The Crystal Frontier (25 page)

BENITO AYALA

Stopped for the night by the river's edge, Benito Ayala was surrounded by men who looked like him, all between twenty and forty years old, all wearing straw hats, cheap cotton shirts and trousers, sturdy shoes for working in a cold climate, short jackets of various colors and designs.

They all raise their arms, spread them in a cross, clench their fists, silently offer their labor on the Mexican side of the river, hoping someone takes note of them, saves them, pays them heed. They prefer to risk being caught than not to advertise themselves, declare their presence: Here we are. We want work.

They all look alike, but Benito Ayala knows that each of them will cross the river with a different bagful of memories, an invisible knapsack in which only their own memories fit.

Benito Ayala closed his eyes to forget the night and to imagine the sky. Through his head passed a place. It was his village, in the mountains of Guanajuato. Not very different from many other Mexican mountain villages. A single street through which the highway passed. On both sides, houses, all one-story. And the shops, the hardware stores, the restaurant, the pharmacy. At the entrance to town, the school. At the end, the gas station with the best bathrooms in town, the best radio, the best chilled soft drinks. But to use the bathroom you've got to arrive by car. The staff knows the people from the vicinity. They order them to shit in the woods, they laugh at them.

Behind the houses, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, the creek. All the walls painted over with beer ads, propaganda for the PRI, announcements of the next or last elections. All things considered and despite everything, a good little town, a sweet village, a village with history and with what the past bequeaths its descendants to make a good life.

But the town didn't live off any of that.

Benito Ayala's village lived off the workers it sent to the United States and off the money they sent back.

The old and young, the few businesspeople, even the political powers became accustomed to living off that. The money was the principal, perhaps only income the village had. Why look elsewhere? The income represented hospital, social security, pension, maternity benefits all in one.

His eyes closed, his arms spread, and his fists clenched, Benito Ayala, stopped for the night on the Mexican side of the river, was remembering the generations of this village.

His great-grandfather, Fortunato Ayala, was the first to leave Mexico, fleeing the revolution.

“This war is never going to end,” he declared one day just before the battle of Celaya, fought there in Guanajuato. “The war is going to last longer than my life. When we all united against the tyrant Huerta, I stuck it out. But now that we're going to be killing our own brothers, I think it's better I leave.”

He went to California and tried to open a restaurant. The problem was that the gringos didn't like our food. Putting chocolate into chicken nauseated them. The restaurant folded. He looked for a factory job because he said that if he was going to bend over to pick tomatoes he'd be better off in Guanajuato. But no matter where he went, the answer was always the same, as if they'd learned a catechism lesson.

“You people weren't made for factory work. Look at you. You're short. You're close to the ground. Bend over, pick fruit and greens. That's what God made you for.”

He rebelled. He made his way as best he could (mostly by hiding in freight cars and not paying) to Chicago, where he didn't give a damn about the cold, the wind, the hostility. He found work in steel. Almost half the workers in the steel mill were Mexicans. He didn't even have to learn English. He sent his first few dollars to Guanajuato. In those days, the mail service still worked and an envelope containing dollars reached its destination at the district capital of Purísima del Rincón, where his family went to pick it up. Twenty, thirty, forty dollars. A fortune in a country devastated by war, where every rebel faction printed its own money, the famous
bilimbiques.

Before mailing his dollars, Fortunato Ayala would stare at them a long time, caressing them with his eyes, imagining them made of satin or silk instead of paper, so shiny and smooth. He held them up to a light and stared again, as if to assure himself of their authenticity and even of their green beauty, presided over by George Washington and the God's eye of the Huicholes. What was the sacred symbol of Mexican Indians doing on the gringo dollars? In any case, the triangle of the divine eye meant protection and foresight, although fatality as well. George Washington looked like a protective grandma with his cottony little head and false teeth.

But no one protected Great-grandfather Fortunato when U.S. unemployment led to his and thousands of other Mexicans' deportation in 1930. Fortunato departed in sorrow, too, because in Chicago he left behind a pregnant Mexican girl to whom he'd never offered anything but love. She knew Fortunato had a wife and children: all she wanted was his name, Ayala, and Fortunato, resigned to being generous, gave it to her, though somewhat fearfully.

He left. He established a tradition: the town would live off the money sent by its emigrant workers. His son, also named Fortunato, managed to get to California during World War II. He was a farmhand. He had entered legally, but his bosses told him his situation was precarious. He was just a step away from his own country. It would be easy to deport him if things started going badly. It was good he had no interest in becoming a citizen. It was good he loved his own country so much and wanted only to return to it.

“It's good I'm a worker and not a citizen,” Fortunato the son answered, and that did not please his bosses. “It's good I'm cheap and reliable, right?”

Then his bosses commented that the advantage of the Mexican worker was that he did not become a citizen and did not organize unions or go on strike, the way European immigrants did. But if this Ayala guy started getting uppity, he'd have to be isolated, punished.

“All of them get uppity,” said one of the employers.

“After a while they all find out about their rights,” said another.

It was for that reason that, when the war was over and the bracero program with it, Salvador Ayala, the young grandson of old Fortunato, found the border closed. Workers were no longer necessary. But the little village near Purísima del Rincón had got used to living off them. All its young men left to look for work up north. If they didn't find any, the town would die, just as an infant abandoned in the hills by its parents would die. It was worth risking everything. They were the men, they were the boys. The strongest, the cleverest, the bravest. They went. The children, the women, the old folks stayed behind. They depended on the workers.

“Here there are men alive because there are men who leave. Nobody can say that there are men who die here because no one leaves.”

Salvador Ayala, Benito's father, the son and grandson of the Fortunatos, became a wetback who crossed the river at night and was caught on the other side by the Border Patrol. It was a gamble for him and the others. But it was worth the risk. If the Texas farmers needed man power, the wetback was brought back to the border and left on the Mexican side. From here he would immediately be admitted—his back now dry—onto the Texas side, protected by an employer. But every year the doubt was repeated. Will I get in this time or not? Will I be able to send a hundred, two hundred dollars home?

The information made the rounds in Purísima del Rincón. From the little plaza to the church, from the sacristy to the tavern, from the creek to the fields of prickly pears and brambles, from the gas station to the tailor's shop, everyone knew that at harvest time the laws were meaningless. Orders are given to deport no one. We can go. We can cross. The police don't go near the protected Texas ranches even though they know all the workers there are illegal.

“Don't worry. This thing doesn't depend on us. If they need us, they let us in, with or without laws. If they don't need us, they kick us out, with or without laws.”

No one had a worse time than Salvador Ayala, Benito's father and the grandson of the first Fortunato. He caught the worst repression, expulsions, border cleanup operations. He was the victim of brutal whims. It was the boss who decided when to treat him as a contracted worker and when to hand him over to Immigration as a criminal. Salvador Ayala had no defense. If he alleged that the boss had given him work illegally, he implicated himself without having proof against his boss. The boss could manipulate the phony documents to prove that Salvador was a legal worker, if necessary. And to make him invisible and deport him, if necessary.

Now was the worst time. Benito—grandson of the younger Fortunato and the son of Salvador, descendant of the founder of the exodus, the first Fortunato—knew that any period is difficult, but this more than any other. Because there was still need. But also hatred.

“Did they hate you too?” Benito asked his father, Salvador.

“The way they're going to hate you? No.”

He didn't know the reasons, but he felt it. Stopping for the night on the Mexican side of the Río Bravo, he felt the fear of all the others and the hatred on the other side. He was going to cross, no matter what. He thought about all those who depended on him in Purísima del Rincón.

He stretched his arms in a cross, as far as he could, clenching his fists, showing that his body was ready to work, asking for a little love and compassion, not knowing if he was clenching his fists out of anger, as a challenge, or in resignation and despondency.

*   *   *

this was never the land without men: for thirty thousand years the people have been following the course of the río grande, río bravo, they cross the straits from Asia, they descend from the north, migrate south, seek new hunting grounds, in the process they really discover America, feel the attraction and hostility of the new world, don't rest until they explore it all and find out if it's friendly or unfriendly, until they reach the other pole, land that has a placenta of copper, land that will have the name of silver, lands of the hugest migration known to man, from Alaska to Patagonia, lands baptized by migration: accompanied, America, by flights and images, metaphors and metamorphoses that make the going bearable, that save the peoples from fatigue, discouragement, distance, time, the centuries necessary to travel America from pole to pole:

I will not speak their names, only those who know how to listen to silence know them,

I will not recount their deeds, only the dusty stars of the paths repeat them,

I will not recall their sufferings, the hurricane of birds shouts them,

I will not mention their calendars, they are all a river of ashes,

only the dog accompanied them, the only animal friendly to the Indian,

but then they tired of traveling so long, let loose their dogs in ferocious wild packs, and they stopped, decided that the center of the world was right here, where their feet were planted that instant, this was the center of the world, the land of the río grande, río bravo:

the world had sprung forth from the invisible springs of the desert waters: the underground rivers, the Indians say, are the music of God,

thanks to them the corn grows, the bean, the squash, and cotton, and each time a plant grows and yields its fruits, the Indian is transformed, the Indian becomes a star, oblivion, bird, mesquite, pot, membrane, arrow, incense, rain, smell of rain, earth, earthquake, extinguished fire, whistle in the mountain, secret kiss, the Indian becomes all this when the seed dies, becomes child and grandfather of the child, memory, bark, scorpion, buzzard, cloud, and table, broken vessel of birth, repentant tunic of death,

becomes a mask, ladder, rodent,

becomes a horse,

becomes a rifle,

becomes a target:

the Indian dreams and his dream becomes a prophecy, all the dreams of the Indians become reality, incarnate, tell them they are right, fill them with fear and for that reason make them suspicious, arrogant, jealous, proud but horrified of always knowing the future, suspicious that the only thing that becomes reality is that which should be a nightmare: the white man, the horse, the firearm,

oh, they had stopped moving, the great migrations were over, the grass grew over the roads, the mountains separated the people, languages were no longer understood, the people decided not to move anymore from where they were, from birth to death, but to weave a great mantle of loyalties, obligations, values in order to protect themselves

until the river caught fire and the earth moved again

DAN POLONSKY

Thin and pale but muscular and agile, he bragged that even though he lived on the border he never exposed himself to the sun. He had the pale complexion of his European ancestors, immigrants who were badly received, discriminated against, treated like garbage. Dan remembered his grandparents' complaints. The savage discrimination to which they were subjected because they spoke differently, ate differently, looked different. They smelled different. The Anglos covered their noses when they passed those old people who were young but looked old, with their beards and black clothes smelling of onion and sauerkraut. But the immigrants persisted, assimilated, became citizens. No one would defend their nation better than they, Dan thought as he stared across to the Mexican side of the river.

“Seen
Air Force
yet?” his grandfather Adam Polonsky asked, and since Dan was too young to have seen World War II pictures, the old man gave him a video so he'd see how the air force was made up of ethnic heroes, not only Anglos but descendants of Poles, Italians, Jews, Russians, Irish. Never a Japanese, it's true; he was the enemy. But never a Latino, a Mexican. A few blacks; they say the blacks did go to war. But never Mexicans. They weren't citizens. They were cowards, mosquitoes that sucked the blood of the USA and ran back home to support their lazy countrymen.