Across the Wire (2 page)

Luis Alberto Urrea Boulder, Colorado 1992

T
his book grew over a long period of time—from 1979 to 1992. Clearly, I did not create it alone. Many hands tended to it—and to me—over these long years. I owe thanks to those both named and unnamed, and I hope the latter will forgive any lapses on my part.

I must begin by offering my deepest gratitude and respect to the people of Tijuana and the border region; their honesty, goodwill, and faith stay with me always. In particular, I owe a debt to Ana María Cervantes Calderón—La Negra—who has taught me much about courage.

There can’t be enough thanks for my wife, Barbara Urrea Davis, for her fearlessness as a border rat and an editor, and for her companionship and support.

To Pastor Von: I owe this book to you, Von. Thank you for more than I can express here. I also must thank the good people of Spectrum Ministries, Inc., San Diego, California. All the workers and missionaries and adventurers who came and went over the long haul are far too many to name here. A blanket “thank you” will have to suffice. However, two co-conspirators, Victor Harris and Steven Van Belle, must be mentioned. Also, of the Mexico Crew, thanks especially to Judy Frye, Cindy Harris, Steven Mierau, Judi Mills, Clara Norris, Mike Sliffe, Sharleen Turner, Kyle Wiggins. And a special greeting to Efren, Mary-Alice, and Javier.

Thanks to agent provocateur Thomas Hart for unflagging faith. To my editor, Deborah Ackerman.

To 91X (XETRA-FM, San Diego). And to the Worst Deejay on Earth: the Mighty Oz. Thanks and love to Cynthia Jeffery. And thanks to the Trash Can Sinatras; Country Dick Montana of the Beat Farmers; and Chas, formerly of Madness. Also, deepest thanks to Jim Holman and the San Diego
Reader
. Thanks, also, to the glorious Jeanette King; and to Sue Greenberg, Linda Nevin, Leslie Venolia, Jeanette De Wyze.

To César A. González-T., mentor and teacher; and to Michael R. Ornelas, good friend and homey. While I wrote the first
batch of these notes, I was employed by San Diego Mesa College Chicano Studies Department, and Mike and César allowed me every Thursday, most Tuesdays, most Fridays, and far too many Mondays away from work.

To the cast members of the UCSD Hispanic Theater Program/Teatro Máscara Mágica, who bravely entered the dumps and
barrios
, then offered these stories back to the public: Peter Cirino, Sol Miranda, Armando Ortega, Raul Ramos, Carmen Elena Sosa, Michael Torres, Luis “Wilo” Tristani, Wanda Vega. Laura Esparza and Roberto Gutiérrez. And thanks to director José Luis Valenzuela and producer Jorge Huerta—for insight and vision. Finally, to Nancy Griffiths, who started the ball.

To my late mother, Phyllis, who worked ceaselessly for the Mexican poor. At Harvard: to brother Jack Booth, photographic genius. At U. of Colorado, Boulder: to Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jay Griswold, Salvador Rodríguez del Pino, Linda Hogan, Marilyn Krysl, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Peter Michelson, Rick Williams. And,
especially
, to the indispensable Janet Hard.

A final riot of thanks—“propers” due to so many who lent a hand. To Patricia Ammann, Rudy Anaya, Judy Bell, Duane Brewer. To Becca Carmona, Diana Casebolt (née Whitney). To the Davis family—especially Peg for her proofreading assistance. And to Bertha Edington and Rick Elias: thanks a lot.

To Chancellor Auggie Gallego of the San Diego Community College District.

To John Garwood, Jock Gaynor: the movie men. Thank you, Bette González. To Cindy Hanes, Margaret Hart. To Ursula K. Le Guin, with lurve. To Mike Lowery, Richard Marius, Michele Moore, Haas Mrue, Simone Muench. To Lyn Niles, for everything. To Mad Dog Lowry Pei. To Darcy Peters, Jeff Schafer. For
sanity, thanks always to Kenneth L. Sipe of Wellesley, MA. Special thanks to Suzy Tanzer for her kind generosity and friendship. And to Lily Tomlin—you brought me back to life.

To los Urrea—Juan, Luis Octavio, Lety, Alberto, y Martha; Hugo Millan; and
un abrazo fuerte para
Sra. Emilia Zazueta de Urrea.

To my good friend Jon Urshan. To Caty Van Housen. And to Shawn Phillips and his late father, Philip Atlee (James Atlee Phillips)—thank you.

Finally, to David Thomson—when others fell away, you were the last man standing.

W
hen I was younger, I went to war. The Mexican border was the battlefield. There are many Mexicos; there are also many Mexican borders, any one of which could fill its own book. I, and the people with me, fought on a specific front. We sustained injuries and witnessed deaths. There were machine guns pointed at us, knives, pistols, clubs, even skyrockets. I caught a street-gang member trying to stuff a lit cherry bomb into our gas
tank. On the same night, a drunk mariachi opened fire on the missionaries through the wall of his house.

We drove five beat-up vans. We were armed with water, medicine, shampoo, food, clothes, milk, and doughnuts. At the end of a day, like returning veterans from other battles, we carried secrets in our hearts that kept some of us awake at night, gave others dreams and fits of crying. Our faith sustained us—if not in God or “good,” then in our work.

Others of us had no room for or interest in such drama, and came away unscathed—and unmoved. Some of us sank into the mindless joy of fundamentalism, some of us drank, some of us married impoverished Mexicans. Most of us took it personally. Poverty
is
personal: it smells and it shocks and it invades your space. You come home dirty when you get too close to the poor. Sometimes you bring back vermin: they hide in your hair, in your underpants, in your intestines. These unpleasant possibilities are a given. They are the price you occasionally have to pay.

In Tijuana and environs, we met the many ambassadors of poverty: lice, scabies, tapeworm, pinworm, ringworm, fleas, crab lice. We met diphtheria, meningitis, typhoid, polio,
turista
(diarrhea), tuberculosis, hepatitis, VD, impetigo, measles, chronic hernia, malaria, whooping cough. We met madness and “demon possession.”

These were the products of dirt and disregard—bad things afflicting good people. Their world was far from our world. Still, it would take you only about twenty minutes to get there from the center of San Diego.

For me, the worst part was the lack of a specific enemy. We were fighting a nebulous, all-pervasive
It
. Call it hunger. Call it despair. Call it the Devil, the System, Capitalism, the Cycle of
Poverty, the Fruits of the Mexican Malaise. It was a seemingly endless circle of disasters. Long after I’d left, the wheel kept on grinding.

At night, the Border Patrol helicopters swoop and churn in the air all along the line. You can sit in the Mexican hills and watch them herd humans on the dusty slopes across the valley. They look like science fiction crafts, their hard-focused lights raking the ground as they fly.

Borderlands locals are so jaded by the sight of nightly people-hunting that it doesn’t even register in their minds. But take a stranger to the border, and she will
see
the spectacle: monstrous Dodge trucks speeding into and out of the landscape; uniformed men patrolling with flashlights, guns, and dogs; spotlights; running figures; lines of people hurried onto buses by armed guards; and the endless clatter of the helicopters with their harsh white beams. A Dutch woman once told me it seemed altogether “un-American.”

But the Mexicans keep on coming—and the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Panamanians, the Colombians. The seven-mile stretch of Interstate 5 nearest the Mexican border is, at times, so congested with Latin American pedestrians that it resembles a town square.

They stick to the center island. Running down the length of the island is a cement wall. If the “illegals” (currently, “undocumented workers”; formerly, “wetbacks”) are walking north and a Border Patrol vehicle happens along, they simply hop over the wall and trot south. The officer will have to drive up to the 805 interchange, or Dairy Mart Road, swing over the overpasses, then drive south. Depending on where this pursuit begins, his detour could entail five to ten miles of driving. When
the officer finally reaches the group, they hop over the wall and trot north. Furthermore, because freeway arrests would endanger traffic, the Border Patrol has effectively thrown up its hands in surrender.

It seems jolly on the page. But imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know. Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let’s take it further—you’ve said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you first hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think.

Then you come hundreds—or thousands—of miles across territory utterly unknown to you. (Chances are, you have never traveled farther than a hundred miles in your life.) You have walked, run, hidden in the backs of trucks, spent part of your precious money on bus fare. There is no AAA or Travelers Aid Society available to you. Various features of your journey north might include police corruption; violence in the forms of beatings, rape, murder, torture, road accidents; theft; incarceration. Additionally, you might experience loneliness, fear, exhaustion, sorrow, cold, heat, diarrhea, thirst, hunger. There is no medical attention available to you. There isn’t even Kotex.

Weeks or months later, you arrive in Tijuana. Along with other immigrants, you gravitate to the bad parts of town because there is nowhere for you to go in the glittery sections where the
gringos
flock. You stay in a run-down little hotel in the red-light district, or behind the bus terminal. Or you find your way to the garbage dumps, where you throw together a small cardboard nest and claim a few feet of dirt for yourself. The garbage-pickers
working this dump might allow you to squat, or they might come and rob you or burn you out for breaking some local rule you cannot possibly know beforehand. Sometimes the dump is controlled by a syndicate, and goon squads might come to you within a day. They want money, and if you can’t pay, you must leave or suffer the consequences.

In town, you face endless victimization if you aren’t streetwise. The police come after you, street thugs come after you, petty criminals come after you; strangers try your door at night as you sleep. Many shady men offer to guide you across the border, and each one wants all your money now, and promises to meet you at a prearranged spot. Some of your fellow travelers end their journeys right here—relieved of their savings and left to wait on a dark corner until they realize they are going nowhere.

If you are not Mexican, and can’t pass as
tijuanense
, a local, the tough guys find you out. Salvadorans and Guatemalans are routinely beaten up and robbed. Sometimes they are disfigured. Indians—Chinantecas, Mixtecas, Guasaves, Zapotecas, Mayas—are insulted and pushed around; often they are lucky—they are merely ignored. They use this to their advantage. Often they don’t dream of crossing into the United States: a Mexican tribal person would never be able to blend in, and they know it. To them, the garbage dumps and street vending and begging in Tijuana are a vast improvement over their former lives. As Doña Paula, a Chinanteca friend of mine who lives at the Tijuana garbage dump, told me, “This is the garbage dump. Take all you need. There’s plenty here for
everyone!”

If you are a woman, the men come after you. You lock yourself in your room, and when you must leave it to use the pestilential public bathroom at the end of your floor, you hurry,
and you check every corner. Sometimes the lights are out in the toilet room. Sometimes men listen at the door. They call you “good-looking” and “bitch” and
“mamacita,”
and they make kissing sounds at you when you pass.

You’re in the worst part of town, but you can comfort yourself—at least there are no death squads here. There are no torturers here, or bandit land barons riding into your house. This is the last barrier, you think, between you and the United States—
los Yunaites Estaites
.