Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (28 page)

The players tended to be young teenagers—a boys’ game was going on at one end of the court, and a smaller girls’ game at the other. Those with some cash at their disposal wore store- bought sneakers, but a great many played with astonishing control in their leather, rubber-tire-soled
huaraches.
Presiding over all this activity, at the high end of the court, were an older group of young men. They still played basketball among themselves, but were too dignified to join the melee of the kids.

As I cut across the plaza to meet the men, I was intercepted by another young man, woman on his arm, baby in her arms, whom I recognized as a
tractorista
from Smith’s.

“
José, ¿que húbole, what’s going on?”

“
¡Teodoro! ¡Welcome to Ahuacatlán!”
We chatted briefly, and then he told his wife about me.
“Teodoro worked in Arizona near where we do. He is a college professor at the University of Arizona. Also, he makes films. He is very famous!”

“
Uh, well, mainly I'm a writer,”
I elaborated.

“
That too! Wonderful!”
He continued to elaborate on my background, most of it imaginary. Apparently it was prestigious, in a way, to have an American friend, and he kept patting me on the back and speaking my praises. Finally I ceased trying to correct him—why fight it?—and we talked about why he was there. He had sprained his ankle in the orchard, he said, and, since he hadn’t come home between seasons last year, he decided he would finish the season early. Through connections he had secured a “Tourist” decal and fake papers for his Oldsmobile, and to his delight had succeeded in getting it through Mexican customs for only a one-hundred-dollar bribe—unheard of! He now joined the ranks of a select few Ahuacatlánians with cars next to their little homes. The license plates were a key, of sorts, to their owners’ double lives: Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Florida, they read. José asked his stylishly dressed wife, in front of me, what she thought about having a car, and she dutifully replied it was
“muy padre”—
pretty cool. Of course, in the Mexican countryside, women were almost never permitted to drive; many men, upon returning to the North, even built little stone walls around their cars to make sure they would stay in “storage.” But José was a good provider.

“
The best thing about being back,”
he continued,
“is that my daughter is getting used to me. ”
As if to demonstrate, he lifted the infant from her mother’s arms—but the baby immediately broke into tears. José laughed uncomfortably and returned her to his wife.

“
Sweet little thing! I met her for the first time last week. In just that time, she has stopped crying when I come into the room.”
I supposed that was good news, if it was true. José had indeed been gone a long time.

He and his wife continued their promenade and I returned to the guys watching basketball. Jesús and Victor introduced me to some of their friends: Concepción (“Conce”), Rogelio, Elihu, and Tiberio. Other, younger men were hanging around the edge of this group, but apparently were not worth introducing. As I would learn later, this was the core of the Idaho group, the coolest guys around Ahuacatlán now, the soccer players, the prestigious dates, the young bucks. The men at their periphery all aspired to be accepted by them, to be taken along to the North. But it was a select group, and there was only room for so many. Again, I began to explain myself to Jesús’s friends, but as they listened I realized they already knew.

A light rain began to fall, and there was a suggestion we all walk over to Pablo’s cantina, the main gathering place for men in town. I nodded and fell into stride with the others.

Pablo’s was a bare-bones kind of place. Two entryways opened onto the street. There was no sidewalk, no swinging doors: when Pablo’s was open the doors were lifted from the entryways and stashed somewhere in back; when he was closed, they were fitted back into place. There was a front room and a back room, both with yellowing plaster walls. The front room contained a table and chairs for card games, a jukebox, and Pablo himself, appearing especially short behind the large plaster bar. The back room contained a pool table, and a tiny partition in the corner, behind which men peed into a hole in the floor. Strung over the table were wires and counters for keeping score; a pool-cue rack was on the wall. There was a rush for the rack as we entered: only one cue was straight and had its leather tip. For fifty pesos Pablo handed over a box containing the balls.

As Jesús racked up the balls, Tiberio put a coin in the jukebox and selected some numbers in the
cumbia
style.
Cumbia
is a
salsa
rhythm popular in southern Mexico and much of the Caribbean; to dance to it, you shuffle forward in little steps, hips tilting suggestively, head and upper body very still. To all this, Tiberio always added a wide grin—and the sight of him dancing around by himself, doing the
cumbia,
always made that grin infectious. Conce bought beers all around.

I lasted two games without being eliminated. A couple of the group’s young admirers watched me from the shadows, but the other players—Conce, Jesús, Tiberio—paid no special attention to me. They were all still quietly checking me out, waiting for me to reveal myself. Would I be like the bosses they had known? Was I cool, okay to have around? Would I add a degree or two of prestige to the group, or be too much of a peculiarity? Was I a threat? I knew that Americans, myself included, had difficulty appreciating the way we came off to Mexicans. This was in part because no country on earth makes us feel weak, or backward, or disorganized, or corrupt. I could appreciate that any American in a less-developed country would have to watch his step, never taking on superior or condescending airs, never expecting special treatment while at the same time hoping to be treated as an equal. So it was with me in Mexico: my Americanness was something I could not deny, and yet it was important not to lord it over them.

Nobody in the bar would allow me to pay for my own drinks. Long before the beer in my hand was empty, someone would tap me on the shoulder and point to a fresh one on the bar. Sometimes I knew these people, sometimes I didn’t. More than once that evening there were two beers lined up for me on the bar, and behind them Pablo’s smiling face.
‘‘Pablo, tell them I appreciate it, but I could never drink all this beer!”
I pleaded. He said he would do so, and then turned around and poured me a tumbler of his special
aguardiente,
a powerful colorless spirit distilled locally from
maguey
cactus juice. Sip it, I said to myself, to survive you’re going to have to sip it.

Pablo’s place was largely without decoration, save for a few bottles of spirits up on shelves on the wall behind him— interspersed with cans of four or five sorts of American lager, perhaps brought to him as gifts—a few calendars of the genre known in Mexico as
“sexy,”
and four long rattlesnake skins stretched on the wall above one of the doors to the outside. Jesús, taking a break from the table, came over to buy another beer; this time, it was my treat. I noticed a colored sheet taped on the wall behind him as he waited for the beer. It appeared to be a page torn from
¡Alarma!
the grisly tabloid.
“¡POBRE SANCHO!”
cried a two-inch headline. Beneath it was a photo of a naked man, hands covering his privates, rushing from a house.
“Husband comes home and the sancho gets his due,”
said a caption at the bottom.

“
Who’s ‘poor Sancho’?”
I asked Jesús. Others near the bar heard the question, and started laughing.
“His name isn’t Sancho, it’s ‘Señor González,’ ”
offered one man, provoking a storm of laughter. I could see that Sancho seemed to be a sort of running joke.

Jesús explained.
“Around here ‘sancho’ refers to a pet,”
he said.
“Say you have a little piglet, or a turkey or a rabbit, and a child likes it. The child pays lots of attention to it and the piglet becomes tame. The parents let it into the house—it’s like a member of the family. Then you say to a guest, ‘Don’t worry about that pig—he’s sancho.’ Get it?”
I nodded.

“
Okay, well, around here, we have a problem. The husband leaves, and sometimes a neighbor man moves in—with the man’s wife, you see? Then he becomes sancho, because he’s kept, he’s looked after, he’s her pet.”
Jesús looked at me to see if I followed.
“We call him sancho, but another name is Señor González. You know why?”
I shook my head. The men around the bar laughed.
“It’s a saying around here:

Tu conoces Señor González

—
el entra cuando tu sales.

[You know Señor González

—he enters when you leave.]

The story under the picture on the wall described, vividly and in a highly moralistic tone, what happened in one rural household when the husband came to find a “Señor González” in bed with his wife.

“
We act as though it’s funny,”
said a man at the bar,
“but when you
sanchear
someone around here—make him a cuckold—it’s very serious. Why, just up the river in Escanelilla, a man left for Florida and his wife had twins by a sancho who moved in. When she heard he was coming home, she got so scared she drowned both babies. Of course, she went to jail. But then the husband came home and found out anyway. Since he couldn’t kill his wife, he killed the sancho. Who could blame him? Now both husband and wife are in jail.”

The others standing around shook their heads. Being cuckolded, in Mexico, was very serious business. The longer I stayed in Ahuacatlán the more I realized it was perhaps married men’s greatest fear upon leaving the States. Having “Pobre Sancho” up on the cantina wall was a good way to be able to laugh and talk about it. And in their stories, perhaps, there was an oblique warning for me. When a young man from a sexually “promiscuous” country came into town for a while, it had to cross people’s minds.

The jukebox stopped, so that suddenly we could hear the sound of the rain, now falling hard on the dirt road outside. The pools of water forming in the road reminded me of a rainy walk down a paved street in Phoenix with Carlos.
“I think the main difference between Mexico and the Unites States,”
he had said to me then,
“is that when it rains here, the roads don’t get muddy.”
From out of the Mexican mud, moments later, entered Jesús’s younger brother Vicente, dripping water but smiling. Vicente was lean but slightly shorter than his brother; crooked teeth and an acne-pocked face made him less attractive. Unlike Jesús, there was a hungry look in Vicente’s dark brown eyes. He was unusual in Ahuacatlán in that he traveled alone, never taking others with him to the States. Word was that he had been fired from the potato ranch in Idaho for sleeping in the field; most recently he had worked in Monte Vista, Colorado, in the sugar beet harvest. We shook hands and he joined a card game of conquián taking place on a low wooden table—the cantina’s only table—in front of the jukebox. But before long he was back at the bar near me. I interrupted his order for a beer and discreetly slid him one of the two unstarted ones in front of me. I could no longer count the beers I’d drunk; Vicente had downed at least two so far.

I was curious about Vicente; I had never met a lone wolf in Mexico. Mexicans at home, generally, were not shy about speaking of work in the States—but with an introspective, private man like Vicente, you had to be careful how you broached the subject. Fortunately, one of the younger teens at the bar did it for me.

“
So, Teodoro, will you travel back home with Jesús and the others?”

“
I don’t know, Serafín. I really haven’t given it much thought,”
I said.

He was just making small talk.
“Well, if you do, you’ll need lots of dough!” he said. “I heard four hundred dollars!”

“
Stupid!”
Vicente lashed out.
“When Teodoro goes over the border, he doesn’t need to pay the coyotes. He’s an American! He just walks over the bridge. He only pays bus fare!

“
Besides, you don’t need four hundred dollars. If you know the score, a hundred is more than enough. Fifty is enough!”

The boy was chastened and said nothing more. But he had made an opening. I knew Vicente didn’t like to talk about his famous solo travels, but given the topic of conversation, and the level of alcohol consumption, it was worth a try.

“
Fifty?”
I said.
“How do you do it?”

Vicente took a long draft.
“From here to the border,”
he said to me, his back to the young man,
“the buses are only twenty. And if you don’t have that, why, just hitchhike to Querétaro or San Luis Potosí. There you can hop a freight to the border, to Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.”

I had spent a long time riding freights in the States, and had seen Mexican hoboes from the windows of Mexican passenger trains. But I knew little about them. I watched and listened to Vicente, fascinated.

“
At the border, you cross like everybody else. You walk or swim. Cross at a town, not in the middle of nowhere. Then hop another freight north.”

In border towns, I knew, that was easier said than done. Immigration was always in the yards, checking every train and every car; they even stopped trains a few miles out of town, to see if anyone had hopped on as the freight left the yard.