The Crystal Frontier (29 page)

“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.

“How much do you make out of all this, Gonzalo?”

“Well, about thirty dollars a person.”

“You'd be better off in my gang,” laughed Serafín. “I swear by your mother: that's the future.”

The confusion of the cold, urgent night allows Gonzalo Romero to bring fifty-four workers across. But it was a bad night, and later in his house in Juárez with Gonzalo's children and wife, all weeping, cousin Serafín noted that when everything seems too easy you've got to be on guard, for sure something's going to fuck up, it's the law of life and anyone who thinks everything's going to go right for him all the time is a jerk—meaning no offense to poor cousin Gonzalo.

It was as if that night the Texas employers, stirred up by the raised-arms demonstration and by the sight of the fifty-four people gathered by Gonzalo Romero next to a gas station on the outskirts of El Paso, had agreed to screw the people who'd come across. From their truck, the contractors first said that there were too many, that they couldn't contract for fifty-four wetbacks, although they'd take anyone who would work for a dollar an hour even though they'd said they'd pay two dollars an hour. All fifty-four raised their hands, and then the contractors said, Still too many—let's see how many will come with us for fifty cents an hour. About half said they would, the other half got mad and began to argue, but the employer told them to get back to Mexico fast because he was going to call the Border Patrol. The rejected men started insulting the contracted workers, who in turn called them stinking beggars and told them to hurry up and get out because there was a lot of bad feeling against them in these parts.