[#] “... And the more I feel my own scars forming.”
Cyclist for Social Change, Retrospect. Phoenix, Arizona,13 September 2010.
A reporter accosts me outside of the convention center in Gómez Palacio, Durango. She wants to know if I am an adherent to the Other Campaign. “Yes,” I say. “I am.”
“But why?” she asks. “Why you? You’re not from Mexico, are you?”
“No, but the philosophy behind the Otra extends beyond Mexico. The Other Campaign is an initiative for all peoples, not just Mexicans.”
The reporter cocks her head to the side, and the features of her face are drawn to her nose, in a wince. “Pues, sí…” she trails off. Marcos exits the building, and the reporter runs after him. “Stay right here,” she shouts, “so that I can continue talking with you.”
She joins the whirling mass of reporters, photographers and autograph seekers. I return to my compañeros of the Karavana.
I’m back in Phoenix for Luis’ birthday. “El Potro”, they call him. “The Colt”. The young and rising leader, in his black hat and boots, kicking up the dirt of our outdoor dance floor. Banda blares in the background. The dark hair, dark eyes of the crowd are sweating, sweating, sweating.
An old friend introduces me to a friend of hers. The woman asks me about my project—my life—and I explain. “The border?” she asks. “What would interest you about the border? O sea, how Mexican are you?”
The day after, a visiting researcher from the Rio Grande Valley asks me the same question. “Ohhh…” she says, nodding her head. “Your project is… interesting. So, is this just some kind of adventure for you?”
At the comedor in Dateland, we hunch over our bowls of albondigas and watch a cheesy Mexican, made-for-TV movie. The protagonist is a latter-day Vicente Fernandez—big personality, big voice, straight from the campo. He belts out a corrido for his misbegotten love. Her family, of course, doesn’t approve of their relationship, and they whisk her off to Mexico City. Ten minutes later we watch as Vicente, the singing cowboy-campesino, rambles door to door in a city of thirty million, looking for his one and only.
Suburbia isn’t that much different than the campo, I think to myself. Are Vicente and I both just wandering the world, in search of a romance we will never quite find?
Where is my border?
Lauren was ejected from her car when the driver somehow lost control and veered from the road. The car flipped several times before smashing into a median, and Lauren was eviscerated under the weight of the vehicle.
I know Lauren from college, and two of my cousins went to high school with her, in Nogales. We attended her service. One cousin has also lost her best friend, Danika, in the accident. It’s been hard for her, and she’s spent a lot of time with family. I should give myself more time to grieve—some time—for a love that never quite was. But a Saturday night later, I am once again at the DeConcini port of entry.
From behind the fence, I watch as beautiful women cross into Mexico, on their way to the clubs. A group of five or six walks past, and I ogle, slack jawed. Qué guapas, I think. Oooh… I look closer, and I spot my cousins. They are all dolled up and gorgeous, and I am apparently attracted to them. Shit.
I whistle—whirp, wroop—but they know better than to look over. “Ladies!” I shout. “Cousins!”
They turn their heads. “What are you doing here?”
“You know… Food and water for people deported back to Mexico. Medical attention. Abuse documentation… Humanitarian aid stuff.”
“Oh… well…” they say. “Cool. That’s cool. We’re going out on the town. Drinks and dancing. Um… Are you going to be here for a while?”
“I’ll be here all night.”
“Okay, then we’ll catch you on the way out? Great… Well, see you later!”
At three in the morning, tipsy, they shout through the fence as they cross into the United States beyond—“yeah, cousin! Whoo hoo!” Their figures fade to laughter, then black, and the checkpoint’s florescent din fills the night.
This dead man has really fucked me up. I haven't had time to process it—seeing him, smelling him. Bouncing back and forth between my favorite chemically contaminated community of Mission and then Tucson with their No More Deaths, I haven't taken time to let this all sink in—my life, these travels, this weight. It has.
I’m going to give you something, and I don't think that I’m going to give it to anyone else. No promises.
"All I want to do is shout and sing and laugh and cry and dance, dance, dance. Dance. Dance in full-on sweat. Dance with my face buried in some woman's hair, my body pressed against hers. Dance until the throbbing music becomes my throbbing body. Boom. Boom. Boom. Dance until my legs go tired, my arms go limp, my feet burn and I sit, wasted and euphoric.
I want my body to ache, and I want to be completely, utterly depleted.
I want to dance just to remember that I'm alive.
Jesus, what a privilege. To be alive and to be healthy. To have a family and friends who are alive and healthy. Well fed. Housed. Privileged."
It's not just the dead man: it’s the sick and the lawyers who take advantage of them. It's the poor and the mother fuckers who ignore them. It’s you and me and those who actually want to do something, anything, and those who just don't care.
I'm crying in the middle of a restaurant, and the waitress keeps asking me “if everything's okay”. “¿Todo bien? ¿Todo bien?” she says. How ridiculous.
The Karavanistas descend from the mountain and desert into what locals call “the Matrix”—a sprawl of industry, traffic and the thick haze of pollution. As we mill about our few nights’ home at the house of Dr. Margill, “andamos muy tristes, todos”, an adherente says. We brought sadness to Monterrey.
I wash dishes after a meal, away from the others. Ana is slender and tall, and her small breasts peer from her shirt as she bends over the washbasin to help me. She talks with me in Spanish that I don’t understand. I try to respond and the words choke up in my throat. Ana leaves for a moment and returns with the diminutive healer, Giitanjali, four and half feet of braids and smile. “We are going to steal you,” she says. “Would you like to be stolen?” The Sup has given us specific instructions not to leave the house. “I am going to take you to a temascal,” Giitanjali says, but I don’t know what a temascal is. I leave without a word to the others.
Ana walks me to the back of Giitanjali’s clinic. “Take off your clothes here,” she says, closing the door behind her. I disrobe and exit trembling, in a towel. Giitanjali is there to greet me. She demands that I follow and leads me outside, to a cement-block sweat lodge.
“Get in and try not to think,” she says. I sit on a bench, and she bolts the door from the outside. I wipe my face dry with my forearms and lick at the salt, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Giitanjali bursts into the temascal and directs me to lie upon my stomach. She stands upon my back, the heels of her feet probing at first, and then depressing to several cracks. She drops to the floor and holds my head in her hands. She pops my neck to one side and then the other. “There,” she says. “Now it’s gone.”
Giitanjali exits and returns minutes later. She orders me out. I stand bare and smoldering in an open court. She throws a bucket of water upon me, and I draw my knee to my stomach, in a perch. She empties another bucket and then another and another and another. I straighten. She tosses me a towel.
Ana. I see Ana. “And do you feel better?” she asks.
“Yes, yes, I think I do.”
But as we make our way back to the house, I still feel the weight within me.
People warned me that I could go into a community and unknowingly tear open old wounds, exposing memories that some are trying to erase. But the more I see, the more I am disgusted with the world around me and the more I feel my own scars forming.
Bit by bit, I lose my sense of humor. At times I want to vomit. The world just isn’t as funny as it once was. It can be crippling, and this is a day-to-day affair: some days, I can hardly speak. I don’t want to speak because I know how little solace my words will bring. But I know that I have to, if not only to bring others along this story with me.
Maybe that’s the reason why I’m here: I’ve read enough garbage in the news and in books, and I hate everyone around me. I see no hope, I read no hope, and I think that humanity is destined to run itself into the ground. I have to believe that there is more our society than death and murder and chemical contaminations, and the miasma of industry and intolerance that hangs over all our heads.
Vicente gets the girl in the end, but the path isn’t so easy. Someone helps him. Anyone.
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