Carlos Fuentes: The Crystal Frontier

“Godfather, everybody in our village has to come to work over the summer to pay their debts from winter. You know it. Don’t be a pain.”

“Okay. Sooner or later you’ll go back to Mexico the way all of you do. That’s the only advantage in this thing. You can’t live without Mexico. You don’t stay here.”

“This time you’re mistaken, Godfather. They told me it’s going to be harder than ever to get in. This time I’m staying, Godfather. What else is there to do?”

“I know what you’re thinking. Once upon a time all this was ours. It was ours first. It will be ours again.”

“Maybe you think that, Godfather, because you’re a man of sense, my mother says. I’m here so I can eat.”

“Get going, Godson. Just figure we never saw each other. And don’t hug me again, it hurts … I’m hurt enough already.”

“Thanks, Godfather, thanks.”

Mario watched the boy he’d never seen in his life run off. He was no godson or goddamn anything else, for that matter, this Eloino (what was his real name?). He’d read Mario’s name on his badge, that’s how he knew it, no mystery there; the enigma lay elsewhere, in the question of why they lived that fiction, why they accepted it so naturally, why two complete strangers had lived a moment like that together..

but the territories were lost even before they were won

the lands did not grow

the population did not increase

the missions grew

the long whip of the Franciscans grew, the whip of implacable colonizers moved by the philosophy of the common good above individual liberty, the letter arrives with the whip, the word of God is written in blood, faith arrives as well,

whip for the Pueblos because the brothers previously used it on themselves, doing penitence and inflicting it: but

the rebellions increased,

Indians against Indians, Pueblos against Apaches,

Indians against Spaniards, Pimas against whites,

until they culminated in the great rebellion of the Pueblos in 1680, it took them two weeks to liberate their lands, to destroy and sack, to kill twenty-one missionaries, burn the harvest, expel the Spaniards, and realize they could no longer live without them, their crops, their shotguns, their horses: Bernardo de Gálvez, a little more than twenty years old and with the energy of more than twenty men, established peace by means of a ruse:

the technique for subjugating the wild Indians of the Río Grande is to give them rifles made of soft metal with long, flimsy barrels so they’ll depend on Spain for their replacement parts, “The more rifles, the less arrows,” says the young, energetic Río Grande peacemaker and future viceroy of New Spain, Gálvez of Galveston,

let the Indians lose the ability to shoot arrows, which kill more Spaniards than badly used rifles:

“Better a bad peace than a pyrrhic victory/” says Gálvez for the ages,

but just plain peace requires inhabitants, and there are only three thousand in the río grande, río bravo, they invite families from Tenerife, they give them land, free entry, the title of hidalgo, fifteen families from the Canary Islands come to San Antonio, exhausted by the voyage from Santa Cruz to Veracruz, colonists come from Málaga, exhausted by the voyage to the Río Grande,

and the first gringos arrive:

the territories were lost before they were won

Juan Zamora had a nightmare, and when he woke up to find that what he’d dreamed was real, he went to the border and now he’s here standing among the demonstrators. But Juan Zamora doesn’t raise his fists or spread his arms in a cross. In one hand he carries a doctor’s bag. And under each arm, two boxes of medicine.

He dreamed about the border and saw it as an enormous bloody wound, a sick body, mute in the face of its ills, on the point of shouting, torn by its loyalties, and beaten, finally, by political callousness, demagoguery, and corruption. What was the name of the border sickness? Dr. Juan Zamora didn’t know and for that reason he was here, to relieve the pain, to give back to the United States the fruits of his studies at Cornell, of the scholarship Don Leonardo Barroso got for him fourteen years earlier, when Juan was a boy and lived through some sad loves …

On his white shirt, Juan wears a pin, the number 187 canceled by a diagonal line that annuls the proposition approved in California, denying Mexican immigrants education and health benefits. Juan Zamora had arranged an invitation to a Los Angeles hospital and had seen that Mexicans no longer went there for care. He visited Mexican neighborhoods. People were scared to death. If they went to the hospital — they told him — they would be reported and turned over to the police. Juan told them it wasn’t true, that the hospital authorities were human, they wouldn’t report anyone. But the fear was unbearable. The illnesses too. One case here, another there, an infection, pneumonia, badly treated, fatal. Fear killed more than any virus.

Parents stopped sending their children to school. A child of Mexican origin is easily identified. What are we going to do? the parents asked. We pay more, much, much more in taxes than what they give us in education and services. What are we going to do? Why are they accusing us? What are they accusing us of? We’re working. We’re here because they need us. The gringos need us. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t come.

Standing opposite the bridge from Juárez to El Paso, Juan Zamora remembers with a grimace of distaste the time he lived at Cornell. He doesn’t want his personal sorrows to interfere with his judgment about what he saw and understood then about the hypocrisy and arrogance that can come over the good people of the United States. Juan Zamora learned not to complain. Silently, Juan Zamora learned to act. He does not ask permission in Mexico to attend to urgent cases, he leaps over bureaucratic obstacles, understands social security to be a public service, will not abandon those with AIDS, drug addicts, drunks, the entire dark and foamy tide the city deposits on its banks of garbage.

“Who do you think you are? Florence Nightingale?”

The jokes about his profession and his homosexuality stopped bothering Juan a long time ago. He knew the world, knew his world, was going to distinguish between the superficial — he’s a fag, he’s a sawbones — and the necessary— giving some relief to the heroin addict, convincing the family of the AIDS victim to let him die at home, hell, even having a mescal with the drunk …

Now he felt his place was here. If the U.S. authorities were denying medical services to Mexican workers, he, Florence Nightingale, would become a walking hospital, going from house to house, from field to field, from Texas to Arizona, from Arizona to California, from California to Oregon, agitating, dispensing medicines, writing prescriptions, encouraging the sick, denouncing the inhumanity of the authorities.

“How long do you plan to visit the United States?”

“I have a permanent visa until the year 2010.”

“You can’t work. Do you know that?”

“Can I cure?”

“What?”

“Cure, cure the sick.”

“No need to. We’ve got hospitals.”

“Well, they’re going to fill up with illegals.”

“They should go back to Mexico. Cure them there.”

“They’re going to be incurable, here or there. But they’re working here with you.”

“It’s very expensive for us to take care of them.”

“It’s going to be more expensive to take care of epidemics if you don’t prevent diseases.”

“You can’t charge for your services. Did you know that?”