Piecework

That is Puerto Vallarta to me. You can wander down to Le Bistro, on the island in the river, and hear good recorded jazz. You can pause in the restaurant’s garden beside the statue of Huston, which quotes from the director’s eulogy to his friend Humphrey Bogart: “We have no reason to feel any sorrow for him — only for ourselves for having lost him. He is irreplaceable.” Or you can have a good laugh at the restaurant called La Fuente de la Puente (The Fountain on the Bridge), where a statue of Burton, Taylor, and an iguana stands, carved from what seems to be Ivory soap but which turns out to be some kind of plastic. I wish Burton could have cast his caustic eye upon this masterpiece.

You can see these things or just watch a carpenter laboring with an artist’s intensity in a small crowded shop or kids pedaling tricycles down the steep hills or country people in sandals and straw hats gazing at the wonders of the metropolis. I carried all of them home from Puerto Vallarta, along with the sound of the rooster at dawn and the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea.

TRAVEL HOLIDAY,

December 1992-January 1993

THE TORTILLA CURTAIN

You move through the hot, polluted Tijuana morning, past shops and gas stations and cantinas, past the tourist traps of the Avenida Revolution, past the egg-shaped Cultural Center and the new shopping malls and the government housing with bright patches of laundry hanging on balconies; then it’s through streets of painted adobe peeling in the sun, ball fields where kids play without gloves, and you see ahead and above you ten-thousand-odd shacks perched uneasily upon the Tijuana hills, and you glimpse the green road signs for the beaches as the immense luminous light of the Pacific brightens the sky. You turn, and alongside the road there’s a chain link fence. It’s ten feet high.

On the other side of the fence is the United States.

There are immense gashes in the fence, which was once called the Tortilla Curtain. You could drive three wide loads, side by side, through the tears in this pathetic curtain. On this morning, on both sides of the fence (more often called la linea by the locals), there are small groups of young Mexican men dressed in polyester shirts and worn shoes and faded jeans, and holding small bags. These are a few of the people who are changing the United States, members of a huge army of irregulars engaged in the largest, most successful invasion ever made of North America.

On this day, they smoke cigarettes. They make small jokes. They munch on tacos prepared by a flat-faced, pig-tailed Indian woman whose stand is parked by the roadside. They sip soda. And some of them gaze across the arid scrub and sandy chaparral at the blurred white buildings of the U.S. town of San Ysidro. They wait patiently and do not hide. And if you pull over, and buy a soda from the woman, and speak some Spanish, they will talk.

“I tried last night,” says the young man named Jeronimo Vasquez, who wears a Chicago Bears T-shirt under a denim jacket. “But it was too dangerous, too many helicopters last night, too much light…” He looks out at the open stretch of gnarled land, past the light towers, at the distant white buildings. “Maybe tonight we will go to Zapata Canyon…” He is from Oaxaca, he says, deep in the hungry Mexican south. He has been to the United States three times, working in the fields; it is now Tuesday, and he starts a job near Stockton on the following Monday, picker’s work arranged by his cousin. “I have much time. …”

Abruptly, he turns away to watch some action. Two young men are running across the dried scrub on the U.S. side, kicking up little clouds of white dust, while a Border Patrol car goes after them. The young men dodge, circle, running the broken field, and suddenly stand very still as the car draws close. They are immediately added to the cold statistics of border apprehensions. But they are really mere sacrifices; over on the left, three other men run low and hunched, like infantrymen in a fire fight. “Corre, corre,” Jeronimo Vasquez whispers. “Run, run.…” They do. And when they vanish into some distant scrub, he clenches a fist like a triumphant sports fan. He is not alone. All the others cheer, as does the woman selling tacos, and on the steep hill above the road, a man stands before a tar-paper shack, waves a Mexican flag, and shouts: “Goll” And everyone laughs.