The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

“Work? What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking some people to Los Angeles,” he said.

  “You are a driver?” she asked.

  “No. I was hoping Martín would drive us.”

  “Los Angeles,” said Martín. “I have a slab to pour, 6:00 AM.”

  “Us?” the mother said, indicating Pablo and Javy with a finger.

  “There are others,” he said. “I brought some men over with me.”

  “Men? You are a coyote?”

  “I am doing some work.”

  “Were you followed? We don’t . . . none of us have the papers, mijo.”

  “No, no. There’s no chance.”

  Speaking for the first time, the father said, “You were expecting rich Americans, son. We’re still simple people.”

  “Everybody has to work,” Martín added. “Every day. All of us.”

  “How much money do you make in a week?” Indio asked.

  “About five hundred.”

  “Take me tonight. I’ll pay five hundred. You’ll be back in time for the slab.”

  Martín looked at the other men. The father shrugged. The middle brother said, “Go for it.” And Martín slowly nodded in agreement.

  “Okay, we’ll have to leave now.” El Indio said his good-byes to his father and brother. He told his sisters that they were still the most beautiful girls in the village, no matter how big the village. He hugged his mother again, and said, “We will be together soon, Madre. Just like you wanted.”

  They turned to leave. Indio opened the door and stepped out. Javy followed.

  Their mother said, “Martín, don’t.”

  10

  Five miles south of the border, as we traversed a broad hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, we were met by an unexpectedly beautiful panorama. A verdant olive orchard crowned the ridgeline and dipped toward the ocean for what seemed to be forever. The orchard appeared ancient, a swath of gnarled agriculture lifted from Pompeii or Constantinople. But this was midmorning in early November on the western edge of Tijuana. The North Pacific’s deep autumn blue contrasted with the tan earth and pale green acres of trees. The Coronado Islands, blocky monuments once called the “Gates of San Diego Bay,” loomed on the horizon as if viewed through a telephoto lens. The combination of the rugged islands, the expanse of ocean, and the rolling orchard completed one of the more striking rural scenes I’d glimpsed in California. It rivaled any similar parcel in Santa Barbara or Malibu. But the true reason the olive orchard came as a shock was that Oscar Romo had been navigating toward the headwaters of probably the most desperate and polluted of Tijuana’s urban slums, Los Laureles Canyon.

  Romo had wide features, a handsome sprawling smile, and a tanned, bald head. He walked like a cowboy but spoke like Ricardo Montalbán. Driving his pickup truck along a dirt road past shanties and businesses with dogs barking from their rooftops, he’d been pondering his national affiliations out loud—a complexity he continued to mull over. He was born in Mexico to a Basque father and an American mother and, while young, was sent to study in Spain. Almost by accident, he said, he found his first adult job as a United Nations diplomat in the service of Mexico. This placed him in posts all over Latin America and the Caribbean. When he finally arrived in Tijuana, he decided he’d had enough roaming and stayed. Now he lived in a rather ordinary San Diego suburb and worked for the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, a federal outfit that managed a big chunk of the American valley.

  “I have an identity problem,” he said. “In Mexico, the people call me ‘gringo.’ In the US, they call me a Mexican. In Spain, they don’t know what I am.” He shrugged, lifting his hands from the wheel.

  As soon as we passed the orchard, its green sweep could be easily dismissed as a mirage. Because we next came upon denuded land and what looked like a down-market junkyard. Then, rounding a final curve, we stopped at a dirt road that descended into Los Laureles. Immediately before and below us was a thicket of shanties. You might think of Rio’s favelas, of blue tarps, corrugated iron—a state of suspended construction. We couldn’t see the ocean anymore but looking north over the rooftops, we could see the skyscrapers of San Diego rising like crystal formations on a salt pan. Los Laureles often drew comparisons with Tijuana’s original migrant slum, Cartolandia (Cardboard Land), and, in fact, was one of the reasons cartolandia had become a generic term for such places. The construction techniques, growth patterns, dynamics, and rhythm of life were all the same. A man familiar with the canyon told me, “People move here with nothing, and as soon as they get something, they leave.” Many, however, became stuck between the gully’s sheer walls. They constructed foundations of car tires. They built shacks that clung to the crumbling hillsides. They built lives. Romo knew an elderly couple, Chinese nationals, who had traveled to Mexico with extended family. They’d intended to cross illegally into the United States. But for unknown reasons, these grandparents had been left behind. Possibly, they couldn’t swim or hike or climb. Now, speaking only Mandarin, they eked out lives in Los Laureles alongside Mexicans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans.

  This place had long compelled Romo. His first visit, in the 1970s, came as a lark. He’d read Father Juan Crespí’s journals of the 1769 Portolà expedition rather closely; this was the group that established California’s mission system. And from his reading, Romo pinpointed the party’s entry from Baja into Alta California as having gone right through Los Laureles. The party had planned to rendezvous with the oceangoing portion of the expedition at San Diego Bay, which was in clear view. At the time Romo became intrigued with the Portolà story, he worked as a junior diplomat and was charged by the UN with documenting migrant culture along the border. But at that time there weren’t yet any migrants living in the canyon. It was just too remote. Romo’s interest in the route taken by the founders of California was purely recreational. He hoped to find a conquistador helmet, maybe, or some telltale artifact. One of the ranches between central Tijuana and the ocean was owned by Señor Soler, the communist. Romo went to the Soler place and struck a deal with a ranch hand to guide him into the canyon on horseback.

  “Back then, it was beautiful,” Romo said, as we stepped out of the pickup. “I have pictures of this looking green and lush. I took the main canyon on horse, but it’s not certain the Portolà expedition came that exact way; there are many subbasins.”

  “Did you find anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, I wish,” he said with a wide grin. “No. If something was there, it would have been very difficult to find.”

  Romo’s current stake in the canyon was less romantic. He worked as a “watershed coordinator” for the American wetland that lay at the end of the drainage. Down there in the green flats, the reserve and state parks staff toiled to restore wetland habitat that had suffered years of degradation—the major cause of which was this unplanned, underdeveloped slum. Gravity set the rules. Los Laureles’s headwater is seven hundred feet above sea level. The wetlands two miles away are near zero. The residue and refuse of everything that goes on in Los Laureles eventually ends up in the United States. Juicy red tomatoes are one example. In the summer, tomato plants—along with green tomatillos and melons of all kinds—spring wild from the soil on the American side, the plants’ origin seeds having passed first through people and then through Los Laureles Canyon as sewage, and finally into the United States as runoff in the same dirty soup carrying trash and car tires.

  We stopped near the dry headwater because Romo wanted to point out a steep hillside that appeared nearly bedazzled with reflective emerald and metallic colors.

  “See the trash sliding down that hill? That’s hospital waste,” he said. “It’s huge; there are layers and layers.”

  It was composed of bandages and syringes, and bags of fluid. Romo had once placed transponders in the trash, and for over a year he followed their signals down the drainage into the United States. I noticed a skinny dog with some kind of spinal condition nearby. I asked about creatures getting into th
e biological waste.

  “Yes,” Romo said. “That too.”

  Across the canyon from the medical dump, we could see the back of a maquiladora, a factory that supplied goods to the United States under NAFTA’s free trade agreements. Here, manufacturing waste spilled down the hill as if the factory were a giant truck that had simply backed up to the canyon and thrown the tailgate down. At a site below the dumps, developers had scraped the topsoil off a few acres of hillside and advertised the sale of lots. This caused a number of problems for Romo. Primarily, all of that topsoil had been tossed into the streambed, and would clog the fragile American estuary as soon as the winter rains arrived. The silt from another such site destroyed twenty acres of wetland in a single night. Secondly, those developers didn’t own the land. They provided a nice-looking but fake paper deed, and because of a loophole that pitted the federal government against the city, nothing could be done to stop them.

  A pragmatic man, Romo was concerned about the lack of sewer and power infrastructure at the site. The settlement of Laureles had begun, coincidentally, with the installation of a pump station at the bottom of the canyon. The men who built the pump station assembled homes at the work site and stayed, but did not develop their own infrastructure. The slum has been creeping up the canyon ever since. In an effort to reduce untreated sewage flow into the United States, Romo approached the Mexican government to develop a plan. The government agreed to install a sewage system at a cost of $1,000 to each household. That cost was presented as a loan to the families, which no one believed would be repaid. It was difficult work for Romo, and considering all of the unpaid loans, it was a feat he didn’t think he could repeat. So when Romo noticed the new development, he walked into their little real estate shack and said he had some questions about the lots. For example, where would the water, sewer, and electricity come from?

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said the salesman. “The old residents, they had the same problems farther down in the canyon. Then this crazy gringo showed up, and brought sewer to all of the houses. It’s no problem here. We are certain that as soon as people start building, that crazy gringo will come back, and do the same thing here.”

  “I am the gringo,” Romo said. He placed a hand on his chest.

  We drove down the canyon road. It was often hard to discern from the colorfully painted houses—lime green, purple, canary yellow, sky blue, and brown—but one or maybe two walls of many of them consisted of repurposed garage doors. The wood for the remaining walls often came from demolition projects in the United States as well—recycling at its most direct. But beneath all of this, there was also a kind of geologic recycling program.

  “I found a shark tooth this big,” said Romo, spreading his hands to indicate an object the size of a tin can. “Right in the street here.” In fact, fossils emerged from the crumbling ground with the same frequency as old car batteries. This was an ancient landscape formed by the big one—a flood of epic scale unleashed when a glacial dam in the interior fissured and broke at the end of the last ice age. The force of the water deposited sediment in layers of cobbles and tan- and copper-colored earth. If you wanted a fossil, Romo said, “you just have to spend one day here. With a bag.” In fact, one could simply snag a plastic bag tumbling along the road, and then wade into the archive.

  As you descend into the canyon, the hillsides grow steeper, so that it becomes more of a V shape than a basin. The shanties climb the pitched walls in ever-creative ways. It becomes dense. This is a barrio people are afraid of—me included. Maybe it’s the claustrophobia and the poverty, the smell of burning plastic. I’ve passed by the bottom of Los Laureles on the ribbon of the International Road innumerable times. I never fail to gaze into the visual clutter of Laureles and experience something—an awe, a dread. But in the heart of Los Laureles, I found it hard to sustain those notions under the same sunny sunshine that falls on San Diego, bathed in the same sublime temperature, with families milling about, working on cars, or playing with children.

  But there was one place that still gave me pause.

  At a certain point, the road is the river bottom. Portions of this thoroughfare are paved, but the pavement is still riverbed. Where a subbasin called Alacrán—Scorpion—joins Los Laureles, two legs of the drainage meet at a bend in the road, doubling the potential water volume. Homes are built right alongside this section. In dry weather it doesn’t look like much. Yet old carpet, diapers, and ice-cream wrappers buried in the road’s weedy shoulder tell the story: this section can become a torrent. During a big rain, it separates the older settlement from the dry road up and out to the south, trapping residents in various sectors of the canyon.

  In January of 2010 rain had been falling for four days when a thirty-three-year-old mother named Rocío Méndez Estrada realized that she and her children could no longer stay in the plywood shack they’d moved into just months earlier. The dirt floor was becoming muddy with seepage. This was at the base of Alacrán, and Méndez feared the shack would flood. She’d had a fight with the father of her two youngest children—the man who’d built the shack and paid the $115 rent on the plot—and in response, he’d simply walked off into the storm. So Méndez gathered her children and made a hasty retreat. But the rain continued, and Méndez realized she’d failed to pack needed medicines and clothing. She then asked the father of her eldest child to help her return to the shack and collect some things. They approached the bend in the road in a white Honda Civic. Riding in the car were her three children: Aramis, ten; Tifany Virginia, five; and Hector Jorge, just a toddler. The adults parked outside the shack and left the children while they dashed in. Even though it had been raining for days, while Méndez and the man stepped away from the car, a flow threshold was exceeded somewhere upstream, and a flash flood swept through the canyon. The water lifted the Honda from its parking place and the children were washed away. “I ran behind the car,” Méndez told a reporter, “but the current was too strong.”

  Tijuana firefighters discovered the empty, crumpled Honda first. The body of Aramis was discovered later that day, just inside the border. But Tifany and Hector had vanished. Locals and Tijuana firefighters hunted for them on the Mexican side. In the United States, a number of agencies, and a group that aids lost migrants called Desert Angels, searched the river valley and wetlands. A dog handler also joined the hunt. But they found no trace of the children for over a week.

  Along with trash, some of the more distinctive items that wash into California’s Border Field State Park are plastic baby dolls—the kind with the flickering lashes and bright eyes. The toys are so numerous that migrants who pass through the area have taken to placing the dolls’ heads in the wispy trees that line the river. The impulse is almost certainly sparked by humor, but the effect is spooky, especially for uninitiated horse riders and dog walkers. People who work in the valley are aware of the dolls, so when Desert Angels volunteer Ricardo Esquivias Villegas and his dog Loba came upon a pile of storm trash, the searcher at first thought Hector’s body was yet another toy. The two-year-old was half buried in trash, and his body was so damaged his sex couldn’t immediately be determined. In the meantime, a migrant walking through the wetland spotted another body farther into the park. The crosser called relatives in Mexico, who called the Tijuana fire department, who called the San Diego lifeguard service, who alerted the searchers. They scoured the area, described to them fourth-hand, but quit as it grew dark. Tifany’s body wasn’t recovered for another four days. The county medical examiner’s office took three weeks to officially identify the children. In that period, the Méndez family was still hopeful they might find the boy and girl alive because several other Tijuana residents had disappeared in the storm. The two nameless bodies could have belonged to another family.

  I’d associated this tragedy with the canyon for a couple of years. Each time I thought of Los Laureles, I pictured the place where the Méndez car washed away. I imagined a precarious dirt embankment, a parking spot on a steep incline, a suspe
ct river crossing. But when Romo and I neared the spot, the humdrum bend in the road, although fatally misplanned, both surprised me with its banality and spoke to dangers in plain view.

  But this was not the place we’d come to see. Another, more like a portal into an alternate reality, lay at the end of Los Laureles, where the canyon’s trough and two walls crossed an imaginary line and became Goat Canyon and the United States.

  Just south of the Alacrán-Laureles juncture the road was blocked. Someone was pouring more concrete. So Romo pitched his truck up a steep road onto the eastern mesa and into a neighborhood called Mirador. Suddenly the badlands were behind us and we passed through a middle-class neighborhood with sweeping views. Chattering school kids in crisp white shirts and dark blue uniforms occupied streets and corner shops. The houses looked substantial. Green lawns rolled curbside. As we made our way to the edge of the mesa, the neighborhood literally fell away. Romo parked on the last street. We walked out to an empty dirt lot that ended in a sheer promontory and found ourselves on a piece of earth that dropped off on three sides. I tested the ground with a slight stomp. It felt like walking a plank. Across the canyon from this point rose the shadowed western wall of Los Laureles. The sound of water thundered up from below. This was the International Road and its stream of traffic heading to Ensenada and points south. Our vantage highlighted the fact that the main highway traversed an earthen berm—from the eastern wall of Laureles, where we stood, to the western one. The road and its dam-like base artificially separated Laureles from Goat Canyon. Underneath the road and the dam ran several culverts, each tall enough to walk through.

  In 2007, Romo had begun to notice something down on the flats in front of the culverts that provoked his imagination. What he saw led him to dream up a tour of sorts. Romo decided he would attempt to guide a group of American citizens south from Goat Canyon into the culverts and then up into Laureles—a reverse migration with the intent to bring awareness to the disparities between the two countries, and their interconnectedness. Colleagues described his proposed project as political theater. When he approached Mexican customs and US Border Patrol officials, both sides scoffed. Romo is no slouch in the world of diplomacy, but mostly he is persistent. “I worked on the paperwork and permissions to the point that someone high up became amused,” he said. As Romo readied one hundred US passport holders to cross into Mexico, he spotted Border Patrol agents chuckling at the sight of his bookish migrants. The Mexican federal government sent out customs agents to process the Americans’ passports as they popped up from the culverts, and “in the only instance of its kind, the culvert became a legal border crossing,” Romo said.