldom caressed them. Where I grew up, when two dogs got into a fight, people warned you to stay away. But in Ahuacatlán, a dogfight was reason for celebration. On more than one evening at the plaza, the sound of snarling attracted a throng of twenty or so children. Cheering, they chased the feuding dogs down the street, sometimes throwing stones to intensify things. Juanito saw the old mongrel of his buddy Pedrito lying in the street and let loose a good-size rock. The missile grazed its target; the dog leapt up and slunk off with its tail between its legs. That’s what dogs were for.

Juanito’s kindergarten teacher, Idalia, smiled at him as she passed going the other way. Soon Juanito passed the cafe where the male teachers took many of their meals. As usual, they were sitting in two groups. There was some kind of war going on between the teachers. It had to do not with the school, but with Mexico. All of them, Juanito knew, were from out of town. As part of their deal with the government, they received their education and credentials in return for agreeing to serve in a remote area for three or four years. But because they were young and bored with Ahuacatlán, and came from several different Mexican states, they found reasons to hate each other. Juanito was glad that Idalia wasn’t a part of it all.

Tomás Peña called a greeting to Juanito, and Juanito looked over at the boarded-up little storefront where the Peñas lived. Señor Peña was out front, a long five-gallon gas can resting up on his shoulder, draining into the fuel tank of a government truck. Tomás was watching from the window. Juanito would have been surprised at the sight of an American gas station: There was nothing so fancy in Ahuacatlán, or even in Querétaro City. Here, if you wanted gas, you found Señor Peña’s house, knocked on his door, and told him how much. His gravity-flow storage tank was in the back; a Pemex tanker truck came around to refill it every six months or so.

Next Juanito neared the plaza, fronted on one side by the huge white domed church, by far the largest building in town. It had taken a long time to complete that church—the Indians, under Franciscan rule, had started it, and mestizos, enslaved by their poverty, had finished it. The plaza was quiet, almost all the dark green, wrought-iron benches that encircled it empty at midday. Except one: sitting in a far corner was Zeferino Herrera. Mamá said he was an idiot. He walked around all day without seeming to know where he was going. When he got hungry, he knocked on people’s doors; most of the
señoras
would fix him a plate of beans, scrambled eggs, something. When Don Beto gave him batteries, he listened to his transistor radio, held it right up to his ear. Juanito walked quietly up the sidewalk opposite Zeferino, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed.

Don Beto, a friendly, outgoing man whose large belly was the subject of children’s jokes, reached from behind the counter for the bag of empty bottles as Juanito entered his shady store. It took a moment for the eyes to adjust—the stores never had lights. Don Beto placed the bottles upright on the counter.
“Four. And what will it be, señorito?”

Juanito placed his order; Don Beto filled the bag and handed him his change. On the way out, Juanito stopped by the overturned crate of the old crone whom Don Beto let use his sidewalk. She came down from some
rancho
two or three times a week and sold roasted pumpkin seeds. They were cheap, even from Juanito’s point of view, and he knew his mother wouldn’t mind. The crone wrapped fifty or sixty seeds into a newspaper cone, and her gnarly fingers picked the appropriate coin from Juanito’s small hand.

The walk back took longer, because now the bag was heavy, and some pumpkin seeds required two hands to eat. Juanito took a different route, for interest’s sake—around behind the church, past the high crumbling wall of a disused courtyard. That was the place where the boxing promoters and cockfight entrepreneurs set up shop once a month or so, placing a card table by the gate to charge admission, installing loudspeakers to let the whole town know they were there, running long extension cords from across the street so they could string up a light bulb or two and keep things going once it got dark.

There had been a cockfight just that weekend, and down the street Juanito stopped where three or four other kids had gathered around a figure seated on the sidewalk. They were watching Pablo, who ran the town’s best cantina. Pablo was bent over something in his lap.

¿Qué?”
Juanito asked his friend Chiquis.

“
One of the roosters,”
said Chiquis.
“He’s sewing it up.”

Sure enough, one of Pablo’s hands was pulling a needle and thread from the direction of the rooster. The rooster had a deep gash in its stomach, where the razor strapped to the foot of its opponent had struck home. Usually such a rooster was simply sold as food, but Pablo had started a small side business through his surgical ability to resurrect fallen roosters: behind his house was a coop where several proud birds, each with a scar, strutted their stuff, awaiting the day they would go at it again. This rooster breathed heavily, blinked slowly, beak open.

“
Think he’ll make it?”
asked one of the boys.

“
This one, I don’t know,”
said Pablo, shaking his head. “
Big cut. But he put up a great fight. I think he’ll make it.”
Using his teeth, he tied a knot down by the bird’s oozy belly and applied ointment to the sutures.

The smells of the midday dinner filled the remainder of the walk home—corn tortillas cooking over wood fires, gurgling pots of refried beans, sizzling meat in the homes of the more comfortable. A rock ’n’ roll hits tape, the kind offered in any store with space for the five-foot-tall rotating rack, blared from the window of one house—over the months Juanito had come to recognize every song on that tape, they played it so often—and, from another, came the
ranchera
music that was Mexico’s own.

I dreamed of money in the bank,

And of driving a Cadillac.

I married a blonde, hoping I’d become a U.S. citizen —but she turned out to be a wetback, too,

And now I’m back home, driving my burro.

Juanito turned onto his own street, and looked: good, he thought, no pigs. He hissed at Pedrito’s dog, which had returned to the sun but was too deaf to notice, and walked through the gate to his house.

*

Concrete floor, gas range, long concrete countertop, and room for a table with four or five wooden chairs around it—Lupe Pacheco’s kitchen was nicer than most. Poor Eustolia Romo across the road had only a dirt floor, had to keep a little cooking fire going all day long, breathe the smoke when she heated water. She smelled like smoke. How did she feel when the government gas truck came to town, and others lifted their empty propane tanks up to the highway for a refill? Perhaps Eustolia’s sons would do well in
“Los Uniteds,”
and send something home to make life easier. Hilario certainly had. Though they had Lupe’s brother to thank for the use of the house. He had left for Florida ten years ago, forsaking his inheritance for the chance of riches up north. He must have done all right, too, for they never heard from him, never had any word that he was headed home. Perhaps it was just as well—where would her family go if one day he showed up?

On the wall was their old AM radio, tuned to the only station it could be tuned to—500-watt XEJAQ, “Radio Happiness,” in Jalpan, down on the plains twenty-five miles away. The announcer was young Miguel Ángel, son of her sister-in-law. Lunch hour was when he always did the requests and dedications received in the mail—often from as far away as Idaho. Lupe was not sure exactly where Idaho was, but she knew they grew potatoes there, and a fair number of young men headed there every spring, her husband’s nephew Victor among them. The names stuck in her head, but the places were only vague imaginings—a vast cold treeless land of rich soil with potatoes popping up everywhere. On the edge of the farm, she saw the owner’s great house, his beautiful wife and children. Lupe’s sister had a friend in California who sometimes sent to Ahuacatlán issues of a magazine called
House and Garden.
That was a fun Sunday morning—sitting at her sister’s house and going over the pictures of the kitchens, the children’s clothes, the surprising things they ate. Lupe had left Ahuacatlán only once—to have an operation in Querétaro City. It was that operation that had sent Hilario back to Arizona, the place he swore he would never return. They had needed money for the operation, and, in only a season and a half, Hilario had saved it. Querétaro was large and frightening, meshed, in her mind, with Hilario’s absence and the experience of being in the hospital. Now she felt better, and was sure she would continue to if she stayed at home.