Reyna — Canocanayesatetlo

Excerpt from Texas MFA — Canocanayesatetlo

“Reyna — Canocanayesatetlo” is an excerpt modified from my DIY novel Texas MFA — Canocanayesatetlo — in which our hero, MFA-in-training-writer crosses the borders of multiple worlds in search of greater stories and meaning in life. The novel and especially this excerpt newly covers some of the same ground, literally and figuratively, as Larry McMurtry's brooding novel All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, which is alluded to in this piece.

Photo by Gene Paull: International Bridge, Roma, Texas — Ciudad Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas

"Ah, Mijo," said Reyna Maria Mendoza — the one and only word in Spanish she ever addressed to me. "Mijo," she called out from beside her car in the parking lot of the Restless Wind Tavern just off the square in San Marcos. She was leaving her shift as server, when we first met.

When I asked, she spelled it out, Mijo — "m-i-j-o" — no apostrophe, and said it meant "my friend." Such was the embarrassing state of my nonexistent Spanish.

Later, I researched and discovered mijo to be idiom, of a sort, meaning man, mate, love, and son — derived from mi hijo, m'hijo, or m'ijo — my son. So it meant more than friend, but I took Reyna at her word then, a year and a half after arriving in the dry savanna of San Marcos, Texas from the verdant Appalachian mountains of northern Pennsylvania and I do so now.

A sort of cosmopolitan local who had lived awhile in San Antonio after coming up from Roma on the border, Reyna made herself who she was and would be. She worked at it — being Reyna — Reyna Whom She Willed. Reyna Who Would Be Reyna. She and I entered a relationship of sorts, a friendship, one staunchly limited by Reyna, one in which I found it instructive often to think of Reyna, in her various ways particular and strong, as reyna — the queen of central and south Texas.

We always met in public at first and so never spent more than a few minutes alone together, yet in the sporadic moments in which we did make one another's acquaintance, I felt I came to know her as well as people I've known for many months and years. Such time then was essentially novelistic. I see this upon reflection and sort of felt it at the time. If life is a novel-in-hiding, a novel diluted, a novel at sea, for awhile Reyna brought more to life than life itself.

---

"Mijo, do you know where I am going?"

We walked arm-in-arm through the San Marcos city park on the trail by the San Marcos River, past scattered children, picnicking families and friends. We walked beneath tall oaks and elms, by the broadleaf plants known as elephant ears on the far side, a great bank of green against woods along water.

"Mija — you're going away."

"I'm going to LA."

"I hear LA has suburbs that stretch to El Paso and Las Vegas and beyond."

"You won't find me in the suburbs."

"I won't find you at all. You won't keep in touch."

"I had to get to know a writer. In the bars we know everything. But I did not know a writer."

"Is that true?"

"I did not know you, Mijo."

"What about your family? You're leaving them?"

"People move. My own family picked up and moved from Mexico. I'm going only across the country. The rest of my family goes in all directions. Besides, I'm the bad girl. My sister is the good one. She does health care, physical therapy. My own life is wide open."

"What will you do in LA?"

"I will seduce young writers."

"You haven't even done that here."

"No? Well, try, try again. I'll get a job. Of course I'm past regular college age but people go to college all the time nowadays. I'll go to college in Cali."

"I know people who moved here from California and they like it in Texas well enough. Isn't one place as good as another, or almost? San Marcos is beautiful."

My grandfather's brother had left my homeland in northern Pennsylvania for southern California, generations ago. I had never met him and wished I had. My grandfather traveled all the way west to see him, once more, with his Russian Orthodox wife and my dad as a young boy and two other sons, one an infant — a long, rough trip into and through the desert southwest before interstate freeways were built. The young Italian-Russian-American family piled into a dentist’s office full of Navajo families in the native center of Gallup, New Mexico, where my grandfather got a painful tooth pulled. In later years, my grandfather, son of ill-fated Italian immigrants, and himself a middle school dropout, kept the brother’s name alive but not much more — my dad’s “Uncle Pete.” In such a fractured life — bullied through school for his lilting English as second language and forced into an unhappy blended family as a boy after losing his father at age 29 in 1919 from the flu pandemic — my grandfather, James Vincent, hung onto the absence of his older brother, and lamented his move away, into his old age. “Uncle Pete,” as my dad called him, never once returned to the cold, hard, mined-out Allegheny High Plateau where some of rest of the family persisted, and held modest reunions.

When I told Reyna about the residual sense of loss passed down through the decades, she replied, "It's like I said. But let’s sit and watch the people. Not every reunion on Turtle Island is easy. Or possible. Or best."

And so we watched, there on the cement retaining wall near the swimmers and tubers shooting through the flume, canoers and kayakers, about a mile down from the San Marcos Springs bubbling up beneath the diamond liquid of Spring Lake on campus, those year-round warm waters — Canocanayesatetlo — there in the middle of a second year in the Texas State MFA progam, right there with Reyna, by the lively scene of splash at the Rio Vista dam.

---

We drove south, Reyna and I, from San Marcos to another land, deep South Texas. Border Texas, border Mexico, border US, barely US — though the same could be said for much of the USA. More obvious in deep South Texas, I guess. You saw it in the hinterland architecture — small and worn outpost-like structures, flat roofs, whitewash flaked by sun and wind. The striations of poverty. Houses easy to mistake for sheds. Hot water tanks outside the walls. You felt it in the sheer geographic distance from everywhere else in America. You sensed it in the sub-tropical climate. And you felt that behind this third land lay a fourth and a fifth. And yet if you detoured into some of the leafy housing tracts of McAllen near the border, you more or less found yourself in the familiar plat of suburbs that politicians like to boast of when referring grandly to “America.”

Fast and long the drive from San Marcos south through San Antonio and then through endless brushlands toward Mexico and the South Texas border — the first time Reyna and I shared very alone together, speeding through dry land at high speed for hours upon end, mesquite wilderness — two of us encased by metal of car, tracked by forever road, dire sun burning. We rode not out west to Big Bend National Park — never did make it that far — but due south to the so-called Valley, the pancake flat river delta, past crossroad towns near which the lively late author Gloria Anzaldúa had been raised. “Don't give me your tenets and your laws. Don't give me your lukewarm gods,” Anzaldúa writes in Borderlands — La Frontera. “What I want is an accounting with all three cultures — white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face…to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.” Reyna had never read Anzaldúa, never heard of her. Not yet.

Our route as we took it ran us into McAllen a few miles north of Mexico where we stopped at a small Tex-Mex café for lunch — chalupas, chips and salsa, iced tea. Then we streaked along the border an hour west to little Roma in Starr County across the Rio Grandé from its twin city Miguel Alemán, Mexico. Reyna took me to Roma's historic section on the high bank by the little terrace, old stone and plank buildings, museum. She told me on holiday summer Sundays the opposite low bank in Miguel Alemán filled with people as children swam in the river or floated down to the international bridge pilings and jumped off. Today the grass and trees across the river sprawled empty except for a few black-and-white pigs grazing and a couple chickens ambling about. Up bank sat corrugated metal roof shacks huddled below somewhat more solid cinderblock structures near a looming unfinished perhaps never to be finished high rise stuck at about the fourth floor, cement encased metal rods jabbing air — bare rebar salute.

Reyna and I walked to a high rock outcropping past a Mexican-American border patrol agent parked in his brown sport utility vehicle and took in the grand view of river, its sharp bend into the lush foliage of the American bank. Dry, sandy, rocky up top. When we glanced back, the agent behind the wheel extended his binoculars through the open window. We walked over and accepted them. I stood on a jutting boulder to take a magnified look at the river and beyond.

"You see much activity here?" I asked the agent.

"Day and night." He told of countless drownings, shootings, concealments, crossings, captures along the river.

"Can the crossing be stopped?"

He was too polite to roll his eyes, I suppose, too controlled to laugh. Probably he had heard it all and seen nearly as much. He seemed trapped in the SUV. Trapped in control.

"From the bottom tip of this hemisphere to the top edge, people have been moving for thousands of years. They aren't going to stop for me. Or any military. This border is almost 2,000 miles long. Go ahead, put an army on it — that would be a good joke. And a navy to patrol the seas on both ends, and an air force to patrol the skies above, and some miners to find tunnels. And detectives to stop bribes and forgeries. It doesn't work but you can employ a lot of people pretending so. They cross for a job. I patrol for a job. It's something to pass time and put food on the plate. What's my job going to be otherwise? Patrolling Iraqis for oil? I'd rather patrol Mexican nationals — for cash. People say you can stop the crossing. Build a wall and put snipers on it. What people don't understand is you can't build a wall here. Too ugly. The people say, 'No'. We have a beautiful river. These cowboys and their idea of a wall — these people are the big stupid. Some of my neighbors go each day into Mexico. They get groceries. They go to the dentist, the doctor. You have a few quarters, your papers in order, you walk across, you walk back. Forget the car. You take in the beautiful river. You see sewage run into the river on the other side across from where the pipes go up to the old water tower here in Roma, you ignore it. We don't use that tower anymore. But a wall you cannot ignore. So, no wall. A wall won't work because you can't build it. You can but you can't. Even if you build the damned thing, it will come down, soon. That's my prediction. There are a million and more Mexicans of America who live from here to the Gulf, on the American side alone, many with barely one foot out of the river, and many are very proud to have one foot still on the other side too. Snipers? Put snipers on the beautiful river bank. Day and night. Infra-red scopes, whatever. Okay, great, but one problem. This river is long. You would need hundreds, thousands in Starr County alone. Can the crossing be stopped? Yes, of course. Get jobs in Mexico. Or create what they call universal minimum income. You want to have the Iraq War on the Rio Bravo? — put in a wall and snipers. You want to stop the crossing? — monetize Mexico. You want to have Israel and Palestine clubbing each other here on my beautiful river? I don't think the people would go for it. If you want to try, okay, maybe you can have it. Let the killing begin. People are dying anyway, right? The crossing will continue. But the stupid idiots of the John Wayne fantasy are like little boys playing. When they grow up they will need to choose — put in a war or put in jobs. But you know, I don't think the people here will ever give them any choice. The river is the river. Maybe if the cowboys would come here to live, they would know this. Maybe they would even do something worthwhile and help make more in Mexico and fix the plumbing — build it up. And on this side too. It's more important to stop the cowboys than the migrants — because the cowboys are like little boys playing with guns and they are not in their five senses. Of course you hear nothing from me. This is the game. This country, that country, no country is in its five senses but we the people must be. Yes and Sí. You need to be."

On the vantage rock, Reyna lowered the binoculars. Four young men who appeared on the other side inflated a yellow boat, climbed in and pushed out of the shallows to cross from Mexico in full sight of the patrol. It took them at least as long to get unstuck from the Mexican shallows as it took to cross the narrow river.

The agent made a call. "He's crossing now. Three, this time." Then he told me, "This guy. We don't know who he is. The police on the other side say they don't know either."

"For real?"

"That's what they say."

We watched the young men paddle across.

"And that's what you say."

"That's what is said."

"Okay."

"I just work here."

"Sí."

The crossers seemed totally oblivious to Reyna, the agent, myself.

"Of course they see us," I pointed out.

"And we see them."

"So now what?"

"I don't expect their police to show, okay? Don't you think boating should be legal?"

"But they're crossing."

"How do you know? It's a good day to fish."

"And you need to arrest them? I hope you don't."

"Only if they come to the US. Coming to America. Romantic. Land of opportunity."

The yellow boat met the grassy shore and three of the men climbed out. Then they helped push the raft back into the river so the ferryman could return.

"Well, they just arrived."

"No. It's an optical illusion." He laughed.

Reyna walked back with the binoculars and held them out to the agent. "You need these?"

He set them on the dash. He said to Reyna, "Your man wonders why I don't jump out and apprehend these guys. Do you know?" He looked at her closely.

"I'm from Roma," she said.

"I thought you might be." He added, "Or hereabouts."

"I mean, I was for awhile."

"Sometimes that's all it takes."

Felt like I was at a kind of frontier church observing an exchange of pleasantries, however pointed, after a service. Or before.

"It's an island," Reyna told me. She nodded at the land to which the men had been delivered. "It's not America."

"I have no jurisdiction,” said the agent.

"It's an optical illusion.”

"That's what I told him."

"The bank is so steep," said Reyna, "and the bend in the river is sharp enough that you can't see the water on the American side flowing around the island. So it looks like it's part of America but it's not. They'll wait till dark then find a way up. They'll jump in the river and float downstream if they have to. Or if the patrol goes away they'll come up the park steps under full sun today. Away from water's edge, they're like anyone else. Not like you, Mijo. So it's simple, but that's the harder way to do it. If you've got money for papers you just drop your change and walk across the bridge and stay as long as you like. Though I feel like things are going to change soon. For now it's almost like the real border is fifty miles north of here, checkpoints on all the roads. Find work on the ranches, or in the fields, or clerking a gas station — and if you don't get fingered by someone who wants your job, and if there's no official raid, you stay as long as you've got work, or as long as you like, as long as you can."

"And that's how it is?"

"Every spot on the border has its own ways," said the agent.

"Isn't it true," said Reyna, "about these little gas stations on the road to the Valley?"

"What truth would that be?"

"Aren't they fronts for laundering, you know, to make their money from marijuana look legal? Is it true that the gas tankers drive up and deliver no gas but make a receipt as if they had and the driver pockets some money and then goes and delivers gas he doesn't record in the cities of the Valley and pockets some of that money too?"

"You want to drive a tanker?"

"Is that how it works?"

"You want to be a reporter? Maybe you need a different source."

"She's going west," I said. "To LA. The city, not the suburbs."

"I'm taking my stories with me," said Reyna

"Details can be a tricky thing, okay?" said the agent. "Some people use those gas stations. I buy gas from all those places. That's what I'm saying. And people pay in cash a lot around here, you know. And why not? It's the economy. Maybe you've seen what they write, these articles about our little land here — not so long ago one out of every two people in Starr County, they were involved in the drug trade — marijuana and peyote, mainly. Who knows, but if you want to talk about the economics of the thing, I can tell you it was more than one out of two. That kind of economy touches everybody. At least it used to. Maybe less so now with things building up. Now there are more options. For some."

Reyna and I drove around the area. I asked her about the many half-built cinderblock houses.

"Block houses? Some people make their money on the Mexican side, or off the border, as best they can. Build over here when they have cash. Then make their move. Or someone in the family does. Or they sell it. Maybe they don't pay taxes until the house is finished. I don't know."

I hadn't realized there were really two borders — the river, and a line a few dozen miles north on every road that usually had a staffed checkpoint. After paying for the required papers of origin, for about fifty cents more, you could walk or drive over to the US and go where you pleased and who would check? Who could check? Who should check? You had to stay within a few dozen miles of the border, but about ten miles or so north there was little or nothing most places anyway, not even many cows — some oil and natural gas wells, sunflower fields — scrub mesquite pasture mainly, endlessly. Even most of the citrus groves and field crops, the cabbages, melons, onions, dense sugar cane — in which immigrants often hid and were occasionally accidentally killed by regular burn-offs — sprawled within a few miles of the river, a dozen miles at most. Here in deep South Texas, off the coast, most human habitation was pushed down near or on the river. Once across, immigrants blended in and moved around or settled down. It seemed to make for a lively area, amid the mighty struggles.

I would come to learn that Starr County was one of the most impoverished in America, as it has been on average over the decades as a measure of per capita income (less than 30 percent of the national average). Starr County's child poverty rate — over 60 percent. Total poverty — over 50 percent. The unemployment rate — about one-third officially and perhaps higher than 60 percent unofficially depending on the season, due to migrant labor. All along the border many people struggled to build the most basic block houses, feed children and otherwise survive. Reyna showed me around. The dirt road colonias reminded me of some primitive settlements and outposts in Appalachia even then.

We stayed that night with an old friend of Reyna's in Garceno, a crossroads east of Roma and Los Saenz, west of Rio Grande City. Reyna and Norma stayed up half the night, going from beer to herb tea, talking Spanish. The next day, Reyna and I set out to drive to no water for no romantic view. It wasn't romance we shared, so much as adventure of a sort, maybe a test, and something more. We did not take the short drive west to Falcon Dam Lake on the river. We did not drive all the way east to South Padre Island, the shore and lagoons. We did not even walk across the bridge into Miguel Alemán. Reyna had wanted to see Roma one last time — the town in which Larry McMurtry set the ending of All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, a moving book, an earworm of a novel for a young man — it can be. For some reason that I've since forgotten, in the closing pages, the young writer narrator jumps into the river behind the gas station on the west end of town and tries to drown his most recent novel manuscript. Takes him awhile — eventually he succeeds. Evidently Reyna had wanted to see Roma and the river for less dramatic reasons. Or maybe she had wanted to visit Norma, and that was all.

---

"She goes by Reyna," I told the border patrol agent by the bluff on the river, before we left him alone to his curious job.

Reyna said, "He goes by Mike. Mike Penne."

The agent examined me. "I'm Miguel."

"Like the city." I nodded across the Rio Grande.

"Like Mike. Like El Presidente Miguel Alemán Valdés. It's true the city was named after him. They say he industrialized the country. You can see for yourself."

We gazed at the rebar of the unfinished high rise poking sky. The building rose very near the end of the concrete international bridge, which ran alongside and above a rusted and narrow, barricaded old metal suspension bridge — a faded Welcome to Miguel Alemán inscription barely legible on concrete.

"How long has it been like that?"

"Years on top of years. They say it used to be all one city. A city a river washed through. And a war. You haven't been to Roma if you haven't been to Miguel Alemán. Roma is growing fast in its way but the city is still over there. That's what I say. They have the big buildings and actual city blocks. And the best restaurants — you know, to me, and a lot of others. But she won't take you there. Will she?"

I glanced at Reyna, and the phrase "cool customer" came to mind. I felt uneasy in face of the agent.

---

Colonias. Wildlife parks on the Rio Grande. Texas rural legal aid in Weslaco. South Padre Island. Shrimp boats. Shipping wharves, freight cranes. Border patrol. Water stations. Spanish radio. Ruby Red and Rio Star Grapefruit. Orange orchards. Backyard sweet lemon and lime trees. Twenty foot spindly-spoke TV antennas, rising from houses little longer than the antennas are tall, to pick up stations in Mexico. Sugar cane fields — horrific death traps during burn-offs. The dammed and the beautiful and the often water-starved river.

Pollution from maquilas on both sides and the resultant deformities. Working class trailer parks of many "snowbirds" come down to winter or retire or hide from the Midwest and all places north. All-day polka fests. Mariachis. International bus stations. Taquerias. A grotto. Mexican bakeries. A big new HEB, the major Texas chain grocery. A couple bookstores. A birthing center founded by nuns next to a goat pasture where birds sit on the goats' heads and backs pecking bugs from fur.

Vast ranches with internal grids of sand-packed roads through prickly pear cactus and scraggly mesquite trees that scarcely cast their own shade. Long flat fields of buffle grass fenced off from mesquite pasture. Small towns, a few old-time southern farms, an aloe plantation, the one main freeway shooting cars and trucks nonstop east and west near the border, 24/7.

Much poverty, some wealth. Elementary schools burning down, for the insurance money, it is said — the way to quickly fund badly needed bigger school buildings — maybe the only way. Resourceful people and communities.

Fields of produce everywhere — ground fruits, vegetables, all variety of leaf crops. Irrigation canals and drainage ditches, herons. Cactus. Green leathery nubs of peyote in pastures. World famous birding parks. So many birds of incredible color flitting from trees and bushes. Palms. Guavas. Lagoons. Alligators, ocelots, javelinas, chachalacas. Historic architecture in some cities, perhaps most visible in Brownsville and Weslaco, Rio Grande City, and Roma.

One day Reyna walked us through the shopping district of what little was left of old downtown McAllen, where I bought an album of classic corridos in a cramped if abundantly stocked music store. Outside on the busy street half a dozen miles north of the border you could almost wonder what country you were in. I asked Reyna, "Have we stepped into Mexico?"

"You haven't seen anything," she said.

Reyna never crossed the border that week, though everyone else seemed to, or about to. Constant traffic both ways.

Finally I did — crossing at Roma in the skin-prickling bite of a December sun of the sort you don't get in any month where I was raised. I walked through half a dozen blocks of narrow streets between two to four story buildings in Miguel Aléman, then came to the city playground and plaza, with its miniscule shed library, smaller than the trailer library in Roma. The playground with no soft bed of pebbles or wood chips was lined with flat stone and cement beneath swings and a metal climbing apparatus. I bought a cup of diced fresh fruit at a stand across from the plaza, diagonal from a corner ice cream store, while half a dozen apparently strong young men — determined, alert, knowing — in their twenties and thirties tried to sell umbrellas to motorists and passersby at the main intersection. A hard sell in the desert, it seemed, even to use as shield against the champion sun.

No sign of tourists or tourism. Much more of a city and a city feel than little Roma. A greater sense of poverty too than its kin city across the river, or in some parts of its kin city, which was saying something given some of the absolutely struggling neighborhoods of Roma that Reyna showed me.

"Growing up I would go over every once in awhile, before 9-11, before they tightened the crossing," Reyna told me after I passed inspection coming back to the US. "Some of my friends went to the clubs" — of which I had seen no sign. "You can drink there young. Anyhow, it's more like a town in interior Mexico than one of the border."

If I had wanted to I could have bought liquor and a few other items at cut-rate in the duty-free shop in Roma, so long as I carried it halfway across the international bridge before returning through customs. I asked Reyna about the umbrellas being sold across the border. She said they were for the sun as much as anything, that if you had to walk a long distance in the sun, an umbrella helped. I wondered if there was a kind of umbrella you could buy to shield you from all life. I doubted it, but maybe I was missing something — probably it’s just money, a lot of it, lacking a sane social system.

Most every night that week, we drove to the Gulf of Mexico and parked our car on the vast beach of South Padre Island that stretched north to the even more vast wildlife refuge. Hunched in seats, we slept fitfully among RVs widely scattered, cars, trucks parked on seemingly endless sand where it was hard packed. I was surprised to find this part of Texas to be open range, still. You could not freely drive on the sand of the ocean shores of the east coast — at least not that I knew.

Good weather, except for a couple nights — once when too cold to sleep even side by side. We rearranged ourselves until Reyna slept directly, painfully, half on top of me — I don't recommend it. We bought a cheap blanket at a beach store that got us through. We made love on that blanket in and among the dunes at night. Almost as silent as the sand, we were. The wind and the water and the all-gathering grip of the shore seemed to wipe out our every embrace. In the morning, the Gulf cleansed.

Another night sleeping in the car, too hot, we woke half suffocating, condensed water beading and dripping off the light cover, trickling down windows and inside the windshield. We dropped the windows and were attacked by mosquitoes, so we swam in the dark gulf to cool down and to preserve ourselves. Later, we slept half wet in stifling car, awkward and free, like drift — adrift, sea drift.

Reyna remembered a time living in Roma asleep in the morning when she heard an incredible commotion outside the flimsy construction of her place — a roar of many young people, as it turned out. Exhausted from a late night of waittressing in McAllen and the long drive back to Roma, she stumbled as if still in dream to the window and peered through blinds and saw that the entire elementary school that she lived nearby had emptied and all the students and teachers marched and filled the road, the children chanting and yelling, screaming, "Say No To Drugs! Say No To Drugs! Say No To Drugs!" carrying bright placards and wearing anti-drug ribbons.

"My head was exploding and these kids were hollering — crazily — so I thought about going outside with a beer and cigarette to lean over the fence and blow smoke and raise the cigarette and join in the chant — you know, 'Say No To Drugs! Say Yes To Sleep!' and swallow beer. I didn't have anything like that in the house anyway so all I did was get dressed and go out on the stoop. Then I saw my neighbor Javier in his backyard cleaning around his grill, so I went over and said, 'Javi, I need to borrow some cigarettes and a six pack so I can go teach these kids about drugs.' Javi said, 'It's my father who smokes, you know, and he has done so every day of his life for the past fifty years. He told our neighbor once, "I've been fifty years smoking," and our neighbor shrugged and said, "It would be a sin to quit now." But he's not popular, you know, for smoking and I don't smoke. Just because my father beat the odds doesn't mean I would. Plus, he coughs. And the hospital knows him.' Javi stared at the march of children hollering by. He shook his head sadly. 'You can't teach them anymore. The young ones. My daughter, she wouldn't eat any fish for breakfast this morning. She said she didn't have time, and what does she know about time? Not having time is traveling across the country and picking strawberries for twelve hours a day, or more, and trying to tend to the little ones too somewhere in the shade, and finishing that season and packing along to the next. Wisconsin, Washington State, Colorado. 'No time,' she says, and I tell her that's what we work the fields for, so you won't have to, so you will have the time. But no.' 'Maybe she just doesn't like fish,' I said, 'for breakfast.' Javi looked at me like I was one of the young ones who could not be taught anymore. She probably does like fish for breakfast. I wouldn't mind it myself — grilled up just so, smoked outdoors. Better than a breakfast taco, especially if it's one of those big flour tortilla stick-in-the-throat kinds, tasty as that might be, and way better than a bowl of milk and puffed nothings. So I said he was probably right and she probably liked fish but other things were pushing on her. Anyway — I never did get around to telling the students about all the lethal legal drugs they can easily buy — and do — at the store. It's way more than alcohol and tobacco. There's a diabetes epidemic around here. Sugar and white flour. And corn syrup — that stuff ought to be banned. It rips you. Who can't see the double standard?”

“People see it,” I agreed, “except when the propaganda is drilled into you deep. Or when your job depends on passing along the propaganda. Even then, I think many people know what's real and what's a double standard."

Studies found that the DARE programs and the "Just Say No To Drugs" campaigns and advertisements actually tended to increase drug use, or have no effect whatsoever — much to the surprise of educators and to the alcohol and tobacco companies, the big drug killers, the protected and subsidized killers who provided funding for the anti-drug programs, the other drugs. If not for progressive activist groups, Partnership for a Drug Free America would still be funded by the alcohol and tobacco industries. Meanwhile, about three dozen times as many people in the US continue to die of alcohol and tobacco each year as die from all illegal drugs combined. I mentioned the stats and the results of these studies to Reyna.

"There it is," she said. "So the campaigns raise awareness that smoking a joint is not so uncommon — people do it. He might be doing it, she might be doing it, a lot of people must be doing it, the campaigns make you think. And then it's not a big step to wondering — 'I might do it too' and 'What's the big deal if so many people are doing it? Most everyone looks okay to me.' Not that it's healthy."

"They've been trying to retool the campaign ever since."

"I wish they would've retooled it down some other street. I had no clue what was going on at first — a plane crash, a tornado, some sort of invasion. The next year, they were back doing the same thing, raucous screaming. God I wanted to go out and lean over that damn fence and tell them the big truth. Maybe they would have gathered around and jeered at me. That would have been good for a laugh, all these six and eight year olds. Give them something to talk about anyway. I don't want to set a bad example but maybe it would give them something to think on. I could have thrown white bread and flour tortillas and sugar and cooking oil and soda pop into the road and lectured about those drugs. Probably I should have — set up a legal drug stand, with informational brochures containing the big-time death and deformation statistics and real samples of the main drugs. But I tried to find the sense in what the anti-illegal druggers were doing. The teachers, many of them as young as me or younger, even they did not look like they were herding sheep down the road so much as being swept along themselves by some obnoxious program that busted up my dreams. Where the Hell are you, America, with all your riches and oh so noble ideals and all your talk? And what are you doing for real? When are you going to take your boots off the necks of Mexicans? And Mexican-Americans. And off the whole world and everyone. You're a migrant too, mijo,” Reyna told me. “Even with your anglo face and bloodless skin. We're all on the move."

Am I though? Or is it all a Texas border land? The first and third world, so-called, side-by-side, a 2,000 mile line. I've read that the US and Mexico are the only first and third world countries to share a border. I find that hard to believe. The first and third world come together in many ways, throughout the US and beyond. Take Appalachia. Even in some of the all-Anglo sections, there's a real mix of first and third world.

"I'm going to LA,” said Reyna. “A shift in place doesn't mean a shift in position. Not always. And if you think about the hemisphere, I was Mexican and still am, I guess, but what does it mean? I'm indigenous-plus — in my case. I'm from Asia and Europe too because people are always getting into other people all over the world. Are Americans really American? The United States of America is the most misnamed country in the world. It doesn't begin to cover the Americas. And don't forget all the genocidal freaks and zealots and slavers who settled the Americas from the caves of Europe and those violent gothic cities full of clubs and daggers and guns and Bibles. Settled? Invaded, is more like it. And not hardly out of power today. Some people survive that. We live where we like, where we can, and when. We always have. If you think about it. You should talk to my father. He knows to talk to people he can trust but he would talk to you if I said okay. He likes to tell people he is from Aztlán, from the mountains beyond the mountains, beyond Monterrey. And he laughs. Which mountains are those? The ones of Durango, Colorado way north? The San Juan Mountains from where the Rio Grande, the Rio Bravo begins? Or the mountains of northern Mexico, not far from Monterrey, where they say is the home of the seven tribes. He likes to say that he is of the seven tribes — that we all are. Which tribe of the seven? 'It's a big family,' he says. 'All tribes.' His pride knows not the bounds of even the continent, I think. What does 'tribe' mean? Extended family, basically. And some people even say the homeland of the seven tribes, from the seven caves, is Utah or the Four Corners region, the land of the Ancestral Puebloans. No matter where Aztlán is, it remains true that 'We did not cross the border, the border crossed us.' You see, my father is like me because I like him say that my people are from Asia and Europe also. And of course before that, Africa. The whole earth. He says we cannot go South without going East to the West and West to the East. So I say to him, 'Mi papi, is this why you had no choice but to go North with your life?' He says, 'And for the cable.' He laughs because we never had cable TV, but his brother my uncle can afford it. I watched it there. My father went North to go home and he knows I am going to Los Angeles now. He has given me his blessing by telling me I need no blessing, and anyway he tells me I can return. And start again."

During that week along the border, Reyna and I took a few children she knew from a colonia to a park — two young boys and their older sister, a sixteen year old with sixteen fillings in her teeth, Reyna told me. Elisa showed off her strength by muscling herself across long horizontal ladder bars, a feat that would have taxed many of the young fathers at the playground and ballfield, I assumed, myself as well. A proud teen, wary, independent, her own person, Elisa thought of her two young brothers, guarded them, attentive to when they wished to swing or run or needed a drink. The boys raced me across the field, from bleachers to fence and back, then repeatedly over and around a wooden obstacle course. Elisa's watchful eye helped slow me down when I raced too fast or rushed them too quick up the plank wall and rope climb.

Finally, in the colonia again, the older boy, against the younger one's wishes and understanding, at least at first, tried to give me the smudged baseball he had found at the park, if I would promise to come back, but I couldn't promise and after a brief explanation and against his will had to refuse the ball, with apology.

An early Spanish explorer-slash-conquistador, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, “more humane than most,” shipwrecked in the 1500s, lived among the Texas coastal indigenous and wrote that mothers nursed their children until the age of 12 — otherwise the scant availability of food might stunt or kill them. Upon the edge of this land now stood towering South Padre Island hotels and condominiums near harsh and fatal conditions for many. The children Reyna and I had taken to the playground and park lived in a colonia in a rotting trailer not much bigger than the broken down van parked alongside it that Elisa seemed to use as a refuge. The mother lay dying of cancer in a corner bed, the father, lacking work, fought despair — scarcely enough shoes to go around, some without shoelaces, virtually no food — peanut butter and tortillas on a broken stand — this is in a country, and world, where unspeakable criminal wealth is devoted to military conquest and economic exploitation, which is not news to many people, and yet such conditions and forces are allowed to stand.

All of life does not need to make sense, I know, let alone this week with Reyna in the borderlands. And yet, what was so difficult to understand?

We live as if civilized — it is said, especially by the officials who rule — but we live amid the barbarous — as the barbarous — amid the too-often too-wretched too-ecstatic conditions of life, in a civilization, so-called, of people and peoples yearning to be more than they can often easily be. How to go — and go through? How to live the real story of the world, our stories — ancient and angry, novel and loving?

I suppose it was too much to expect Reyna to reveal the full and universal meanings of life in central and south Texas at that time, or any time, to a transplant from northern Pennsylvania, or to anyone, including to herself. I was not up to the code-cracking task either, not all of a sudden, I knew, not moment by moment. So we could only move.