El Pastor has run the asylum since the late nineties. I first heard about the place in Charles Bowden’s book Murder City. The cartel wars were at their bloody apex—before 2007 Juárez had not had more than 300 murders in a single year but then had 2,754 murders in 2009 and 3,622 in 2010, and the trend seemed likely to rise until it swallowed the city whole. Murder City is Bowden’s scramble through the worst of Juárez in 2008. He writes of the asylum as the home of a woman he becomes obsessed with, a beauty queen from Sinaloa who is driven insane after gang rapes by the municipal police, a woman brought to—discarded at—the asylum by those same police when they were done with her. Bowden characterizes El Pastor’s place as a kind of beautiful collection of lunatics in the desert, the only truly sane people on the border, an oasis where Mexicans are all but killed by a perfect storm of evil—of cartels and government corruption and U.S. immigration policy and poverty and NAFTA exploitation and general fucking human darkness—could finally take care of one another. Murder City gave the impression all of Juárez would drown in blood and rape and drugs and even probably the asylum too but at least El Pastor was making a real go at building an ark to weather the wrath. Then, in 2011, for the first time in years, the Juárez murder rate dropped. By 2012 there were just 803. Even though the rest of Mexico seemed to pick up the slack—nearly 30,000 murders nationwide in 2012 with only 523 of those resulting in a conviction—the American media was impatient to write a feel-good story. “Ciudad Juárez Weighs a Neglected Notion: Hope,” said a July 2013 New York Times headline. By December the paper was less ambiguous: under the headline “Ciudad Juárez, a Border City Known for Killing, Gets Back to Living,” it highlighted the return of bars and restaurants and young people dancing in a club with “fake blood on the walls, as if mocking the violent past, hoping to render it harmless.”
A city does not just dance away from 12,000 murders in six years, does not just bounce back from an exodus of nearly half a million citizens fleeing the violence. But like most of us I want to believe that humans, alone or altogether, can just decide to be better humans and then, almost miraculously, it happens without hardly any work at all. Our souls find a better fit. We stop getting dragged along. Old dog. But learns tricks. When I heard an acupuncturist had begun visiting the asylum outside Juárez to teach residents to treat themselves, it seemed a good measure for how things were healing. Visión en Acción is a microcosm of all the suffering along the border—families torn apart and brains melted by drugs and bodies cut and shot and raped by cartels and spirits and bones ground down by twelve-hour days at the maquiladoras making all manner of American bullshit—and acupuncture, just a handful of little needles, therapy on the borderlands of science and mysticism, seems a Hail Mary, a miracle or a wholly futile endeavor, one small indicator of whether anything at all can ever heal along the ceaseless wound we call la Frontera.
From the kitchen we head out into the plaza, the pulsating center of the asylum, me and Bemis and El Pastor out into a crowd of residents, half lounging and the other half pacing, moaning, screaming, slapping at the air. The plaza isn’t large and everyone is bunched up at the outer edges against cinder-block walls, lingering in tiny cells of shade as the sun climbs to its burning place on high. An old basketball hoop in the middle of the plaza gives the sense of a school playground. There’s a big green gate and stone benches and pink walls, vibrant like an actual village plaza. Two stories of cinder-block rooms are built into the outer wall like a roadside motel or a ramshackle fortress. The bottom floor of rooms are real cells with real bars and people on the other side of the bars holding on, residents deemed too dangerous to roam. Everywhere clothes hang drying, like the yard of a big family, secondhand clothes from the empire to the north, all the brand names and logos faded or torn. There are exercise bikes, in disrepair. The one bike with a seat gets use but only for sitting. A guy named Yogi jumps off that seat, runs up to hug each of us. Yogi has been here since he was unceremoniously dropped off as a boy, is still exuberantly boyish on account of his Down syndrome, can’t speak much but never stops smiling and squealing approval. He touches things, pets them really, inanimate objects: the bike, a tree, a cup. He runs around and touches everything like this and then comes and touches me, pets my hand and arm. Then pets the bike. Then the tree and the concrete. Nothing is dead. For Yogi everything is full of life.
Ah, my army of insane, says El Pastor. He often calls the residents insane or lunatics or human garbage, which is not so much passing judgment on them as it is passing judgment on the society that has treated them this way. My recycling center, he says. For the human garbage. Even through his big grin of what seems to be genuine love, it’s hard to hear El Pastor say this kind of thing without wincing, at least at first. But everyone gets used to it. I think of the writer Harry Crews and how he always said his books were about freaks but also said that when he said freaks, he was just using a kind of shorthand and what he meant was people with special considerations under God. Crews was crass and a freak himself but there was no mistaking how he meant freak as a term of endearment for the only people he considered worthy of endearment. And El Pastor reminds me there is no point to political correctness out here in the Mexican desert. The asylum is a complicated place.
You see? My family, he says as Yogi grabs ahold for another hug.
Gaspar, who dresses like a soldier in unmarked secondhand fatigues, fighting for a nation unknown, shakes my hand. Gaspar! says El Pastor as he points at another resident, bellows another origin story: He was burning down houses and eating dead dogs. Elisabeth carries an empty purse, has a mischievous smile and a freshly shaved head. She speaks English, and when she hears me speaking English, she comes up to ask for a cookie. El Pastor doesn’t have an origin story for her. Nobody shouts her name. She says she’s lived in Los Angeles for years and has only been here at the asylum for three days. She says she is looking for her lost children. She rubs her shaved head to show me how new she is. She touches my hair, tells me I’m too old to be wearing it so long. It is good hair, she says, but we will shave it or you will get the bugs. Elisabeth is a flirt, crossing and uncrossing her legs to show off her black platform shoes as she plays with my hair and asks for a cookie over and over. I don’t know it yet but much of what she’s said is a lie. She’s been in one of those cells for at least two years on account of her propensity to attack other residents. They’ve just set her free and that’s why they’ve shaved her head, trying to keep whatever infects the cinder-block cells out of the general population.
Most of the residents do not speak English, and I don’t speak great Spanish. El Pastor and his right-hand man, Josué, speak English. Bemis translates whenever I get lost. An old woman, Favela, rolls up in her wheelchair. Favela says that I am beautiful, that I look like her son. She talks about how proud she is of her son and how hard she worked when she cleaned the seats of city buses and how proud that made her feel. She scrubbed seats. She scrubbed walls and wings. She scrubbed the sky. She will scrub the sky and let me sit there. I am her son. The sky is big and has no seats. Her hands go up in the air and she double-times her rate of speech. Bemis has difficulty translating, says it has all become nonsensical. His attention drifts to another resident pulling at his shirt. Favela keeps reaching up high from her wheelchair, does not take her blue eyes off me as she rants, eyes sitting so deep in her face that their brightness is sort of tunneled or channeled and comes out like beams. I try to listen to every word but comprehend almost none of them other than cielo, cielo or mi hijo. I pay attention to her inflection, her eye beams. I’m twice removed from rational comprehension—without her language or her singular rationale—trying to feel what she has to say, trying to listen in a way we rarely do in our lives, without our ears. I don’t expect to understand every word so I am not thrown off by non sequiturs. Everything seems of the utmost importance. How necessary is language? I can never find the right words, which is why I use so goddamn many of them. In a perfect world, this story would be exactl
y one word long, just the right word, maybe not even a word but just a sound, and you’d understand it all. Ah, you see? I’m also searching to excuse not knowing a language I should have tried harder to learn all the years I was growing up just fifty miles north of here. I’ve studied French and Spanish in language classes, but like most of us Americans I can’t have a real conversation in any language other than the language of our empire. And even then I say eye beams, struggling to convey what it is to have Favela looking up at me from her wheelchair, in this place and smiling still—all the way alive still even though I can’t quite tell you her story.
El Pastor gets annoyed as I linger in the plaza. He’s ready to move along, show me everything else, keeps listing off all the things I’m about to see. I realize he’s guiding me through a pretty standardized tour, something he’s done many times since Bowden first wrote about his asylum five years ago. Every few weeks or months another media outlet shows up to get their five hundred words about a glimmer of hope in Juárez, to snap their pictures of El Pastor and his maimed flock. Or another church group shows up to do the tour and a few hours of group prayer and post blogs about their dangerous forays to minister to the criminally insane south of the border. El Pastor has become as much a public relations man as anything else. He knows I will want to start my story with the tale of his violent conversion and that’s why he tells it to me within twenty minutes of my arrival. He knows my readers will want all the horrific details of the residents’ origin stories and so he shouts them even before their names. Whatever pristine isolation the asylum once enjoyed is gone and I’m just one more brick in the road toward a bona fide media sideshow. El Pastor makes no bones about it: my job as the gringo writer is to tell all the other gringos about his saved Mexicans so they will send him money so he can save more Mexicans. In this way there is nothing disingenuous about El Pastor’s tour—it is some of that new sincerity that feels like the oxymoron of a heartfelt wink.
We make our way to the chicken house, where sixty chickens lay the breakfast eggs. El Pastor keeps smacking my back like he does and says, Ah, my army of insane, about the chickens. He winks but it’s an unsettling joke because of its heartfelt part. The chickens mill around in the same arbitrary manner as the residents in the plaza. There is the same kind of constant, dull chatter. But I don’t feel drawn to connect in any emotional way with the chickens and that is a kind of relief compared to the plaza, at least until an intense wave of guilt for feeling relief about not having to empathize with the residents sets in. Then I want to run back to the plaza and talk to everyone and help however I can. El Pastor has mapped out a perfectly evocative media tour.
We visit the goats and the pigs and the stained block upon which the pigs are slaughtered. El Pastor is particularly proud of an area where he has run electricity for a cinder-block-making machine. With this machine they will build more walls, grow the asylum to make room for more residents. Three hundred, he says. I want three hundred crazies. Three hundred just like the movie. He enacts some version of Spartan violence from the film 300, a big kick to the chest of his invisible enemy. He throws his arms wide and slaps the concrete of the slaughter slab. I will really have my army! I guess it’s the kind of dark humor that inevitably develops after decades of living in the desert with addicts and orphans, schizophrenics and murderers, and now all the cartel corpses. But an actual suit of armor is in El Pastor’s chamber and swords are on the walls, with many paintings of Roman centurions throughout the asylum, and a big Roman-style crest he has adopted for Visión en Acción is painted on the entrance gate. When I ask about all the ancient military stuff, he says of course they are at war. But then also he just loves the whole aesthetic of ancient Rome. He relates the plots of his favorite movies, Gladiator and 300, and he cannot remember all the names of the ones he watched when he was young, but he’s talking about Spartacus and maybe Julius Caesar and definitely Ben-Hur. We’re in the laundry room now and one big rat is in the corner by the wash bin eating one little rat as El Pastor recounts at length the scene from Ben-Hur in which Jesus has a cameo. The first time you see Jesus, he says. And he gives water to the warrior! El Pastor kicks the big rat off the little rat but only kicks the gnawed corpse an inch behind the washer. The big rat immediately jumps back on. And the warrior gets his revenge. Do you know this movie?
El Pastor’s latest project is a new plaza being built to look vaguely Roman. Five residents work filling molds with plaster for its columns. A mural will show Daniel in the lion’s den. Already cast in concrete is a lion’s head that will be placed atop a giant fountain. El Pastor’s spent ten grand and will probably need seven more. It will be my Rome, he says. To cut down on violent incidents, he wants to separate some of the women residents from the men, give the women their own high-class plaza. But also he wants a place to showcase the grandeur of his vision. So, a new plaza, the first thing any visitor will see, the volunteers and the media and the stray dogs, gazing upon El Pastor’s white columns and the busts of lions and the fountain and the women residents milling around.
I wonder if El Pastor knows how the Romans treated his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I wonder if he knows the cartels have this obsession with all things ancient Roman too, if he knows about cartel leaders, such as Sinaloa’s El Ondeado, building themselves half-million-dollar Greco-Roman-style mausoleums. Or the Zetas reportedly organizing gladiatorial combat with hundreds of kidnapped Mexicans, a game to see who will be the last man standing, who will be pressed into service as their next assassin, their next sicario. And sicario itself, a word from the Latin sicarius, a member of a group of Jews, the Sicarii, who rebelled against Roman rule in the first century C.E., a name meaning dagger wielders. “These Jews,” says the historian Josephus, “who slew men in the daytime, and in the midst of the city; this they did chiefly at the festivals, when they mingled themselves among the multitude, and concealed daggers under their garments, with which they stabbed those that were their enemies.” But the Sicarii were not killing Roman soldiers, just other Jews who sympathized with Roman rule or got in the way of their rebellion. Like the cartels kill each other some and Americans rarely, but mostly they kill innocent Mexicans who get in the way. But down here the cartels are the empire, not the rebels. So, etymologically, sicario isn’t the right word for cartel assassins because the cartels are not the disenfranchised. Who is the real sicario, wielder of little daggers, rebel with eyes toward the empire’s demise? The point is, a lot of what you might call ancient Roman memorabilia is at the asylum. Well, alright. It’s an absurdity of the kind one can’t question in any satisfying way. Like the asylum’s brief business of manufacturing apple-themed décor, a kind of art therapy turned moneymaking venture, kitschy décor one might find in the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog but here is a room full of it at the asylum. Like the wooden apple El Pastor gives me or the apple-shaped clock with crooked hands he gives me that will hang in my momma’s kitchen for years, telling a lie a second or still just stuck on asylum time.
El Pastor’s next project is a garden for what he calls the hopelessly insane. These are the residents kept locked up in the cells of the old plaza’s outer walls. They are always naked, he says. They are always eating their own shit. I want to build for them a garden. A big garden where they can walk around naked and eat their shit and be just as they are, in my garden. Ah, just like the garden of the Bible.
Have you noticed how El Pastor likes to punctuate his sentences with ah, not a word so much as an epiphanic sound that communicates succinctly the grandeur of his vision?
Ah, here is that wooden apple in my hand, red and shiny and about the right size of an apple but not at all the right shape of an apple, the bottom totally flat and the top far too narrow, a warped apple plucked from the asylum before it ever has a garden. What knowledge is stored in this apple’s tree, which is not a tree but the hands of El Pastor’s army of insane? What will be the consequence for learning such knowledge? I will carry this wooden apple for years and never take
a bite.
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