Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (32 page)

The morning passed slowly, and one by one the
coyotes
made their appearance. I never noticed them arrive; they just seemed to slip into our area, so that instead of seeing Plácido resting on the grass, I would look up to discover him and Rolando and possibly Jesús huddled with a stranger. I was curious about how their discussions went, but it was important for me, at the delicate negotiating stage, to maintain a low profile, to not be noticed at all, if possible. Even if they assured the
coyote
that I was trustworthy, not a risk, the
coyote
might up the ante, or refuse to go.

Different
coyotes
appeared: a short, flashy man sporting mirrored sunglasses and jewelry, who brushed off a tree stump with a handkerchief before sitting down; a nervous-looking, slightly overweight kid in sneakers and jeans who claimed to be representing a friend; a tall, aggressive, denim-dressed man in the cowboy mold; and an old farmer type, in floppy hat and baggy pants, who asked many questions about us before even suggesting that he might be able to barter for a ride. The conversation with him seemed to drag on for hours, because he matched the description of the suspected informer. Plácido and the others expertly offered even less information than he offered them: it was the original Mexican standoff. I admired their skill in this, and that of their countrymen generally; though at other times, when I was trying to find something out, it would drive me crazy: Mexicans can be maddening experts at not coming to the point.

The tall
cowboy-coyote
was the only one to give me any trouble.
“And who is this gabacho?”
he demanded, before even stating what his price might be. Plácido was about to answer, but the man came right up to me.
“Hanging out with all these Mexican guys ... an informer for La Migra, perhaps?”
He wore a wide belt with a silver buckle; the points of his cowboy boots, a couple of feet from where I lay on my stomach, were also covered with silver. I sat up.

“
We heard
you
were the informer,”
I said.

“
Who told you that?”
he demanded. He took the bait easily; he was not too smart.

“
Oh, just some guys down the road. Who are you if you’re not the informer?”
From my experience with La Víbora back in Phoenix, I felt that the best way to get a
coyote
to back off was to ask him about his profession.

“
None of your business!”
he replied, swearing lowly as he turned. By evening we still hadn’t settled on a
coyote;
according to Plácido, all of them wanted too much. We were faced with a night out in our little meadow, the eleven of us huddling under three blankets near the embers of a fire. It wasn’t only the cold that made it unpleasant: the word from the other border-crossers was that thieves had been making regular raids along the stream banks at night, knowing their victims carried cash. All night we shivered, from cold and nervousness. The only one unconcerned, from what I could tell, was Evangélica, lying slightly apart from the group, curled up with Jesús in his big parka.

The nervous teenager returned the next morning and conferred again with Jesús and Plácido. After twenty minutes Plácido left with him, to negotiate directly with whomever it was the kid represented. He returned half an hour later. “Twenty dollars,” was his good news, “twenty to La Nariz.” La Nariz means “The Nose,” a descriptive local nickname for a rock formation half an hour east of town, just across the border. I expected a cheer to go up from my fellows, all still thawing out around the fire from the previous night—the offer was an amazing ten dollars cheaper than the next best one. But they only nodded: getting the ride wasn’t a surprise, just a matter of time.

We would rendezvous with the
coyote
in the desert that night. In the meantime we had to reprovision ourselves with food and water for the crossing. Conce and Tiberio took up a collection, and Jesús and I fell in behind as they walked down the stream toward Sonoita.

It was a Sunday, and the sleepy border town was as buzzing as it ever got—with American tourists. It was arresting to be still in Mexico and see Americans everywhere—in sleek sedans, in lumbering RVs, or on foot, wearing shorts, carrying shopping bags and cameras, looking a thousand miles from home. As we turned down a dirt street toward the grocery store—already packed with border-town Americans who shopped here to save money—we passed an American family of four, the parents portly, the kids fat cheeked and sticky faced from candy. The street was empty except for the four of us and the four of them, and I saw the parents shepherd the kids to the side of the street as we approached—but there was nothing to fear. As they neared my friends all looked to the ground, in traditional deference to the more powerful. The parents stared resolutely ahead. Only the children and I caught each other’s eyes.

We passed, closer for that uncomfortable instant than most Americans and most Mexicans would ever come. And it struck me again what a fascinating place the border is. They had crossed south, to spend money. We would be heading north, to earn it. Nowhere on earth did such a developed country border one so poor. In that superficially dull town, all that was different came into strong relief: rich and poor, light and dark, content and hungry, mild and spicy, ahead and behind. Here, Mexicans and Americans caught brief, sun-squinted glimpses of each other; the paths of two nations intersected, however lightly, and continued on their separate ways.

We bought what was needed—flashlights, food, gallon jugs of water, a pair of pliers for pulling out cactus spines—and then, laden with grocery sacks, we walked back streets to the streamside, trying to maintain a low profile. The path to the stream, unfortunately, passed right by the rear of the Federal Judicial Police headquarters, but we saw no one through the dirty windows, and passed on toward our little oasis.

As camp came into view, we saw six men lounging around with the rest of our group. The tallest of them looked up as we approached, and a flash of recognition crossed the face of Jesús, at my side. The men, it turned out, were from Quirambal, a high
rancho
three hours by foot from Ahuacatlán; they had left Querétaro the morning after we had. Jesús and the others walked up and shook hands, and then introduced me—but the men already knew who I was. The tall one, Genaro, was their leader. From dusty cowboy boots to wide leather belt to felt cowboy hat, he was dressed in black. The younger ones, less talkative and less polished, seemed to have carefully imitated his dress, three of them to the point of having spray-painted black their straw cowboy hats. When we learned that they, too, were headed to Phoenix, Plácido offered to cut them in on the
coyote
deal to La Nariz. There was safety in numbers, I reasoned, and economies of scale when dealing with
coyotes
—but perhaps he was just being neighborly. They accepted, and we celebrated the arrangement by settling down in the shade and drinking the still-cold case of beers we had brought from town.

In the late afternoon, when the sun was lower and the air around us cool and humid, we began to prepare for departure. The two-day desert crossing would require at least a gallon of water per person, and a lot of food. Empty plastic gallon jugs were scavenged to augment the ones we had bought; we filled them at a farmer’s house down the road. Next we took belts, cords, and even plastic bread bags, rolled the long way and knotted, and threaded them through the plastic handles of the jugs to provide a better means of carrying them. To each person were distributed bags of flour tortillas, chunks of cheese, boxes of sweet Mexican cookies, fried pork rinds, pieces of cured meat, home-cooked chunks of candy, a couple of cans of tuna, tins of sardines, and, of course, cans of chilies. Plácido and Genaro directed this effort. As they did, it became clear that Genaro—charismatic and outgoing—was more the natural leader. When he and Plácido discussed the route we would take, we saw that he was also more experienced: he had crossed the desert here nine times, by his own counting. Slowly Genaro came to make decisions for the entire group.

The Mexicans had a very different style for managing groups than Americans do. There was no explanation of how far we would have to walk to meet the
coyote,
no questions or answers concerning how long it would take. Leaders made the decisions and the others followed. Broad consensus making was not a part of it; as the moment of departure approached, nobody checked around and asked, “Everybody ready?” Rather, Genaro bustled around, eager to go, waiting only for the moment when enough people were on their feet. And then he just walked off up the stream.

Striding briskly, single file, the rest of us hurried to keep up with him. Evangélica, the day before, had put on her new jeans, tucked the bottom of her dress into them—and added to her newfound freedom of movement by replacing her pumps with sneakers. She and Jesús took up the rear. Within a quarter mile, the stream had sunk down between the walls of a red-sanded arroyo—a miniature canyon—leaving us in shadows about fifteen feet beneath the level of the surrounding land. We moved fast along the muddy earth, and a rush of excitement carried me as I realized we were finally beginning: we were on our way to cross the border. It was a reenactment of the earliest form of human travel: migration, for survival and opportunity. For this most critical part of the journey, we were resorting to our feet. I was glad to be with experts.

Shepherds stepped aside on the narrow bank or peered down from the rim of the arroyo as we passed, all taking the time to get a good look at us. Among them, Jesús swore he saw the face of the nosy, elderly farmer-type whom we had suspected of being a police spy. But no one else did, and he couldn’t be sure.

The arroyo disappeared and we climbed back into the light of the setting sun. We had been walking about forty-five minutes. Ahead, seated by a tree, was the teenager who had arranged our ride. He rose and led us five minutes up a small tributary of the stream to a dense stand of short evergreens. There, he said, we would wait until dark. I was nervous and suspicious, but everyone else seemed to think it was a good time to relax a bit. The area around the stand of trees was dry and seemed deserted; they talked freely. Conce had been saving a couple of joints for a special moment; they now were lit and passed around. It appeared we were going to have a bit of a wait. Inocencio, the young Indian, apparently was thinking several days in the future; as Tiberio pulled out his wallet to show me a picture of his last girlfriend in Idaho, Inocencio asked him about a Social Security number.

“
Ah, here—I have three,”
said Tiberio.
“Copy whichever one you want.”
Two of them were scratched on a scrap of paper; the third was embossed on one of those metal replicas of cards you can order through the mail. Inocencio borrowed my pen.
“I bought it from a coyote in El Mirage,”
said Tiberio of the card. I had seen a man selling other fake documents once, at the Sunday swap meet. The birth certificates and resident alien (“green”) cards went for $50 to $200 apiece. But Social Security numbers, really, could be had for free. I remembered the well-publicized case of the plastic wallet sold by Woolworth’s in the 1970s. Inside was a sample Social Security card, with a sample number printed on it. The Social Security Administration, a few months after the appearance of the product, reported that 33,000 people had paid in to the nonexistent account. Such contributions, of course, were of great benefit to the system: Mexicans could pay in, but they couldn’t get anything out.

“
I also have a birth certificate,”
Tiberio boasted, carefully removing and unfolding another piece of paper from his wallet. He passed it to me delicately, this important document in an unknown language. Others watched as I read.

“CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS,” it said across the top, in curving, ornate letters. “Certificate of Baptism.” It had Tiberio’s name printed on, was signed by an “elder” and a “bishop,” and was dated two years earlier at Aberdeen, Idaho.

“
It’s from the Mormons,”
I said.
“Where did you get it?”

“
El patrón,”
Tiberio explained—the owner of the ranch in Idaho.
“He’s a Mormon. He baptized all of us.”
He nodded toward Jesús, Plácido, Conce, and Victor, all of whom were watching.

“
But you’re Catholic!”
I protested.

“
Yes,”
Tiberio conceded.
“But it made him very happy. We all did it. On a Sunday.”

“
In the swimming pool,”
Jesús added.

“
What? What swimming pool?”

“
The swimming pool of el patrón,”
Jesús explained.
“He dropped us in.”

“
And said these prayers.”

“
What prayers?”

“
Who knows?"
Tiberio shrugged.
“He was very happy.”

“
The whole family is Mormon,”
Jesús explained.
“They’re very strict—they don’t drink or smoke. We can never be seen drinking when they’re around.”

“
But the son—”
said Tiberio
"—the son likes tobacco, that kind you chew, ‘¿eSkoal?’
” He pronounced it fairly well.
“Sometimes he asks us to get it for him. In return, he won’t tell his father if he finds a beer can. Though he still gets mad.

“
After our third year here, he gave us a car—a Cadillac Eldorado. He was buying a new one. Before that he always had let us drive it around. It’s in Phoenix now.”
They left it there, I knew, whenever they went home, and then drove it back to Idaho upon their return each spring. I smiled at the thought of the guys piling into a millionaire rancher’s used Cadillac and cruising up to Idaho. Inocencio had seemed transfixed by the tale, as though picturing himself behind the wheel of the Caddy.