by Paul Theroux
“He was smoking marijuana. So were the other coyotes, to keep going.
“We arrived at a cave and rested. Now it was about two in the afternoon. This was the second day—two days of walking. After an hour we began walking again, but I was limping. I’d had two pairs of socks, but they were in shreds and my feet were sore.
“The coyote said, ‘We have to climb this mountain.’
“We climbed and climbed. When we got to the top and looked down, we could see big roads and cars and houses. The United States!
“The coyote said, ‘This isn’t it. We have to go down.’
“Meanwhile, one of the guys had broken his foot while climbing. He said, ‘Please give me some water.’
“The coyote said, ‘If you can manage to make it down there, you’ll save yourself. They’ll help you. But it will be the people who’ll arrest you.’
“We left him. We didn’t know what happened to him. We continued down the mountain and saw tire tracks in the sand.
“The coyote said, ‘Let’s go. But be careful. Use my footprints. That way, they won’t know how many there are of us.’ And he told the last man in the group to grab a branch and erase the footprints.
“The Border Patrol spotted us—we saw their lights. Yet there were trees and bushes around us. The coyote said, ‘Let’s watch and wait.’ It was then about two or three in the morning. We heard voices all around us.
“Then we heard, ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot’—in Spanish. And, ‘If anyone is hurt, we can help you.’ And they shone a bright light.
“The coyote said, ‘You’re on your own now. I’m out of here.’
“Everyone except the five of us from San Dionisio ran away. The Border Patrol found us. They captured us and took us to a processing center and gave us food. They treated us with respect. We slept there, and they took us in a bus to Tijuana.
“They said, ‘Go home. Don’t come back.’
“We discussed this among ourselves. We didn’t want to go back to San Dionisio. We decided to try again. We ate something and went to find another coyote. We had money—we hadn’t paid the first one!
“The new coyote took us back in a van—there were eight of us now. We were left at a bridge, but in a more mountainous area. This time the coyotes carried the water and doled it out to us. They said it would be a shorter route. We walked and walked—my feet were bleeding. We lost all sense of direction. We asked, ‘Where are we?’
“The coyote said, ‘We’re already in the United States.’
“We walked a day and a night, the same as before. Walk six hours, then rest.
“We came to a little house. There were fifteen people inside, waiting for a ride to Los Angeles. It was near a highway. We stayed there all day and night—no food, no water, no talking. And no bathroom.
“One man found a can that had been left behind. It was empty, but he used a small stick to get the last residue of beans, which he ate. The rest of us were desperate and hungry.
“A truck came to pick us up. Twelve or thirteen went in the first truck—fighting to get in. The second truck came six hours later. The back was open, we pushed in. The driver stopped and bought some beer, and after that he began driving erratically.
“We heard sirens. The Highway Patrol stopped us. They opened the door with their guns drawn. They arrested us and brought us to a station. There, they said, ‘Where are you guys going?’
“We were still in their van. One of us who spoke English said, ‘We’re going to such and such a town to work’—I can’t remember the name of the town.
“We heard the Highway Patrol talking outside. Talking and talking. They opened the door of the van and said, ‘Okay, get out of here.’ They didn’t want to deal with us. Too much trouble!
“Someone said, ‘Hey, this is Phoenix!’
“We walked all morning. We were dirty and ragged, but we were in the United States. One guy had a Social Security card. We used it to have some money wired to us, and went to a hotel to rest, eat some food, and change our clothes.
“We were told we couldn’t take a bus to Los Angeles, because it went through a checkpoint, so we got bus tickets to Las Vegas. The bus was stopped, but we kept our heads down, and eventually went by bus to Los Angeles.
“In the end, we didn’t pay anything to the coyotes! In Los Angeles we got in touch with our relatives and friends, and we were picked up. I lived with them near Santa Monica Boulevard.”
He fell silent. I asked, “What then?”
“Washing dishes for a few weeks,” he said. “Then at another place that served breakfast. I hurt my back. I couldn’t work. I wasn’t earning anything. I came home. I’m making sandals now.”
He had a detailed memory for the handful of days he’d spent trying to cross the border, his adventure. His year in Los Angeles he summarized in a few sentences, as an experience of little consequence.
Mezcalero
Someone—it might have been Sarahi—mentioned that at the edge of one of the far hills of San Dionisio there was a palenque, a mezcal distillery (called a vinata elsewhere in Mexico). This distillery produced high-quality mezcal that was much in demand. It was a family business that had been productive for generations—and by the way, the present mezcalero had been to the United States, another border jumper.
I drove there on a steep unpaved road that led to a notch between two hills and what looked like an encampment—sheds, outhouses, stacks of wood, a tethered horse, smoke rising from a great pyramid of earth and wood, packed solid. Six or seven men toiled with shovels or carried thick chunks of firewood. The impression I had from a distance, approaching it from the road, was of campers, fossicking among their lean-tos and shelters, smacking the smoldering pyramid with shovels and stabbing it with pitchforks.
Up close, the scene resolved itself into something more industrious and coherent, which I often found to be the case in Mexico: what looked like disorder from afar was something harmonious when I peered at it without prejudice.
“Hola, welcome—welcome!” It was an unshaven man in a filthy shirt and torn sandals, his baseball hat on sideways, but with a beatific smile and a courtly manner.
This was Crispin García (San Dionisio was mainly Garcías, some of them related), the owner, the jefe, the director of operations, and the patrón. It would be a great mistake to judge him by his grubby work clothes, because he was not only a highly respected mezcalero, but a wealthy man, his product much sought after. And it turned out he was also an immensely friendly man. He had not known I was going to show up, and yet, in the Mexican way, he made me welcome, introduced me to his crew of mezcalistas, asked me what I wanted to know, and explained the whole operation.
“The oven,” he said—horno—of the smoking, eight-foot mound of earth and wood. “Or as we say in Zapoteco, a gorn.”
The other men and boys laughed, and I realized they were not conversing in Spanish but in Zapoteco. I remarked on this.
“Yes, we speak it all the time,” Crispin said. “Our secret language!”
They laughed at this, too, but it was true: the slushy susurrus of Zapotec voices in rural Oaxaca—and in the nearby towns—is incomprehensible to an outsider, not only to a gringo but to Mexicans from other states. Clinging to their language, the language of Monte Albán, with its uniqueness in expressing aspects of that ancient culture, they have made themselves unassailable and remote. Retaining their language was one of the side benefits of being ignored, overlooked, or despised—early writers seldom refer to Zapotecs or Mixtecs or Tzotzils as Mexicans. For Greene or Huxley or Lawrence, it’s “Indians”—“the cave man face,” “the reptilian gaze.” The growing of agave and making of mezcal is one of their traditions, along with their own Day of the Dead, or the Guelaguetza festival, the weaving, the pottery, the fabulous oral literature. So much for “Indians.”
“Inside the oven are a lot of agave hearts—piños,” Crispin said. “Look, show him what we do.” A man held an agave plant and hacked off the thic
k leaves, making it look like a large, cartoonish pineapple. “We’re cooking the piños. We’ll cook them slowly for the next four days—there are hot rocks inside this oven. After that—”
He led me to a circular cement platform, very smooth and stained the terra-cotta of cooked agave juice. A post in the middle was attached to a log and a large circular stone, a leather harness tangled on the surface.
“This is the mill”—the molino—“the millstone”—the tahona. “A horse pulls it round and round. It grinds the cooked agave hearts into shreds we call bagasso. Over there it’s put into those vats”—tinas.
Some of the sunken vats were filled with the dark, stringy agave shreds, and from the sour odor it was easy to tell it was stewing in dark broth, swelling and fermenting.
“We mash it, we turn it over,” Crispin said, taking me to a big cement sink with an array of copper pipes. “Then we put the liquid in this sink and distill it. Slow is best. A drop at a time! Then into the barrels.”
Big blue plastic drums, nine of them, were lined up in one of the sheds. Each one held 200 liters and was sold for 12,000 pesos—$670—which was the reason that Crispin was a wealthy man.
“Now we take some doa’nhis.”
“Doa’nhis?”
“Mezcal.” He laughed. “Zapotec word.”
He poked a thick bamboo pipe into a barrel and, sucking it, filled the pipe, which he decanted into two halved coconut shells, filling each one with mezcal—colorless, slightly viscous, pricked with bubbles, slopping in the shell. He handed me the bigger shell.
“To you! To friendship!”
“To us!”
And we drank, the first sip a knife blade of liquid slipping down my throat and stinging my eyes, the second sip soothing the laceration of the first sip. The third sip induced a feeling of well-being, warming my face. The second cup percolated to my extremities, a relaxation of fingers and toes, a mollifying of the mind and spirit.
“Quiero emborracharme,” I said with a gasp. I want to get drunk.
“Forty-five percent alcohol,” he said. “Here’s how you tell the quality of mezcal.” He jiggled the coconut shell. “Bubbles—see the bubbles?” Burbujas. “This is good. In Zapoteco the word for bubbles is cordon.”
“Do you make tequila, too?”
“No. I don’t like tequila. It’s made from agave but a different process.” He laughed, saying, “They add alcohol,” as though accusing the tequila makers of cheating.
“My grandfather and father were mezcaleros,” he said. “But it was hard for them. They didn’t have a car. They used burros and horses to get the agave from the mountains.”
I loved Crispin’s gap-toothed grin. We toasted again. He said, “Americans are nice people!”
“You’ve been to the States?”
“Six years in Los Angeles,” he said. “North Hollywood.”
“What sort of work?”
“Restaurants. Three years in a Chinese one.”
“What was its name?” I said, to tease him.
“Chin-Chin!” he said, and wheezed with laughter. “Then a Japanese one. Cleaning tables, also preparing food.”
“How did you cross the border?”
“Coyote—three hundred dollars the first time. That was 1994.” He was fifty-seven now, so he had been thirty-three on that trip, and he’d traveled with some other young men from San Dionisio. “Second time I paid a thousand. I crossed near Mexicali, ten hours walking to the freeway.”
“Any problems with the police in LA?”
“None! They left me alone. I loved it there. My intention was to save money, then come back here and help my family.”
All this time we’d been surrounded by the crew, watching us drink, shouting at each other in Zapoteco, bringing more mezcal in the bamboo pipe from the barrel.
Gesturing to one of the young men, Crispin said, “This is my son, Rodrigo. He’s been across!”
Rodrigo was thirty-five, heavyset, with a rueful expression. He said in English, “I paid three thousand to cross the first time. I crossed at Tecate. Five thousand the second time. A lot of money. I had to work two years to pay it off, so I didn’t save much. But I liked it there.”
“What do you miss about the States?”
“I miss the work. I miss the pretty towns, so quiet,” he said sadly.
Crispin knew enough English to understand what his son was saying. He said in Spanish, “Our family is here. We’re happy. I had a lot of work in the States but I never made much money. I’ll never cross the border again. Look, I have my mezcal business. And I’m home. Less pressure. I want to make the best mezcal.”
He was swaying slightly, balancing a coconut shell of mezcal on his fingertips, still smiling.
“How do you make the best mezcal?”
“You have to cut the agave exactly,” he said, with a slicing gesture of his free hand. “The exact cooking. The exact fermenting of the bagasso.”
He flung his arm around me. He began to speak in Zapoteco, with great force, in a heartfelt way.
“Eet yelasu nara!” he said, smiling, but blinking mezcal tears.
“What is he saying?” I asked Rodrigo.
“‘Don’t forget me.’ In Zapoteco.”
No, nor would I forget the sunlight slanting through the puffs of smoke from the earthen pile of the oven, or the thatched roofs of the mill and the sheds, the tang of fermenting agave gunk, the horse cropping grass in the valley below, the eager faces of the Zapotec crew, their work-toughened fingers when they shook my hand, or my delirium, part mezcal, part pure traveler’s bliss.
Día Siguiente: Feast Under the Trees
A recent death in the García family in San Dionisio meant two weeks of mourning—Mexican mourning, a process of easing the spirit of the dead person into the next world. In this case, the deceased woman was the beloved matriarch, Gabina García, who had died at the age of seventy-one. She had led a full life, having married at the age of fifteen and given birth to seven children, one of them Sarahi’s mother.
I was invited to an afternoon meal at the sprawling García compound—a feast, really: about a hundred people were eating in the backyard, under the low boughs of the trees. This was El Día Siguiente—the Following Day—also referred to as a recalentado, the word for reheating, the ceremonial warming up of food the day after the burial, for additional guests.
Women and small girls served tripe and liver stew out of a tureen, tortillas wrapped in cloth napkins, chicken hacked apart on platters, pots of vegetables. And mezcal. We sat at long tables, some men conferring on benches, an impromptu kitchen at the back of the garden—a pot of maize being stirred for tomorrow’s tortillas amid a drone of voices, the subdued garrulity of the feasting and grieving friends and relations.
“It takes thirteen days for a soul to get to heaven,” a woman serving me said, meaning the journey to the afterlife. “We take thirteen tortillas and put them on the house altar after a death. Every day we divide one tortilla into small pieces, and we share it. And we are also sharing it with the departed one.”
As I ate at the table with Germán García—sixty-one, the patriarch—I was asked the usual questions: where was I from, what was my work, how did I like Mexico, did I have a wife and children, and what was I doing in this small village?
With the talk about the reverence of ritual mourning in mind, I said, among other things, that I liked Mexican politeness, the small courtesies I’d seen, many of them extended to me in country areas.
This drew a snort of disapproval from an old woman. “No,” she said. “In the past we greeted each other four times a day—four greetings. We kissed hands.”
“Like this,” Sarahi García said, and demonstrated how a person would extend both hands, turned down, offering them to be kissed.
“Yes,” the old woman said. “But these days the young people just say ‘Hi!’”
“Barbarous Mexico,” Germán said. He sat back in his chair, tipped up the broad brim of his hat, and
folding his arms importantly, he looked aristocratic in his confidence. “It’s a book, México Bárbaro, written by a gringo, John Kenneth Turner. You know the book?”
I had to say I did not know the book. I had never heard of John Kenneth Turner. But later I was easily able to find out about this crusading journalist (1879–1948), a precocious socialist (a reader of Marx at the age of sixteen) and a frequent visitor to Mexico at crucial periods, during the Porfirio Díaz years and again at the time of Pancho Villa’s Punitive Expedition (1916–17)—humiliating for Mexico as another gringo intrusion, though Villa eluded capture. On his last trip, in 1921, Turner interviewed a powerful Zapatista general. Turner became a hero in Mexico, and the atrocities detailed in his book were so important in rousing revolutionary fervor that the artist Siqueiros included a portrait of Turner among the faces in the vast mob in his mural The Revolution Against the Porfirian Dictatorship, on the walls of Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City.
“This gringo Turner was here in Oaxaca just before the revolution,” Germán said, stroking his mustache. “He was also in Chiapas and Sonora. He wrote about the indigenous Yaquis in Sonora, how they tried to prevent outsiders from exploiting the copper mines. This was around the turn of the century. So what did the Díaz government do? They exterminated some Yaquis and sent other Yaquis to Yucatán, forcing them to work on the henequen [sisal] plantations. And he describes how the Yaqui women were made to marry Chinese laborers.”
“You’re a reader,” I said.
“Of course. Mainly history.”
I was impressed by his passion, by his description of the book I’d never heard of, written by an American a century ago. And this book had appeared around the same time—1910, the turbulent years of Porfirio Díaz—as Charles Macomb Flandrau’s Viva Mexico!
Had Germán read Flandrau?
“Of course,” he said. “And Enrique Krauze and many others.”
“Flandrau talked about the courtliness of Mexican manners,” I said, thinking of how he had written: “I have heard a half-naked laborer bent double under a sack of coffee-berries murmur, ‘With your permission,’ as he passed in front of a bricklayer who was repairing a wall.”
