by Luis Urrea
Von often reminds his workers that they are “ambassadors of Christ” and should comport themselves accordingly. Visitors are indelicately stripped of their misconceptions and prejudices when they discover that the crust on Von and his crew is a mile thick: the sight of teenybopper Bible School girls enduring Von’s lurid pretrip briefing is priceless. Insouciantly, he offers up his litany: lice, worms, pus, blood; diarrhea, rattletrap outhouses, no toilet paper; dangerous water and food; diseased animals that will leave you with scabies; rats, maggots, flies; odor. Then he confuses them by demanding love and respect for the poor. He caps his talk with: “Remember—you are not going to the zoo. These are people. Don’t run around snapping pictures of them like they’re animals. Don’t rush into their shacks saying, ‘Ooh, gross!’ They live there. Those are their homes.”
Because border guards often “confiscate” chocolate milk, the cartons must be smuggled into Mexico under bags of clothes. Because the floors of the vans get so hot, the milk will curdle, so the crew must first freeze it. The endless variations of challenge in the Borderlands keep Von constantly alert—problems come three at a time and must be solved on the run.
Like the time a shipment of tennis shoes was donated to Spectrum. They were new, white, handsome shoes. The only problem was that no two shoes in the entire shipment matched. Von knew there was no way the Mexican kids could use one shoe, and they—like teens everywhere—were fashion-conscious and wouldn’t be caught dead in unmatching sneakers.
Von’s solution was practical and witty. He donned unmatched shoes and made his crew members wear unmatched shoes. Then he announced that it was the latest California surfer rage; kids in California weren’t considered hip unless they wore unmatched shoes. The shipment was distributed, and shoeless boys were shod in the faux fashion craze begun by Chez Von.
Von has suffered for his beliefs. In the ever more conservative atmosphere of American Christianity (read: Protestantism), the efforts of Spectrum have come under fire on several occasions. He was once denounced because he refused to use the King James Bible in his sermons—clearly the sign of a heretic.
Von’s terse reply to criticism: “It’s hard to ‘save’ people when they’re dead.”
Von has a Monday night ministerial run into Tijuana, and in his heyday, he was hitting three or four orphanages a night. I was curious, unaware of the severity of the poverty in Tijuana. I knew it was there, but it didn’t really mean anything to me. One night, in late October 1978, my curiosity got the better of me. I didn’t believe Von could show me anything about my hometown that I didn’t know. I was wrong. I quickly began to learn just how little I really knew.
He managed to get me involved on the first night. Actually, it was Von and a little girl named América. América lived in one of the orphanages barely five miles from my grandmother’s house in the hills above Tijuana.
She had light hair and blue eyes like mine—she could have been my cousin. When she realized I spoke Spanish, she clutched my fingers and chattered for an hour without a break. She hung on harder when Von announced it was time to go. She begged me not to leave. América resorted to a tactic many orphanage children master to keep visitors from leaving—she wrapped her legs around my calf and sat on my foot. As I peeled her off, I promised to return on Von’s next trip.
He was waiting for me in the alley behind the orphanage.
“What did you say to that girl?” he asked.
“I told her I’d come back next week.”
He glared at me. “Don’t ever tell one of my kids you’re coming back,” he snapped. “Don’t you know she’ll wait all week for you? Then she’ll wait for months. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
“I mean it!” I said.
I went back the next time to see her. Then again. And, of course, there were other places to go before we got to América’s orphanage, and there were other people to talk to after we left. Each location had people waiting with messages and questions to translate. It didn’t take long for Von to approach me with a proposition. It seemed he had managed the impressive feat of spending a lifetime in Mexico without picking up any Spanish at all. Within two months, I was Von’s personal translator.
It is important to note that translation is often more delicate an art than people assume. For example, Mexicans are regularly amused to read TV Guide listings for Spanish-language TV stations. If one were to leave the tilde (~) off the word años, or “years,” the word becomes the plural for “anus.” Many cheap laughs are had when “The Lost Years” becomes “The Lost Butt Holes.”
It was clear that Von needed reliable translating. Once, when he had arranged a summer camping trip for barrio children, he’d written a list of items the children needed to take. A well-meaning woman on the team translated the list for Von, and they Xeroxed fifty or sixty copies.
The word for “comb” in Spanish is peine, but leave out a letter, and the word takes on a whole new meaning. Von’s note, distributed to every child and all their families, read:
You must bring CLEAN CLOTHES
TOOTH PASTE
SOAP
TOOTHBRUSH
SLEEPING BAG
and BOYS—You Must Remember
to BRING YOUR PENIS!
Von estimates that in a ten-year period his crew drove several million miles in Mexico without serious incident. Over five hundred people came and went as crew members. They transported more than sixty thousand visitors across the border.
In my time with him, I saw floods and three hundred-mile-wide prairie fires, car wrecks and gang fights, monkeys and blood and shit. I saw human intestines and burned flesh. I saw human fat through deep red cuts. I saw people copulating. I saw animals tortured. I saw birthday parties in the saddest sagging shacks. I looked down throats and up wombs with flashlights. I saw lice, rats, dying dogs, rivers black with pollywogs, and a mound of maggots three feet wide and two feet high. One little boy in the back country cooked himself with an overturned pot of boiling frijoles; when I asked him if it hurt, he sneered like Pancho Villa and said, “Nah.” A maddened Pentecostal tried to heal our broken-down van by laying hands on the engine block. One girl who lived in a brickyard accidentally soaked her dress in diesel fuel and lit herself on fire. When I went in the shed, she was standing there, naked, her entire front burned dark brown and red. The only part of her not burned was her vulva; it was a startling cleft, a triangular island of white in a sea of burns.
I saw miracles, too. A boy named Chispi, deep in a coma induced by spinal meningitis, suffered a complete shutdown of one lobe of his brain. The doctors in the intensive care unit, looking down at his naked little body hard-wired to banks of machinery and pumps, just shook their heads. He was doomed to be a vegetable, at best. His mother, fished out of the cantinas in Tijuana’s red-light district, spent several nights sitting in the hospital cafeteria sipping vending-machine coffee and telling me she hoped there were miracles left for people like her.
Chispi woke up. The machines were blipping and pinging, and he sat up and asked for Von. His brain had regenerated itself. They unhitched him, pulled out the catheters, and pulled the steel shunt out of his skull. He went home. There was no way anybody could explain it. Sometimes there were happy endings, and you spent as much time wondering about them as grieving over the tragedies.
God help me—it was fun. It was exciting and nasty. I strode, fearless, through the Tijuana garbage dumps and the Barrio of Shallow Graves. I was doing good deeds, and the goodness thrilled me. But the squalor, too, thrilled me. Each stinking gray barrio gave me a wicked charge. I was arrested one night by Tijuana cops; I was so terrified that my knees wobbled like Jell-O. After they let me go, I was happy for a week. Mexican soldiers pointed machine guns at my testicles. I thought I was going to die. Later, I was so relieved, I laughed about it for days. Over the years, I was cut, punctured, sliced: I love my scars. I had girlfriends in every village, in every orphanage, at each garbage dump. For a time, I was a hero. And at night,
when we returned, caked in dried mud, smelly, exhausted, and the good Baptists of Von’s church looked askance at us, we felt dangerous. The housewives, grandmothers, fundamentalists, rock singers, bikers, former drug dealers, school-girls, leftists, republicans, jarheads, and I were all transformed into The Wild Bunch.
It added a certain flair to my dating life as well. It was not uncommon for a Mexican crisis to track me down in the most unlikely places. I am reminded of the night I was sitting down to a fancy supper at a woman’s apartment when the phone rang. A busload of kids from one of our orphanages had flipped over, killing the American daughter of the youth minister in charge of the trip. All the gringos had been arrested. The next hour was spent calling Tijuana cops, Mexican lawyers, cousins in Tijuana, and Von. I had to leave early to get across the border.
Incredibly, in the wake of this tragedy, the orphanage kids were taken to the beach by yet another gringo church group, and one of the boys was hit by a car and killed.
My date was fascinated by all this, no doubt.
Slowly, it became obvious that nobody outside the experience understood it. Only among ourselves was hunting for lice in each other’s hair considered a nice thing. Nobody but us found humor in the appalling things we saw. No one else wanted to discuss the particulars of our bowel movements. By firsthand experience, we had become diagnosticians in the area of gastrointestinal affliction. Color and content spoke volumes to us: pale, mucus-heavy ropes of diarrhea suggested amoebas. Etc.
One of Von’s pep talks revolved around the unconscionable wealth in the United States. “Well,” he’d say to some unsuspecting gringo, “you’re probably not rich. You probably don’t even have a television. Oh, you do? You have three televisions? One in each room? Wow. But surely you don’t have furniture? You do? Living room furniture and beds in the bedrooms? Imagine that!
“But you don’t have a floor, do you? Do you have carpets? Four walls? A roof! What do you use for light—candles? Lamps! No way. Lamps.
“How about your kitchen—do you have a stove?”
He’d pick his way through the kitchen: the food, the plates and pots and pans, the refrigerator, the ice. Ice cream. Soda. Booze. The closets, the clothes in the closets. Then to the bathroom and the miracle of indoor plumbing. Whoever lived in that house suddenly felt obscenely rich.
I was never able to reach Von’s level of commitment. The time he caught scabies, he allowed it to flourish in order to grasp the suffering of those from whom it originated. He slept on the floor because the majority of the world’s population could not afford a bed.
CHAPTER ONE
SIFTING THROUGH THE TRASH
Trash
One of the most beautiful views of San Diego is from the summit of a small hill in Tijuana’s municipal garbage dump. People live on that hill, picking through the trash with long poles that end in hooks made of bent nails. They scavenge for bottles, tin, aluminum, cloth; for cast-out beds, wood, furniture. Sometimes they find meat that is not too rotten to be cooked.
This view-spot is where the city drops off its dead animals—dogs, cats, sometimes goats, horses. They are piled in heaps six feet high and torched. In that stinking blue haze, amid nightmarish sculptures of charred ribs and carbonized tails, the garbage-pickers can watch the buildings of San Diego gleam gold on the blue coastline. The city looks cool in the summer when heat cracks the ground and flies drill into their noses. And in the winter, when windchill drops night temperatures into the low thirties, when the cold makes their lips bleed, and rain turns the hill into a gray pudding of ash and mud, and babies are wrapped in plastic trash bags for warmth, San Diego glows like a big electric dream. And every night on that burnt hill, these people watch.
In or near every Mexican border town, you will find trash dumps. Some of the bigger cities have more than one “official” dump, and there are countless smaller, unlicensed places piled with garbage. Some of the official dumps are quite large, and some, like the one outside Tecate, are small and well hidden. People live in almost every one of them.
Each dompe has its own culture, as distinct as the people living there. (Dompe is border-speak, a word in neither Spanish nor English. It is an attempt to put a North American word or concept—“dump”—into a Mexican context. Thus, “junkyard”becomes yonke and “muffler” becomes mofle.) Each of these dompes has its own pecking order. Certain people are “in.” Some families become power brokers due to their relationships to the missionaries who invariably show up, bearing bags of old clothes and vanloads of food. Some dompes even have “mayors”; some have hired goons, paid off by shady syndicates, to keep the trash-pickers in line. It’s a kind of illegal serfdom, where the poor must pay a ransom to the rich to pick trash to survive.
Then there are those who are so far “out” that the mind reels. In the Tijuana dompe, the outcasts were located along the western edge of the settlement in shacks and lean-tos, in an area known as “the pig village.” This was where the untouchables of this society of untouchables slept, among the pigs awaiting slaughter.
I knew them all: the Serranos, the Cheese Lady, Pacha, Jesusita.
A Woman Called Little Jesus
It was raining. It had been raining for weeks, and the weather was unremittingly cold. The early-morning van-loadings were glum; all spring and summer and even into the fall, more volunteers than we’d known what to do with joined us for the weekly trips into Mexico. One day, we had over a hundred eager American kids loaded into buses ready to go forth and change the world. Now, though, as the late-winter/early-spring rain came, the group dwindled. Sometimes we were reduced to a small core of old-timers, six to ten at most.
When we pulled into the dump, the vans slid almost sideways in the viscous, slick mud. Windchill turned the air icy; there was no smoke to speak of that day, and the dogs were mostly hiding. Women awaiting food were lined up, covering their heads with plastic sheets. Even in this wind and wet they joked and laughed. This feature of the Mexican personality is often the cause of much misunderstanding—that if Mexicans are so cheerful, then they certainly couldn’t be hungry or ill. It leads to the myth of the quaint and jovial peasant with a lusty, Zorba-like love affair with life. Like the myth of the lazy Mexican, sleeping his life away, it’s a lie.
Perhaps the women laughed because they were simply relieved to be getting food. Perhaps they were embarrassed—Mexicans are often shamed by accepting help of any kind. When embarrassed or ashamed, they often overcompensate, becoming boisterous, seemingly carefree. Or maybe the poor don’t feel the compunction to play the humble and quiet role we assign them in our minds.
As I climbed out of the van, Doña Araceli, the Cheese Lady, bustled over to me. We called her the Cheese Lady because she had taken to coming to the dump with globs of drippy white goat cheese wrapped in cloth. She sold it to the locals, and she always pressed a lump of it into my hands as a gift. Nobody in the crew had the guts to taste it. We’d pass the cheese around for a couple of hours, then unload it at an orphanage or a barrio in Tijuana.
Doña Araceli was extremely agitated. She had discovered a new family—a married couple, several children, including toddlers, and one daughter with an infant—and they had no house to stay in. They were very poor, she said, and in dire need of help.
One of our projects over the years was to build homes and churches for the poor. An associate of ours named Aubrey devised an ingeniously simple construction plan. He collected garage doors from houses being torn down or renovated; these doors, hammered to a simple wooden frame, made handy walls. Depending on how many doors were available, the new house could be as long or as wide as the builders chose. With saws and donated windows, Aubrey could modify the place and make it quite fancy. The roofs were either more garage doors, plywood, or two-by-six planks covered with plastic sheeting that was either carpet-tacked or stapled into place. Old carpets and plastic sheets were transformed into a quick floor. Once a month, we had a dompe workday: truckloads of youths armed with tools came in an
d began hammering, and in a matter of hours, they created a new building.
Doña Araceli wanted us to build this family a house right away. She said the mother was waiting to meet me. The woman’s name was Jesusita. Little Jesus.
Jesusita shook my hand and called me “Hermano”— “Brother.”
This is not a common Mexican greeting; it is used among Protestants as a shorthand for “fellow Christian.” A “real” Mexican would never resort to such Protestant language (though it is a habit for Mexicans to call each other “’mano,” which is short for “brother” but actually takes the place of “pal” or “dude.” Mexican linguistics are a delicate and confusing art: mano also means “hand”). The poor, however, deal with missionaries and soon learn to use the more religious term freely. It is often a manipulative thing. They are hoping you will assume they are “Hallelujahs,” too, and give them more goods than the rest. Consequently, Jesusita’s “Hermano” didn’t move me. I paid it no heed.
What really caught my eye instead was her face. She was small, a round woman with gray hair and the kind of face that retains a hint of young beauty under layers of pain and comfortless years. Her eyes, nestled in laugh lines, were a light, nutbrown color. She smiled easily. She wound her hair in twin braids and pinned it to the top of her head, framing her face. She made me feel happy, absurdly pleased, as though she were a long-lost aunt who had appeared with a plate of cookies.
Over the next year, as we got to be friends, she lavished me with bear hugs. Her head fit easily beneath my chin. On the day I met her, though, she cried.
“Hermano,” she said, “vinimos desde el sur, y no tenemos casa.” (We came from the south, and we don’t have a house.) “Somos muchos, todos mis hijos, un nietito, y mi señor.” (There are many of us, all my children, a little grandson, and my husband.)
