The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  Nearly all of this history is invisible—buried, paved over, or fenced off.

  Grizzly bear still roamed Southern California when the Arguello Adobe, the Mexican-California ranch house that anchored the original Rancho Tijuana, was erected on a small rise overlooking the bay. Assembled of handmade bricks, whitewashed, and laced with bougainvillea, the compound was the only structure between the Spanish presidio at San Diego and the frontier city that would rise to the south. It was once attacked by Indians—saved only with a concession of beef—and served the Arguello descendants from the Mission Period through the gold rush and California statehood. During World War II American soldiers commandeered it for a lookout. But then, in 1951, a year after the last Arguello descendant died, the historic casa was bulldozed during construction of the I-5 freeway. The native Kumeyaay village marked at the south end of San Diego Bay by Don Juan Pantoja’s 1782 map is now the province of third-rate strip malls cornered by discount gas stations. Charles Howard’s sprawling thoroughbred ranch, where Seabiscuit trained, is now freeway-adjacent and obscured by subdivisions of asphalt-roofed track homes. Even the eight-ton marble obelisk—inscribed in both Spanish and English and, as Bartlett noted, visible by land and sea—has been permanently gated into Mexico by Homeland Security’s eighteen-foot-tall steel fence. In the early 1900s, the monument drew as many as one hundred thousand visitors a year. Now, you can touch the American monument only by traveling to Mexico.

  In crime writer Joseph Wambaugh’s narrative nonfiction account, Lines and Shadows, the border canyons are given menacing characters. The book profiled a real team of San Diego police officers who dressed as poor campesinos and cased the boundary for criminals. Their aim was to capture a gang of bandits that preyed on migrants when they were at their most vulnerable, just as they crossed. The true tale highlights a unique period in border enforcement. In the early 1980s, the Border Patrol was a fraction of its current size. Undocumented migration was yet to become a partisan political issue, and the boundary was porous. This maverick SDPD squad may have been the last of a breed as well. Some of them were Vietnam vets, many of them Latinos. They filled in for a Border Patrol agency prohibited from working the boundary at night. Much of the action took place in a basin Wambaugh called Deadman’s Canyon. In one scene, the undercover officers are beset by a covey of bandits. The wily campesinos pull their guns. “Suddenly [another] group of thugs poured out of the shacks on the hillside, heaving rocks.” It dawns on the cops that they are outnumbered. Then, in this canyon that serves as a natural amphitheater, something odd happens. The regular people of the Mexican neighborhood adjacent to the fence come out of their own shanties in droves. They howl at the rock throwers. They begin to march toward the thugs, who quickly melt back into the barrio night. As the officers cuff their criminals on the American side, the regular people of the shanties cheer the officers. They applaud. “There were lots of weird things happening in these canyons,” Wambaugh writes, “but this was one of the weirdest.”

  Wambaugh’s Deadman’s Canyon is sometimes referred to with the equally ominous name Death Canyon. Both are just lazy misinterpretations of the Spanish, Arroyo del Matadero, or Slaughterhouse Canyon. This wasn’t the setting of a Quentin Tarantino movie either, just the site of an everyday butchery on the fringe of the city. As Matadero enters the United States, its name changes to Smuggler’s Gulch, and this moniker holds up to history. Cattle rustlers, goat herders, gunrunners, Mexican revolutionaries, bootleggers, traders of highly taxed lace undergarments—they all made use of the canyon. The problem started in the 1880s, when the United States initiated customs duties and prohibitions a couple of miles away, at the port of entry in San Ysidro. In a wide-open country, this tax thing just would not fly among locals and traders accustomed to crossing freely. Mostly ranchers used the canyon. Then smugglers came along, and maybe, at first, the ranchers and smugglers were the same people.

  The drug trade, Iaon Grillo pointed out in his book El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, was kick-started by a Chinese community suspended in Tijuana by the United States Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For nearly three decades Chinese laborers had been immigrating to North America to work in mines and build railroads. They brought opium poppies and introduced the plant to the Sierra Madre. As California’s gold rush and railroad building came to an end, US legislators shut the door on Chinese immigrants. By then trade routes from the Sierra Madre through Ensenada and Tijuana to the opium dens of Los Angeles and San Francisco were already well greased. The narcotics passed through Smuggler’s Gulch with the goats and cows. During Prohibition, smugglers traced the same routes with beer, whiskey, and tequila.

  Nearby is Russian Hill. It is true that eighteenth-century Russian trappers made it down this far about the time they’d colonized parts of Northern California (San Francisco’s Russian Hill is named after a cemetery established by early traders). But this hill earned its handle through a type of labyrinthine mythology peculiar to border towns. The highland belonged to a ranch owned by a Señor Soler. At one point Soler was a regional player in the Mexican Communist Party. The ideology was popular with Mexican thinkers and artists, and arguably, didn’t carry the same stigma that communism did in the US. Soler was ambitious in his ideals. At one point he built a bullring and a theater on his hill in order to attract people to a neighborhood he intended to base on socialist principles. Much later, at some point in the 1980s, a blocky, multistory building was erected on the edge of Soler’s growing barrio. Residents set up so many large antennas and satellite dishes on the roof that its position lording over the American valley became noticed. Over time, Tijuanenses associated Señor Soler with communism, communists with Cold War Russia, and the USSR with spies. Clearly, the building topped with CB antennas and satellite dishes at the precipice of the United States just had to be teeming with communist spies, and thus its name: Russian Hill.

  The naming of Bunker Hill actually was a consequence of geopolitics. Cement bunkers, something like the string of batteries along the coast of France, were dug into the mesa during World War II. They’re still there. Somewhere offshore rests a sunken submarine. Residents like to think it’s a Japanese sub wounded by the guns of Bunker Hill. There’s a kind of dark glee in the idea that the enemy had been so close. But more likely, the sub is an obsolete American vessel junked and sunk by our own navy out of boring expediency.

  The submarine is invisible, but scars of war preparation lie all over the dirt. The desert has reclaimed an important landing strip, evidenced only by a stretch of relatively level ground. Historian Charles W. Hughes wrote that early unmanned aircraft, or “drones,” were tested in the valley and used this strip. In fact, during World War I, a boy stepped out of his ranch door on the way to milk his heifers just as an out-of-control drone dropped from the sky and decimated the barn.

  There’s a small basin clogged with bamboo thickets that is popular with illegal crossers. It was named after Tijuana’s first health food restaurant, Yogurt Canyon. The namesake eatery is still open just on the Mexican side, where the canyon is called Sauces, or Willows. A small, flat-topped mesa next to it is striated in a white residue. The thick layer of chalk looks like a stark geologic phenomenon, but it was actually created from nine thousand years of the Kumeyaay people’s clam harvests. They scooped and ate the clam meat, and dropped the shells at their feet. Imagine eating the same thing in the same place for nine thousand years. I imagined consuming nine thousand years’ worth of hot dogs—the mound of wrappers rising underfoot year after year, into a mountain. I could look down and see my great-great-great grandfather’s wrappers. I could see that he preferred ketchup and pickle relish. There’s a story in the waste. But this mound of our ancestors’ wrappings, the layers from which we could glean information, was imminently due to be paved over by Homeland Security’s new road.

  McCue pointed out that the National Guard had also been deployed to the boundary. Their first mission here was called Operation Jump Start. The h
igh ground was key to success, and Guard troops took command of various hillocks, erecting what looked like party tents. The high ground was crucial because they weren’t permitted to engage in immigration matters, only to observe and report what they saw. Each soldier was either coming from or going to Afghanistan or Iraq—one could imagine this landscape as just another exotic desert oddity.

  “There was one group of soldiers who took a position on Spooner’s Mesa and sat in the blowing wind day in and day out,” McCue said. The smell of street food wafted across the border wall. “Perros calientes,” street vendors called. “Carne asada!” Banda music was caught in the desert drafts. “They took in a dog that had wandered over from Tijuana—as if it had been a meek stray, and not an opportunist,” McCue added. “Those guys had no idea where in the world they were.”

  The migrant woman I imagined—the one astride the Free Spirit—I mentally placed her at various locations in the terrain. This was the kind of place a competitive mountain biker might take on for sport. I thought of the elegant ten-speed. It was a tough image to jibe. The 1974 model had been advertised in a folksy TV commercial; the background song went: “Hear the wind blowing, see the grass growing. Hear the sounds of love and laughter through the day, now you’re on your way. When you have a Free Spirit . . . you’ll always have somewhere to go.”

  Confronted with the border industrial complex—the fences, the roads, the towers mounted with cameras, the jeeps and trucks and the constant buzz of agents patrolling on quad motorcycles—I just couldn’t imagine my migrant going anywhere at all on the Free Spirit.

  5

  Roberto came from a small ranch in the state of Sinaloa, a mountainous and arid region that runs up against the azure Sea of Cortez. In 1979, Sinaloa wasn’t the powerhouse of narcotics trafficking that it is today. The Sierra were a badlands so lost in time that the last Apache raiders hid out among its forests and heights even as Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic by plane, the Jazz Age swept America, and Gandhi led his Salt March for independence. Roberto’s family’s ranch was an isolated spread two hours by donkey from the closest school. But he grew up knowing there was another life out there. One of his father’s brothers, he understood through stories, was a worldly man of some esteem who had lived in Tijuana for many years. And the moment Roberto, the eldest of six siblings, had outgrown his dusty little rancho, he found himself walking the streets of a central neighborhood called Cinco y Diez until he found his uncle’s ramshackle house. It was not the urban palace he’d imagined, but Roberto didn’t care. He hadn’t hitchhiked and bused to Tijuana to reunite with the uncle. “I wanted to cross to el otro lado,” Roberto said. “Well, that was my plan.”

  The uncle was an old bachelor who lived with several yappy little dogs. He worked as a bartender in one of the seediest bars in a city built on them. His bald head, bulbous eyes, and small features caused many people to mark the similarity between the uncle and his perritos. He often said it was a lucky thing the resemblance didn’t earn him a nickname. In Tijuana nicknames were inspired by physical traits, defects, and flaws. A guy called Chango (Monkey) likely boasted a protruding jaw and big ears; El Calaca (the Skeleton) would be bony; El Sombra (the Shadow) might be a mute. There was Feo (Ugly), and Moco (Booger). There was even a kid born with his right leg slightly shorter than his left; the discrepancy forced a side-to-side hobble, and inspired the nickname El Pingüino (the Penguin). Roberto’s uncle was called, for reasons lost to memory, El Barbero (the Barber).

  As a barkeeper in the red-light district of the Zona Norte, the Barber had a lot of contacts. His establishment was frequented by prostitutes, pimps, a sprinkling of sailors, slumming politicians, musicians, artists, jai alai players, bullfighters, jockeys, and a new kind of creature that had come into being right there in the borderlands—el coyote.

  Although celebrated in the street corridos as a wily and mythic character, part whiskey runner and part Robin Hood, el coyote had a fairly specific and recent birth date that dipped, at that point, just a generation deep. After the binational Bracero Program—a guest worker agreement struck between the United States and Mexico to fill agricultural vacancies caused by World War II—was ended in 1964, thousands of Mexican workers were repatriated to Mexico on railways, and spilled out onto the streets of windblown border towns like Tijuana, Mexicali, and Juarez.

  Within a growing season, a small-time hustle in the guiding of these workers back into the United States was initiated—some say right there in Tijuana. This was a mom-and-pop business, and client recommendations were key. The men and women who filled these positions often had family on both sides and were culturally bilingual. A savvy borderlands operator might sell untaxed cartons of cigarettes from the trunk of a car parked in a Pomona berry field one day, and cross the people who worked in that field the next. Importantly, this first generation of entrepreneurs saw themselves as compassionate hosts. God delivered the migrants to their care and it was their duty to protect them. Over time, their business was compared to that of travel agents, as there were options and classes of tickets to consider. And eventually these transnational travel agents were hung with an umbrella moniker: el coyote.

  By the time Roberto sat for his first beer in the uncle’s bar, the business of crossing Mexicans without documentation into the United States had grown into an industry with agreed-upon codes of conduct and a hierarchy of diverse yet compartmentalized job descriptions. El coyote was no longer a lone operator but had become the big cheese, a businessperson who managed a workforce, handled the books, and rarely put him or herself in danger by personally setting foot in the United States. At the base of the coyote’s pyramid were any number of freelance recruiters, sometimes called enganchadores, who scoured the central bus station, the airport, the slums, the beach, and the borderline itself for potential clients. The customers were called pollos, chickens, and all of the people who worked for el coyote were generally referred to as polleros, chicken herders.

  On the ground was the head pollero. This was a manager who called the shots and explained the rules of the game to the pollos. The first being that once on the inside, the chickens were never to admit even a whiff of el coyote. In America there were no pollos and polleros; they were all job seekers, nothing more.

  In a high-ground position crouched el checador, a surveillance man who kept track of Border Patrol movements through binoculars or whatever else he deemed necessary. This person was intimate with the agents’ shift changes and lunch breaks, with the nuances of each agent’s work habits. El checador memorized drive times from hilltop to bottomland. He logged response times in every type of weather. And when conditions were right, el checador flipped the whole machine into action with a wave.

  Primarily, he was signaling a figure who idled in an obvious and open position near the fence line. This figure carried no bundle or provisions. He might wear red or a bright soccer jersey. He might be big, he might be loud, for it was el gancho’s duty to make himself known to Border Patrol. Imagine old-timey rodeo clowns—jokers who entered into the ring to protect fallen riders by distracting the agitated and surly Brahma bulls. Whatever means they saw fit to accomplish both was fair game: a challenge, a tease, a sprint. Likewise, the gancho might make a show of himself right out of the gate—leading agents away from the migrants’ route. Or he might wait as needed—if it looked like the pollos could be in danger, the gancho might act the clown, a crazy person running in circles, a security danger that required attention. His eyes rolled, he foamed at the mouth. Then he might get caught in a pickle, a pickle among jalapeños—which, owing to their green uniforms and hot tempers, was a slang term for Border Patrol.

  When the ganchos looked to be successful, then the guías, or guides, would lead their migrants into the landscape. There were canyons and valleys and ocean and beaches and marsh. There were trails, and no trails. There were culverts and ditches, farms and factories. And at the precise moment, el comunicador placed a call to el levantón, the getaway driver
who waited on the US side to meet the guías and the pollos and load up and slip off into el Norte.

  In 1979, Roberto’s uncle paid a bar patron, a known coyote, $1,800 cash—a first-class ticket—to pass his hick nephew into the United States.

  “I was crossed at Otay,” Roberto recalled. “There, you just jumped the fence, ran a little, and you were at the factories where the ride was waiting.”

  Months passed and Roberto was washing dishes in Los Angeles. He started to wonder how many times he’d washed the same dish. In his stained apron, amid the vapors and steam of the machines and the force of the industrial spray nozzle, he began to rehearse his obstacle run, the jump, the climb, the fall, the sprint, and the skip into the United States. He saw a camarada’s face every time, another migrant waiting in the pickup car who’d slapped his leg and said, “Man, that shit is like drugs. I get a high every time.”