“Hola,” the older man said on approach.
“Buenas tardes,” answered Fernandez. “Are you crossing?”
The men caught their breath. “We’re trying to cross, yes,” said the older man, “but not now.” He nodded down the trail at the dark figure.
“Policía?” asked Fernandez.
“Sí, El Gordito.”
They knew him, or knew of him. This pair wasn’t following us but escaping the short, fat cop. Tijuana’s municipal police extort money from migrants with such regularity, it didn’t occur to anyone present to mention exactly what it was the policeman wanted on this hilltop.
“Have you crossed before?” Fernandez asked.
“Yes, we’ve both been inside. I was in Michigan. I have a daughter there now. I’m trying to get back to her.”
His partner added, “I was packing onions in LA, but then I got deported. If I can get there, I can get my job back.” They both looked down the trail. “Okay,” the young man said with perfect American pronunciation.
“Okay,” we said in turn. “Okay.”
“Buena suerte,” offered Fernandez with a low wave.
The migrants turned and hiked toward the crown of the hill. Despite the close and painfully slow chase, there seemed to be many avenues of escape. The men could turn down into Los Laureles Canyon. They could make for the International Road. I didn’t worry about their flight from this solitary cop until I saw another uniformed man pop up from the east side of Bunker Hill, a dark figure holding a radio. The migrants looked to be in a pickle, one that appeared well rehearsed. This is when the migrants turned toward Clinton’s rusty old fence, climbed the corrugated metal ribs, and threw themselves over. They were gone.
El Gordito caught up to us fast. He was sweating and panting, the uniform bluer than I’d thought, more significant, and pressed. The badge was real. His expression focused. Those goddamned migrants had part of his pay in their pockets, I was sure of it. When Gordito’s feet crunched down on the earth we shared, he muttered a curt “Hola.”
“Hola,” I replied.
“Buenas,” followed Fernandez.
Meeting at the top of Bunker Hill, the two policemen conferred for a moment. Their quarry had called their bluff. What could have been some easy pocket change was now the problem of la migra and the United States. Who knows, maybe they’d see those fucking pollos once they got caught, processed, and deported back to Tijuana. Then one of the policemen pointed toward an open patch on the Mexican slope. A man, presumably homeless, was either sleeping or dead on a mat of greasy blankets. I’d noticed his camp earlier but took the man’s lack of response to this police presence as a sign of impunity. And maybe it was. The police descended on the man and pulled him to his feet. His body language failed to register concern. One cop held the man’s hands behind his back while the other rifled his pockets. They came up with nothing, and left the man to his ink spot on the side of the tan hill. I turned to see Fernandez snapping photos of the whole shakedown.
El Gordito’s compadre passed back over the hill, and the fat man himself approached us on his descent. He wore sunglasses and no expression. “Be careful with that camera,” he said to Fernandez. “There are thieves and criminals about.”
“Okay,” she said. “But what did you want those men for?”
“For assault,” he said.
Fernandez shook her head, and tsked. So much compassion seemed compressed in her slight frame that to be judged by her was to be guilty. Gordito didn’t give the gesture a thought; there was money to be made in this town. The air then ripped with the arrival of la migra agents on muscular quad motorbikes. First one then another pulled to an idle just on the other side of the fence. The sound of their engines reverberated through the metal. Nothing was visible to Fernandez or me, but we knew our friends were now in the crosshairs of the jalapeños as well. And soon to be caught, surely. This was the most enforced portion of the border. The sun had risen to high noon, leaving nowhere to hide. Depending on the migrants’ records, detainment could mean anything from a short return trip to a year or more behind bars.
But the quads shot off to the east, and the hilltop went quiet. After a while, we turned to make our way back down the trail. The navy-blue bowling pin figure of El Gordito waddled down the route with a swift familiarity. Soon, he was out of sight. We took our time. Fernandez snapped some shots. I made notes. The bullring in Playas looked like a saucer I could flip a peso and a wish into. Around a final curve, we watched as the cop drove away in his camioneta, his little truck.
The home of Mateo, the man who had sent Fernandez up here to photograph the graffiti, then came into view. The house was a converted semitrailer parked in a kind of stair step notched out of Bunker Hill. It was a dirt mine. And if the excavating progressed any farther north, the billion-dollar border fence would cave into the operation. The house was parked on a level patch. From there, the terrain continued to descend in low undulations to the ocean. It wasn’t readily apparent that the house was a truck trailer because its additions and outbuildings had altered its shape into a sculptural construction of white blocks. If it had been parked outside of MoMA, the house would have received serious artistic critique.
“When I first came to the border to make pictures,” Fernandez explained, “I wanted to photograph homes built of unique materials. There are so many in Tijuana.” She came upon a home in Colonia Libertad that used President Clinton’s corrugated iron as the back wall of a multiroom house where three generations of the same family lived. Technically, US soil extends three feet south of the wall. Some members of the family slept with their heads in the States and their feet in Mexico. On either side of this compound, neighborhood people gardened at the wall in the way you’d beautify an ugly backyard fence—succulents, tomato plants, and fruit trees. Across from the wall was a small market called Pasadita—the Little Crossing—where essentials for a strange commute might be purchased.
The photographer continued to encounter people who made portions of the wall their homes but, as if at a juncture, her artistic vision skipped tracks. She’d wanted to make art out of these creative houses, but like many people who got too close, she became ensnared by the fence. Now, all she wanted was to document life along this strange line.
Still, Fernandez kept in touch with the friends she’d made while photographing their odd houses, Mateo especially. He would alert her to new artworks on the fence, and importantly, he would accompany her. She’d had rocks thrown at her. She once slipped and fell down a steep decline. So Mateo’s companionship was much appreciated. In return, Fernandez brought food and clothing for his family. She took their portraits and framed them for the house. Yet while she’d delivered some gifts when we first arrived at the semitruck earlier that day, for reasons unknown to me at the time, that friendship was not directly perceptible.
Mateo had wide-set teardrop eyes like those in an ancient Egyptian portrait. His face and mouth were also wide and his half smile revealed teeth spaced like fence posts. Fernandez had introduced me as an amigo. We shook hands; he barely gripped mine. I could see that he wondered what an American was doing here next to his truck trailer, the pit mine, the border fence.
“My friend is curious about the pollo business, the one that used bikes,” Fernandez said.
“I hear they worked from this lot right here,” I added, and I pointed to the gently sloped land just below the truck trailer. It was so close a position to where we stood, I imagined one might have caught their conversations in drafts.
Mateo nodded and said, “That work is their job, not my job. It’s bad business to explain other people’s jobs.”
He looked around and found what he was looking for—the fat cop sitting in his pickup at the side of the International Road. Then he mentioned to Fernandez, “You two should go look for the graffiti you’re interested in.”
As we made our way back down to the truck trailer, we came upon the older migrant we’d met earlier on the hill, the on
e who had followed us and, along with his partner, jumped the fence. A magician, here he appeared back on Mexican soil. The man beamed as we came near.
“We thought, for sure, you were caught,” Fernandez said.
“No,” he said with a chuckle.
“How did you get away?”
“I just ran along the wall, on the other side, to down there. Then I jumped over.”
“La migra came for you.”
“Yeah, I saw them,” he said.
“Where is your friend?”
“He went the other way. I’ll see him later.”
We walked together toward the trailer and Mateo stepped out. He grinned as well. “El Gordito is gone,” he said, shrugging, an apology for his curtness earlier. “I don’t want any problems with him, because he knows me, he knows I’m always here.” He then congratulated the migrant on his escape.
“Sí, gracias,” the man replied.
“Gordito used to sell pollos like him to the bicycle coyotes. Down there.” Mateo indicated the lot. It was empty now, and covered with spring flowers. “Sometimes he would bring bikes to sell too. But always, he wanted money for allowing the migrants to pass over.”
This was the same lot El Negro had described as a base for bicycle crossing—where he stood when the Border Patrol agent approached on the other side, spotted the bikes, and asked why Mexicans didn’t recycle waste metal. When I considered the site in Los Laureles Canyon that Oscar Romo discovered, a picture of a diverse enterprise revealed itself. This explained why each ranch and farm on the American side received its share of the abandoned wheels. I gathered that this lot was a secondary site, yet since it was located across the street from the supermarket, Comercial Mexicana, it was the one that everyone knew about.
Mateo became grave and asked, “Do I have your confidence?” He looked at Fernandez. She nodded. “Okay. After I first arrived here in late 2006, I started seeing some movement, at night. The bikes came in trucks and they put them down in here. They brought the bikes ready to go. I think bicycles from el Norte, but they were used. The polleros brought exactly one for each of the pollos. Every day, I saw the trucks coming with the bikes and pollos. Every kind of bicicleta—kids’, mountain bikes, turismos. All kinds of people. They passed migrantes every day, even in winter.”
“Were the crossings steady, or did the numbers of migrants go up and down?” I asked.
“One year was extensive. I think 2008—it was very, very busy. And at that time I believe they were making rounds with the same bikes that went to the other side, because you wouldn’t find any bikes in Tijuana. It seemed like that was a problem. This is when Gordito brought some bikes here to sell to the polleros. Maybe they didn’t work, I don’t know. I don’t think the pollos had the money for him, or they didn’t want the deal. Because one day Gordito and his partner cuffed the pollero. They must have come to some agreement because the next day, the polleros were right back here with a load of pollos and bicis.”
“Do you know the polleros personally?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “They worked there. I worked here.”
“Have you heard of a man called El Indio?”
“There are a lot of indios around here,” he said.
19
“We came to Tijuana in February of 2006 and we didn’t know anyone in Tijuana and we didn’t have anyone waiting for us here, or on the other side either,” said Leti, a twenty-one-year-old woman traveling with her friend Julia. “I think, like all poor Mexicans, one has the tendency to want to get ahead, to pull yourself out of the poverty hole,” she said.
Being young, they had also come for the adventure, just hoping that God would be on their side. At first Leti and Julia camped on the streets in the Zona Norte, a common staging point for migrantes. “I would sleep for a bit and then Julia would, so that we could watch over each other. Those were really hard times for the two of us. But after wandering around and getting to know the place for a good amount of time, we made a friend there in La Zona.”
His name was Tomas and he worked as the parking attendant at an unassuming hotel that catered to the Zona Norte’s visitors. He was stationed in a glass booth that stood adjacent to the parking lot entrance. Being fixed on that busy street, Tomas was seen as a point of communication. Neighborhood people dropped by, leaving Tomas with messages, information, and gossip.
“He was funny and nice,” said Leti, “and Tomas seemed to have connections. We talked with him about our situation, and he told us that if we wanted, me and Julia could stay in his room.”
The space was very small, but the women immediately rearranged things to accommodate themselves. Their plan was to stay with Tomas while he looked for a way to get them across. The handsome parking attendant had mentioned a number of acquaintances. One was a friend’s boss, a man he called El Indio, who passed migrants of all types. Tomas said he would try to speak with this man, to ask if he could do a special favor in this instance, because the women didn’t have any money. It wasn’t common, he said, but polleros sometimes did deals. And most didn’t mind helping out a couple of girls, especially ones as sincere as themselves.
“Only a few days after we moved into the room,” Leti said, “some guy named Juan showed up. He had five migrantes with him, and he said he wanted to keep these people there with us, and that Tomas would know why. But when Tomas came back to the room just before sundown, he looked at me and at Julia, and was like, ‘What’s up with all of these people?’”
Leti described the man who’d brought them. Tomas made some calls on his cell phone. “A little later,” she said, “the famous El Indio appeared.”
The women were surprised to see that the head man was so young, just a few years older than they were. He met their greetings with a clear, pleasant expression. His bearing was confident, somehow magnified by an inner reserve that seemed at odds with his youth.
Yet, Leti said, “even he—El Indio—asked, ‘Why are these people here? Whose are they?’”
Tomas answered: “I suppose they are yours, amigo. Juan brought them.”
Indio made a phone call himself. Before Tijuana, Leti and Julia had never lived in a house with a telephone, let alone a place where everyone carried phones in their pockets. They watched Indio as he stepped out and conveyed orders into the device. Soon afterward, a van arrived. El Indio and the driver ushered the migrants into the vehicle and then they all sped off.
“Seeing how efficient and confident he was there at the house,” said Leti, “me and Julia decided to go down to el Cañón de los Laureles with Tomas. And I tell you, we were able to see the way that man worked. It really was a whole affair—people running this way and that, talking on the phones, and sometimes yelling in panic.” In her singsong voice, Leti mimed the workers. “‘What do you mean I didn’t tell you that, man? Next time pay more attention! Okay, okay, anyway . . .’”
Leti felt a burst of excitement when El Indio gave instructions; suddenly the dream seemed real.
“Follow the person at the front of the group, the one guiding—that was emphasized the most,” she said. “And it was really cool when the gancho went to distract la migra. Right away the agent guy rushed down and chased after him. With that, the guides, the migrants—todo—took off flying to the inside. One straight line. A minute later, they just disappeared from view.”
The next day, the women woke early and returned to the canyon alone. They found El Indio in a rush—one of the workers had forgotten water for the crossers.
“I said to El Indio, ‘Give me the money and I’ll go to the Comercial to buy it.’”
Without a word, Indio thrust a wad of pesos into her hand and turned back to his work. The women ran off toward the International Road and the blocky, bright orange supermarket—hustling there and back, over the rough terrain, as fast as they could. They bought small individual bottles instead of the gallons they’d seen the day previous. El Indio commended the decision.
Leti offered the pollero his sc
anty change, a gesture that seemed to surprise him. In response, Indio said, “Tomas explained your situation. Let me see what I can do for you.”
Leti said, “If you have someone who can give us work over there, we’ll make payments to you weekly, I promise. If you please help us out, we won’t let you down.”
El Indio made a gesture suggesting that she should be patient. He went back to his business. Not long after, he approached the women. “Listen, one of you is going to the other side right now. Who wants to go first?”
Communicating via imprecise shrugs and hand signals, the women came to the conclusion that Julia would be the first to leave.
“From the time I sat down on the bicycle, preparing myself,” she said, “I had this strong feeling, like, this is something I never thought would happen to me. When I saw the leader beginning to take off, my whole body started trembling. I couldn’t believe it, me, trying to cross by bicycle into the United States! And the pace became fast really quick. By then my body was really shaking, all-out adrenaline. In the distance, on top of a hill, I could see a migra truck. I was scared. But maybe it was the fear that kept me going, kept me from blacking out. That first burst was really tiring. I felt lightheaded. I pedaled as fast as I could go. Then, around ten minutes after we tore out of there, the guide slowed down to gather the group. It seemed like we all were falling apart. Some of our riders were covered with dirt from crashing. I fell too—but you’d just get right back up and start again. No one could wait or help anyone else. A guide was there in the back keeping an eye out, but really, no one can ride your bike for you. It was each person’s responsibility to either keep going or stay behind.”
Down a dirt track, the group reached a thicket of bushes that signaled the river and wetlands just beyond. They entered a trail that revealed itself only once the guide waved the first riders through, but the ground became too soft and soggy to continue. The guide ordered the migrants to dismount and leave the bikes.
“We just threw them down,” Julia said. “Then we ran for about five minutes until we reached a road. There, the people who were going to pick us up were already waiting.”
The Coyote's Bicycle Page 21
