Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

Juan Zamora just smiled and crossed the border.

Now, on the other side, he felt for an instant he was in another world. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of vertigo. Where would he begin? Whom would he see? The truth is he didn’t think they’d let him in. It was too easy. He didn’t expect things to go that well. Something bad was going to happen. He was on the gringo side with his bag and his medicines. He heard a squeal of tires, repeated shots, broken glass, metal being pierced by bullets, the impact, the roar, the shout: “Doctor! Doctor!”

the gringos came (who are they, who are they, for God’s sake, how can they exist, who invented them?)

they came drop by drop,

they came to the uninhabited, forgotten, unjust land the Spanish monarchy and now the Mexican republic overlooked,

isolated, unjust land, where the Mexican governor had two million sheep attended by twenty-seven hundred workers and where the pure gold of the mines of the Real de Dolores never returned to the hands of those who first touched that precious metal,

where the war between royalists and insurgents weakened the Hispanic presence,

and then the constant war of Mexicans against Mexicans, the anguished passage from an absolutist monarchy to a democratic federal republic:

let the gringos come, they too are independent and democratic,

let them enter, even illegally, crossing the Sabinas River, wetting their backs, sending the border to hell, says another energetic young man, thin, small, disciplined, introspective, honorable, calm, judicious, who knows how to play the flute: exactly the opposite of a Spanish hidalgo

his name is Austin, he brings the first colonists to the Río Grande, the Colorado, and the Brazos, they are the old three hundred, the founders of gringo texanity, five hundred more follow them, they unleash the Texas fever, all of them want land, property, guarantees, and they want freedom, protestantism, due process of law, juries of their peers, but Mexico offers them tyranny, catholicism, judicial arbitrariness

they want slaves, the right to private property,

but Mexico abolished slavery, assaulting private property, they want the individual to be able to do whatever the hell he wants

Mexico, even though it no longer has it, believes in the Spanish authoritarian state, which acts unilaterally for the good of all

now there are thirty thousand colonists of U.S. origin in the río grande, río bravo, and only about four thousand Mexicans,

conflict is inevitable: “Mexico must occupy Texas right now, or it will lose it forever,” says the Mexican statesman Mier y Terán,

Desperate, Mexico seeks European immigrants,

but nothing can stop the Texas fever,

a thousand families a month come down from the Mississippi, why should these cowardly, lazy, filthy Mexicans govern us? this cannot be God’s plan!

the pyrrhic victory at the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad: Santa Anna is not Gálvez, he prefers a bad war to a bad peace,

here are the two face-to-face at San Jacinto:

Houston, almost six feet tall, wearing a coonskin cap, a leopard vest, patiently whittling any stick he finds nearby, Santa Anna wearing epaulets and a three-cornered hat, sleeping his siesta in San Jacinto while Mexico loses Texas: what Houston is really carving is the future wooden leg of the picturesque, frivolous, incompetent Mexican dictator

“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” another dictator would famously say one day, and in a lower voice, another president: “Between the United States and Mexico, the desert”

Sitting on his Harley-Davidson on the Yankee side of the river, José Francisco watched with fascination the unusual strike on the Mexican side. It wasn’t a sit-down but a raising up — of arms displaying the muscle of poverty, the sinew of insomnia, the wisdom of the oral library of a people that was his own, José Francisco said with pride. Perched on his bike, the tip of his boot resting on the starter, he wondered if this time, with the fracas going on on the other side, both patrols might stop him because he looked so weird, with his shoulder-length hair, his cowboy hat, his silver crosses and medals, and his rainbow-striped serape jacket. His only credible document was his moon face, open, clean-shaven, like a smiling star. Even though his teeth were perfect, strong, and extremely white, they, too, were disturbing to anyone who didn’t look like him. Who’d never been to the dentist? José Francisco.

“You must go to the dentist,” he was told in his Texas school.

He went. He returned. Not a single cavity.

“This child is amazing. Why doesn’t he need dental work?”

Before, José Francisco didn’t know what to answer. Now he does.

“Generations of eating chiles, beans, and tortillas. Pure calcium, pure vitamin C. Not a single cherry Lifesaver.”

Teeth. Hair. Motorcycle. They had to find something suspicious about him every time in order to admit he wasn’t odd, simply different. Inside he bore something different but he could never be calm. He bore something that couldn’t happen on either side of the frontier but can happen on both sides. Those were hard things to understand on both sides.

“What belongs here and also there. But where is here and where is there? Isn’t the Mexican side his own here and there? Isn’t it the same on the gringo side? Doesn’t every land have its invisible double, its alien shadow that walks at our side the same way each of us walks accompanied by a second ‘I’ we don’t know?”

Which is why José Francisco wrote — to give that second José Francisco, who apparently had his own internal frontier, a chance. He wanted to be nice to himself but wouldn’t allow it. He was divided into four parts.

They wanted him to be afraid to speak Spanish. We’re going to punish you if you talk that lingo.

That was when he started singing songs in Spanish at recess, until he drove all the gringos, teachers and students, insane.

That was when no one talked to him and he didn’t feel discriminated against. “They’re afraid of me,” he said, he said to them. “They’re afraid of talking to me.”

That was when his only friend stopped being his friend, when he said to José Francisco, “Don’t say you’re Mexican; you can’t come to my house.”

That was when José Francisco achieved his first victory, causing an uproar in school by demanding that students— blacks, Mexicans, whites — be seated in the classroom by alphabetical order and not by racial group. He accomplished this by writing, mimeographing, and distributing pamphlets, hounding the authorities, making a pain in the ass of himself.

“What gave you so much confidence, so much spirit?”

“It must be the genes, man, the damn genes.”

It was his father. Without a penny to his name, he’d come with his wife and son from Zacatecas and the exhausted mines that had once belonged to Oñate. Other Mexicans lent him a cow to give the child milk. The father took a chance. He traded the cow for four hogs, slaughtered the hogs, bought twenty hens, and with the carefully tended hens, started an egg business and prospered. His friends who’d lent him the cow never asked him to return it, but he extended unlimited credit for as many “white ones” as they liked— out of modesty, no one ever referred to “eggs” because that meant testicles.

There, here. When he graduated from high school they told him to change his name from José Francisco to Joe Frank. He was intelligent. He would have a better time of it.