Tales from the Desert Borderland

Lawrence J. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030351328
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030351335
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Taylor brings an ethnographer's eye, ear, and many years of experience to this fictional portrait of life along the US/Mexico desert border. In these linked short stories, readers are taken on a wild ride from San Diego to Nogales, into Mexican and Chicano neighborhoods, failed spas and defunct mining towns, rambling Native American reservations and besieged Wildlife Refuges. Along the way they will share the conflicts, calamities, and occasional triumph of an engaging cast of characters. While these tales treat such familiar border themes as drug- and people-smuggling or hybrid and conflicting cultures and identities, they do so with a literary flair that revels in the rich diversity of border life as well as in its ambiguity, ambivalence, irony and often unexpected humor.

© The Author(s) 2020

L. J. TaylorTales from the Desert BorderlandPalgrave Studies in Literary Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35133-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Machaca

Lawrence J. Taylor¹

(1)

Maynooth University, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Lawrence J. Taylor

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Fig. 1.1

Photograph by Maeve Hickey

Ana Rosa pulls into the gravelly yard behind El Sueño de mi Abuelita to find a clutch of strangers—men, women and children—waiting in the dawn shadows near the kitchen door. She is not surprised; Jimenez had texted the number “10.” One of them, a young man, approaches: tentative, shy eyes surprised, comforted, disconcerted.

She looks like us, but different. Teeth whiter. Hair cut short with a blond streak. Will Luisa look like that in a few years, when we are all Americans?

Ana Rosa offers only a business smile, ushering them inside through the kitchen to another door leading into the basement. They troop wordlessly down and settle themselves in among the sacks of dried beans and rice to wait.

At noon, Orozco pushes heavily through the front door of the restaurant as if performing a search warrant. Clark follows, but pauses to admire a colorful mural of life in the eponymous “Abuelita’s” tropical village brightening the walls, padding respectfully through the dining room as if it were a path through the pueblito michoacano. He takes a chair opposite Orozco, who has found a seat in a dimly lit corner facing into a large mirror with a view of everything and everybody behind him. Eyes in the back of his head. Like a Goodfella at a favorite pasta palace. In Orozco’s case, the gun is in plain sight, holstered beside other dangling tools of the law-enforcement trade.

“I’ll take that table myself,” Ana Rosa mumbles, snatching the pad from a puzzled young waitress and nodding toward the corner where the two men in uniform are leaning over their menus. “I already heard about that fat pocho bastard. Of all the restaurants in this fucking town, they come here? And today? ¡Que pinche vida! Let me deal with him.” Patting her already perfect coif, she sets off through the swinging door into the dining room.

Orozco has picked up the menu, his deeply lined face a battle ground between hope and disdain as he recites the names of the dishes, “caldo de albóndigas, pozole de Jalisco, pollo estilo Michoacano,” intoning them in his ponderous norteño baritone like poetry, like sacred texts. His eyes well up with longing as the words roll about his mouth. Savory memories: less delicate than a madeleine but fit to conjure the warm chatter and pungent aromas of his Tía Josefina’s kitchen. Then his face darkens, like a toddler whose scoop of ice cream has tipped off the cone and landed on his shoe. If he orders any of those beautiful dishes, he will be served only disappointment.

Clark looks up at Ana Rosa, whose scarlet lips and cocoa eyes say “bienvenidos.” He beams warmly in reply, but she is looking at Orozco, whose big head remains buried in the opened, plastic-coated menu. He turns a page and finds a slip of paper: a hasty addition of “today’s especial.”

“Machaca!”

He reads it aloud with an exaggerated Sonoran lilt, as if the word announced the Second Coming. But the eyes he fixes on Ana Rosa are hooded by a brow arched with irony. As if any place in this town could deliver on such a promise!

Ana Rosa gulps; she hadn’t OK-ed that dish. But she remembers that pedote, Bustamante, the new chef she hired only yesterday, is a Sonorense from some God-forsaken hole near Hermosillo. Chef! Puebla has chefs. Michoacán, Oaxaca, La Capital, Jalisco. But the land of sand, cattle, narcos and kidnappers through which everybody must make his painful way norte? What have they got to cook? Stringy cattle and tortillas de harina are not a cuisine. Chef? A worthless flojo more likely. He showed up for his first day this morning an hour late, hauling a filthy sack she feared was his laundry and emptied it right onto her clean cutting counter—an avalanche of chiles, aguacates, nopales, and a dozen sacks of dried, shredded god-knows-what—all the time raving in what was probably a meth-induced ramble about real Sonoran food and how you couldn’t get it in California, “Not everybody wants esos chingados tacos de pescado!”

Gripping her order pad, she risks a knowing nod at Orozco.

“Señor Bustamante, nuestro chef, es Sonorense. Debe ser machaca autentica.”

Authentic? Orozco is sure she’s bluffing and, as if to raise the bet, orders platters for both Clark and himself. He watches closely in the mirror as Ana Rosa strides back through the swinging door into the kitchen, catching before it closes, he is sure, a worried look on her face as she turns toward the stove to repeat the order.

“That woman,” he explains to Clark, “is from Michoacán. She doesn’t know machaca from caca. And if there’s a Sonoran in her kitchen, he’s probably some chingado mojado who lied his way in! You watch, his chirle machaca is going to run over the plate like diarrhea. And his day’s going to end real bad when I haul his skinny ass in!”

Orozco is cheered by the thought of any impending arrest, but having Clark there again looking up to him with that callow beach boy face, his smile deepens with nostalgia.

It was Clark’s first day on the job. They were standing outside the car somewhere in a maze of empty hills by Smugglers’ Gulch near the Tijuana border. Orozco handed him binoculars, nodding toward the south. Atop the next ridge they could see rows of stunted shrubs in the first gray light. But then they were moving. Swaying slightly, edging over and down the slope. Against the whitening sky the shrubs became human, branches now arms, moving steadily toward them through the high grass.

“What the hell?” Clark searched Orozco’s wide, impassive face for some clue. “Is that the Mexican army coming our way?”

“Nope. That’s our first group of customers.”

Orozco was enjoying the moment, playing the wise, weary veteran, checking his watch and leaning back against the patrol car. Clark tried to count the figures as they disappeared into the lower ground between the ridge and themselves.

“Shouldn’t we call for backup, then? There’s got to be fifty or sixty of them.”

“Closer to eighty, but we won’t need any help. We’ll wait till they reach the bottom.” He motioned Clark into the car, nodding toward the radio. “Just give our coordinates and tell them to send two buses to pick them up.”

When the last of the figures disappeared into the flats below them, he signaled Clark to start the engine and ease the Blazer downhill along the hard dirt road. They rolled to a stop amid the fields of dry grass, where the migrants had already sunk down into the foliage, crouching beneath view. He leaned over Clark and flipped on the high beams and the flashing red, white and blues, lighting up the field like a disco ballroom, and then hauled himself wearily from the car. Clark followed, soft and innocent even in uniform, his hand fluttering nervously over his holstered gun. But Orozco had already strolled out to the center of the field, standing, arms folded over his belly, calling out for the migrants to show themselves. They rose from the grass like extras in some B horror movie, and then moved meekly toward him, resigned to their fate.

For Orozco, Clark was at first sight a poster boy for everything wrong with the Patrol. Softly focused green eyes, harmless grin, and loose waves of streaked hair peeking out from under his cap: another good-looking, empty-headed surfer drifting through his life and the perfect San Diego seasons. There was nothing soldier about him.

Yet, there was something that drew Orozco to the boy, despite himself. Like most of his kind, Clark had crossed the border only once before, on a high school beach trip to Ensenada, during which he failed to get laid, spending the night vomiting over the edge of a red satin sofa, never fully realizing he had entered another country. But now, even though constantly embarrassed by his own clumsy ignorance, Clark was clearly entranced by the vibrant cacophony of life on the other side of the fence. Orozco watched with amusement as his partner encountered the often unexpected and sometimes poetic moments of border life. Like when the little girl in a pure white First Communion dress suddenly scampered away from her proud parents to offer him una paleta—frozen fruit bar—through the chain links.

Over the weeks and months, Orozco slowly dropped the jaded drill instructor act, becoming instead an increasingly enthusiastic tour guide to a world he regarded as his own. They were a comical pair, especially walking the jumping border streets. Clark: slim—though thickening a bit on border lunches, beach boy tan, green eyes shuttering like a camera in constant surprise; Orozco towering over him, unabashedly huge, strolling like the emperor through a sea of parting subjects, gray-flecked black mustache and darker eyes that saw all, even while staring unblinking ahead.

Vigilant for any chink in his nation’s armor, Orozco was equally alert to cuisine, taking Clark on critical tours of every rolling taqueria in endless quest of the perfect tacos de birria, de cabeza, carmelo, y al pastor. And while they ate, Clark got Spanish lessons, Orozco laughing and making him repeat every word or phrase until he got it right.

Each meal reminded Orozco of others, the features of which he liked to recount in detail and with great affection. Especially those consumed at his tía’s.

“Every Sunday it was pozole!”

They were taking a dinner break in their car on the beach, assorted tacos soaking through the ripped-open paper bags spread between them on the seat. Just to their left, the border fence cut through the sand and continued several dozen yards into the Pacific Ocean: an emphatic statement of the prevailing moral geography. Clark had spent much of his life on such beaches, only without fences or other signs of limit or containment. Water and sand without end, or an ending.

Orozco was chewing and talking.

“See, you gotta use the right ingredients. The hominy’s gotta be good of course, but it’s the chiles that make the difference. Guajillos. They have to come from D.F., man—La Capital. The pot would simmer away there all morning when we came by, first as kids, later with our own families. And my mama and tía would cook together, tamales, tostadas, rellenos … todo, man, we fuckin’ ate all day.”

“Where was that? Your tía’s?” Clark knew that Orozco was from southern Arizona, but he was becoming increasingly sensitive to the particularity of place.

“Nogales. We call it Ambos Nogales, ‘both Nogales,’ because there’s one on each side of the border. We were born and grew up on this side. My Tía Chata was on the other side. Just south of Nogales in a ranchito called Cibuta. That’s where we would get together.”

“¡Hola! ¡Hola!”

Two little boys were dangling over the water from the chain links on the Mexican side of the fence, shouting enthusiastically. When Orozco and Clark turned to watch through the windshield, they dropped into the sea with yelps of glee.

Orozco chuckled despite himself but quickly turned to one of his other favorite topics, telling Clark about a particularly clever arrest he had made, popping up behind the last man in a line that had just made its silent way in the dark of night around that very fence.

“Do you ever feel funny … I mean … does it bother you to be arresting Mexicans all the time?”

As soon as the words were out, Clark was sorry he spoke. Orozco met his young partner’s hesitant look with a hard stare and then continued in a voice of patient instruction.

“Mira. Look. What matters is what’s inside. Some guys are divided inside. Not me. I got no trouble with who I am. I am American. It’s that simple. My father was a Marine. He fought in Korea and lost his brother there. And I was a Marine in Iraq. When I got home, I just put on a different uniform.”

Clark nodded sheepishly, as if he hoped Orozco didn’t think he dared question his loyalty to a country that Clark himself had all his life taken absolutely for granted.

“If other people have a problem with that…”

Orozco’s was suddenly agitated, as if reacting to more than Clark’s question.

“If they can’t see a Mexican American as American, as American as any Italian, Polish, Jewish, Irish—or whatever the fuck flavor they happen to be—American, then that’s their problem.”

Clark was still nodding, but Orozco knew what he was thinking—none of those other American “flavors” spend their lives going back and forth on a weekly basis to the land of their grandparents, nor are they poised at the border protecting America from an inundation of their relations. Orozco, however, managed to talk himself through any possible ambivalence. After all, his American experience, a series of traditions from pozole to the Marines defined and anchored him, perhaps on the edge of America, but still in it. Clark, on the other hand, couldn’t help but feel that he himself had no such anchor, no such place.

Unless it was the beach. His eyes turned again to the bisecting fence, and he gunned the patrol car into life. As Orozco buckled in, muttering about his crazy surfer partner, Clark took them bouncing over the rippled sand right at the roaring water. He spun the wheel at the last moment, and set off north along the sea edge, shooting back great arcing sprays of wet sand and water, to the noisy approval of the kids once again clambering up the fence on the other side.

Then everything changed with Operation Gatekeeper.

The Station Chief was annoyed, not with the strategy, but with the name. He would have been happier with any sports metaphor—even Goalkeeper would have been an improvement—but he much preferred football. Football made sense and offered purpose in a way that life sometimes did not. And this stage of play called for a determined resistance that had been well captured by the name used in El Paso: Operation Hold the Line. So, he borrowed the title.

“That’s right, like football.” The Chief looked like a desperate coach, hunched squinting over his maps and rosters. “Doesn’t matter what the quarterback is doing if the others break through.”

He was right about one thing; his men weren’t keeping any gate. They were on the line, and the line had been pulled wide. Two high fences of corrugated steel formed a sky-roofed tunnel through which the green and white border pat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Machaca
• 2. Hot Springs
• 3. Love and Lettuce
• 4. NAFTA
• 5. Endangered Species
• 6. Burying Sheila Cassidy
• 7. Ranch Rescue
• 8. The Tunnel