Months before the conquistadores came to your country, the Italian explorer Andrea Corsali scrutinized the night sky from his ship during an East Indies expedition. On calfskin vellum, he wrote a letter to his royal sponsor, describing in detail something he saw in the southern sky: a constellation in the sign of a cross. “This crosse is so fayre and bewtiful, that none other hevenly signe may be compared to it,” he wrote. The constellation came to be called Crux. I feel as Corsali must have felt contemplating configurations in the sky. What secret do these crossings spell? Do they signify anything, or are they more mere music? A choir of crossings? Concordant conflicts? Harmonious cacophony?
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The first recorded crossing of Antonio Valenzuela occurred in March 1923, through El Paso, Texas. He was twenty-two. His purpose was listed as: “Seek work.” Widespread irrigation projects were turning the pastoral Southwest into an agro-industrial region requiring cheap labor. Most eager and affordable were the Mexicans. Antonio found someone who taught him to sign his name, and he practiced until he could do so with a little flourish on the V. As of 1917, immigrants had to prove literacy to cross the border. Corporate farm interests made sure a signature was proof enough. When he crossed, Antonio joined the largest migration in the history of the two countries, one of a million Mexicans who entered the United States between 1900 and 1930 to harvest crops in el campo of the Southwest. Some came to work on el traque (the railway), too, and in las minas (the mines). Your grandfather lived in labor camps crawling with roaches and rats.
Antonio crossed many times before the 1923 recorded incident, according to his children who heard his tales. From coast to coast, the border then was porous. Illegal crossings were the norm. Barbed-wire fencing had been erected along small sections of the border to keep Mexican livestock from devouring U.S. crops, but along most of the 1,954 miles between the two countries, there was nothing but dirt and vegetation. The border existed in treaties and on maps and in minds—not on the land. So although Antonio crossed at least five times through official junctures, his actual number of crossings was probably much higher. He went back and forth across la frontera, a zigzagging pattern followed by hundreds of thousands of migrants across the century who sought to work in the United States while living in Mexico.
As hunger had taught Antonio to be a skilled hunter, debt peonage had showed him to find amusement in hard labor. Work was something his body took pleasure in, like eating or drinking or having sex. His portrait from those days shows a strikingly handsome man. His eyes are feline in shape, with an eagle’s intensity. His straight nose curves smoothly at the tip. The lines of his face are angular, aquiline, attractive. His skin looks white, but his immigration documents describe his complexion as brown, no doubt tanned from laboring under the sun. His lips are a thin, serious line, contradicted by a subtle amused tilt in his right eye. His eyebrows are nearly nonexistent, maintaining the focus on his intense yellow irises. He wears a white or beige ascot cap and matching tie.
During a Tlaltenango visit, he married a local woman named Antonia. Physically, she resembled his mother. Your grandfather could not have known that, had Juanita not materialized out of thin air at around that time. Go into the street, your mother has returned from the revolution, a townsperson told Antonio. He recognized himself in her perfect nose, her barely there eyebrows, the feline shape of her eyes. She had come back with a fourth son, Felipe, and was settling down to practice her curanderismo.
Most of Juanita’s story dissolved with her flesh. I don’t know what role she played in the revolution—if she conducted spells on the battlefield, carried bullets in her pockets for the soldiers or fired the weapons herself. I like to think she was the Juanita immortalized in the famous revolution-era Mexican ballad, or corrido, that says in Spanish: “She was always in front of the troops, fighting like any Juan…here comes Juana Gallo, screaming on her horse.” But all I know is this: when she came back from the revolution, she became a respected healer and clarividente. I have no doubt she felt a strong connection to her indigenous ancestors. She turned a discerning eye toward the plant life in the forests and, through trial and error and inquiry, identified each herb that might cure a sickness, soothe a hurt or summon a spirit. She prepared potions and creams. Her neighbors came for medicine, for help communicating with lost loved ones, to find runaway livestock and buried inheritances. In her trances, surrounded by candlelight, she divined the truth so often that she earned the name La Adivina. People came to see her from faraway towns. Throughout her life, she made a living with her mystical gifts, dispensing healing potions and prophecies, and paid for her own house. She taught her son Felipe to heal with magic and flowers; when Felipe was grown, he was respectfully called El Doctor.
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A black-and-white photograph of Juanita shows her resting a hand on a tree branch in the backyard of her house, surrounded by crumbling adobe walls. Her neat silvery hair is pulled back from her face, emphasizing her astonishing pómulos. She wears an ankle-length white dress with spacious pockets and a dark rebozo draped over her shoulders and head. A pentagram of twigs and leaves hangs from one of the branches beside her. At the center of the pentagram is a piece of paper with something illegible written on it. I have so many questions for Juanita, but she died long before I was born, even before you were born, Papi. What if you inherited her psychic sensitivity to supernatural stimuli? I imagine a shamanic gift could be confusing, even terrifying, if it evolved in the wrong context. I recall the secret prophecies you left me in your VHS tapes: Their flowering will be brief. And in their urgent need to attract pollinators, they provide copious nectar.
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Juanita told your grandfather that he, like she, could read the world’s hidden symbols, invisible to the unconditioned brain but decipherable for insights unhindered by space or the linearity of time. Like any language, the hidden symbols, once learned, could be spoken as well as read. She told him he could use this knowledge to alter reality, causing the earth to yield crops or rain or sunshine. But Antonio knew nothing about reading. What he knew about was the tangible world: how to put his muscles, his physical body, to good use. The only thing he was interested in making the world yield was money—so he used his brain to find work, the only way to make money, as far as he was concerned. He said goodbye to his mother and bride and crossed the border again. After saving up dólares, he came back to fetch his beloved. The two crossed together at El Paso on September 10, 1923. The migration document describes Antonio as having a mole on his left cheek and another on his upper lip. He and his wife shared an apartment in Delano, California, with his brother Isidro and his family. Antonio’s first son, Goyo, was born on June 1. Against all odds, Antonio had made a life in the United States, without recourse to supernatural influences—only his flesh and sweat. I imagine he felt proud.
One day, he came home from the crop fields to discover that his wife was dead. She was complaining of stomach pains, but it didn’t seem serious, Isidro told him. Antonio took a train up the coastline and stopped in Amador County to work in the darkness of a mine. Earlier that decade, forty-seven miners had been burned alive in the shafts, possibly after someone had dropped a cigarette. Antonio volunteered to be in charge of the explosives. Every day his lungs filled with dirt and smoke from cigarillos he sucked on as he sweated underground. At night, he played cards and chugged whiskey in the camp.
Scholars know that the course of history can be altered in a single moment; philosophers know individual lives are even more vulnerable than that. But Antonio was never much of a philosopher, or a scholar. He was playing a card game with his compañeros and humming drunkenly. Another worker grew annoyed by the sounds and asked Antonio to stop. Your grandfather told the man to mind his own business in a manner so impolite that his colleague responded in kind. Punches were thrown. Antonio fetched a razor blade from his sleeping bag and sla
shed either his enemy’s arm or his cheekbone (his children remember conflicting details). Then the police arrived. On September 22, 1929, Antonio was placed in San Quentin prison on charges of assault with a deadly weapon. His height was reported as 5 feet and 6.5 inches; his weight as 128 pounds. In his mugshot, his dark hair is swept back elegantly as if with pomade, but lopsided, with a few loose strands sticking up in the back. He wears a collared white shirt and a jacket.
San Quentin, the oldest prison in California, was a waterfront institution with a torture chamber, a dungeon and granite walls overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It had been built in 1854 on land once owned by Indians. More than a hundred men had been hanged there. During Antonio’s stay, a twenty-three-year-old American named Gordon Stewart Northcott was executed for the notorious Chicken Coop Murders; while Antonio had been traveling up and down California working in el campo, Stewart Northcott had been kidnapping young boys, raping them and butchering them. Newspaper articles described the gruesome grave discovered under the boy’s chicken coop near Los Angeles, as having bones, blood, bullets and strands of human hair. In modern times, Mexico has become notorious for the brutality of its drug cartels. People are dissolved in vats of acid, skinned alive, eyes gouged out, headless naked bodies hanged from bridges. In the days of your grandfather, however, such hellish violence was unheard-of in Mexico. I imagine he was astonished by the discovery of it in the United States, a country of privileged men. Why would anyone maim and massacre here? Was it boredom? Antonio realized there were two ways to view his situation: as yet another injustice or as an opportunity. Having learned his lesson, Antonio chose the latter, and directed his love of utility to the world behind bars. He befriended an inmate who taught him to read and write in both English and Spanish. San Quentin wasn’t bad compared with his life as a homeless child: he had daily meals and a mattress. Isidro brought Goyo to visit.
When Antonio was released, in the early 1930s, the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression. Mexicans were vilified for stealing jobs from Americans. He was deported with half a million other immigrants that decade. He didn’t want to return to Tlaltenango—there was nothing for him there, besides his strange mother—so he headed to Guadalajara, Jalisco, a tourism hub. Now that he was bilingual, he obtained a highly coveted job as a hotel tourism agent. Dressed in a fancy suit with a striped tie and the hotel’s insignia, he persuaded English- and Spanish-language visitors at the central train station to follow him to the Hotel Phoenix. One of the hotel cleaning ladies, Maria de Jesus, caught his eye: she was a shy brunette with sensuous down-turned lips that gave her a regal aspect. Like Antonio, she had grown up without a father; hers was killed by the Mexican army in the Cristero War following the revolution.
On June 23, 1933, Antonio wrote her a love letter in a beige card with a blue ribbon and intricate threaded pink flowers. “May God concede that some other year, if we are alive, the two of us shall be united forever, forever….I ask God with all my heart for it to be thus, for it is impossible, for me, that you not be the owner of my love,” he wrote in sometimes misspelled but eloquent Spanish. Bidding her farewell with a “he who sighs and suffers for you,” he signed his name with an unusual amount of flourish, underlining his name thrice with an infinity sign connected to the final letter of Valenzuela. Maria de Jesus, your abuelita, became his second wife.
Their first child was a stillborn girl. Maria de Jesus gave birth to five children who survived: Antonio Jr., Joaquin, Carolina, Irma and Jaime. Carolina, your mother, was born on March 23, 1938, days after the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the oil industry and expropriated the property of foreign oil companies. Cárdenas was the first president of Mexico who seemed a true product of the revolution. Nearly two decades after the fighting ended, he redistributed almost fifty million acres of land. But unprecedented population growth worked against him. Most Mexicans continued to live in poverty. Antonio rented a bare studio with an oil stove in the corner for his family. Lines formed for the communal toilet. Many residents lacked patience, so the complex stank of urine and feces.
In 1942, the United States faced a manpower shortage as soldiers went overseas for World War II. The country signed a binational agreement with Mexico to launch the bracero program, which initially recruited 250,000 temporary Mexican laborers to work in agriculture and railroad repair. Bracero means “a person who works with his arms.” Antonio was hired by the Northern Pacific Railway. He joined a crew that inspected California tracks for wear, replaced railroad ties, laid switches and fixed washed-out roadbeds. Antonio sent money to Maria de Jesus, allowing her to rent a house with its own toilet. One day in 1944, the repair cart turned over and broke Antonio’s wrist. The railway company paid for his surgery, then sent him back to Guadalajara with a large scar and a hefty indemnity. He bought a fruit-and-refreshment stand in front of the central train station. The family commissioned the construction of a house with three bedrooms, electricity, running water, even a boiler. They were able to enjoy warm baths for the first time in their lives. Antonio grew fat. He started lending money on interest and bought the neighboring fruit stand. He purchased a fluffy Pekingese puppy for his children. He amassed stylish suits, hats and leather shoes.
In 1950, the city announced it was going to demolish the central train station and rebuild it on the outskirts of Guadalajara. Antonio protested. Officials promised him a fruit stand at the new location. But that area of Guadalajara lacked pedestrian traffic. Antonio made hardly a penny. He sold the stand and bought a cantina. The cantina didn’t do well, either. Your grandfather started to gamble and guzzle whiskey. He sold his cantina for five thousand pesos. He bought another fruit stand. He drank so much that Antonio Jr. repeatedly had to take him to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. Whenever Antonio passed out, Maria de Jesus and Carolina gathered up his liquor bottles and buried them in the yard. But it was pointless. Antonio summoned strangers from his bedroom window with coins for more whiskey.
In a fit of inspiration in September 1952, Antonio told the family they were moving to Tijuana so he could start working in the United States again. He sold the Guadalajara house to a wealthy priest. Intent on traveling like the rich man he had momentarily been, Antonio bought first-class train tickets for the family and the Pekingese pup. It took five days to arrive in the border town because the train broke down multiple times. Maria de Jesus wept all the way north; blood poured down her legs; a fetus had failed to thrive.
Antonio arrived in Tijuana in September 1952. In October, he crossed the border through the San Ysidro Port of Entry to see a doctor. An immigration official wrote: “States that when he drinks Iced drinks that he can not breathe and falls down.” Antonio’s health had begun an irreversible decline. He would die less than a decade later in a San Diego hospital. His body was buried in a Tijuana cemetery. But first—he took his children to the border. He showed them how to cross.
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New Spain became Mexico in the early 1800s, when the face of La Virgen de Guadalupe united pagan indigenous tribes with Catholic Criollos and mestizos. The historian Earl Shorris wrote in The Life and Times of Mexico that her cacahuate skin served as a bridge between the brown natives, the children of white immigrants and their mestizo offspring. Carrying her image, they rebelled against the Spanish-born settlers who had monopolized power. An eccentric old priest and silkworm producer named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla led the march into battle. They won. Mexico—named after the native Mexica—was born. Betrayals came as if on cue—a signature of the country’s soul since Malintzin fell for Cortés. Cousins turned on cousins. Sisters turned on sisters. A competitor executed Hidalgo y Costilla. The United States saw an opportunity to invade the new nation. President James K. Polk sent troops south of the border. In 1848, Mexico was forced to hand over half of its territory. Today’s border was born.
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For more tha
n a hundred years, the border existed as a 1,954-mile concept on paper without a corresponding body in the world. A porous patchwork of barriers rose in the twentieth century, mostly around cities: chain-link fence, sediment piles, steel columns. In the late 1990s, dozens of miles of helicopter landing mats from the Vietnam war were erected between San Diego and Tijuana, one of the world’s busiest border crossings. After September 11, 2001, the United States spent billions of dollars on improved border security. Over the next decade and a half, hundreds of miles of steel fencing sprouted on the land like strange silver teeth: double-layered, triple-layered, topped with razor wire. As the border came to life, so did its hunger. Migrant traffic was rerouted into the desert, where the ravenousness was most extreme. There, the crossers became delirious. Amid saguaro and prickly pear cacti, they saw diablos and demonios—incarnations of la frontera that stalked them under an infernal sun, sending voices and visions into their minds, seducing them away from los Estados Unidos. Thousands died of dehydration or heat exhaustion. Most lie lost forever, hidden beneath shrubs where they sought shade.
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You traverse the border all the time through ports of entry. You were fortunate, I suppose, that your parents immigrated in the 1970s, when it was all still rather simple. You could apply for citizenship, but you don’t want to. You reject both countries. You’re a new species, Papi. A new species. You dwell in a place I cannot touch.
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On the West Coast where San Diego meets Tijuana, the border fence stretches into the Pacific Ocean. Barnacles cling to its steel column bases. They look like large, algae-covered pores; the fence is coming alive on the coast. The crustaceans greet the sea with their feathery fingers as waves bring particles of starfish and mariscos. The barnacles pull the marine detritus into their shells, into the fence. A rip current extends beyond the barriers into the horizon, following a channel made by the infrastructure. I remember your voice: ¿Qué miras? Inland, the fence is steel mesh so tightly woven that only the smallest of fingers can fit through the gaps. Corrugated steel gates rise up for miles eastward, parallel to a secondary fence crowned by concertina wire. I drive east along this border, searching for you. The city gives way to desert, where barriers stop and start amid steep, boulder-studded mountains. In the Tohono O’odham Nation, home to one of the border’s deadliest smuggling routes, I walk into the desert with a group of farmworkers, plumbers and construction workers who search for dead or dying migrants on weekends. Vultures circle the sky. We pass the twisting green limbs of towering saguaros and visnaga cacti with bloodred flowers. Snakes slither. Scorpions crawl. Cattle skeletons glow white on the landscape. A single white stallion stands perfectly still. I see an abandoned Bible on the earth. I sit down and flip through its dusty pages. The text is crawling with insects—termites. They’re devouring the holy text.
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