Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (25 page)

Lupe was thirty-three, but looked ten years older than an American woman her age. Most of the women in Ahuacatlán did, and it wasn’t for lack of skin cream: childbearing started early, child rearing took up most of one’s life. And when the husband was away—and in Ahuacatlán they were away a lot, making money—there were husband’s duties, as well: taking care of the chickens and cow, managing the money, or lack of it, raising the kids, and handling relations with friends and neighbors. Vacations were when she got sick.

Ah, and taking care of Grandma. Lupe’s mother, in her eighties (“
nobody’s really sure how old,”
Lupe told me,
“including her”),
lived in the second bedroom, the one that opened onto the kitchen. Most of the day she sat there, in the dark, confined by arthritis to bed and a tall, straight chair. The girls attended to her feeding and other needs. Now she was out in the kitchen, where Hilario and his brother, Cornelio, had carried her in the chair. After lunch, after the dishes, Lupe and the girls would take Grandma to the patio, to comb out the waist-length silver hair and pick out nits. Next to Grandma, dressed in her widow’s black, toothless and deeply wrinkled and mostly deaf, Lupe looked positively girlish.

Cornelio, sitting with a glass of milky-whit
e pulque
—the home- fermented juice of the
maguey
cactus—pulled up a chair next to her. She declined a sip of his drink, and they talked in low tones for a while. She looked worried about something; I could hear her addressing him,
“ayy, joven, joven”
—young man, young man. Cornelio, who had been drinking a bit, raised his voice:
“Oooh, that’s ridiculous, Grandmother. Don’t even say such ridiculous things. If my parents were still alive, it would be a great privilege for me to have them in my house. How proud I would be to have my father sitting there. What a great comfort to me! Why, if my father were alive, I would indulge his every vice! If he asked me for a beer, I would send Victor right off to get him one
...”

Everyone was listening; Grandma knew it and didn’t respond. I looked down at the concrete floor, at the turkey chicks that had wandered in and were pecking at my shoe. Even in a land where the family is intact, where family care for the infirm is a given, the elderly had these doubts. Poor
abuela,
I thought—though at the same time I thought her perhaps luckier than my grandparents, isolated from young people, from new life.

The silence was broken by the arrival of a laborer from a
rancho
atop the mountain opposite Hilario’s home. He carried in his arms a crate of small high-altitude peaches. They were from orchards Hilario had pointed out to me high on the mountainsides, on slopes so steep that every tree required a stone-rimmed terrace to survive—a project of the cooperative. They were the season’s first, and the children cried out in delight—fresh, sweet fruit was hard to come by in Ahuacatlán. Our meal would have a fine dessert.

After receiving the peaches, Hilario sat back down at his chair on the porch next to the kitchen, surrounded by corn husks, and ate a peach without expression. His main work was with the cooperative, but in his spare time, almost as a hobby, he grew corn and small amounts of sugarcane, coffee, and fruit. The sugarcane was mainly a treat for his kids to munch on—with his machete he had just cut down a single cane, sectioned it, sliced off its hard outer layer, and handed pieces to me and Juanito. We gnawed as Hilario returned to shucking the corn. He wasn’t preparing it to be eaten on the cob; instead, the ears would go onto the roof, in a fenced-in area protected from birds, next to the coffee beans, to dry. Later, Lupe would grind the corn to mix daily with lime and salt as tortilla dough. Hilario didn’t seem comfortable unless he was working: even in the moments before a meal, he shunned idleness.

He was a slender man, of medium height, fond of jeans and checkered shirts—always carefully ironed by Lupe, and washed, of necessity, by hand. Outside the house he always wore a straw hat, slightly rounder than cowboy style. His was an Indian face, broad with high cheekbones, and black hair, already starting to gray at thirty-eight; but his torso was European sized, long and tapering to a narrow waist. Lupe’s face and physique were both European looking, but her skin was Indian dark. In Ahuacatlán as everywhere in Mexico, only a very few—Indians, isolated by remoteness and poverty, or those of European descent, isolated by wealth, privilege, and a desire to stay “thoroughbred”—were not mestizo.

The chickens, a little flock of seven or eight hens, trailed by chicks of various ages, approached and made a run on the kitchen, but Hilario shooed them away. The line between human space and animal space was lightly drawn in Ahuacatlán, due mainly to mild weather, which made doors unnecessary. He then watched with a skeptical eye as they approached Lupe’s flower bed. The flowers were slowly being pecked to death, until, the day before, Hilario had taken twigs and small branches from a dead bush with lots of thorns and made a sort of natural perimeter fence. A couple of the tiniest chicks somehow snuck in, but the big ones stayed out. Several of these, I had thought, were some sort of exotic Dr. Seuss breed: their pink necks were completely bald. But Hilario set me straight: it was the work of the crazy rooster, he explained, the mean one with the missing eye and frayed comb—he attacked the hens instead of just stimulating them, plucking out their neck feathers from behind. His wounds he had received in battle with a turkey. He was a nasty piece of work, but we had him to thank in part for this special dinner: earlier that morning his life had ended at the edge of Hilario’s hatchet, on the chopping block. We were having chicken with chocolaty
mole
sauce, a local specialty and great treat, given the price of chocolate. Its smell drifted out from the kitchen.

“
Lupe!”
yelled Hilario.

“
Five minutes!”
came her harried reply.

The chickens had another enemy: a nocturnal mountain weasel that the locals referred to by its Indian name, the
tlacuache.
For that reason, every night at dusk they were retired to the branches of the huge tree that spread over the yard. The kids all joined in rounding them up, and then Hilario, or his brother-in-law Rigo, who lived down the hill, would toss them one at a time into the tree’s lowest crotch. With a great commotion, the chickens would make their way slowly up to the high branches, using small ramps Hilario had built in places where there was too big a jump. At dawn they came down of their own accord, making the final jump—about ten feet—with a frantic beating of too-small wings and an audible
thump!
as each of their heavy bodies hit the dirt.

Pulque
in hand, Cornelio came outside and set up a chair in the sun. That week, his son Victor had returned from Querétaro City with the latest issue of
¡Alarma!,
the popular pictorial magazine of crime and grisly violence. Juanito and Hilario’s daughters crowded around as Cornelio haltingly read aloud an update on the notorious Poquianchis, the sisters arrested for prostitution, kidnapping, pandering, drug sales, et cetera, in Mexico’s biggest sex scandal. No periodicals of any kind were on sale in Ahuacatlán—XEJAQ had only hit the airwaves three years before—so for them it was a special delight. Hilario disliked
¡Alarma!
however, not because of its grisliness but because it was frivolous. Occasionally you could catch him reading a western novel. He sniffed his boredom when Cornelio asked him to clarify a word he hadn’t seen before. The word was
cocaína.

Finally Hilario’s daughter Lupita came out to tell us the meal was ready, and we walked past the partition to the kitchen. Soup, a chicken broth with noodles, was already on the table, along with plates of the ever-present corn tortillas. Tortillas, rolled into little scoops, were the primary utensils; the spoons, I had a suspicion, were mainly there as a courtesy to me. Next came rice, the rich brown chicken
mole,
and a small circle of goat cheese from a
rancho,
a few short white hairs attesting to its authenticity. A fresh batch of piquant
salsa,
ground that morning in Lupe’s stone
molcajete,
was there to be added to anything, but tasted best with the rice. Cornelio twisted Hilario’s arm until Hilario consented to try Cornelio’s cool white
pulque;
my arm needed no twisting. So many were there that only the males (including, to his pleasure, little Juanito) were seated, with Lupe running back and forth, keeping the stack of tortillas fresh and high, serving and clearing. Her sister-in-law, Rigo’s wife, Con- chita, stood by with baby Omar in her arms, and Grandma watched from the dark doorway to her room. Lupita pushed the colorful baskets that hung from the ceiling back and forth, on behalf of Omar, who would watch them for hours. The baskets were not only decorative but necessary for the storage of foods that appealed to crawling bugs. Lupita’s older sister, Alicia, shooed out the chickens. Lupe served coffee and lemon tea, Cokes and orange soda. Omar, to his mother’s surprise, reached out and caught a basket with his six-month-old hand; when she pried it away, with great difficulty, Omar began to bawl.

“He loves to hold on to things,” Conchita said to Lupe, who listened with half an ear. “His little fingers are so strong, and he hates to let go. It’s like he’s afraid something will happen if he lets go.”

“
Pobrecito cabrón! Pobre cabroncito!”
cooed his Uncle Hilario to wailing Omar. Poor little bastard!

“
Once he got a hold of my hair,”
said Grandma from the doorway, to no one in particular.

Cornelio poured us more
pulque.
Lupe presented us with a plate of the dry sugar-sprinkled pastry from the town bakery. Alicia cleared off more dishes, and carried them outside to wash in the tub. Juanito picked at his chicken and sipped his Coke with gusto.

Hilario decided we would take our coffee and peaches outdoors.
“Gracias, señora,”
I said to Lupe as we stood up from the table—immediately feeling silly. Though appropriate at home, it was an elaborate decoration here: people were not thanked for performing their duties. No one ever said it but me. It was just one of many things I had yet to learn.

Cornelio did not share his brother Hilario’s strongly Indian appearance, or his reputation for strictness and self-discipline. His hair was wavy, his shirt collar open, his manner relaxed. The three of us sat in the shade of the large tree. Cornelio, to me, was a breath of fresh air; Hilario was trustworthy, sober, and responsible, but Cornelio was expressive and open, willing to discuss and joke about almost anything. I knew Hilario had spent many years in the States, but had not yet succeeded in getting him to talk about it. A proud man, he found his years on “the other side” to be demeaning, I knew. His fervent wish was that Juanito never be tempted, nor compelled to go there. That was one reason he worked so hard for the cooperative: if local agriculture could be developed to the point where it would support a living wage, men would not have to leave Ahuacatlán. That afternoon, though, with the prompting of Cornelio, the warm breeze, and the cool
pulque,
Hilario opened up a crack. I asked Cornelio about his time in the States.

“
We left for the North in ’forty-nine, the year father died, no?”
he asked Hilario. Hilario nodded. He set down his drink and crossed his legs.

“Cornelio was eleven and I fourteen. Men had left Querétaro for other parts of Mexico for years back then, traveling to earn more money, but the States was still a new idea. In Texas the oil boom was starting, and there were jobs in that and in picking cotton.

“Well, we walked one hundred kilometers, from here to Xilitla, because there was no highway then, no bus. We took a bus to the border, crossed the Río Bravo, and found work in the valley, in Weslaco. The crossing cost us many humiliations—no, not from the gringos, from the other Mexicans—because we were so young and small and had no protector. The border towns can be very tough. We stayed there in Weslaco three years, sending money home to our mamá. And then Cornelio left.”

“I returned then because my maternal cousin, Antonio, wanted to sell me his delivery business,” Cornelio interjected, somewhat defensively. “That way I was able to help Mamá from closer by.”

“Then, I was so sick of cotton—you know, they almost never pick it by hand anymore in the States—I was so sick of cotton I went with some friends to Oregon, to work in the onions,” Hilario continued. “I did that for two years.”

Hilario had been deported in 1954, during what I realized must have been the large sweep of illegal aliens—1.4 million of them—known as Operation Wetback. Besides being inconvenienced, he was deeply embarrassed by the episode.
“To be handcuffed, put in a truck, have your name published in the paper
—
why, they treated me like a criminal! I did not go back until Lupe needed the operation.”
Cornelio, still delivering bricks thirty years later, had never gone back.

“No, I didn’t save anything for myself, sent it all home to my mamá,” Hilario continued. “Ah, no, I take it back: I did bring home a souvenir ...”

Hilario unbuttoned his shirt far enough to show a long wide scar on his shoulder. “You are lucky to live in a time when beer bottles have twist-off caps,” he said. “A guy with a bottle opener in a Weslaco bar decided he didn’t like me.”

I was fascinated, as we talked, to learn of the history of what was for them an
emigration
to the States, of the patterns that had developed over time. Men from Querétaro, they told me, generally went to Arizona or Florida to work. Men from the state of San Luis Potosí, on the other hand, typically headed for California and Texas. And it did not end there. In Arkansas, picking tomatoes or planting seedlings for lumber companies, you found mainly workers from Michoacán; in Kansas feedlots, they came from Michoacán and Guanajuato. To California they also came from Guerrero, to Texas especially from Jalisco. In American cities the distribution of Mexican nationals seemed more random, but this order behind rural immigration patterns lent the phenomenon a completely different face from that presented in U.S. newspapers and magazines. This was less a random tide of desperate people than a traditional economic relationship, grown up over decades, between Mexican "hands" (the term
bracero,
used to describe Mexican immigrants in the early years, comes from the Spanish for "arm") and American growers. It was nothing for them to feel ashamed of, and they evidently did not.