On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  “Not easy,” he said. “The current is fast here.”

  He said that Ciudad Alemán was a peaceful town. “Not like the others.”

  But Omar, a man of about twenty, a shopkeeper selling piñatas just off the Plaza Principal, said, “Yes, a nice place, but”—and emphatically—“don’t go outside town. Twenty miles away are the ranchitos, and the mafia.” His voice dropped and he began to whisper. “Here we have Los Golfos—they fight the Zetas for control. Drugs, people smuggling, extortion—they are into everything . . .”

  Speaking in this way, he became short of breath and choked a little, the gasping of a border Mexican when answering a question about the cartels. It was a physical change, a lapse into euphemisms. He slowly began to hyperventilate in an excess of anxiety, struggling to speak, becoming reluctant and evasive, panting a bit, then abandoning the effort altogether and turning away. It was fear.

  The subject was hideous; any mention of the cartels was dangerous. The gangs were brutal, merciless, unforgiving, and well armed, advertising their brutality everywhere. Where could you go for help or protection? The Mexican police and army inspired the same fear.

  And what made this fear peculiarly surreal was that Omar sold piñatas, large ones, and they hung around us from the veranda of his shop, comic painted images, doll-like, of Mickey Mouse and El Chapo, of Bernie Sanders, of big-breasted women, of beer bottles, and a fat, orange-haired piñata of Donald Trump.

  Omar had gone to school across the river in Roma but had no hope of ever returning. His was a family business here—party favors, costumes—and he would continue to run it, because Mexicans were willing to spend lavishly on parties and fiestas. And Ciudad Alemán, in spite of the cartels, was a well-regulated town. The factories ran twenty-four hours a day, the streets were clean, the buildings painted and presentable, even if business was slow.

  One of the common denominators I noticed of the Mexican towns was this civic pride. The street sweeper with his handcart was a feature of every border town I visited, and the local boast was that life was quite a bit better in your own town than in others on the border—in spite of the fact that, wherever you were, a violent drug cartel dominated the place. This Our Town feeling of belonging, the assertion that “I was born in Ciudad Alemán, I grew up in Ciudad Alemán, this is my home,” gave me hope, because the speaker was a ten-minute walk from Roma, Texas.

  I had lunch at a taqueria, ate an ice cream, and sat in the plaza and talked to a local man about the maquilas (auto parts)—and he laughed and called me a gabacho. Returning to the US side, I mentioned the piñatas to the immigration officer.

  “I’d like to take a swing at the Bernie Sanders piñata,” he said.

  “What about Trump?”

  “He’s doing a good job. We need him.”

  “To build a wall?”

  “For everything—everything that’s wrong in this country. So much needs to be fixed.”

  “Have you been across?” and I jerked my thumb toward the bridge.

  “Not for years. I hear it’s like the Wild West.”

  I was nearing the towns I had left weeks before—Rio Grande City, Mission, and McAllen. But instead of stopping, I continued forty or so miles to Brownsville, the last bridge into Mexico—Matamoros in this case. Brownsville was another example of the blurred border, of Mexico brimming against the US and lapping over it, leaving a margin of Mexico on the north bank of the green river. The streets and shops of Brownsville were indistinguishable from the streets and shops of Matamoros, except that owing to its reputation for danger, gringos were absent from Matamoros.

  Still, it was a short walk to the other side, and although much of Matamoros was stinking and sun-scorched and crumbling, a taxi driver named Germán promised he’d show me the high-priced neighborhood of Matamoros. This was a bluff on the east side near the river, a community called Villa Jardín—where the US consulate general sat behind bomb-proof exterior walls (with armed guards and barriers)—an enclave of shaded streets of big trees and leafy boughs, and mansions, some of them decaying and haunted-looking, others with mansard roofs and landscaped gardens and perimeter walls higher than the consulate’s.

  “Narcos,” Germán said as we passed.

  “In those big houses?”

  “Yes. They control Matamoros. The narcos live in big houses.”

  “Trafficking people?”

  “People and drugs—choncha,” he said, using the slang for weed. “And coke. But mainly it’s piedra [meth], because that’s the cheapest and most popular. The users in your country don’t have much money.”

  The Zetas were the traffickers here; they controlled Matamoros and Reynosa. Ciudad Alemán was dominated by the Gulf cartel, Juárez by the Juárez cartel, Nogales by the Sonora cartel, and all of them, plus the Sinaloa cartel, fought for Nuevo Laredo.

  I had hired Germán for my day in Matamoros. I liked his temperament—easygoing, fatalistic in a comical way, anxious to please, grateful for the work of being a guide, and candid about his exploits. He’d been born in San Luis Potosí, he said. It wasn’t at all like Matamoros; it was quiet, traditional, but without many job opportunities. The action was on the border, he said. He had bounced around.

  “I’ve been to the States,” he said. “I lived there for three years. My girlfriend here has a US passport. We have three children.” He glanced at me. “I might marry her!”

  “How did you get to the States?”

  “I went with twenty guys to Miguel Alemán,” he said.

  “The bridge or the river?”

  “We swam across. It was easy, and most of us got jobs nearby in Rio Grande City. If we’d gone up the road, the Border Patrol would have arrested us at the checkpoints. But we stayed on the border. I worked as an electrician and earned good money. After three years I swam back.”

  A crossing similar to this occurs in Yuri Herrera’s novel of the border, Signs Preceding the End of the World. This highly praised book (“masterpiece,” “epic,” “legend-rich”) is an oblique and euphemistic narrative of a confident young woman, Makina, in search of her migrant brother in the United States. She goes from her village to a town to “the Big Chilango” (Mexico City), then takes a bus to the border and a short but turbulent inner-tube journey across the Rio Grande. She suddenly capsizes, is rescued, and then has adventures on the opposite bank. Makina is a Mexican of the present moment: constantly on the move, in space, in time, in cultures. That aspect of its being cosmopolitan seems to me the book’s value.

  Though the novel is portentous and incoherent in the way it chronicles the stoical Makina’s travels, this blurring also accurately represents the incomprehension of a Mexican migrant in the US. Herrera is deft in rendering the insights of an alien. The brother, reluctant to return home, admits his migrant confusion: “We forget what we came for.” Authority figures and officialdom are a menace throughout the book, with the paradox of Makina needing help in the strange land: “And what was the point of calling the cops when your measure of good fortune consisted of having them not know you exist.”

  This paradox was Germán’s, too, as he led me through Matamoros. We had left Villa Jardín. He would show me the arts center, which was the pride of Matamoros. He was still talking.

  “The second time I crossed, I swam again, but nearer Brownsville, and I avoided the checkpoints.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “By going around them, through the woods,” he said, and he had ended up safely near Harlingen, Texas, thirty-odd miles away. “I walked for nine hours.”

  He showed me the parks near the river, the Olympic Plaza with its arts center, a museum, and—in a border city with the worst reputation today, worse now than Ciudad Juárez or Tijuana—an auditorium for dance and music recitals, a reminder that life goes on. At the river, I took a path down the bank and saw that it was overgrown on both sides, the bushy banks identical. You’d never guess here that this was a border, the narrow green river an international frontier
.

  “What about the Zona de Tolerancia?”

  “We go.”

  He drove west through the hot streets, descending into the back end of the city, the numbered streets in the city grid—one-story houses here, small shops, garages, fenced-in bungalows, barking dogs, and no trees.

  “Calle Ocho,” Germán said.

  “Putas.”

  “Sí. Muchas.”

  Flat-fronted, low cement huts lined Eighth Street, the entrances at sidewalk level, no stairs, and most of the doors were open. As Germán slowed the car, a young woman stepped out and waved. Germán stopped and asked me if I wanted to go in.

  “Yes, but wait for me.”

  She was perhaps twenty but could have been younger, fresh-faced, in a T-shirt and shorts, and had she been walking near any of the twenty colleges or universities in Matamoros—say, the Instituto de Ciencias Superiores, which we’d passed an hour earlier—you would have taken her to be a student. Squinting in the sun, she grimaced in the glare, and I saw that she was wearing braces—unexpected in a prostitute, but lending to her smile an aspect of awkward girlishness.

  “Come with me,” she said, and walked through the open door. Next to the door a sign, ROOMS FOR RENT, and just inside an odor of ambiguous sweetness that was both sticky perfume and disinfectant. This was the lobby; the rooms, a bed in each, were to the left and right, and on the wall, as tall as me, a poster of Santa Muerte, Holy Death, a skeleton in a hooded cloak, with a grinning skull, her bony hand wrapped around the shaft of a scythe. The saint of desperate people, and of criminals and drug traffickers and whores; the saint who offers hope and does not blame or ask for repentance. All that Santa Muerte asks is veneration.

  Two women sat cross-legged in upholstered chairs on either side of the lobby, where a fan moved its face back and forth. They were dressed in black, heavy and middle-aged, with fleshy arms. They were holding mirrors and applying makeup, painting smoothness onto their faces, pinkish cheeks and red lips, giving themselves unconvincing masks of youth.

  “What do you want, señor?”

  Now the odor of sweetness had faded and lost its ambiguity, and a stronger note was mildew and dampness and dirty sheets—I could see the rumpled coverlets through the bedroom doors. And Santa Muerte was grinning at me in defiance.

  “How much for an hour?”

  The young girl began to say a number when the heavier of the seated women lisped in Spanish, “Fifty dollars.”

  The other woman nodded at the young girl and said, “Go with her,” and now a wink. “Tell her the things that make you happy.” Las cosas que te ponen feliz.

  Instant bliss for fifty bucks. Apart from all other considerations, something that bothered me was the glazed look on all the faces, a hint that they might be tóxicas—addled, users.

  “I’m sorry, my friend is waiting,” I said, and slipped outside into the sunshine.

  Germán laughed at me when I got back into the car and told him what the woman had said. “Gringo, she could have made you happy!”

  “I would have made my wife very unhappy.”

  Looking at his watch, Germán said, “I’m going to drop you at the bridge. You don’t want to be in Matamoros after dark.”

  I stayed in Brownsville, small and tame compared to Matamoros, but just as Mexican, only tidier, with a zoo, the well-stocked Gladys Porter Zoo, but with far fewer colleges. This was a year before migrants arrived at the bridge from gang-haunted towns in Honduras and El Salvador, and those of them who were mothers with children—babies in some cases—were ordered to one side and their children snatched from them, the children screaming, the mothers weeping. The children were brought to chain-link cages in Brownsville (not unlike the western lowland gorilla cage at the Gladys Porter Zoo), the mothers locked in detention, in holding pens. Two and a half thousand children incarcerated, the mothers (and some fathers) bereft.

  The justification for the United States government’s barbaric and inhumane violence to the families was a biblical injunction to submit, preached by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, smiling over his notes: “Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to [sic] the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

  After a public outcry against the children being taken from their parents and locked up, the US government relented and changed the policy. But the authorities did not reunite all the parents and children, nor was any solution found for the other eleven thousand child migrants held in detention centers in twenty states, in tent cities in Texas, and some in holding pens as distant as Oregon and New York.

  To complete my frontier journey, I drove east from Brownsville, about twenty miles on sandy, narrow Route 4, through low, marshy wetland—no houses on the way, though in the distance a factory for making oil rigs, upright girders, sculptural and strange. Nearer, in the marsh grass, were shorebirds, snowy egrets and cattle egrets and cranes, and the fluttering of migratory birds, hugging the coast, heading south from Padre Island, mocking the human border guards on the ground.

  At the end of the road, which grew sandier until it was covered with a thickness of ribbed sand, the beach was awash with breaking waves—and sandpipers, plovers, turnstones, and a flock of eight brown pelicans flying in formation overhead, across a sign in the dunes that warned TURTLE NESTING SEASON. I left the car on the road and walked along the beach, through Boca Chica State Park, to where the green river poured into the Gulf of Mexico.

  No fence, no buildings, nothing but sawgrass and low dunes and birds and nesting turtles.

  I was stopped at a checkpoint on the narrow road back to Brownsville, and although the Border Patrol officer waved me past the barrier, I stopped and asked what he was looking for.

  “We’re looking for people.”

  “Do you find them?”

  “Now and then. We find them in cars. They cross the river and come down this road. Smugglers have them in vans sometimes.”

  I had more questions, but the officer interrupted me with an order.

  “You can go, sir.”

  I ended my traverse from Tijuana with the vision of the border as the front line of a battleground—our tall fences, their long tunnels. We want drugs, we depend on cheap labor, and, knowing our weaknesses, the cartels fight to own the border. The migrants were restless young men, tough guys and desperadoes, ambitious would-be students and field hands, and women who wanted nothing more than a low-paying job in a meatpacking plant or a chicken farm. And weeping mothers, separated from their children, struggling over the fence and walking in the desert to save their families.

  One encounter in particular stayed in my memory, like an apparition I had been privileged to experience: María, in the Comedor in Nogales, who had related to me how she had left her three small children in Oaxaca. Abandoned by her husband, destitute, with no chance of supporting her family, she had left her children in the care of her mother and crossed the border with four other desperate women.

  “I wanted to find work as a cleaner in a hotel,” she said softly.

  Separated from the other women in the Arizona desert, she’d become lost, was arrested, roughed up, jailed, and then deported. Her eyes filled with tears when she talked about her children. Later I saw her alone, praying before she ate, an iconic image of piety and hope. Far from her children, she seemed like the tragic mother of a Mexican legend, the ghost La Llorona, the weeping woman, lamenting her loss.

  Sometimes a whispered word, or a single image or glimpse of humanity, can be a powerful motivation for looking deeper into the world.

  Part Two

  Mexico Mundo

  Over the Border

  I left my car on the US side and walked across the border from McAllen to Reynosa to solicit information about obtaining a Vehicle Importation Permit. Bring your car and your papers tomorrow, they said, and we’ll help you.

  “Business i
s bad, but at least it’s quiet here,” Ignacio, a shoeshine man, said to me in the plaza at Reynosa, brushing goop on my shoes. “How old do you think I am? I’m fifty-eight, a grandfather. Black hair, because I’m an Indian. And see, Indian eyes—they’re green. Look. Pure Indian.”

  I mentioned that I was planning to drive to Monterrey.

  “The roads are dangerous,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be lucky. Do you have a pickup truck?”

  “No. Just a normal car.”

  “Good. Because if you had a camioneta, someone would steal it,” he said. “Notice there are no gringos here? They don’t come anymore. No more gabachos!”

  Reynosa has a terrible reputation for cartel violence. But Reynosa’s two large hotels on the plaza were inexpensive and pleasant, and I had a good meal at the restaurant La Estrella.

  “And on Calle Dama there used to be many chamacas,” a man named Ponciano told me, using the local term for young girls. “Many gringos used to come here looking for them. Not many these days. Now we make seat belts.”

  Schoolchildren hurrying through the streets in school uniforms, hugging books; old men selecting red peppers and women buying tortilla flour; a youthful population, some youths in identical T-shirts canvassing for votes for their candidate in a coming election; parishioners going in and out of the cathedral on the plaza; and on the back streets and the pedestrian mall people shopping or chatting at taco stands. Nothing could have looked more peaceful.

  Curio shops and boot shops and hat shops, but there were no American buyers: the gringos of McAllen stayed at home, knowing that the Zeta cartel controlled Reynosa. But the criminal activity was nocturnal and cross-border: mainly drugs—crystal meth and “monkey water” and weed; and the trafficking of desperate migrants; and the rounding up of girls and women for brothels in Texas and farther north.

  The next morning, I drove across the border at nine, over the Rio Grande—green and narrow at this point, worming its way to the Gulf. I was apprehensive for my being conspicuous: Ignacio was right—no gringos visible, either in cars or walking. I paid a deposit of $450 and some smaller fees for my Vehicle Importation Permit, about an hour of paperwork, the back-and-forth generally friendly. There was no line, no one waiting; I was the only person being processed in this building full of clerks and policemen.