Parents stopped sending their children to school. A child of Mexican origin is easily identified. What are we going to do? the parents asked. We pay more, much, much more in taxes than what they give us in education and services. What are we going to do? Why are they accusing us? What are they accusing us of? We’re working. We’re here because they need us. The gringos need us. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t come.
Standing opposite the bridge from Juárez to El Paso, Juan Zamora remembers with a grimace of distaste the time he lived at Cornell. He doesn’t want his personal sorrows to interfere with his judgment about what he saw and understood then about the hypocrisy and arrogance that can come over the good people of the United States. Juan Zamora learned not to complain. Silently, Juan Zamora learned to act. He does not ask permission in Mexico to attend to urgent cases, he leaps over bureaucratic obstacles, understands social security to be a public service, will not abandon those with AIDS, drug addicts, drunks, the entire dark and foamy tide the city deposits on its banks of garbage.
“Who do you think you are? Florence Nightingale?”
The jokes about his profession and his homosexuality stopped bothering Juan a long time ago. He knew the world, knew his world, was going to distinguish between the superficial—he’s a fag, he’s a sawbones—and the necessary—giving some relief to the heroin addict, convincing the family of the AIDS victim to let him die at home, hell, even having a mescal with the drunk …
Now he felt his place was here. If the U.S. authorities were denying medical services to Mexican workers, he, Florence Nightingale, would become a walking hospital, going from house to house, from field to field, from Texas to Arizona, from Arizona to California, from California to Oregon, agitating, dispensing medicines, writing prescriptions, encouraging the sick, denouncing the inhumanity of the authorities.
“How long do you plan to visit the United States?”
“I have a permanent visa until the year 2010.”
“You can’t work. Do you know that?”
“Can I cure?”
“What?”
“Cure, cure the sick.”
“No need to. We’ve got hospitals.”
“Well, they’re going to fill up with illegals.”
“They should go back to Mexico. Cure them there.”
“They’re going to be incurable, here or there. But they’re working here with you.”
“It’s very expensive for us to take care of them.”
“It’s going to be more expensive to take care of epidemics if you don’t prevent diseases.”
“You can’t charge for your services. Did you know that?”
Juan Zamora just smiled and crossed the border.
Now, on the other side, he felt for an instant he was in another world. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of vertigo. Where would he begin? Whom would he see? The truth is he didn’t think they’d let him in. It was too easy. He didn’t expect things to go that well. Something bad was going to happen. He was on the gringo side with his bag and his medicines. He heard a squeal of tires, repeated shots, broken glass, metal being pierced by bullets, the impact, the roar, the shout: “Doctor! Doctor!”
* * *
the gringos came (who are they, who are they, for God’s sake, how can they exist, who invented them?)
they came drop by drop,
they came to the uninhabited, forgotten, unjust land the Spanish monarchy and now the Mexican republic overlooked,
isolated, unjust land, where the Mexican governor had two million sheep attended by twenty-seven hundred workers and where the pure gold of the mines of the Real de Dolores never returned to the hands of those who first touched that precious metal,
where the war between royalists and insurgents weakened the Hispanic presence,
and then the constant war of Mexicans against Mexicans, the anguished passage from an absolutist monarchy to a democratic federal republic:
let the gringos come, they too are independent and democratic,
let them enter, even illegally, crossing the Sabinas River, wetting their backs, sending the border to hell, says another energetic young man, thin, small, disciplined, introspective, honorable, calm, judicious, who knows how to play the flute: exactly the opposite of a Spanish hidalgo
his name is Austin, he brings the first colonists to the Río Grande, the Colorado, and the Brazos, they are the old three hundred, the founders of gringo texanity, five hundred more follow them, they unleash the Texas fever, all of them want land, property, guarantees, and they want freedom, protestantism, due process of law, juries of their peers,
but Mexico offers them tyranny, Catholicism, judicial arbitrariness
they want slaves, the right to private property,
but Mexico abolished slavery, assaulting private property,
they want the individual to be able to do whatever the hell he wants
Mexico, even though it no longer has it, believes in the Spanish authoritarian state, which acts unilaterally for the good of all
now there are thirty thousand colonists of U.S. origin in the río grande, río bravo, and only about four thousand Mexicans,
conflict is inevitable: “Mexico must occupy Texas right now, or it will lose it forever,” says the Mexican statesman Mier y Terán,
Desperate, Mexico seeks European immigrants,
but nothing can stop the Texas fever,
a thousand families a month come down from the Mississippi, why should these cowardly, lazy, filthy Mexicans govern us? this cannot be God’s plan!
the pyrrhic victory at the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad: Santa Anna is not Gálvez, he prefers a bad war to a bad peace,
here are the two face-to-face at San Jacinto:
Houston, almost six feet tall, wearing a coonskin cap, a leopard vest, patiently whittling any stick he finds nearby,
Santa Anna wearing epaulets and a three-cornered hat, sleeping his siesta in San Jacinto while Mexico loses Texas: what Houston is really carving is the future wooden leg of the picturesque, frivolous, incompetent Mexican dictator
“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” another dictator would famously say one day, and in a lower voice, another president: “Between the United States and Mexico, the desert”
JOSÉ FRANCISCO
Sitting on his Harley-Davidson on the Yankee side of the river, José Francisco watched with fascination the unusual strike on the Mexican side. It wasn’t a sit-down but a raising up—of arms displaying the muscle of poverty, the sinew of insomnia, the wisdom of the oral library of a people that was his own, José Francisco said with pride. Perched on his bike, the tip of his boot resting on the starter, he wondered if this time, with the fracas going on on the other side, both patrols might stop him because he looked so weird, with his shoulder-length hair, his cowboy hat, his silver crosses and medals, and his rainbow-striped serape jacket. His only credible document was his moon face, open, clean-shaven, like a smiling star. Even though his teeth were perfect, strong, and extremely white, they, too, were disturbing to anyone who didn’t look like him. Who’d never been to the dentist? José Francisco.
“You must go to the dentist,” he was told in his Texas school.
He went. He returned. Not a single cavity.
“This child is amazing. Why doesn’t he need dental work?”
Before, José Francisco didn’t know what to answer. Now he does.
“Generations of eating chiles, beans, and tortillas. Pure calcium, pure vitamin C. Not a single cherry Lifesaver.”
Teeth. Hair. Motorcycle. They had to find something suspicious about him every time in order to admit he wasn’t odd, simply different. Inside he bore something different but he could never be calm. He bore something that couldn’t happen on either side of the frontier but can happen on both sides. Those were hard things to understand on both sides.
“What belongs here and also there. But where is here and where is there? Isn’t the Mexican side his own here and
there? Isn’t it the same on the gringo side? Doesn’t every land have its invisible double, its alien shadow that walks at our side the same way each of us walks accompanied by a second ‘I’ we don’t know?”
Which is why José Francisco wrote—to give that second José Francisco, who apparently had his own internal frontier, a chance. He wanted to be nice to himself but wouldn’t allow it. He was divided into four parts.
They wanted him to be afraid to speak Spanish. We’re going to punish you if you talk that lingo.
That was when he started singing songs in Spanish at recess, until he drove all the gringos, teachers and students, insane.
That was when no one talked to him and he didn’t feel discriminated against. “They’re afraid of me,” he said, he said to them. “They’re afraid of talking to me.”
That was when his only friend stopped being his friend, when he said to José Francisco, “Don’t say you’re Mexican; you can’t come to my house.”
That was when José Francisco achieved his first victory, causing an uproar in school by demanding that students—blacks, Mexicans, whites—be seated in the classroom by alphabetical order and not by racial group. He accomplished this by writing, mimeographing, and distributing pamphlets, hounding the authorities, making a pain in the ass of himself.
“What gave you so much confidence, so much spirit?”
“It must be the genes, man, the damn genes.”
It was his father. Without a penny to his name, he’d come with his wife and son from Zacatecas and the exhausted mines that had once belonged to Oñate. Other Mexicans lent him a cow to give the child milk. The father took a chance. He traded the cow for four hogs, slaughtered the hogs, bought twenty hens, and with the carefully tended hens, started an egg business and prospered. His friends who’d lent him the cow never asked him to return it, but he extended unlimited credit for as many “white ones” as they liked—out of modesty, no one ever referred to “eggs” because that meant testicles.
There, here. When he graduated from high school they told him to change his name from José Francisco to Joe Frank. He was intelligent. He would have a better time of it.
“You’ll be better off, boy.”
“I’d be mute, bro.”
To whom if not to himself was he going to say, as he gathered the eggs on his father’s little farm, that he wanted to be heard, wanted to write things, stories about immigrants, illegals, Mexican poverty, Yankee prosperity, but most of all stories about families, that was the wealth of the border world, the quantity of unburied stories that refused to die, that wandered about like ghosts from California to Texas waiting for someone to tell them, someone to write them. José Francisco became a story collector.
he sang about his grandparents, who had no birth date or last name,
he wrote about the men who did not know the four seasons of the year,
he described the long, luxurious meals so all the families could get together,
and when he began to write, at the age of nineteen, he was asked, and asked himself, in which language, in English or in Spanish? and first he said in something new, the Chicano language, and it was then he realized what he was, neither Mexican nor gringo but Chicano, the language revealed it to him, he began to write in Spanish the parts that came out of his Mexican soul, in English the parts that imposed themselves on him in a Yankee rhythm, first he mixed, then he began separating, some stories in English, others in Spanish, depending on the story, the characters, but always everything united, story, characters, by the impulse of José Francisco, his conviction:
“I’m not a Mexican. I’m not a gringo. I’m Chicano. I’m not a gringo in the USA and a Mexican in Mexico. I’m Chicano everywhere. I don’t have to assimilate into anything. I have my own history.”
He wrote it but it wasn’t enough for him. His motorcycle went back and forth over the bridge across the Río Grande, Río Bravo, loaded with manuscripts. José Francisco brought Chicano manuscripts to Mexico and Mexican manuscripts to Texas. The bike was the means to carry the written word rapidly from one side to the other, that was José Francisco’s contraband, literature from both sides so that everyone would get to know one another better, he said, so that everyone would love one another a little more, so there would be a “we” on both sides of the border.
“What are you carrying in your saddlebags?”
“Writing.”
“Political stuff?”
“All writing is political.”
“So it’s subversive.”
“All writing is subversive.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About the fact that lack of communication is a bitch. That anyone who can’t communicate feels inferior. That keeping silent will screw you up.”
The Mexican agents got together with the U.S. agents to see just what it was all about, what kind of a problem this longhaired guy on the bike was creating, the one who crossed the bridge singing “Cielito Lindo” and “Valentín de la Sierra,” his bags filled, they hoped, with counterfeit money or drugs, but no, it was just papers. Political, he said? Subversive, he admitted? Let’s see them, let’s see them. The manuscripts began to fly, lifted by the night breeze like paper doves able to fly for themselves. They didn’t fall into the river, José Francisco noted, they simply went flying from the bridge into the gringo sky, from the bridge to the Mexican sky, Ríos’s poem, Cisneros’s story, Nericio’s essay, Siller’s pages, Cortázar’s manuscript, Garay’s notes, Aguilar Melantzón’s diary, Gardea’s deserts, Alurista’s butterflies, Denise Chávez’s thrushes, Carlos Nicolás Flores’s sparrows, Rogelio Gómez’s bees, Cornejo’s millennia, Federico Campbell’s fronteras … And José Francisco happily helped the guards, tossing manuscripts into the air, to the river, to the moon, to the frontiers, convinced that the words would fly until they found their destination, their readers, their listeners, their tongues, their eyes …
He saw the demonstrators’ arms open in a cross on the Ciudad Juárez side, saw how they rose to catch the pages in the air, and José Francisco gave a victory shout that forever broke the crystal of the frontier …
* * *
the frontier is not yet the río grande, río bravo, it’s the Nueces river, but the gringos say nueces—nuts—to a frontier that keeps them from carrying out their manifest destiny:
to reach the Pacific, create a continental nation, occupy California:
the railroad cars full, the wagons, people on horseback, cities packed with pioneers, seeking deeds to the new lands, thirty thousand gringos in Texas on the day of the Alamo, a hundred and fifty thousand ten years later, the day of the War, Manifest Destiny, dictated by the protestant God to his new Chosen People, to conquer an inferior race, an anarchic republic, a caricature of a nation that owes money to the whole world, with a caricature army, with only half of the forty thousand men it says it has, and those twenty thousand, almost all of them, Indians marched down from the hills, conscripts, armed with useless English muskets, dressed in ragged uniforms:
“There’s a Mexican garrison that hasn’t been able to show itself in Matamoros because the soldiers have no clothes”
was the American army any better?
no, say the enemies of Polk’s war, they only have eight thousand men, cannon fodder who have never been in a fight, disloyal criminals, deserters, mercenaries …
let them set us on the gringos, they shout from the Mexican bank of the río bravo in Chihuahua and Coahuila, we’ll beat them with our natural allies, fever and the desert, with the freed slaves who join up with us,
do not cross the río grande, say the American enemies of Polk’s war, this is a war to help the slave owners, to expand the southern territories:
río grande, río bravo, Texas claims it as its border,
Mexico rejects it, Polk orders Taylor to seize the bank of the river, the Mexicans defend themselves, there are deaths, the war has begun,
“Where?” demands Abraham Lincoln in Congress, “will
someone tell me exactly where Mexico fired the first shot and occupied the first piece of land?”
General Taylor laughs: he himself is the caricature of his army, he wears long white filthy trousers, a moth-eaten dress coat, and a white linen sash, he’s short, thickset, as round as a cannonball,
and he laughs seeing how the Mexican cannonballs bounce into the American encampment at Arroyo Seco, only one Mexican cannon shot in a thousand hits the mark: his guffaw is sinister, it divides the very river, from then on everything is a stroll, to New Mexico and California, to Saltillo and to Monterrey, from Vera Cruz to Mexico City: Taylor’s army loses the torn trousers of its commander and wins the buttoned-up dress coat of Winfield Scott, the West Point general the only thing that doesn’t change is Santa Anna, the man with fifteen nails (he lost five when he lost his leg), the cock-fighter, the Don Juan, the man who can lose an entire country laughing if his reward is a beautiful woman and a destroyed political rival,
the United States? I’ll think about that tomorrow
he chews gum, buries his leg with full honors, orders equestrian statues from Italy, proclaims himself Most Serene Highness, Mexico puts up with him, Mexico puts up with everything, who ever said that Mexicans have the right to be well-governed?
looted country, sacked country, mocked, painful, cursed, precious country of marvelous people who have not found their word, their face, their own destiny, not manifest but uncertain human destiny, to sculpt slowly, not to reveal providentially: the destiny of the underground river, río grande, río bravo, where the Indians heard the music of God
GONZALO ROMERO
To his cousin Serafín he said, when Serafín turned up still smelling like a garbageman, that here in the north there were jobs for everyone, so Serafín and Gonzalo were not going to engage in a territorial fight, especially as they were cousins and especially as they were working to help their countrymen. But Gonzalo warned him that to be a bandit on the other side of the border is another thing, it’s dangerous—nobody’s tried it since Pancho Villa—but being a guide like Gonzalo, what they call a coyote in California, is a job that’s practically honorable, it’s one of the liberal professions, as the gringos put it: meeting with his colleagues, some fourteen or so young men like him, around twenty-two years old, sitting on the hoods of their parked cars, waiting for tonight’s clients, not those deluded types in the demonstration over at the bridge but the solid clients who will take advantage of this night of confusion on the border to cross over then and not by day, as the coyotes recommend. They know the Río Grande, Río Bravo by heart, El Paso, Juárez: they don’t go where it’s easiest to wade across, the river’s narrow waist, because that’s where the thieves lie in wait, the junkies, the drug pushers. Gonzalo Romero even has a flotilla of rubber rafts to carry people who can’t swim, pregnant women, children, when the river really does get grand, really requires bravery. Now it’s calm and the crossing will be easy; besides, everyone’s distracted by the famous demonstration—they won’t even notice. We’re going to cross at night, we’re professionals, we only get paid when the worker reaches his destination, and then—Gonzalo told his cousin Serafín—we still have to split the profits with drivers and people who run safe houses, and sometimes there are telephone and airplane expenses. You should see how many want to go to Chicago, to Oregon because there’s less checking there, less persecution, no laws like Proposition 187. An entire village in Michoacán or Oaxaca chips in their savings so one of them can pay a thousand dollars and fly to Chicago.
The Crystal Frontier Page 21
