Texas by James A. Michener
On the bleak and sandy plains of northern Mexico, midway between the cities of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez, stood the adobe village of Moctezuma, seven small huts, one of which served as a roadside shop dispensing allegedly cold drinks to American motorists. The place was called by the grandiloquent name La Tienda del Norte and was operated by the Guzmáns, a widowed woman with two daughters and a son.
The older girl was married to the man who ran the nearby Pemex station, and it was her responsibility to wash the windshields of any cars that stopped, and to send orders to the national gasoline monopoly for such additional supplies as her husband thought he might sell to motorists who found themselves short of gas on this rather frightening road. If one did not fill up at Moctezuma, one could well be stranded before reaching Chihuahua.
It was this constant flow of big cars passing south that caused discontent in the little village, for when one stopped for either gas or a cold drink, the Mexicans could see the wealth the owners possessed: ‘They are all richer than the archbishop. It must be fun to live in los Estados Unidos where money is so easy!’
The young wife, Eufemia, had often thought of this as she tended the rich travelers, but more so now that she was pregnant. Her condition occasioned great discussion among the residents of Moctezuma, for what a young woman did when she was pregnant made a universe of difference, as two of the older women reminded the mother, Encarnación: ‘It is important. It is life and death, really, that you get her to El Paso.’
‘True, but neither her husband nor any of his friends have done this thing, and they have no way of instructing her.’
‘What you must do,’ one of the women said, ‘is get her to Juárez and put her in touch with my cousin. El Lobo, that’s his name, and his job is to slip people into the States.’
The other woman had a simpler plan: ‘To get into El Paso is nothing, you just walk across the bridge. But to leave El Paso for the rest of the States, that’s when you need El Lobo.’
‘You think that Eufemia can just go to Juárez, cross over and reach Thomason General without getting caught?’
‘Others have done it, haven’t they?’
And that was the nagging fact: other pregnant women from villages far off the main road had somehow reached Juárez, got across the river and entered the hospital, had their babies and come home with that precious piece of paper, more valuable than gold, which certified that this child, male or female and of such-and-such a name, had been born within the United States.
Such a paper meant that for as long as he or she lived, that child could enter the States, assume his citizenship, get a free education, and build a good life. Without such a certificate, life would almost certainly be one of unending poverty in northern Mexico; therefore, women like Eufemia were willing to undergo any hardships to ensure that their unborn children received a fair start in life, and that was why even the poorest, even the least-educated, headed for El Paso in their ninth month.
But these benefits did not fully explain why so many citizens of Moctezuma yearned to live in the States. Nothing differentiated their land from that of New Mexico or Arizona, and it was actually better than many parts of West Texas; the strain of people was no different from that of people who prospered in those American states; and the climate was the same. But the sad fact was that in Mexico no way had been devised whereby the unquestioned wealth of the land, almost unequaled in the Americas, could be justly distributed. The wealthy grew immensely wealthy; the Guzmáns could see the great cars sweeping north to the shops across the Rio Grande and then come roaring back loaded with goods purchased in American stores. But in the Mexican system none of that wealth filtered down to the peasants who did most of the work. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more cynical system than that which trapped Encarnación Guzmán and her three children, for the national leaders had been preaching since the 1920s the triumph of La Revolución, and each succeeding administration had cried at election time: ‘Let us march forward with La Revolución!’ but the same reactionary cadre had remained in power, cynically stealing the nation’s wealth and allowing the great masses of the people to plod along, sometimes at the starvation level.
Any young person living in Moctezuma would try to get to the States, and if a pregnant woman wanted to ensure that her baby was born with rights to that superior economic system, she was entitled to try every known device to accomplish it. The flood of people streaming north never seemed to diminish.
The plan that the Guzmáns worked out was this: brother Cándido, a clever seventeen-year-old, would take his sister Eufemia to Juárez, where he would make contact with El Lobo, and for a small fee, which Cándido would carry in his shoe, Eufemia would be taken across the bridge two or three days before her labor was supposed to begin. She would be kept in a house run by El Lobo’s friends, and on the morning when birth seemed imminent, she would be taken to a place close to the hospital. At the proper time, and this would be crucial, but women in the area could help determine it, she would be rushed as an emergency patient to the hospital, where she would give birth, she hoped, to a son. Then her friends would show her how to acquire a birth certificate and purchase three or four photographed copies. She would then recross the bridge, rejoin her brother, and return to Moctezuma—and eighteen years later she would bid her son goodbye when he left to take up residence in the States.
The awful price exacted by this system was the inevitable breakup of the family, for the time would come when this child with his precious documents would leave Mexico forever; but the good part was that when as a young man he established his American citizenship, he could send down to Moctezuma and bring in his entire family under ‘the compassion rule.’ So once Eufemia gained entrance to Thomason General, she was guaranteeing future American citizenship for herself and, perhaps, as many as a dozen family members. ‘Make no mistake,’ warned an older man who had worked as an illegal in Texas, ‘many things happen up there that no one in his right mind would wish, but it’s better than here. It’s worth the risk.’
Cándido and his sister caught a ride north with one of the Pemex trucks, and as they neared Juárez the driver said: ‘You understand, it’s easy to cross over into El Paso. Anyone can do that. But it’s hell to slip out of the city and move north. Guards and stops everywhere.’
‘I don’t intend to stay,’ Cándido said, and the driver said: ‘They all say that. When you see it, you’ll want to.’
Although Juárez was a large city, they had no difficulty in finding El Lobo: ‘I’ll get your sister to the hospital at the right time. I can also take you to fine cities in Texas, Cándido. Lots of work.’
‘I’m not staying.’
‘For fifteen dollars, all the way to Fort Stockton and a good job.’
‘Just my sister.’
It was agreed that Cándido would accompany her to the first stopping house and would at the appropriate time move her close to the hospital, and he did this effectively, so that Eufemia had a minimum of worry. At the stopping place six other pregnant women counseled with her, and she watched as they moved on to the American hospital; she saw two of them when they returned with their babies, both girls, and displayed the precious birth certificates. ‘You are so lucky,’ she said, and they replied: ‘We know you’ll be lucky, too.’
She was. With the skill of an expert, Cándido moved her nearer the hospital, and when her labor pains became intense, he led her to the emergency entrance, where a young intern with a mustache cried: ‘Here’s another Aztec princess!’ and before Cándido could ask even one question, his sister was whisked away.
It cost the city of El Paso about twelve hundred dollars to deliver a Mexican baby and care for the mother prior to release, but the most Thomason General could extract from the constant stream of pregnant women was seventy-five dollars each, and most, like Eufemia, could pay nothing. Why did Texas allow this preposterous system? ‘I’ll tell you,’ Officer Talbot explained to a newspaperman from Chicago. ‘We’re a comp
The Pemex driver had been right. Once Cándido saw the riches of El Paso and the good life available to even poor Mexicans, he wanted to stay, not in that crowded city but in the hinterland, where he heard that jobs were plentiful, and this desire tempted him to come back across the international bridge as soon as he placed his sister and her baby on the Pemex truck heading south.
Since he did not purchase the services of El Lobo, he was able to penetrate only a few miles past the immigration blockades when a tall Border Patrol officer named Talbot detected him on the road and sent him back to Mexico.
On his next try he did use El Lobo, who put him well inland, but again he had the bad luck of running into Officer Talbot, a misfortune that was repeated on his third attempt. ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ Talbot asked, and this time when he shoved the boy across the border he warned: ‘Next time, jail.’
So Cándido, with his burning memories of riches in the United States, returned to Moctezuma, but in June of the following year, when he was eighteen and working at his brother-in-law’s garage, his younger sister, Manuela, informed her family that she wanted to try to get into the States, and again the women of Moctezuma decided that Cándido should take her to Juárez, where, for fifteen dollars, El Lobo would lead her not into El Paso, where she would be apprehended if she tried to sneak past Officer Talbot, but to a safe crossing he had developed some seventy miles to the east. Said a man who had used that route under El Lobo’s guidance: ‘It’s not easy. You cross the Rio Grande, walk inland about a mile, and a truck picks you up. Costs another fifteen dollars, but you can’t make it alone. Cándido, warn your sister that she cannot make it alone.’
For Cándido the next days were agonizing, because the old longing to get into the United States revived, but he knew that if he went, he would leave his mother alone: Eufemia married. Manuela gone. If I go, who’s left to help? But then he began to think of his sister: I can’t leave her in a truck at the edge of the desert. By the time he and his sister were ready to board the Pemex truck he had not made up his mind, but as he said farewell to his mother he embraced her with unusual ardor and burst into tears. She must have known what tormented him, for she said: ‘Do whatever’s right.’
When they reached Ciudad Juárez and Cándido actually saw El Lobo again, he knew he must not leave Manuela in that man’s corrupt hands. So without having made a major decision himself, he eased into the Lobo operation, reserving the right to back out at the last moment.
The truck carrying the would-be emigrants left Juárez at five in the afternoon with seventeen passengers, eleven men and six women at fifteen dollars a head, and drove southeast along a bumpy road traveled by other trucks returning empty from the trip to the crossing. At dusk the emigrants pulled up at a lonely spot east of Banderas, and there Cándido had to make up his mind: ‘Well, are you joining them or not? Fifteen dollars if you do.’ And on the spot the boy said: ‘I’ll stay with my sister.’
At this place the Rio Grande was so shallow that the Mexicans could walk almost completely across, needing to swim only the last few yards to the American side, and there the American guides had stationed two Mexican men, who helped the women. When all were safely ashore, El Lobo blinked his lights and was gone.
They had come to some of the loneliest land in Texas, that stretch along the river which not even the hardiest settlers had attempted to tame. Rocky in parts, steeply graded, bereft of trees, with only dirt trails leading inland, it was a terrain so forbidding that Cándido was glad he had stayed with his sister: ‘This is dangerous. Stay close to me.’
The eighteen wetbacks were led to a miserable truck, which had bounced over these roads many times, but before they were allowed to climb in, a man named Hanson growled: ‘Fifteen bucks, and I put you on a back road to Fort Stockton.’ He stood in the shaded glare of the headlights, verifying the payments, and when all were accounted for, he piled the Mexicans in and started north, but as he drove, a cohort rode atop the cab of the truck, keeping a shotgun aimed at the passengers.
‘Don’t no one try to jump off,’ he warned. ‘We don’t want to show La Migra how we move about.’
There was a moon, rising at about nine and throwing only modified light, but it was enough to permit the Mexicans to see the wild terrain they were traversing. ‘Oh, this can’t be Estados Unidos!’ a woman cried, and the gunman replied in Spanish: ‘It sure is. Three hundred miles of it.’
At four in the morning, when they were far from the river, the driver, seeing a chance to earn a lot of money with no responsibility, made the engine cough and then conk out. ‘Damnit,’ he cried, ‘we’ve got to fix this,’ and he ordered the Mexicans to leave the truck and stand well back while he worked on it. To their delight the engine began to sputter, caught, and then purred nicely. At these welcome sounds the Mexicans started toward the truck, when, to their horror, the two anglos revved the motor and took off across the desert, leaving the wetbacks stranded, with no guide, no food and, worst of all, no water.
It was a trip into hell. At ten in the morning of the second day, when the sun was blazing high, the first Mexican died, a man in his forties whose swollen tongue filled his mouth. An hour later, six others were dead, but the two Guzmáns still survived. ‘Manuela,’ Cándido whispered, ‘we must look for plants, anything.’
They found nothing, none of the big cacti which often saved lives in such circumstances, and by noon, three more were dead. Overhead, the sky was an arch of blue; not a blemish obscured the sun, which beat mercilessly on the hapless Mexicans. Two o’clock passed, with more than half the wetbacks, ironic name, dead, and in the late afternoon, in that dreadful heat, Manuela gasped one last plea for water, stared madly at her brother, and died.
Three men made it to U.S. 80, a hundred and forty miles west of Fort Stockton. In despair they tried to flag down motorists; none stopped. Cándido finally threw himself in front of an approaching car while his companions waved frantically, but they did not need to do this, for the man driving the car was Officer Talbot, who had been searching for them.
‘Poor sons-a-bitches,’ he said to his partner, ‘let’s get them something to drink.’ They drove eastward to Van Horn, where Talbot tossed the three in jail, but not before providing them with all the liquid they could drink.
They were returned to Mexico, of course, and since Cándido was too ashamed to go back to Moctezuma to inform his family of Manuela’s death and of how it had occurred, he slipped back into El Paso, found a job, saved his money, bought a gun, grew a mustache so as to alter his appearance, and went back to El Lobo as if he had never seen him before: ‘Is it true, you take people into los Estados Unidos?’
‘Fifteen dollars to me, fifteen to the men on the other side.’
‘I’ll go.’
‘I’ll take you through the barriers in north El Paso.’
‘I was told there was a better crossing at Banderas.’
‘You want to go that way, all right.’
This time a party of nineteen illegals drove beside the Rio Grande to the little town, where the emigrants paid their fee and swam the river. On the far side Hanson was waiting with his same rickety truck, the same shotgun assistant. They left the river at dusk, rode through the night, and at about three in the morning, the truck broke down again.
‘Move over here while we fix it,’ Hanson said, but as he spoke, Cándido and two other wetbacks whom he had recruited en route shot him and the assistant dead. Commandeering the truck, they sped toward where U.S. 80 would have to be, and long before dawn they were at the outskirts of Fort Stockton. Disposing of the truck in a gully, they shook hands and made their way variously into the town and into the fabric of American life.
Cándido, moving alone along the highway, started back west, to give the impression, if questioned by police regardi
The driver was a big, florid man in his late thirties, dressed like a sheriff, and he terrified Cándido, who whispered: ‘Solamente español, señor,’ whereupon the man surprised him by saying in easy Spanish: ‘Amigo, if you seek work, you’ve met the right man.’
He invited Cándido to sit beside him, and together they rode to Fort Stockton and a short distance to the north, where they came upon a frontier ranch with an ornate stone gate and a sign which said:
EL RANCHO ESTUPENDO
LORENZO QUIMPER
PROPRIETOR
‘Come in and grab yourself some grub,’ the rancher said, and in this way Cándido Guzmán became a permanent resident of the United States and a lifelong employee of Lorenzo Quimper, who owned some nine ranches for which he needed reliable workmen. Few immigrants had ever dared so much to find haven in Texas, few would serve it more faithfully.
In the city of Detroit things were not going well for the Morrisons. Todd, the father, could see that within a few more months his branch of the Chrysler Corporation might have to shut down. The ax had already fallen on his wife, Maggie, for one Friday morning three weeks earlier the principal of her school had handed her the gray-toned sheet of paper teachers dreaded:
The Cascade Public Schools District Board of Education, meeting in regular session, voted last night to take certain actions necessary for its survival. It is my duty to inform you that your teaching contract will not be renewed upon its expiration at the close of the 1968 spring term, and both your job and your salary will end at that time.