The Coyote's Bicycle (14 page)

During the protracted siege,
Tijuanenses
had simply learned to live for, and entertain, themselves. Rather than dampen the city's culture, the troubles seemed to make it anew. I was aware of these things, but I'd lost touch with Tijuana—it was a place I was happy to
drive through. Once I reached the end of the bike trail in the Tijuana River Valley, however, I knew that if I wanted to discover the source of the border bicycles I would have to make Tijuana's acquaintance again, and probably more. I didn't have a clue where to start. So I did what most newcomers to cities around the world do: I took a tour. A weird one.

On an elevated Mexican slope overlooking the border fence—facing north across the wandering and brush-filled river valley to the blue bay pooled at the foundations of San Diego's skyscrapers—sits the oldest cemetery in Ciudad Tijuana. The walled and hoary graveyard is named after an old, secondary border crossing that admitted large freight and lumber into Mexico. This casual crossing once stood just a stone's throw from the cemetery. It was called Puerta Blanca, or the White Gate—an unobstructed dirt route guarded by a single US sentry post. Tijuana residents commonly crossed through to buy fresh fruit and eggs in Monument, the American town just across the line. That town no longer exists, and today, there is no entry point at Puerta Blanca either, only a triple-fenced steel wall. Adjacent to the boundary is the international sewage-treatment plant—built by US taxpayers to treat modern Tijuana's waste—and then the broad saltwater estuary. Since the 1970s the old White Gate's competitor, the official crossing at San Ysidro five miles to the east, has grown. At fifty million crossings per year, the sheer number of cars idling in line, waiting to enter the United States, made the customs complex one of the strongest emitters of greenhouse gases in Southern California.

The Puerta Blanca cemetery is quiet now. Almost nobody remembers the customs gate that lent the graveyard its name. Proximity to the boundary continues to resonate, however, as Puerta Blanca is home to one of Mexico's new and rising people's saints, a deific figure well suited for the vagaries of
la línea
. Like those of the
deathly Santa Muerte (usually depicted as the grim reaper) and Jesús Malverde (a mustachioed Robin Hood celebrated by the narco underworld), the legend of Juan Soldado has been canonized not by the Roman Catholic Church but by the disenfranchised citizenry of Mexico. For Juan Soldado is the patron saint of
los inmigrantes
, and the fact that the mountains and deserts of the United States fill the vision of anyone looking north from Soldado's shrine atop the cemetery hill is no coincidence.

On a cool November afternoon following Mexico's Day of the Dead celebrations, I joined a quirky, unsanctioned tour of Puerta Blanca. The small group was made up of former and current Tijuana residents as well as a number of young Americans. The drug warfare had pushed a large percentage of Tijuana's middle class to relocate just across the border to suburban Chula Vista and greater San Diego. On any given Saturday night the waft of Mexican laundry detergent in a number of trendy American bars was palpable enough to suggest what 2010 census takers struggled to document—an exodus. On this tour, some of these natives were reuniting with a dusty but potent little corner of their original hometown.

I might have been lumped in with the group's second half—young urban professionals—but their youth and the vitality of their presence surprised even me. As if in the wake of a storm, an arts resurgence had sprung from the rubble of Tijuana's tourism industry. This in turn drew a cadre of hip, media-savvy Americans south to participate in it. They made music and visual art; they wrote. The city's color, dilapidation, and chaos contrasted sharply with the suburban meditation on the “safe” side of the border. These artists mined that divide. As a result, in print and in conversation, Tijuana had been dubbed “the poor man's Paris,” a cheap, liberal, culturally rich city.

Initially, I found the comparison of Paris and Tijuana a strange one. I pictured Hemingway and Fitzgerald sharing a bottle of mescal
and a bucket of Tecates in the vinyl booth of a Tijuana bar last updated with pinup posters of the 1970s, discussing a narco soldier nicknamed El Pozolero—the Stew Maker—a body-disposal expert made famous by his technique of dissolving human remains in acid; or maybe how fans and defenders of bullfighting increasingly found themselves put on their heels by animal rights groups, even here in Tijuana. Slowly it dawned on me, however, that Paris had been the poor man's city. For as disparate as Paris of the 1920s and Tijuana of the 2010s might have been in the imagination, the structural elements were there: war ruin, a flexible legality, openness to the arts, lots of space for rent, and a favorable exchange rate. The only element that seemed to have changed in the century between the Gilded and Computer Ages was national culpability for the organized violence and destabilization. I truly wanted to believe my neighboring city was in the process of rebirth. But my on-the-ground sense was that the ceasefire that made this trip to Puerta Blanca seem intriguing and worthwhile existed only in lull, a moment between moments.

White wooden vending carts loaded with flowers, beads, votives, and candles were parked beside the iron bars of the entrance. Inside, a wide cobblestone road progressed up the hill; tombstones ascended with it like stadium seating. The quality of the cobbles was important to note because if devotees of Juan Soldado received the miracle they'd asked for, tradition required that they return to his shrine on their knees—a testament of their faith. This was expected to bloody the knees. Sure enough, we came upon a middle-aged woman assisted by family members who held her at the biceps—an attempt to lighten the weight on her kneecaps. Despite the aid, she grimaced as she set each nub before her. On both sides of this procession, the occasional grand mausoleum or sepulcher rose from the mud in buoyant color. There'd been no obvious plan for filling this hillside, but the fact that the family plots looked regularly visited, added to, and evolving suggested a kind of messy intimate care. Halfway to
Soldado's grave we approached another devotee, this time an attractive, manicured woman with big hair and hoop earrings. She absolutely strode on her knees. Her pilgrimage was slowed only by the two young men who picked up plush car floor mats from behind her, circled, and set them before her again—carpeting the path. This is when I first noticed our tour's hostess amid the crowd, because she began to badger the young woman with a wagging forefinger. “You're cheating, you're cheating,” she said to the woman, in Spanish. For the benefit of the English speakers the hostess turned and repeated, “This woman is cheating. She will not receive her miracle.”

An amateur Tijuana historian and hometown psychic, our hostess, Martha Henke, wore black velour pants and a black vinyl jacket. She had straight dark hair with a strip of graying roots down the middle. Large-lensed sunglasses obscured a good portion of her face. Though dressed young, she appeared to be in her fifties, and she smacked her lips between thoughts like an
abuela
. After berating the elegant Soldado devotee aboard the floor mats, Henke took the helm of our mob with an upraised finger and led us in a group to the grave.

There, we lined up to enter a small house-like sepulcher. Inside an archway, both a bust and a small statue of Juan Soldado were crowded by candles, wreaths, bouquets, notes, and photos—tight quarters with the paste-up decoration of a child's room. The bust looked like a smooth-faced caricature, a cartoon, something from Disneyland. The saint's eyes were mere black pupils, the nose thin. He wore a green soldier's cap and jacket. I could have easily taken him for a trolley conductor.

The personal notes pasted all about, however, were nothing if not heartfelt. They thanked Juan Soldado for help with immigration papers, the recovery of a loved one, or an unspecified
milagro
. On lined paper, a schoolkid had drawn an image of the saint in crayon with a coffee-colored face and a green bellman's cap. The top of the
page read, “Juanito el Soldado”—Little John the Soldier. If the letters came off as sweet, the abundant photos were unsettling. Mostly showing men, most of them young, the collection of images looked to be of the missing. The photo of a teenager cut from his California driver's license was scotch-taped to Soldado's bust, as was a black-and-white mug shot of a serious man in his early twenties, as well as an image of a father figure lost in the North. Engraved tiles thanking the folk saint for miracles plastered both the inside and outside of the little structure—the names of the appreciative family always given but, disappointingly, not the exact circumstances of the miracle. Each item in the mausoleum created an unfinished narrative. Underneath all of this was the supposed body of Juan Castillo Morales, but not his story. For this we traveled farther up the hill between offset graves, to a secondary shrine set against the uppermost cemetery wall marking the place where the twenty-four-year-old army private was executed by military fire in 1938.

“How many of you believe in spirits?” Henke asked the gathered. “How many of you have felt a presence?”

I struggled to remember or imagine some sensory wisp from a night in my past—a hovering light, maybe, or an unexplained chill. I failed to conjure anything. A few timid hands rose. A man standing in a graveyard with his hand in the air came off as an eerie admission, I thought. Most hands quickly lowered. In the back of the small crowd a woman I'd noticed earlier for her looks—strong cheekbones, straight nose, pale green eyes, raven hair, black leather jacket and blue scarf—now caught my eye with the confidence of her stance, her right hand held firmly aloft. Attractive, international, and dressed for a biker's funeral—she evaded assessment. I then looked to Henke for a response to the show of hands. The hostess seemed to take in not the hands but the nature of this crowd, one that quite visually seemed to disappoint her. The sky was overcast, the air chilly, we stood in mud.

She said, “Well, I'll tell you, some of us see things. Some of us feel things, and it is real.”

Henke said her mother had actually known the Camachos—a respected Tijuana family raising a string of pretty little girls. The eldest, an eight-year-old, was named Olga. On a Sunday in February, thin light falling on dirt streets the color of cumin, this child was sent to the store for “a cut of meat.” The Camachos lived close to the La Corona market so her mother, Feliza, expected a quick return. As the light weakened further on that short winter day, Mrs. Camacho became alarmed at Olga's absence. The mother hurried to the shop as it was closing and spoke to the owner, Señor Mendivil, who confirmed that he'd sold Olga the meat and that she'd skipped off with the package. Outside, Mrs. Camacho saw a soldier leaning against a wall. He'd not seen a little girl. Nonetheless, he said, “Maybe she went that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction of the Camacho home. As dark came on, the family's distress caught the hearts of the neighbors. The police, a volunteer force of just five or six officers, enlisted help from the nearby military barracks. They managed to cordon off roads heading north to San Diego, south to Ensenada, and east to Tecate. Still, no sign of the girl appeared until, as Henke told it, the next day, when a couple of boys playing in a field found a bloody sack containing Olga's remains.

The soldier leaning against the wall, Juan Castillo Morales, and another soldier were later detained by police. No one knows why. Some say it was because they stood watch earlier at the garrison, and so may have seen something. Three vagrants were also detained in the sweep. These strangers were quickly released and, eventually, the family of the second soldier provided an alibi. By this time a curious crowd had formed outside the military
comandancia
, a castle-like structure intended to dissuade Americans from encroaching on the empty Baja peninsula. Inside the
comandancia
, at a table within earshot of the growing rabble, Morales vigorously denied any part in the murder of Olga Camacho.

Here, our hostess stopped to tell an interesting and complicating side story. In her childhood barrio it was believed that a corpulent commanding officer of the federal garrison, a man known for making inappropriate advances toward young girls, had seen Morales loitering about in the street earlier that Sunday. He called Morales into his office. He said, “Morales, I've seen you admiring my gold-gilded pistol. I need a favor. I was out hunting rabbits today, and I cleaned them, but now I have this big sack of guts and bones. Take this sack and get rid of it in the desert, quick before it stinks, don't even take the time to look inside. If you're fast about it, when you return, I'll loan you my pistol for the week.”

In the 1930s, Tijuana had fewer than twenty thousand residents while San Diego boasted more two hundred thousand. The point that Henke's mother had known Mr. and Mrs. Camacho as neighbors, had from a distance shared in their horror and pain, brought much to the tale. It built a bridge from family history to graveyard legend. But Henke's connection to the Camacho tragedy also brought that odd story of the gold-gilded gun, a Faustian trade with the devil, a nonsensical explanation for the only physical evidence discovered in the case—a blood-stained uniform, an item supposedly found in Morales's home during a search conducted while he sat accused in the
comandancia
. Neighborhood myth has it that the uniform had been stained by rabbit blood during Morales's errand. The corpulent officer, of course, does not exist in the official record. And yet, there Morales was, confronted with the tainted uniform by his prosecutors. A clear confession was sought from the frightened young soldier.

At the time of Henke's tour, I was unaware of a well-researched book exploring the rise of the Soldado myth:
Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint
. In a work backed by firsthand interviews, the late San Diego State University history professor Paul J. Vanderwood delivered a more nuanced set of facts and, importantly,
he illustrated how it passed that a terrified and outraged town so quickly raised a lynch mob even as Morales and the others were questioned. In their fury, the mob barraged the
comandancia
with stones. Torches and pistols were not far behind. The small Tijuana police force dissolved into the streets. The
comandancia
itself held only a few hundred soldiers. And after business hours the crowd of Tijuana citizens outside grew into the thousands.