Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

To his cousin Serafín he said, when Serafín turned up still smelling like a garbageman, that here in the north there were jobs for everyone, so Serafín and Gonzalo were not going to engage in a territorial fight, especially as they were cousins and especially as they were working to help their countrymen. But Gonzalo warned him that to be a bandit on the other side of the border is another thing, it’s dangerous— nobody’s tried it since Pancho Villa — but being a guide like Gonzalo, what they call a coyote in California, is a job that’s practically honorable, it’s one of the liberal professions, as the gringos put it: meeting with his colleagues, some fourteen or so young men like him, around twenty-two years old, sitting on the hoods of their parked cars, waiting for tonight’s clients, not those deluded types in the demonstration over at the bridge but the solid clients who will take advantage of this night of confusion on the border to cross over then and not by day, as the coyotes recommend. They know the Río Grande, Río Bravo by heart, El Paso, Juárez: they don’t go where it’s easiest to wade across, the river’s narrow waist, because that’s where the thieves lie in wait, the junkies, the drug pushers. Gonzalo Romero even has a flotilla of rubber rafts to carry people who can’t swim, pregnant women, children, when the river really does get grand, really requires bravery. Now it’s calm and the crossing will be easy; besides, everyone’s distracted by the famous demonstration— they won’t even notice. We’re going to cross at night, we’re professionals, we only get paid when the worker reaches his destination, and then — Gonzalo told his cousin Serafín — we still have to split the profits with drivers and people who run safe houses, and sometimes there are telephone and airplane expenses. You should see how many want to go to Chicago, to Oregon because there’s less checking there, less persecution, no laws like Proposition 187. An entire village in Michoacán or Oaxaca chips in their savings so one of them can pay a thousand dollars and fly to Chicago.

“How much do you make out of all this, Gonzalo?”

“Well, about thirty dollars a person.”

“You’d be better off in my gang,” laughed Serafín. “I swear by your mother: that’s the future.”

The confusion of the cold, urgent night allows Gonzalo Romero to bring fifty-four workers across. But it was a bad night, and later in his house in Juárez with Gonzalo’s children and wife, all weeping, cousin Serafín noted that when everything seems too easy you’ve got to be on guard, for sure something’s going to fuck up, it’s the law of life and anyone who thinks everything’s going to go right for him all the time is a jerk — meaning no offense to poor cousin Gonzalo.

It was as if that night the Texas employers, stirred up by the raised-arms demonstration and by the sight of the fifty-four people gathered by Gonzalo Romero next to a gas station on the outskirts of El Paso, had agreed to screw the people who’d come across. From their truck, the contractors first said that there were too many, that they couldn’t contract for fifty-four wetbacks, although they’d take anyone who would work for a dollar an hour even though they’d said they’d pay two dollars an hour. All fifty-four raised their hands, and then the contractors said, Still too many — let’s see how many will come with us for fifty cents an hour. About half said they would, the other half got mad and began to argue, but the employer told them to get back to Mexico fast because he was going to call the Border Patrol. The rejected men started insulting the contracted workers, who in turn called them stinking beggars and told them to hurry up and get out because there was a lot of bad feeling against them in these parts.

Romero began to gather all of them together — no way. He wouldn’t charge them, he only charged when he delivered the worker to the boss. That’s why he was respected on the border. He kept his word, he was a professional. Listen, he told them, I’m even teaching my kids how to be guides when they grow up — coyotes, as we’re called in California — that’s how honorable I think my miserable job is …

It was then that the desert night filled with the echo of a storm that Gonzalo Romero tried to locate in the sky; but the sky was clear, starry, outlining the black silhouettes of the poplars, perfumed by the incense of the piñons. Was the tremor coming from deep within the earth? Gonzalo Romero thought for an instant that the crust of mesquite and creosote was the armor plating of this plain of the Rio Grande and that no earthquake could break it up; no, the roar, the tremor, the echo arose from another armor plate, one of asphalt and tar, the straight line of the highways of the plain, the wheels of the motorcycles calcifying the desert, motors ablaze, as if the bikes’ lights were fire and their riders warriors in an unmentionable horde. Gonzalo Romero and the group of workers saw the arms tattooed with Nazi insignia, the shaved heads, the sweatshirts proclaiming white supremacy, the hands raised in the Fascist salute, the fists clutching cans of beer, twenty, thirty men, sweating beer and pickles and onion, who suddenly surrounded them. They formed a circle of motorcycles, screaming, White supremacy, Death to the Mexicans, Let’s invade Mexico, might as well begin now, we came to kill Mexicans. And at point-blank range each fired his high-powered rifle at Gonzalo Romero, at the twenty-three workers. Then, when they were all dead, one of the skinheads got off his bike and checked the bleeding head of each body with the tip of his boot. They’d aimed well, at the Mexicans’ heads, and one of them put his cap back on his bare head and said to no one in particular, to his comrades, to the dead, to the desert, to the night: “Today I really had the death faucet wide open!”

He showed his teeth. On the inside of his lower lip was tattooed WE ARE EVERYWHERE.

and then disguised as a French lawyer, Benito Juárez sent Santa Anna packing, was attacked by the French, and took refuge in El Paso del Norte because the French left him nothing but that bend in the río bravo, río grande, to defend his Mexican republic:

he arrived with his black coach and his wagons filled with papers, letters, laws, he arrived with his black cape, his black suit, his black top hat, he himself as dark as the most ancient language, like the forgotten Indian language of Oaxaca, he himself as dark as the most ancient time, when there was no yesterday or tomorrow,

but he didn’t know that: he was a liberal Mexican lawyer, an admirer of Europe betrayed by Europe who had now taken refuge in the bend of the río bravo, río grande, with no other relics for his exodus than the papers, the laws he’d signed, identical to the laws of Europe,

Juárez looks at the other side of the river, at Texas and its growing prosperity, there where Spain left only the footprints of Cabeza de Vaca in the sand and Mexico, translating that name word for word, was only a cow’s head buried in the sand,

gringo Texas founded commercial towns, attracted immigrants from all over the world, crisscrossed its territory with railroads, increased its wheat and cattle, and received the gift of the devil, oil wells, with no need to make the sign of the cross:

“Texas is so rich that anyone who wants to live poorly will have to go elsewhere, Texas is so vigorous that anyone who wants to die will have to go elsewhere”:

look at me, Juarez says from the other side of the river, I have nothing and I even forgot what my grandparents had, but I want to be like you, prosperous, rich, democratic, look at me, understand me, my responsibility is different, I want us to be governed by laws, not tyrants, but I have to create a state that will see to it that laws are respected but that won’t succumb to despotism: