Across the Wire

by Luis Urrea

  It published the first piece near Thanksgiving, as a frontpage exposé. A woman named Cynthia Jeffery, who worked in the advertising and promotion department of an FM radio station in San Diego—91X—read the story. The station was a former border-blaster that actually broadcast out of Tijuana (its call letters were XETRA). Its studios and offices, however, were in San Diego.

  Cynthia was moved by the story and wanted to do something for the people of Tijuana. Obviously, the Christmas season was coming. She called me in late November, and she dropped a bombshell: the management at 91X had agreed to make the garbage-dump and barrio people the focus of a Christmas project to be called “The 91 X-Mas.” Various clubs and bars around town would begin the season by sponsoring “X Nights”—gift-collecting events, complete with toy depositories. Meanwhile, requests for food, clothes, and gifts would go out on the air beginning in early December. Finally, December 21 would be dedicated to a live daylong broadcast from the parking lot of the station; disc jockeys would then accompany us into Tijuana to distribute the gifts. Cynthia wanted to know if I could help.

  “What do you need?” I said.

  “A minister or priest or missionaries who can distribute the stuff.”

  “No problem.”

  “Can you select a neighborhood for us to go to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you come for the broadcast?”

  I thought she was kidding.

  She had no way of knowing that the recession, and “Operation Desert Shield” (it was not yet a “Storm”), had hurt Von and Spectrum Ministries. They were down almost twenty thousand dollars, and when Cynthia called, they had not yet received a single toy donation for their yearly Christmas drive. In many barrios and orphanages in Tijuana, Von provided the only Christmas the children ever got. Certain neighborhoods had received every toy for a score of years from Von. Before Cynthia’s call, it had looked as though Christmas wasn’t going to happen that year.

  The selection of a neighborhood was an interesting challenge. It meant I’d have to go back. The Reader published an article about my beloved little girl Negra, who had spent her girlhood in the dump and then vanished. I could have written a hundred more stories about the border without setting foot across the line. But the memory of Negra receiving her first doll nagged at me. There were thousands of small Negras all over Tijuana. Cynthia was going to try to touch them all.

  The Tijuana colonia that had once established itself at Tijuana’s garbage dump had changed since the days I’d written about. For example, it wasn’t there anymore. The landowner envisioned making a new fortune by clearing out the garbage and building maquiladoras (border factories, American assembly plants administered by Mexicans and employing Mexican labor at ridiculously low daily wages). Clearly, he could make more money with industrial plants than by renting the space to the city and buying recycled glass, tin, wire, and aluminum from the basureros (trash-pickers), even though he resold the junk at a high profit. The only problem was the basureros didn’t want to go, and in defiance of him, formed a neighborhood collective that parceled out the land in lots.

  The old dump site was now two warring colonias, Panamericano and Trincherazo. The active dump had moved several hills farther west. The old central dump area and the pig village had filled with tar-paper huts, then a few wooden houses, and now some stucco beauties were appearing. Rough streets meandered between the houses, and each home had a fence, many still fashioned from the coils of burned mattresses. From what I’d been told, it looked for all the world like a little community.

  Though a touch more civilized, life was still not easy on that hill. There was no “officially” running water. (They provided their own by running hoses from a huge water tank on a hill above the colonia; a series of rubber tentacles snaked all over the neighborhood, bringing in pirated water.) Electric power had only recently been provided by the city. Power was still often generated by stolen or scavenged car batteries. The only heat came from dangerous fires inside the houses, or even more dangerous braziers of coals, or still more dangerous kerosene burners. If the people weren’t overcome by carbon monoxide fumes, they stood a good chance of being burned to death. With the dump closed down, there was no ready work, and few of the families could afford transportation to the new dump, six or seven miles away. Many of those who went there to work got up at four and made small lunches of flour tortillas, then walked.

  Some families had discovered that the hillsides in Trincherazo and Panamericano, formed by tractors piling mud and slag over mounds of garbage, could be mined for glass. Incredibly, there were now small trash-mines dotting the slopes, where families pried apart the hard gray-black soil to recover bottles. A fifty-pound gunnysack of glass from the hill brought them $1.50.

  Because the barrios were built on roughly improvised landfill, all manner of dreadful substances roiled to the surface. The dust there was not normal dust—it was equal part ash, chemicals, and decomposed biological matter. When it rained, the dirt didn’t quite form mud. It formed a kind of noxious pudding that flooded the outhouses and lifted their contents to float into the streets, adding to the miasma. After rain, methane gas seeped out of the soil. The smell of sewage and explosive subterranean processes leaked from the ground as though the entire barrio were a drowsing volcano waiting to blow.

  Though the old dump had changed drastically, and though Negra had been missing from it for years, I still felt connected to the place. I still carried pictures of them all with me, showing them around my various English and writing classes. For all I knew, Negra was dead. On the other hand, she could have simply moved to a neighboring barrio and I’d never know where she was. She could have gone home to Michoacán; she could have crossed the wire; she could have died on I-5 running across at San Ysidro, or in Oceanside. There was absolutely no way to know.

  In her world, most people don’t read or write. There are no telephones, so nobody calls. And if there should be a writer in the bunch, there would be no way to get a letter to anybody, because they live in places with no addresses. There is no place to write to. About the best you can do with Panamericano, for example, is to write to the corner store and hope they’ll give the letter to the right person. Finally, most of the people can’t muster the money to buy postage, paper, or envelopes, should they have an address to which they could send letters. You could move two miles away and vanish forever. Their view of San Diego and the coastline, though, remains spectacular.

  There were several other colonias around the city that were likely targets for the “X-Mas” drive. In spite of the smell and the dirt, the lice and the dogs stiff with mange, and the violence, Tijuana was a place I loved and had been away from for too long. Writing for the paper had reminded me. And the irony of the situation hadn’t been lost on me: once, a few years ago, I had fed these families. Now I was back, and they were feeding mine.

  The next time I called Cynthia, we were on: the disc jockeys were already talking about it on the air. I was to take them into a preselected location in the 91X van: both she and their midafternoon personality, Oz (whose on-air promos solemnly pronounced him “probably the worst deejay in the world”), would accompany me across the border and hand out gifts. I didn’t want either the radio people or the folks from the colonia to get in trouble. Anything was possible—from outright banditry to police raids. If we heaped gifts on one group of people to the exclusion of another, there could be retaliations. (One fellow, who turned out to be Negra’s uncle, lived near the new dump. He was rumored to be hoarding money in his shack. He’d been seen that day selling his possessions. He was, in fact, getting ready to return to Michoacán, and had sold his furniture to pay for the trip. It was a less developed area in those days, and his shack was set apart from the others. A gang of toughs, after failing to bust in on him, decided to set the shack on fire and burn him out. The fire killed him.)

  In many Latin American countries, too much attention can get you killed. It is illustrative to note that in El Salv
ador, almost every Salvadoran professional wrestler wears a mask. The saddest thing about it is that safety is entirely up to the momentary whim of those who have the power, which is usually a chopped-down carbine.

  We would select a safe colonia and arrive on a commando raid: in and out.

  Things had changed with Von, too. When I left, the Mexico Crew was still a loose assortment of renegades working out of a Baptist church. It was a motley crew in those days, but eight years had passed, and now the Crew was a Corporation—Spectrum Ministries, Inc. Every single member from my old days was gone. Many, like me, were married and trying to get on with their lives. Some were burned out. Some were so angry at their experience that they cursed Von and all he stood for. A few had become missionaries on their own. Von, whom some of us called “God’s Machine,” was still there. He was into his sixties and outrunning men and women half his age.

  One of his old-timers now ran the drug-treatment center in the neighborhood where the Satánicos lived. We were looking into the area as a potential beneficiary of the gift drive. He invited me to walk with him down the hill, to look at their small compound. We strolled away from the ball court, through a grating wooden gate that opened onto a small yard. There, a family was gathered around a trash fire. He introduced me to them. We shook hands, joked, and they laughed and wished us “Dios les bendiga” (God bless you) as we moved through.

  “91X!” he yelled. “No way!”

  He couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Praise God!” he hollered.

  It was totally dark. He chugged along at a steady thirty miles an hour, and I was trying to keep from tripping over all the rocks.

  “This is the clinic we run,” he said as we made our way along a cement-block building. “They came and took all our medicine away.”

  “Who?”

  “They. The city. Said we weren’t using it right.”

  Almost nothing was visible on the street. The moon wasn’t up. The houses had saffron wedges of candlelight in their windows. Transistor radios were blaring cumbia music. Voices could be heard within, murmuring, or laughing, or cursing.

  We were at the church. “Right here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the dirt at the entrance to his driveway. “They shot a guy right here. He died right here. He was standing around and a car pulled up and they shot him. He was gasping and gurgling. Right on this spot here.”

  One of the addicts was guarding the driveway.

  “¿Qué onda?” the missionary said. (What’s up?)

  “Nada,” the guy replied.

  “We built this place out of plywood and scrap.” He unlocked the door to the little church. Every door in the compound was padlocked shut. The church had a dirt floor, wooden benches. “The cathedral. Not too fancy.” Next door, there was a workshed. “Look at this,” he said. “The guys build stuff in here. It’s part of their rehab. Check out this cabinet.”

  It was quite nice. They had fashioned it out of sheets of plywood, two-by-fours, hinges. All of it was lovingly sanded and shellacked.

  “Pretty nice, huh?”

  “What are these?”

  Shiny wooden objects were stacked on the workbenches. They seemed to be wooden squares that looked a little like big floor tiles, hinged, with a handle sticking up from the top.

  “Tortilla-makers.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, really. Tortilla-makers. See? You open it up like this, put the dough in here like this, then press down the handle like this. Makes instant tortillas!”

  The handmade tortilla press was the main industry of the rehab center. The men got up at five or five-thirty, attended a six A.M. Bible study, then ate breakfast. (“It weeds out the ones who aren’t really serious about getting off drugs,” the missionary said. “Kind of like boot camp.”) After breakfast, it was off to the woodshed to build these ingenious little machines. The profits from the tortilla-makers, selling for ten dollars, helped keep the center running. I bought one.

  He showed me the dorm room, a cluttered bedroom of stacked bunk beds, separated by a blanket from a small kitchen area. His own quarters were no better—he unlocked yet another door and led me up a steep homemade stairway. At the top, in a kind of small plywood attic, was his room. Battery-powered lamps illuminated a rough table and bookshelves made from wooden boxes. On the walls hung mounted blowguns and Indian artifacts from his many trips into the South American jungle. His hammock was strung in a corner, its bottom brushing the top of a kerosene heater.

  This compound and the youth center nearby would be the focus of one of the Christmas runs, those kids in the street the recipients.

  “This is it,” he said.

  He walked me back out to the street. We talked there for a few moments about private matters of heart and faith. A strange sound at the back of the compound sent him and the one addict on a quick perimeter march, flashlights nervously probing all the darker corners. When he came back, he said, “Cat.” We stood around for another minute, then, to my dismay, he said, “Well, good night!” and went back to his room. I looked up the street. I thought, Oh great.

  It had gotten late. As I walked in the direction of the youth center, I occasionally tripped over big rocks jutting out of the dirt. Ahead, vague in the dark, I could see a group of the Satánicos. Their cigarette ends flared intense red, and seemed to float disembodied like fireflies. I clutched my tortilla press, figuring I could at least break somebody’s nose before they got to me. About a hundred yards farther up the hill, a car in the middle of the street turned on its headlights and sat there. The Satánicos were a blue-gray shadow against the light. They were watching me. But, after all, this was Christmas. It was a time for wonders, and as I came even with them, they all called “Good night,” and “See you later,” and “How’s it going?”

  I replied, “Hasta luego,” and “Buenas noches,” and kept walking, touched and relieved.

  Back at the youth center, one of the addicts saw my tortilla press. “Hey!” he said. “I made that!” He was beaming as he shook my hand.

  But this is not the story I have come to tell you.

  Nor is the story of 91X’s big broadcast, nor even what came after. Christmas 1990 began once all these events were finished. But we had to go through them to get there.

  I pulled into the 91X parking lot at seven forty-five. It was Friday, December 21—a blustery day with early-morning clouds sailing in from the sea. Victor Harris, one of the ace drivers on the old Mexico Crew, slid the Spectrum Ministries van into an executive slot near a small pile of toys and clothes. The radio station staff had already been out there since six. Dwight Arnold, who was officially in charge of the project, was up on a ladder, hanging the black-and-yellow 91X banner over the entryway to the station. Several puffy-eyed suits from the “Mighty 690” AM side of the station stood around gawking, blowing on Styrofoam coffee cups.

  A tent stood dead-center, where bagels and coffee were being doled out. Cream cheese in white plastic buckets attracted one homeless guy who was wearing several pairs of glasses at once. He had white cheese hanging in small icicles from his whiskers. I was impressed at how hard he tried to look like a station employee. Later in the day, he caught a chance to slip into the studios through an open door and not reappear.

  Bryan Jones, the morning disc jockey, was well into his radio show, and “cutting edge” music echoed off the Highway Patrol building across Pacific Highway. “We’re broadcasting live from the parking lot,” Jones cried into the mike, “collecting toys for the needy and homeless, and we’re freezing our butts off!”

  Later, he would say, “Donate to the homely and needless.”

  By nine, two large piles of goods had accumulated. David Thomson, guitarist for the mighty Los Angeles rock band Tokyo Burlesque, drove all the way to San Diego to help load toys. It struck me as incongruous that this rocker in his very bad ’67 Mustang fastback the color of blood had chugged down I-5 to stand around in the rain putting several hundred pounds of stuff in th
e vans of a bunch of Baptist missionaries, most of whom wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Tokyo Burlesque or 91X.

  Cynthia came out to say hello. She was a beautiful woman with a blond mane. “You did this,” I said as the steady flow of rock ‘n’ roll philanthropists dropped off trash bags full of clothes. Somebody brought a clear plastic Winnie-the-Pooh full of Cracker Jacks.

  “This is great,” Cynthia said. “But wait till Oz gets here.”

  It was now midmorning. Steve West, an Englishman, took over the mike. He put me on the air a couple of times, but he seemed to think my name was “Ruiz.”

  Suddenly, the drummer for the Beat Farmers, Country Dick Montana, made an appearance. He staggered out of the parking lot, saying, “Anybody seen Oz? Where’s Oz?”

  West motioned the Reverend Dick (mail-order) over to the mike. Already famed for his cheerful dissipation, Dick didn’t disappoint, quipping on air that he’d recently barfed. He also suggested people bring in provocative underpants. Then he lurched back into the parking lot and vanished.

  The first vanload of toys pulled out, to much hoopla. Another would go out during West’s show. It rained. The Trash Can Sinatras pulled up in a record-company van. They had come to play on-air, to help the “lads and lassies” of Tijuana—though I’d lay odds they had no idea who or what that might be. They shuffled around in the parking lot. Gorgeous and indecipherable Scottish-sounding accents ensued. “Hootmon,” they said. “Oots a roody hoot tee plee heer!”

  They went inside and performed an acoustic set on the air. Then they came back out. Kids had flocked to the parking lot with video cameras and Instamatics, and the Trash Cans (or are they the Sinatras?) gave autographs. After they left, two Asian girls ran up to West begging to see the band. Told the band had left, one of them cried into the mike, “I just got screwed!”

  West, unflappable, said, “Right here in the lot?”