The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  Tijuana police cars with flashing lights were also present. The scene drew onlookers. Passing motorists and pedestrians on the International Road yelled:

  “Arrest those bastards!”

  “Get the illegal aliens!”

  “Deport the fucking gringos!”

  Arms folded, Romo beamed in the retelling of the event. His grin spread as if the whole thing centered on a private punch line. His political theater had garnered an Associated Press story that was picked up by newspapers around the world. If former Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon hadn’t been arrested on charges of illegal arms possession hours later, Romo’s crossing would have grabbed even more attention.

  And the thing he’d seen there, on the flat ground before the culverts, time and again—that mysterious activity which had inspired his plans and might have been a measure more bizarre?

  “Yes, that was the staging area for the bikes,” he said. “You would see two dozen, three dozen people waiting on bicycles, waiting for the signal.” Romo looked at the sky in thought. “Whoever did it the first time knew that it was a good strategy. On foot, you’re in bad shape. The bicycle is a very inventive and creative way because you can do in minutes what would take hours.”

  We turned our backs on the canyon and began walking toward Romo’s truck. I pictured the migrants he’d described, waiting for a signal. I imagined a wave or a whistle. The cyclists’ feet leaving the ground and finding the pedals; sprockets and chains engaged; balance in momentum; the dark maw of the culverts admitting a pinprick of distant light; the tunnel vision; the awful, damp smell of the pipes. And then they were gone; they’d left my imagination and rolled into the very same portals that carried silt, sewage, appliances, refuse, lost and mislaid items downstream.

  “Some of the bikes are still around, you know?” Romo said, as we drove away. “You can find them in Goat Canyon. I’ve been tempted to take a bicycle myself. I’ve seen some nice ones.”

  11

  “So, do you think he’s really coming back?” asked Juan.

  The enganchador sat with the guía, Javy, at the bar of the Chicago Club. It was hot outside. The bar was dark, cool, and empty. They sipped golden-brown Cuba libres—a cola-and-rum drink invented on the heels of Cuba’s liberation from Spain. American GIs brought the Coke, Cubans the rum. The magic concoction seeped up into Dixieland and spread north and west with the rumrunners of Prohibition. Untold gallons of rum passed through Tijuana.

  “Shit, I don’t know, man. He picked up twelve thousand dollars crossing those pollos. What would you do?”

  “His whole family is already set up on the inside,” Juan said.

  “That too,” Javy said. “He’d be back by now. Los Angeles is only two, three hours away.”

  “So, how did you guys leave it? Indio just said, what? ‘Thank you for your services and good-bye’?”

  “No,” Javy sighed. “It was pretty emotional at his mom’s house. She didn’t want him to go. But he had to get the pollos to Los Angeles to get paid.”

  Heading north wasn’t as easy as simply hopping on the freeway. There were permanent Border Patrol checkpoints at San Onofre on the I-5 and before the city of Temecula on the 805. Vehicles were stopped by agents who peered into their interiors. For reasons unknown to the polleros, these checkpoints were periodically closed. The smugglers could scout the situation in a number of ways, yet regardless, six Mexicans in a small Toyota wasn’t going to look good. This was the reason, Javy said, that he’d been left behind.

  “Indio gave me some money and said, ‘See you in Tijuana.’ He also told me to get to work and, whatever . . . ‘see how many you can get.’ So I took the chance. I picked up two couples and they’re waiting in the room right now, probably wondering what the fuck is going on.”

  “Indio asked me to get bicycles,” Juan said, “a lot of them. I bought twenty for a hundred bucks. But he asked me to get them before he crossed and, you know, saw his family again. If Indio doesn’t come back, what the fuck am I going to do with all of those bikes? I can only ride one at a time. Right, cabrón?”

  The polleros ordered another round and watched an apathetic dancer. A flashy-looking couple entered the bar, followed by another man. The boys observed the trio but when the couple sat at a booth, the other man continued toward the bar. This man wore sunglasses indoors, which caught Juan’s eye, and he seemed to be walking toward them.

  “Que onda, compas?” he addressed them, then slouched backward.

  “Indio? What happened to you? Have you gone loco?”

  This took Indio aback. He straightened. “What do you mean, Juanito?” he asked, spreading his hands.

  “Look at you,” said Javy. “Those clothes you’re wearing, and the Nikes. You’re all baggy.” Javy and Juan burst out laughing. “Where are the huaraches?”

  The sides of Indio’s head were nearly shorn and the hair on top was slicked back with gel. The style somehow made his features sharper, cheekbones higher, more indigenous-looking. His T-shirt was big and loose, making his forearms appear short but broad. The sharp creases and cuffs of his chino pants revealed that they were a brand-new pair.

  “You are an overnight cholo,” Juan said.

  “Enough,” Indio said. “I bought clothes for you guys too.” Javy and Juan looked at each other. “No shit, a cab is waiting outside. Check the back seat.”

  They changed on the street while the paraditas (“standing ladies”) in miniskirts and heels, the Chicago Club bouncer on his stool, and the guys at the taco cart watched. Then the boys sauntered back in. Javy looked at his reflection and said, “This pollero is really handing shit out.”

  In place of the bus station recruiters sitting before their Cuba libres in the bar-back mirror of a second-rate strip club, the boys now saw three hip-looking borderlands cholos, the factory creases of their large T-shirts hardly visible under the colored lights.

  “Looking at ourselves in the mirror, with the cool new threads,” Juan later admitted, “I swear we were on cloud nine.”

  Indio met Solo at the Tijuana bus terminal in early 2006, just two months after the first bicycle crossing. He immediately whisked his childhood amigo into the heart of the city. They shared the little room in the Zona Norte; they ate meat tacos on the street. And the new pollero initiated a tutorial in la vida de la frontera. Indio purchased their first cell phones. These had a walkie-talkie option, which they used to abuse each other: Cabrón, they’d say. Pinche cabrón. And for his campesino friend, Indio picked out a pair of black tennis shoes with white stripes.

  “If you wear huaraches in the city,” he explained, “when people look at you, that is all they will see.”

  Solo had assumed that Indio borrowed the money he’d wired, and he felt a daunting obligation to make good on the loan and bring Indio back into standing with whoever could part with such a substantial sum—but Solo quickly learned the truth.

  His lessons began with recruiting at la línea. Indio coached Solo on how to approach possible clients and offer their services. Their language, Indio explained—their words and the slow, resonating intonation of the farmlands—was their advantage. These were their people.

  “They have a desire and you can help to fulfill it,” he said, before warning, “But still, amigo, the pollos won’t trust you completely. Be mindful. When your pet dog catches rabies, you share a history with the creature, you love this animal—but at that point your interests split,” Indio said.

  He then introduced Solo to the business at the bus station.

  But here, a couple of city cops looking to snatch up some pollos themselves spotted the dopey peasant farmer in the strangely new tennis shoes. There was nothing a corrupt cop liked less than competition. The police arrested Solo under suspicion of recruiting migrants. He was taken to jail. After thirty-six hours in a dark cell that smelled of urine, he was placed before a judge who questioned the young man from an elevated bench. Noting his dress, his simple speech, his recent arrival in Tijuana, and the
fact that Solo carried not a peso in his pockets, the sun-spotted magistrate concluded that Solo lacked the wherewithal to work as a human smuggler. Charges were dismissed.

  El Indio, however, lectured his friend. “Pay close attention, Solo,” he said. “The border is chaos. Our business is about intuition and precision—about reaching in and pulling something out. You need to know what’s coming before it arrives.”

  One day Indio recruited two migrants, and he and Solo took them to the canyons. His gang had cultivated more entry points—some of them hidden in plain sight—and Indio wanted to familiarize Solo with the layout. This was also an opportunity to instruct the pollos. Being on the ground was the key to his operation. El Indio didn’t arrive to work a shift: he inhabited the landscape. On this occasion he took the group to the western turnout at Summit Canyon. To the south, the tin-roofed hovels of Los Laureles climbed a canyon wall in increasingly untenable perches. The architecture of necessity always created a frayed aspect along the passage of the International Road. Below, on the other side, at the base of the dam-like ridge that held the road, was only desert and an anemic dirt track, which, at that distance, looked as pale as a dry streambed.

  Indio had indicated this path to the clients, and he’d begun to describe the benefits of the route, when they noticed a white Ford pickup approaching from the city center on the International Road. A man drove, but the passenger-side window framed the face of a woman—the slender aspect of whom immediately drew the eye. Both the driver and the woman appeared to contemplate the smugglers’ small group. But the truck continued on. Indio resumed his instruction. Moments later, however, the truck passed by in the opposite direction. A concrete meridian separated them from the traffic. Later, the Ford again dipped into the saddle of the canyon road. This time, it came to a stop in the turnout. A man in a light-colored Stetson stepped out and approached Indio’s group.

  12

  At the foot of Avenida Revolución is a five-way intersection, the odd-numbered tail of which is a broad footpath that leads through to downtown Tijuana. Anchored at two of the intersection’s opposing corners, a monumental silvery crescent—something like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri—loops into the sky overhead. Steel suspension cables rise from the corners to meet the curvature at intervals, giving anyone appraising the monument from the highlands an impression of a spoked aluminum wheel. At ground level, the arch is surprisingly easy to miss. Its action is too lofty. It is said to be the gateway to Latin America, but a pedestrian could slip underneath without noticing any distinct change; Latin America really begins hundreds of miles north in Los Angeles—the arch is just a formality.

  At the southeast corner of the same intersection stands another set of arches made of aged brick and tile, a flourish reminiscent of an early California mission. About fifteen feet tall, these arches don’t appear to have a function either—their patina leading one to suspect that they were purchased from some decaying hacienda and stationed here to support a foundation myth for Tijuana. Both monuments—one to an idealized Mexican future and one to the country’s past—stand at the intersection of Avenida Revolución and Benito Juárez.

  And yet, this is one of my favorite places in the city because of the noisy third element: all of the troubadours, mariachis, and whole bands for hire that blow their horns in and around the ruined arches. They play into the traffic and into the noise, their suits bristling with ruffles, epaulets, and medallions, their arms cradling the shapely wood bodies of guitars, fiddles, and string basses. Horn players carry their glinting brass low, like sidearms ever ready to be raised and blasted into the street. I admired the whole idea of artists pacing, preening, and charming clients. But passing the intersection at Avenida Revolución again, and laying eyes on the city’s congregation of professional mariachis, what I liked most was the idea, despite the violence and loss of the region’s tourist economy, that all over the hills and valleys of Tijuana, fiestas and weddings and quinceañeras needed real mariachis, and there they were, leaning against the arches, just waiting.

  I met Dan Watman at the big yellow farmacia where tourists used to buy their Viagra and recreational pain pills. We walked through the colorful, empty commercial maze that funnels visitors to the footbridge over the concrete Tijuana River and toward Avenida Revolución. We passed the arches while a mariachi group choked in ruffles played “Por Ti”—“For You”—and we kept on walking through to downtown.

  At a street corner that reminded me of 1970s suburbia—the mom-and-pop stores with their faded corrugated paneling and bright but brittle plastic lettering—a honey vendor sold gooey chunks of honeycomb from a blue plastic bin. The man fought off bees still at work while, with the flourish of a magician, he stuffed the golden combs into black plastic bags. Two pesos each. There were stands selling leather belts and wallets stamped with the names of Mexican states and emblems that glorified professional truck drivers. Taco-cart workers assembled a great variety of dishes for people who stood around as if at a wine tasting, plates elevated, looks of inward discerning on their faces. Intersections held crosswalks in the form of Xs painted right through the center. And on a red light, they brimmed with pedestrians. The city appeared to be bursting at the seams with kids, teenagers, guys and girls in their early twenties—on buses, in school uniforms, hanging out the doors of minivan taxis.

  In the quick-hit coverage of Tijuana’s troubles, this emerging population bubble was rarely reported on. The Los Angeles Times did publish one story about a massacre in a private home, after which the first people on the scene were school kids let out of class down the street. In navy uniforms and knee-high socks, they tiptoed through the battered house full of gory crime-scene curiosities and the recently deceased. Yet it was never outright acknowledged that many firsthand witnesses of the war for America’s drug corridors were children. They’d known no other city, no other reality. That an entire population was coming of age during a conflict with no real fronts, no political identity, ever-shifting alliances, and no end date was a hard reality to wrap the mind around. But their youth could also help explain the resilience. New art, music, ideas, and businesses sprouted in Tijuana during every period of relative peace. The young people’s desire to push their city forward even took them into the streets. On one occasion, a group threw a birthday party for a giant pothole. They brought cake and a piñata. “Tijuana: where our potholes age in years,” they sang. Within an hour, a city truck arrived to fill the cavity. If the violence was to have any lasting opposition, the kids were it.

  Watman and I found a diner whose walls were painted the same light green color as the chilaquiles it served. Otherwise, it looked like any similar place in small-town California—deep booths, cash register up front, big street window. I’d contacted Watman for the same reason I’d tracked down ecologist Greg Abbott, farmer Jesse Gomez, and reporter Janine Zúñiga: I was looking for witnesses. Without any idea of where the bicycles had originated, or who had arranged their crossing, I sought individuals who, I hoped, might each produce some new piece of the story—maybe without even considering its significance.

  Like photographer Maria Teresa Fernandez, Watman was a creature of the marginal space along the fence line. As a young man he’d become enthralled with foreign languages, especially Spanish, which lured him from California’s Central Valley south to a university in San Diego. Afterward, he taught Spanish at community colleges and made frequent trips to the closest place he could engage in his passion, which eventually pulled him across the line to live.

  Around that time Watman began to take his Spanish students to Friendship Park—a binational space surrounding the 1851 border monument, and a stone’s throw from where the security fence meets the Pacific Ocean. The paperwork he’d need to fill out to actually take his students into Tijuana was daunting; some colleges even prohibited students from traveling there. So these meetings at the fence seemed the best go-around. He invited people he knew from the other side as well—a group of volunteer lifeguar
ds who worked the stretch of beach at Las Playas were the first. The idea was simply to have his students communicate with someone en el otro lado. For the students, however, the sensation of meeting another’s eyes through the pylons was more than a novelty. The fence offered both the security of dark sunglasses and the intimacy of face-to-face conversation. There was butchered Spanish and battered English, and a lot of hand gestures.

  The encounters were meant to be a school exercise, but Watman saw something else during the encounters that compelled him: people from different worlds, who likely would never have passed a sentence between them, making each other’s acquaintance across the divide. Whatever it was that charmed him, Watman soon dropped the college students entirely. He wanted anybody and everybody, as dissimilar as possible, to come to the fence and stumble through a conversation. He came up with ideas to lure disparate parties. There were bilingual salsa dance lessons attended by people on either side. There were concerts, yoga classes, poetry readings, and sign-language meet-ups. The event that drew my attention was a binational trash pickup. Watman arranged for a kite maker to teach attendees how to make kites from their trash. The images of a blue sky filled with the bright metallic colors of junk food bags and candy wrappers was transformative. I didn’t know what it was blotting out the iron border fence with all of that color, but I liked it.