The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (11 page)

In the kitchen there was a stove and a sink; a house with running water in San Matías was at best rare. A turn of the handle brought a flame out of the stovetop. Magic. There was a large round table for the group to eat at. They each paid $95 a month in rent and $25 a week for food. Martha, who was the sister of Gustavo and Mariano, lived in the small bedroom with her husband. She was on the lease and handled the rents and cooking. Martha had three children at home in San Matías with her mother in the rooms right behind where Eduardo’s family lived. Her brother Gustavo had left two children in Mexico with his wife. One day Gustavo’s wife left the children with Gustavo’s mother in San Matías and said she was going to look for work. Instead, she went off with a man and never returned. This left the grandmother in San Matías with six grandchildren. All her upbringing and beliefs told her there was something worse ahead, a catastrophe, a tragedy falling from the sky, and she never could see it, but now suddenly it was in front of her at night. In a dream she had, she was in line at the window of the appliance store for the money order from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and instead of a man with her money order, there was a skull, a death’s head, with eye sockets fixed on her.

In the morning she told this to Eduardo’s father at the brickyard.

He didn’t believe her.

“If it happens, what will I do with all these children to feed?” she asked him.

He doesn’t remember what he said, exactly. He knows he just went to work at bricks. Of course her death’s head vision never
materialized. Something worse would: a clerk in the window shaking his normal head. No, no money order from Brooklyn.

Alejandro lived on the floor next to Eduardo for the same reason as Eduardo: to send enough money home to soften the path when he returned. But every night he reminded himself that he’d never thought he would be here living alone and his wife would be home in Mexico with his children. On most nights he thought of his marriage. He’d married his wife in a civil ceremony with his mother and father present. He wore a shirt and he knew she’d worn a dress, but he couldn’t remember what it looked like—you only wore a white dress for a big church wedding. He remembered going with her to the clinic for their first baby. He was there at 6
P.M
. and waited with her in one room, where she was monitored, and then she went into the delivery room and he stayed outside. They didn’t know whether it would be a boy or girl. Each wanted a
niña
, and that’s what they got.

He’d set up an upholstery shop in a room in the house opening onto the street. He had to rent a compressor because he couldn’t afford to buy one. He had to borrow or rent other equipment. Air pistols, saws to cut—they would cost another 20,000 pesos.

His biggest job had been for 7,500 pesos. He did the whole room—walls, sofa, love seat, and chairs—in fifteen days, and was very proud of it. Fine. But often he could not get a compressor to rent and he had to tell customers who showed him photos of what they wanted that he couldn’t get to them until the week after next.

He had been earning the equivalent of about $150 a week. Alejandro and his wife and her brother talked about Alejandro changing what looked like a bleak future: He was going to earn $150 a week and probably less for all of his life. Alejandro and his wife had been talking of his going to America and had agreed that he could try heartbreak for a year and a half for the money. He could earn enough to buy upholstery tools. Then he could work at home and support a family without sweating blood. But this was not Italy,
where the men leave Sicily for seasonal work in desolation and loneliness in the north, in Switzerland even, but return to Sicily at the end of the season. A Mexican going to New York must cross the border like a wanted criminal. No husband could return for a simple visit, and no wife could follow him to New York.

Alejandro’s wife, who suddenly realized that she would be alone with the children for a year and a half, had been shaken. Her brother helped make the decision: The only way for Alejandro to give his wife and children a future was to change the order of their living now, and for Alejandro to go to New York.

He’d gotten up at 5
A.M
., and his wife went with him on the bus to the Puebla airport. She came inside, kissed him goodbye, and stood alone as he went through the gate to the plane to Hermosillo in Sonora. From there he went across a border that was unexpectedly unguarded that night. Ahead of him was Brooklyn and loneliness.

At Brighton Beach, Gustavo had gotten him a job at $7.50 an hour working construction. His arms soon advertised his work. He has iron bars for upper arms. He is 5 feet 6 inches and 135 pounds or so. He has a mustache and a young smile.

He worked for a builder named Eugene Ostreicher and his son, Richie. They were doing a lot of housing in one section of Brooklyn called Williamsburg.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

M
ariano, who slept on the other side of Eduardo in the room at Brighton Beach, came from the house directly behind him in San Matías. His mother and her family kept pigs in pens outside their adjoining cinder-block huts. Anytime they came up short on food, they yanked one of the pigs out of the pen, slit its throat, and went on a steady diet of pig meat. Visitors were happily fed because there wasn’t an ice cube in San Matías to keep the carcass unspoiled. If the children became tired of the diet, that was their worry; they could show their ribs. If the pig meat ran out for all, then everybody had rib cages sticking out.

In Brooklyn, Mariano worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. He didn’t know the street it was on, only how to get there. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he wasn’t working in the afternoon, much less tomorrow. He was single but couldn’t go near the topless bars and whorehouses on Fifth Avenue. Lucino Hernández, at thirty-one the oldest in the group, told everybody that the Fifth Avenue bars were dangerous because they get raided by police and
anybody without papers could wind up being deported at the flash of a badge.

When they were not out of the house for work, they stayed in their room and watched shows on the Spanish-language stations or talked or slept. On Saturdays they drank. As none of them had a paper to show anything more than name and address, they were inordinately afraid of immigration agents, who in their minds were everywhere. Each day there were reports of a white immigration van on a street somewhere in Brooklyn. When they were walking to work, the impulse was to say something to a pretty young woman, but it was Lucino who always stopped them.

“She might call the police,” he said. The police would not bury them in jail for harassing some woman, but they surely would call the immigration agents. And for telling a young woman that you want to get next to her, you would be back in the worst of the dust in Mexico, sent there broke.

It was surer and safer to walk around the corner to Neptune Avenue and toward Coney Island Avenue and run into one of the many whores who were out there every night.

For his first dinner in the house, Eduardo came to the big kitchen table and sat. Around him, everybody was eating and getting up to go to the stove and then returning to the table. He watched them and wondered when his plate would be put in front of him.

There was a discussion about a group of students who were black and who had come out of the high school across the street. They had called Alejandro “Mexican shit.” Alejandro said he pretended not to hear them.

“That was the right thing to do,” Lucino said. “The Negro. You get in a fight with them, the police come, and then you are fucked. They don’t have anything to worry about. They are citizens. You have no ID. They send you back to Mexico.”

Eduardo decided that he would never go out of the house except to work.

At that point, he had not worked for a single day yet. He had barely been around the neighborhood. Yet skin color, which was never an issue in San Matías, now touched everything. Already he was aware of the quick, short glances of the whites as he passed them, particularly the white women. And he was learning that the black people didn’t like him, and of course he didn’t like the looks of them, either. The Puerto Ricans sneered at the Mexicans. The Puerto Ricans didn’t like the Dominicans, either, but they most disliked these Mexicans.

“Incas and Mayans! Little people with straight hair!” said Herman Badillo, the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress and now the head of the City University of New York system. “When they speak of La Raza, they don’t speak Spanish, they speak in indigenous languages. They should be in separate classes.”

Eduardo looked around again for his food. In his whole life, he had never served himself. The mother’s hands were always close: one on his shoulder, the other putting his food in front of him.

“What are you looking for?” Martha said.

Eduardo shrugged.

“You get your own food,” Martha said.

He got up. He didn’t like it. Eduardo’s first Saturday night in Brooklyn was the same as the ones that would follow. He was in a commune of the lonely. All week, they worked and came home to eat and sleep so they could work tomorrow. On Saturday night, they preferred being drunk. Lucino wanted them to stay in one loud room while they did this. His brow furrowed whenever somebody said they wanted a bar with women. All he could think of was police walking him to the border and throwing him back into Mexico. Stay here, he said. So each Saturday night, everybody stayed in the room and drank big cold beers, Corona and Heineken with lime
twists wedged in them. After every third beer they had tequila. The belief of people from Puebla was that three big cold beers caused an indigestion that only tequila could calm. They got good and drunk and talked about going back to Mexico, where they would climb all over the girls.

Eduardo listened and laughed. He drank a couple of beers but not much else, and this left him as the only one in the crowded room able to deride their fantasies. Alejandro, Gustavo, and Miguel were married and had lived faithfully with their wives and families back home. The religion was in them deep enough to keep them out of adulteries.

“How could you do this to these girls?” Eduardo asked them.

They all called out over the alcohol that not only would they do what they said to these girls, but that they would go far beyond that.

“How can you do that if you don’t know any girls?” Eduardo said.

As the night grew late, the laughter turned into the silence of homesickness. Alejandro’s wife and two children were living with his family at number 29 Avenida Cinco de Mayo in Santa Barbara, Mexico. He told Eduardo that he imagined his children out at a party. A fiesta. The children are playing while he is talking to everybody at the party. The band is playing
cumbia
music, a mixture of Mexican and Colombian. Then he said he was thinking of all the times he went out with his wife and visited relatives. Dropping in. Nothing formal. There are so many cousins in each family that they take the place of friends.

Eduardo thought of his mother and father, and then the store. He told everybody about the store, as if the video game machine was the attraction, not Silvia, the owner’s daughter.

E
DUARDO LIVED
in local history.

On a larger scale, sociologists first traced Mexican immigration to New York through the Twenty-third Street YMCA in Manhattan, where in the 1920s a small number of people recently arrived from
the state of Yucatán established a social club. For some reason, that particular migration ended, but studies of it did not. As there is no way to jump in and out and question some immigrant who doesn’t even keep his name on his person, any realistic study must come from a large school, with professors who have a year or two off to work on the project, with papers gathered from everywhere and researchers with the time and funds to travel. Still, it is work done over the longest of hours and you must fall in love with the subject.

The work now is being done by a young professor, Robert Smith, of Barnard College in New York. In a crowded office in Milbank Hall, he writes papers about Mexicans who come to us across the hot sands of an empty desert. On the street outside his window, 116th Street and Broadway, there rise the sounds of New York City traffic at its steadiest and heaviest.

Robert Smith does work that will help so many understand. Others will make a living from his work. He gets a satisfaction that he realizes in the small of the night. He would never trade his life for money.

Two men from a farm south of Puebla live in Professor Smith’s studies as the men who started the Mexican migration to New York. They were Don Pedro and his brother Fermin. They had attempted to bribe local Mexican officials and a hungry American bureaucrat to get a contract for the Bracero program that between 1942 and 1964 recruited Mexicans to work in U.S. agriculture. The American sneered at the size of the bribe offer, and the brothers were shut out. They then walked across the border, which at that time, on July 6, 1943, was virtually unguarded. The brothers got on the road and hitched a ride with a man named Montesinos, who was coming from an annual vacation in Mexico City. After talking to them during the long ride to New York, Montesinos thought he could get them started. He put them up at a hotel in Manhattan for two days while they looked for work. At that time, during World War II, anyone could get a job anywhere, and both brothers did. They started
sending money home to Puebla. The arrival of a money order in the town was an event comparable to none other because money describes itself. It is money. Its presence in the hands of the relatives of brothers Don Pedro and Fermin caused others to follow, first in small groups who crossed uncontrolled borders and survived desert and river and, once arrived, ran their palms over the sidewalks of New York, feeling for gold.

By 1980, as many as forty thousand Mexicans had slipped through to New York for the Job. In 1986 there was an amnesty that allowed immigrants to apply for temporary residency, then permanent residency, if they had been living in the United States since 1981. Immigrants who had been unable to leave New York—they had beaten the border once, and most didn’t want to try again—suddenly found they could leave the country and return whenever they wanted. They carried messages home about the wonders of New York. Some even told the truth: that it was hard work for higher pay than in Mexico, but low pay for the expensive city of New York.