Carlos Fuentes: The Crystal Frontier

“You’ll be better off, boy.”

“I’d be mute, bro.”

To whom if not to himself was he going to say, as he gathered the eggs on his father’s little farm, that he wanted to be heard, wanted to write things, stories about immigrants, illegals, Mexican poverty, Yankee prosperity, but most of all stories about families, that was the wealth of the border world, the quantity of unburied stories that refused to die, that wandered about like ghosts from California to Texas waiting for someone to tell them, someone to write them. José Francisco became a story collector.

he sang about his grandparents, who had no birth date or last name,

he wrote about the men who did not know the four seasons of the year,

he described the long, luxurious meals so all the families could get together,

and when he began to write, at the age of nineteen, he was asked, and asked himself, in which language, in English or in Spanish? and first he said in something new, the Chicano language, and it was then he realized what he was, neither Mexican nor gringo but Chicano, the language revealed it to him, he began to write in Spanish the parts that came out of his Mexican soul, in English the parts that imposed themselves on him in a Yankee rhythm, first he mixed, then he began separating, some stories in English, others in Spanish, depending on the story, the characters, but always everything united, story, characters, by the impulse of José Francisco, his conviction:

“I’m not a Mexican. I’m not a gringo. I’m Chicano. I’m not a gringo in the USA and a Mexican in Mexico. I’m Chicano everywhere. I don’t have to assimilate into anything. I have my own history.”

He wrote it but it wasn’t enough for him. His motorcycle went back and forth over the bridge across the Río Grande, Río Bravo, loaded with manuscripts. José Francisco brought Chicano manuscripts to Mexico and Mexican manuscripts to Texas. The bike was the means to carry the written word rapidly from one side to the other, that was José Francisco’s contraband, literature from both sides so that everyone would get to know one another better, he said, so that everyone would love one another a little more, so there would be a “we” on both sides of the border.

“What are you carrying in your saddlebags?”

“Writing.”

“Political stuff?”

“All writing is political.”

“So it’s subversive.”

“All writing is subversive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About the fact that lack of communication is a bitch. That anyone who can’t communicate feels inferior. That keeping silent will screw you up.”

The Mexican agents got together with the U.S. agents to see just what it was all about, what kind of a problem this longhaired guy on the bike was creating, the one who crossed the bridge singing “Cielito Lindo” and “Valentín de la Sierra,” his bags filled, they hoped, with counterfeit money or drugs, but no, it was just papers. Political, he said? Subversive, he admitted? Let’s see them, let’s see them. The manuscripts began to fly, lifted by the night breeze like paper doves able to fly for themselves. They didn’t fall into the river, José Francisco noted, they simply went flying from the bridge into the gringo sky, from the bridge to the Mexican sky, Ríos’s poem, Cisneros’s story, Nericio’s essay, Siller’s pages, Cortázar’s manuscript, Garay’s notes, Aguilar Melantzón’s diary, Gardea’s deserts, Alurista’s butterflies, Denise Chávez’s thrushes, Carlos Nicolás Flores’s sparrows, Rogelio Gómez’s bees, Cornejo’s millennia, Federico Campbell’s fronteras … And José Francisco happily helped the guards, tossing manuscripts into the air, to the river, to the moon, to the frontiers, convinced that the words would fly until they found their destination, their readers, their listeners, their tongues, their eyes …

He saw the demonstrators’ arms open in a cross on the Ciudad Juárez side, saw how they rose to catch the pages in the air, and José Francisco gave a victory shout that forever broke the crystal of the frontier …

the frontier is not yet the río grande, río bravo, it’s the Nueces river, but the gringos say nueces — nuts — to a frontier

that keeps them from carrying out their manifest destiny:

to reach the Pacific, create a continental nation, occupy California:

the railroad cars full, the wagons, people on horseback, cities packed with pioneers, seeking deeds to the new lands, thirty thousand gringos in Texas on the day of the Alamo, a hundred and fifty thousand ten years later, the day of the War, Manifest Destiny, dictated by the protestant God to his new Chosen People, to conquer an inferior race, an anarchic republic, a caricature of a nation that owes money to the whole world, with a caricature army, with only half of the forty thousand men it says it has, and those twenty thousand, almost all of them, Indians marched down from the hills, conscripts, armed with useless English muskets, dressed in ragged uniforms:

“There’s a Mexican garrison that hasn’t been able to show itself in Matamoros because the soldiers have no clothes” was the American army any better?

no, say the enemies of Polk’s war, they only have eight thousand men, cannon fodder who have never been in a fight, disloyal criminals, deserters, mercenaries …

let them set us on the gringos, they shout from the Mexican bank of the río bravo in Chihuahua and Coahuila, we’ll beat them with our natural allies, fever and the desert, with the freed slaves who join up with us,

do not cross the río grande, say the American enemies of Polk’s war, this is a war to help the slave owners, to expand the southern territories:

río grande, río bravo, Texas claims it as its border,

Mexico rejects it, Polk orders Taylor to seize the bank of the river, the Mexicans defend themselves, there are deaths, the war has begun,

“Where?” demands Abraham Lincoln in Congress, “will someone tell me exactly where Mexico fired the first shot and occupied the first piece of land?”

General Taylor laughs: he himself is the caricature of his army, he wears long white filthy trousers, a moth-eaten dress coat, and a white linen sash, he’s short, thickset, as round as a cannonball,

and he laughs seeing how the Mexican cannonballs bounce into the American encampment at Arroyo Seco, only one Mexican cannon shot in a thousand hits the mark: his guffaw is sinister, it divides the very river, from then on everything is a stroll, to New Mexico and California, to Saltillo and to Monterrey, from Vera Cruz to Mexico City: Taylor’s army loses the torn trousers of its commander and wins the buttoned-up dress coat of Winfield Scott, the West Point general the only thing that doesn’t change is Santa Anna, the man with fifteen nails (he lost five when he lost his leg), the cockfighter, the Don Juan, the man who can lose an entire country laughing if his reward is a beautiful woman and a destroyed political rival,

the United States? I’ll think about that tomorrow

he chews gum, buries his leg with full honors, orders equestrian statues from Italy, proclaims himself Most Serene Highness, Mexico puts up with him, Mexico puts up with everything, who ever said that Mexicans have the right to be well-governed?

looted country, sacked country, mocked, painful, cursed, precious country of marvelous people who have not found their word, their face, their own destiny, not manifest but uncertain human destiny, to sculpt slowly, not to reveal providentially: the destiny of the underground river, río grande, río bravo, where the Indians heard the music of God