Imperial (141 page)

So he works as a dealer to earn money, explained Angélica.
Why do you remember this song in particular?

You hear it a lot on the border, so it gets stuck in my head. The ones I like the most are the prettier ones, like the traditional ones.

Oh, you don’t like the
narcos
?

To tell you the truth, she allowed, I listen to them.

Stinking like a toilet, she used my toilet without flushing it, spraying urine and toilet paper all over the floor. Then she sat back down on the bed, rubbing her reddish-brown skin and apologizing for not having written out the lyrics; she’d been too busy at work. She had five children. Although she was only in her forties she looked as if she were nearing sixty.

She sang the song about three women: I live with three ladies, the blonde is cocaine, the brown hair is shooting up, and the black hair is . . .—she was exhausted; she could hardly stay awake.

Finally she thought she had it. It was called “La Morena y la Rubia”

I’ll tell you why I love the brunette
and I love the blonde:
Because these two women
keep me alive!
I love the brunette . . .

It’s just that almost all those songs about brunettes and blondes are
narcos,
said Angélica. I like the pretty, traditional songs, but the ones about
narcos
get stuck in my head, little pieces of them . . .

Each recital required her to think for a long time, but then she’d be smiling more and more widely as she sang her snatches of
narcocorridos
whose wicked cleverness animated her glowing, sagging face like a sniff of good meth.

She remembered the lyrics of “Jefe de Jefes” less accurately but more pointedly than Cookies had. She sang:

I am the chief of the chiefs, my friends.
That’s why I work against the law.
Even the Federales do what I say . . .

There are many about a drug lord called “Lord of the Skies,” she said. There are also some about the Juárez Cartel . . .

Do the
narcocorridos
have different tunes from the other
corridos
?

They are more contemporary. In the time when I really listened to music, there were none. It used to be that the
corridos
sang about famous men who were brave or who were real womanizers. Now they are about men who sell drugs and kill Federales, and make them larger than life. It’s almost always the same story:
I sell them, I do them, I kill them.
There are also some who talk about working your way to the top. You start out helping and then you’re the one who’s telling the people what to do. I don’t really like that.
I kill, I do, I sell, I make fun of.
The Federales tell us what to do and we do it, but the drug dealers are always the big boss and nothing ever happens to them. In all the songs, they never kill the drug dealers.

Why do you think they are so popular?

People like to listen to them when they’re drunk in a cantina. In almost all the cantinas you’ll find drunks listening to them.

And why do drunks like to listen to them?

For people who sell drugs, it makes them feel valiant.

That was the operating word, I thought. The ex-policeman had used it in the
corrido
that flattered his wife.

And what about those who don’t sell drugs?

Because they play them a lot on the radio.

That begged the question, I thought. For me, the answer was this: Mexicans didn’t like being told what to do.

If some drug lord fell in love with you and gave you a lot of money, would you be happy?

No.

What would be your ideal?

An opportunity to work very, very hard for myself and for my family.

Then she staggered downstairs stinking, clutching her plastic bags of cans taken from the garbage.

AN ADMIRER OF THE LORD OF THE SKIES

Around the corner from the high-countered office where Francisco Cedeño brought roses and dinner to his policewoman wife, and down a lovely lane of razor-wire, gaped the prison entrance, where all visitors had to pass through metal detectors which happened to be dead; I was hoping to pay drug offenders to sing to me, but that shift’s jefe, the chief, a huge thuglike individual whom I would not have wanted to see in authority over me in any capacity, much less to be my jailer, graciously denied me permission to enter, and so did the jefe of the following night; fortunately, I was granted the acquaintance of a young policeman behind a tall desk, a boyish type whom they all teased goodhumoredly because he liked the prohibited ballads. He first heard them when he was three or four, he said.

What kind of melody do they have?

Guitar, he said smilingly. Banjo, tuba . . .

Oh, yes, that was not the first time I’d seen that smile, the
narcocorrido
smile that had crept out on Lupe Vásquez’s hard face, and even on Emily’s.

The
corrido
that the young policeman remembered best was “Señor de los Cielos,” which is to say “Lord of the Skies,” about a drug dealer who commanded airplanes and highways in Sinaloa (you may remember that Angélica had made reference to a series of ballads on this topic); and I had the feeling that if this officer and I were in a bar together, or even on the street, instead of conversing with a metal detector between us, no matter that it appeared to be turned off, he would have happily started singing it.

I was twenty years old when I heard my first
narco,
said another policeman. Some are good, some are bad, he opined with a shrug. He liked it
for the music.
It had
pretty tones.
And he shrugged again.

Do you ever hear the prisoners singing them?

The policeman who admired “Señor de los Cielos” said:
We
won’t hear them singing
narcocorridos,
but when they are in the cells they will sing them.

They’re forbidden on the radio, said a third policeman helpfully.

Then why are they on the jukebox? I wanted to know.

They shrugged together.

A STORY THAT NEVER ENDS

Angélica had said: It’s almost always the same lyrics. It’s a story that never ends.

She was referring to the
narcocorridos,
but her words applied equally well to the idiotic War on Drugs itself:
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN
that
Nine Thousand Six Hundred ($9,600.00) Dollars, U.S. Currency, was seized on January 13, 2003, from the person of Luz Maria, at 610 Imperial Avenue, Calexico, County of Imperial, CA, by officers of the Imperial County Sheriff Office in violation of Health
Safety Code Section(s) 11359 and 11360 (03-AF-001).
Meanwhile, how many more years does Miguel Palominos have left to serve? Or did the jury, overruling the judge’s command against pity, set him free?

There were many good lines in “Jefe de Jefes” which Angélica and Cookies had not sung, such as

Many want to be where I am.
You can see that they’re falling.
They wanted to steal my crown
but those who try end up dead.

Who truly wanted to be where they were? That was the sad thing. It was definitely true that those who tried ended up dead. And the
corrido
singers knew this, presenting their knowledge as a kind of fatalistic courage.
They say / that one day they’re going to kill me,
runs a stanza of the Tigres del Norte ballad “Pakas de a Kilo,” which continues:

They say
that one day they’re going to kill me.
The snakes don’t scare me!
I know how to lose and how to win.
I carry a goat’s horn
for whomever wants to get into it.

“Cruz de Marijuana,” by the appropriately named Exterminador, prepares for the future, instructing the hero’s survivors:

When I die,
put up a marijuana cross
with ten bottles of wine
and one hundred packs of cards.

This ballad remembers the narrator’s life as a luxurious sort of living death:

In my fine coffin,
with grapeshot as my treasure,
I enjoyed every little thing in life:
jewels, women and gold.
I am a drug dealer;
I know the rifle from the dust!

And indeed the blurring of death and life is common in the
narcocorridos.
Valentín Elizalde’s “Catarino y los Rurales” is a frankly supernatural tale:

They raised seven men from the dead
who had killed Catarino . . .

Catarino shot bullets;
the
rurales
shot cannons

but Catarino’s ghost defies theirs. And the heroes of
narcocorridos
often evince fantastic powers. To quote one last time from “Jefe de Jefes”:

I navigate under the water.
I also know how to fly in the sky.
Some say the government watches me;
others say that’s a lie.
From up high I entertain myself.
I like them to be confused.

Just as Jesus spoke in parables, likewise the narco-saints—and their listeners. The more desperate they were, the more profoundly the
narcocorridos
sang to them. The hotel clerk Patricia, whom I had known for years, disliked them actively; the barber who always remembered me and said
God bless you
felt the same. The police expressed various tolerations, exasperations and likings from within their collective prison of stolidity. Poor Francisco Cedeño was drawn in equal measures to fantasies of policewomanly valiancy and imaginings of priest-smugglers. Emily liked tunes more than words;
narcocorridos
pleased her on that basis; certainly the so-called drug culture was more normal for her than for many Northsiders; in fact I knew nobody in Mexicali who lived in isolation from it. María knew prohibited ballads in spite of herself; Cookies and Angélica relished them all the more for their prudish affectations; Érica lived the addict’s life and half-consciously breathed them; Javier Armando Gómez Reyes, not to mention the great Lupe Vásquez, stood loyally for them; the field workers at the Thirteen Negro who paid Emily’s air-conditioning bills shouted the words out.

I’ve failed to mention the Tucanes de Tijuana, a famous band who composed the first
narcocorridos
Angélica ever heard; I’ve neglected to relate Alfonso Rodríguez Ibarra’s musicological distinctions between
corridos;
²⁶⁸
I’ve failed to introduce you to the most famous narcotraffickers, whom even the police speak of with respect: Güero Palma, the brothers Chapo Guzmán and Aureliano Félix from Tijuana; Cárdenas the chief of chiefs, the Valencia brothers . . . But maybe I have showed you that certain individuals of a daringly decorative bent can paint the walls of hell with words as yellow, hot and sulphurous as the Chinesca at three in the morning.

Chapter 155

THE
MAQUILADORAS
(2004)

Q. Are
maquiladoras
good or bad for Mexico, and why?

A. To tell you the truth, I don’t know.

—Interview with Señora Candelaria Hernández López, maquiladora worker, 2004

In our country, there’s reality and there’s superficial truth.

—Séñor A., private detective, 2004

O
nce upon a time in a concrete house on the west bank of the Río Hardy, on one of those hundred-and-ten-degree humid afternoons which in southeast Asia would have imparted an air of Buddhist dreaminess to everything but which in Mexico expressed itself in simple torpidity, a certain Cucapah woman who travelled by slow bus five days out of every seven to the
maquiladora
in Mexicali where she assembled unknown components for the better than average wage of a hundred dollars a week informed me that before she’d given birth to those four children who now sprawled in the dirt, one of them sleeping, two of them playing, the eldest slowly fighting the flies over his can of soda pop, she had worked in a different
maquiladora
managed entirely by men and labor-staffed mostly with single young women like her; in this establishment, the name of which she’d forgotten, every female on the line was required to bring in a bloody tampon each month for inspection. No tampon or no blood, and she got fired. My driver-interpreter Terrie Petree was skeptical. She said that Mexican women usually wore pads, not tampons; and, besides, how difficult would it be to borrow a neighbor’s bloody tampon or procure a splash of chicken blood? All the same, I knew a book which seconded the indictment, an angry little book whose certitude glared as inescapably as Imperial sunshine. Its author was none other than Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, whose exaggerations about the feculence of the New River my own laboratory samples had underwhelmingly verified; on the other hand, I credit the man’s reassuring consistency for excelling that of the Bible: In brief, Mexicans were mostly right and gringos were always wrong. (His tract ends thus:
A healthy and prosperous American economy will not forever endure if the mass of Mexicans to the south, many of whom labor for greedy American employers, live in Third World dependency.
) What about the Cucapah woman’s story? Well, Señor Ruiz was apprised that a certain
maquiladora
in Ciudad Juárez compelled its female employees to bring in bloody tampons each month for the first three months.