Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (26 page)

The breeze had stopped, so that we could feel the sun beat down; we scooted our chairs back into the shade of the tree. As Cornelio refilled my glass, I put my little notebook away— research for the day was done. I had to watch out in Ahuacatlán: men’s most interesting memories of the States often emerged after a few drinks, which was precisely when it became most difficult for me to remember them. More than once I had to double-check a story the next day.

Lupe called to Hilario from the porch—a local man was there, with a big jar in his hands.
“Honey,”
said Hilario to himself, rising to fetch the man some from the large vat under the porch. Honey was a big money-maker for the cooperative. I used the opportunity to point out to Cornelio a large, ripe pomegranate hanging from a tree across the yard; he agreed that we deserved it, and soon it was in our hands. Cornelio and I sliced and ate our second dessert of the afternoon, the delicious red juice staining our fingers and shirts.

*

There was a rapping outside my door.
“Slee-ee-pyhead! Ti-i-ime to get u-u-p!”
Waking his American was, it seemed, one of the great pleasures of Hilario’s day.

“What time is it?”

"Late! Already very late!"
I scrounged around for my watch. It was 5:30 A.M.
.
The sun had not yet risen; roosters were only starting to greet the brightening sky. In half an hour or so, choruses of cock-a-doodle-doos would sweep over the town—but there had been barely a peep yet from the neighbors' big fighting cock, who seemed the village choral director. I needed a drink of water, badly ... but the only water at Hilario's house came straight from the river. I groaned.

“
Up yet?”
said Hilario, cracking the door to get a good look at my puffy face.

“
¡Sí, sí! I’m up!”
I sat up painfully. Hilario was delighted. Americans acted so superior, but really they were soft. I was the proof. He grinned and gazed. It was not pleasant.
“You can leave now,”
I said.
“Shut the door, please?”
Hilario grinned more widely, and shut the door.

When members of the
cooperativa
weren't staying over, I had a room to myself—part of Rigo and Conchita's little house, fifty feet down the hill from Hilario and Lupe's. Towel over my shoulder, I made my way from there past the chickens to the laundry basin which both households shared. The donkey brayed plaintively as I approached—my sentiments exactly, I thought. I scooped a bowlful of cold water from the rain barrel—which sat underneath the extension of a gutter from Hilario's house—poured it into a small plastic basin, and splashed it over my face. The effect was devastating, but it opened my eyes. I was changing the cartridge in my razor as Hilario came up to wash his hands.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Changing the blade,” I said.

“So soon? You changed it just last week.”

“
At the
beginning
of last week,”
I said defensively.

He picked up his old safety razor.
“See this?”
he said. He indicated the blade, and I knew what was coming.
“Six months!”
Wasteful Americans!

“Well, maybe if you changed it more often, you would be more handsome.”

“
¡Pah!”
was his reply, emitted as he turned to go toward the kitchen.
“Breakfast is ready as soon as you are,”
he said, without turning back. “ ...
as soon as you are done holding everything up!”
he might have added. Slow Americans! Pah!

My consolation was that Hilario really had a use for me. The night before, members of the cooperative had filled the bed of the group’s ten-ton, three-axle, ten-speed truck with sacks of cement. Its destination was the
rancho
of Rincón de Pisquintla, where villagers would use it to construct a modest reservoir to store water from a small mountain spring, making possible the irrigation of otherwise unproductive land. The first hour of driving was paved highway, but the next two were dirt road—increasingly winding dirt road, that climbed high into the remote sierra. Hilario didn’t like to drive, had no stomach for it. I thrived on it.

Lupe was up, of course, to serve us coffee and simple pastries. The coffee was brewed from the real beans that dried on the roof of the house—but it tasted strange to me, the way real farm eggs can have a different flavor from the store-bought kind. Alas, I was raised on store-bought coffee, so I opted for the tea she brewed with leaves from the lemon tree out back. Three cups quenched my thirst from the night before, and, with Hilario pacing impatiently beside me, we were off.

It was status to drive a big truck like this in the sierra—good ones were expensive and seldom seen. I felt powerful climbing up into the cab. Little kids waved; I tooted the horn. In the small city of Jalpan, down on the valley floor, we stopped for Hilario to buy oranges—the distributors made it this far, but not up to Ahuacatlán—and then soon it was back off the highway and into the mountains,
rancho
bound.

The road was everything one would expect from a remote mountain road in Mexico—precipitous, curvy, full of surprises: a herd of goats around this bend, a muddy morass around that, a hairpin turn where you would least expect it, totally unmarked. Fortunately, Hilario provided verbal road signs, well in advance. We crept across two streams where the wooden bridges had been washed out. Hilario suggested I was being too nice to the livestock we encountered—if they couldn’t get off the road, they were not meant for this world. And if they got hit, well, “
Somebody will eat them soon,”
he assured me.

Ranchos
were among Mexico’s most remote locations. Typically they had only between twenty and fifty residents; almost never did they have electricity. Many could not be reached by automobile—you got a bus to let you off on a certain creek or ridge, and then you walked. Small mountain springs were often their sole reason for existence. Up these mountains, many had fantastic names: when we wanted to arrange a meeting, Hilario would pay for an ad to be broadcast on XEJAQ:
“Attention, residents of Piglet, Big Peach, The Bats, and Saint Peter the Old! Meeting next Friday at the home of Rafael Ramos at sundown."
Normally one person could be counted on to hear the message, and that person would be responsible for telling everyone else. The residents were generally interrelated, and family feuds had long and sometimes violent histories. Residents of
ranchos,
I had discovered at Martinolli’s, often understood the world in different terms from the rest of us. I had asked a
rancho-born
student of mine in Phoenix how far he lived from Ahuacatlán.

“
Eight hours,”
he explained.

“You must get tired of all that driving,” I suggested. He looked puzzled, and asked what I meant. “Just that, any time you need something, like radio batteries, you have to drive eight hours both ways.”

“No, no,” he explained earnestly. “We walk. Eight hours walking.”

Hilario, in answer to my question, explained that parents in ranchos were among the most eager anywhere to get their kids to emigrate to the States. “They see it as their big chance to get rich,” said Hilario. “Their sons come home with fifty dollars, and it's the most money they’ve seen in their lives. Some parents nearly throw their kids out the door!”

The mountainsides were bushy, but not lush. Spectacular vistas opened up as we rounded one ridge, then the next. The broad mountainsides were different from those of my home in that they were cultivated—looking across any expanse, you could see the different-colored crops separated from each other by stone fences, dotted with faraway humans in straw cowboy hats and the stout oxen that helped them plow. Clouds obscured the highest points, thinned by the wind as they descended the tableau before us. Nearer the road, a common sight was lines of white boxes set up on stumps or wooden legs, each one striped with a different combination of bright colors.
“Beehives,”
Hilario explained.
“The stripes tell the bees which box is theirs. Or so it is thought.”

“You see that road?” he continued, pointing out a steep grade forking off to the left. “Padre Cano, the priest, visits all the ranchos once or twice a month. Last summer he told me about something which had just happened to him on that road.

“It seems the father was coming down on horseback with Don Reyes Alvarado, who lives up there, in Huilotla. They came upon a fat man and his wife and their infant daughter making their way slowly up the hill.

“ ‘Good afternoon, young man,’ said Don Reyes. The young man stopped and stared and Don Reyes, who finally brought his horse to a halt. ‘Well?’ demanded Don Reyes finally, ‘what’s the matter?’ ”

“ ‘Don’t you recognize me, father?’ said the young man, slowly. It was his son! He had been away seven years in the States, getting fatter as so many do there, finding a bride.”

I whistled lowly.

“But you know,” said Hilario, “it could easily have been the other way around. I have heard many stories of children not recognizing their own parents. Many return only when they hear their parents have died
... "

“If you want to know more about this, you really should talk to the priest. He is very highly educated—in your country, in fact—and he thinks about these things a lot.”

After passing several other settlements, we finally arrived at Rincón de Pisquintla. Only a few dwellings were visible to us, all of them made of wood or cane. Two had metal roofs; the others were thatched. There were a couple of old dogs. The air was wonderful, cool and fresh and full of butterflies. Men came out of fields, clad in
huaraches
and home-sewn clothes, to greet Hilario, and kids were sent to find other men. After a discreet interval wives and mothers asked Hilario for news of their sons in the north—had he heard anything? Hilario said I had been in Phoenix, and probably had more recent news—and then it occurred to me that probably I
did
know several of the men who belonged to these women. Talking with the wives, seeing the babies, the plots of beans and onions, was a revelation: up in the States, I had never appreciated that the men were ... well, so
important.
On the ranch they seemed so single, and rootless—like random pieces of an unknown picture puzzle you found in a cabinet and were unsure what to do with. Here, suddenly, I saw how they were husbands, fathers, owners—missing pieces that would make a puzzle complete, prettier, a whole picture.

After the wives came younger men, just entering their teens. Approaching with extreme shyness and respect, they asked if I could get them jobs. No, I had to say, I wasn’t an owner, I had worked alongside others from this town.
Was there much work?
Some, I said, not a lot, but some if you were patient. “University of Arizona,” read the emblem on the T-shirt of one little girl.

By late afternoon we had the truck unloaded, and had been treated to chunks of
quiote
—the fibrous, sap-soaked inner core of the
maguey
cactus, round and white like a slice of pineapple, chewed and sucked on as a pick-me-up. Cokes were served alongside, making the snack a bizarre combination of Otomí and Americana.
Did I like it?
a woman asked.
Tastes a little like wood,
I admitted—if you lied about these things out of politeness, I had learned, you were liable to get another helping.

“
Wood?”
Those who had understood me relayed the answer to those who had not. They thought it was hilarious.
“Wood! Wood!”
Their teeth weren’t so good; you could tell when they laughed. One offered me a little piece of wood to chew on, so that I could tell the difference. We laughed about that too.

Rincón de Pisquintla was perched on a hillside; all afternoon I had been watching the colors of the land change as the sun moved across the sky. You could hear birds everywhere; no radio or TV noises diverted your attention from the life around you. But the sun began to set, and Hilario signaled it was time for us to leave. I was so pleased with the place, I wanted to spend the night. And I was annoyed when I started the engine—what a racket it made! how badly it stank!—and even more annoyed when a young man came running up with a big tape deck under his arm. He didn’t look like anyone else in town.
“I’m the teacher,”
he explained. He was from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, on the Guatemalan border, assigned here to do his national service. He had run three miles from a neighboring
rancho
when he heard we were here.
“Can you take me down with you?”
We said sure, and fit him in in front. I was filled with romantic thoughts about living in such a place. But the teacher wasn’t. The bus to town—probably another White Arrow—hadn’t made its weekly trips for the entire past month, he explained, and he was going crazy. His radio batteries were almost dead! He grasped the device with a fervor that made me realize he considered it his sole link to civilization.
“Boy, am I glad to be out of there for a while!”
he said, smiling broadly.

The engine of the truck whined as I downshifted to keep us on the road. Hilario held tight to his seat and told me to slow down. The teacher asked if either of us would mind if he played his radio. Hilario just looked away, out the window.
“Softly,”
I said. A family of turkeys scattered as the big blue truck bore down on them in the twilight.