by Luis Urrea
“Help her, Luis!” cried Doña Araceli.
Jesusita’s full name was María de Jesús. Mary of Jesus.
Requests for help were a constant; they were the rule. That Jesusita needed assistance didn’t make her special, but something about her involved me right away. I suppose it is the thing we conveniently call “chemistry.” Still, Jesusita was one face in a river of hundreds.
Everyone needed help. For example, there was the family recently arrived from near Guadalajara. They had no clothes except what they were wearing, and the children were so infected with scabies that their skin looked like old chewing gum. Scabies is a mange caused by a burrowing mite, a louse, that tunnels through your flesh, leaving eggs under your skin. You scratch and scratch, but can never quite get to the itch—the mites move in you at night. They like crotches and armpits. Scabies victims claw themselves raw. The kids didn’t understand what was wrong with them. They all slept together, and the mites could easily move from body to body. Their beds were full of these mites; their clothes and underwear were also infested.
When we tried to explain what was causing their itch, they looked at us with disbelief and laughed.
The family was living in a shack on a hillside across the highway from the dump. It could be reached only after a long and confusing drive through crooked alleys and ridgetop dirt paths. Lean-tos thrown together by junkies and winos surrounded their shack. You could smell the booze and urine coming through the slats. There was a small goat tied to a stake in the dirt, and no lights brightened the neighborhood save for small fires and the occasional flashlight. The men’s voices were thick; they cursed and broke glass in the dark. In the shack hid Socorro, the thirteen-year-old daughter. The men wanted her. They’d come out after dark and storm the house, trying to break through the doors and walls to get to her. When I went up there one night, waving my flashlight in the dust clouds, I could hear them outside Socorro’s door, howling.
Clearly, the Guadalajarans needed a new house. Everywhere we turned, someone needed a new house. Jesusita’s family would have to wait for theirs, though we committed to giving them assistance wherever it was possible. I told Jesusita to wait for us in her place down the hill, and we’d be down as soon as we could. She cried again and put her arms around me. “Gracias, Luis,” she said. “Gratias, Hermano Luis.”
Fear
This is a record of a small event that happened on a typical spring day near the pig village.
I was unloading one of the vans—the huge Dodge we called “the White Elephant.” Some of my friends were standing around the van with me—Doña Araceli, a Mixtec woman named Juanita, and a little girl named Negra. I noticed a woman standing in the distance, among the trash piles. I didn’t recognize her. None of the dump people seemed to know her, either. We watched her lurch back and forth, spitting and waving her arms. She would occasionally glare at me, start toward me, then stop after a few steps and curse. Her face looked like a rubber mask: white creases and a red-slash mouth.
“Is she drunk?” said Juanita. I said something, no doubt a joke, and leaned into the van. I worked the box I was looking for free by shoving one of the heavy bags of beans out of the way. When I turned around, the woman was standing right beside me, staring into my face. She snarled.
I stumbled back from her. Her hair stood straight off her scalp as though she were taking a heavy charge of electricity through her feet. She was wheezing.
One of the women said, “She’s crazy, Hermano.”
“Fuck you,” she snapped. Her voice was deep, like a man’s voice. “Vete a la chingada.”
She leaned toward me. “We know you,” she said. “We know who you are. We know what you’re doing.”
I laughed nervously. “What?” I said.
“You’ll pay for this.”
I put down my box. “I don’t understand,” I said.
She began to rasp obscenities in her man’s voice. “We know you. We’ll get you.”
She spun around and jerked away from us, very fast. She stumbled over rocks in the road, but kept moving, shouting all the time, “¡Vas a ver! You’ll see! We’ll get you. We’ll stop you.”
She paused in front of Pacha’s house at the top of the hill, gesturing at me and yelling her strange threats. The hair at the back of my neck began to rise.
“Is she drunk?” Juanita repeated.
The woman threw her head back and screamed.
Pacha
Pacha had startling eyes. They had a kind of gold-green edge; they had yellow flecks, like the eyes of a cat. They slanted up the slightest bit. If she’d lived anywhere but the Tijuana garbage dump, her eyes would have seemed like a movie star’s.
She lived with a thin, dark man named José. He called himself her husband, though he was not the father of her children. His face was craggy and his teeth long, hidden by a thick black mustache. When he talked to you, he’d bob his head and grin. When either of them laughed, they’d cover their mouths with their hands. They were pagans when they came north, of full Indian blood, and not used to church services or ministers. Their marriage ceremony was more personal and private—José moved into Pacha’s bed. He became her mate, and he remained faithful to her. It was a simple agreement, as firm as a wolf’s.
José liked Jesus very much. When Pastor Von and his workers visited his house, José always asked Von to pray for him. We put our arms around each other and Von prayed and I translated and José kept saying, “Thank you, Jesus, for listening to me.” He cried.
Pacha wouldn’t come to the vans to get food. She said it embarrassed her to be begging and fighting with all those other women. I made it a habit to save her out a box of goods, and after the crowds dissipated a bit, I would take it up to her.
Her home was on a slope that swept down into the dump; hers was a long, meandering shack with a low roof and uneven walls. The entire house was at an angle. José designed it this way so that the rain, when it came, would flow through the house, under their bed, and down the hill. He was very proud of his ingenuity: he had built one of the dump’s best-engineered houses. Those who built below him, on flatland or in hollows, found themselves in puddles of mud all winter.
Their floor was a conglomeration of carpet pieces and stray linoleum squares. José and Pacha pressed them into wet soil. The exterior walls were board. The interior walls were cardboard, with an occasional bit of wood—fruit crates, barrel slats. They sealed the gaps with plastic sheeting.
They did have one luxury: a bed. It was quite odd to look through a door and see a big bed with an iron bedframe and headboard. Often a bed was the only thing people in the dumps owned that was worth anything. Except for televisions.
You’d see little black and white TV sets scattered through the dump. There was no electricity, but there were wrecked cars in the yonkes in the valleys. The men took the car batteries and hooked the TV sets to them. Sometimes the TVs were balanced on huge oil cans—rusted Pemex, Opec barrels—which, when filled with paper and dung or twigs, served as stoves.
Pacha didn’t have a television, but she did have oil barrels: she cooked in one of them. The other she used to store water. It was full of mosquito larvae wiggling like tiny fish. Its water was the color of blood.
Pacha’s eldest daughter offered to pay me to smuggle her across the border. She was pregnant—her husband had gone across the wire and never come back. She watched for him on a neighbor’s television. I told her I couldn’t do it.
On New Year’s morning, she had her baby in the free clinic in Tijuana. The nurse took the infant and dunked it in a tub of icy water. It had a heart attack and died. It was a girl.
Pacha got pregnant next. Her belly stuck out far and hard, like a basketball, from her small body. When we arrived at the dump, she stood in front of her house with José, pointed at me and laughed. They laughed a lot. She was furious with me if I didn’t come up the hill right away to see her kids.
José had hurt his back. He could barely stand, much less wor
k, and the days were hard for Pacha and her kids. They all had to take the trash-picking poles and work the mounds, supporting José, who would give out after a few hours.
When I took them the food, I’d pat that huge stomach and shout, “What are you doing in there!” They would laugh, and she would scold me for waking him up. It was José’s first child with her, the seal of their marriage.
One day, when we drove over the hill, a crowd was there, milling. It was hot—the flies had hatched, and were forming clouds that swept out of the trash like black dust devils. The rain had been over for months, and the deep heat was on. I glanced at Pacha’s house—nobody in front. Then I saw an old pickup truck coming up the hill. José was in the back with a group of men. They held cloudy bottles by the necks.
I waved at him, but he just looked at me as the truck went by, no emotion at all on his face.
As we were unloading the vans, one of Pacha’s girls came to me and put her hand on my arm. “Luis,” she said, quietly. “Mama’s baby died.”
I stared at her.
“Don José just took him away in the truck. His head was too big. He was all black.”
I asked her if it had been born here.
She shook her head. “Free clinic,” she said.
She stood calmly, watching me. “Mama needs you,” she said.
I didn’t want to go up there.
It was a terrible charade: Pacha was blushing and overly polite, as though caught in an embarrassment. I was pleasant, as though we were having tea and crumpets at the Ritz. Everything felt brittle, ready to shatter. She wore baggy green stretch pants and stood holding a salvaged aluminum kitchen chair.
“Poor José,” she said, looking off. It was very dark in the house, and it smelled of smoke. “Poor José. It hurt him so much.”
That look as he drove past, drunk: where was Jesus now?
“The baby wouldn’t come out,” she said. She looked at her feet. “The doctor got up under my chi-chis and pushed on him after I tried for a few hours.”
“He sat on your abdomen?”
She nodded. “Sí. They got up on my chest and shoved on me. And then the doctor had to get down there and pull me open because the baby was black and we were both dying.” She swayed. I jumped up and took her arm, trying to get her into the chair. “It hurts,” she said. She smiled. “It’s hard to sit.” I got her down. “They stuck iron inside me. They pulled him out with tools, and I’m scared because I’m fat down there. I’m still all fat.” She couldn’t look at me; she bowed her head. “It’s hard and swollen and I can’t touch it.”
I told her not to move and ran down the hill to get Dave, a medical student who was working with us. He grabbed a flashlight and followed me up.
Pacha repeated her story; I translated.
He said, “Tell her to pull the pants tight against her crotch so I can see the swelling.”
She did it. He bent close. It looked like she had grown a set of testicles. He whistled.
“Think it’s a hernia?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Could be.” Many of the women in the dump get hernias that are never treated—I knew one woman who had one for fifteen years until she asked one of us to look at it.
Dave said, “Tell her I have to feel it.”
I told Pacha. She just looked at me. Brown eyes flecked with gold. “Anything you say.” She nodded.
“Is she all right?” Dave asked.
“Yeah.”
He handled her very tenderly; she winced, sucked air. “Feels bad,” he said.
She kept her eyes on my face.
“We have to get her pants off, buddy.”
“Wonderful, Dave.”
“Culturally?” he asked.
“A disaster.”
One of my aunts, when she was pregnant, was attended to by a male obstetrician. My uncle ordered him to stand outside a closed door—his nurse looked at my aunt and called out the details to him. My uncle hovered nearby to make sure there would be no outrage against her womanhood.
Dave stood there for a moment. “Too bad. We have to look.”
“Pacha,” I said. “The, ah, doctor needs to see it.”
She nodded. She took her children outside and told them not to come back for a while. I held her hand and helped her into the bed.
José had designed a little paper alcove for the bed. Pictures of musicians, movie stars, and saints were pasted to the walls. A ragged curtain hung beside the bed for privacy.
“He was too big,” she said, stretching out. “Too fat.”
She worked the pants down around her hips. A strip of dirty elastic—perhaps torn out of an old girdle—was wrapped around her fallen belly to hold it up. She unwrapped herself. Her navel hung out like a fat thumb.
She undid some safety pins that held her underpants together. They were blue, lightly stained. A smell rose of warm bread and vinegar. Dave sat beside her. She stared into my eyes.
I looked away. I was embarrassed and nervous.
Dave handed me the flashlight and said, “Here. Illuminate it for me.”
Her right side was thick and grotesque. The right labium was red. Bits of lint stuck to her. Every time he touched her, Pacha gasped.
“Blood,” he said. “Tell her it’s blood. No hernia.” He smiled at her.
I translated.
She smiled a little bit, more with her eyes than her lips.
We put her to bed for several days—no more trash-picking. She needed to let the blood reabsorb. Dave gave her a battery of vitamins, some aspirin, put her on lots of fluids.
“Ay, Luis,” she said.
I stepped out of her home. The sky was black and brown—they were burning dogs at the end of the dump. It smelled like Hell. I took a deep breath and walked away.
Coffee
It was finally time to go down and see Jesusita.
We climbed into the four-wheel-drive Blazer and drove down the slippery hill. The dirt road was already so deep in mud that the truck couldn’t make it. We had to abandon it and slog down. In places, the mud went higher than my knees.
Jesusita and some of her brood waited for us at the bottom of the hill. They led us to what seemed to be—for the dump, anyway—an especially luxurious house. It was a small American-style place with stucco walls and what appeared to be a real roof. It even had a porch. We were a little suspicious at first. The Cheese Lady had made such a fuss about this? Our opinions changed when we got inside. Half of the interior walls had fallen in, with the back walls sagging and open to the wind. The floor was raw, uncovered cement, and the whole house was awash in one or two inches of water. Only two areas remained recognizable as rooms. In what had clearly been a living room, on a sheet of plastic, were piled all of Jesusita’s possessions—clothes, bundles—forming a small dry island. The family slept on this pile. The other room was a kitchen.
They had dragged the empty shell of a stove from the dump. A linoleum-and-aluminum table stood in the kitchen, too, with four unmatched chairs. On the counter, a few coffee cups, a pan, and the meager food supplies we had given Jesusita. Her husband arrived, took off his straw vaquero hat, shook our hands, and very formally and graciously invited us to sit and have a cup of coffee with him. He was an iron-backed man, not tall, but erect and strong; his hands were thick and solid as oak burls. He wore old cowboy boots and faded jeans and a white pearl-snap shirt. We learned that he was a horse-breaker from the interior of Mexico, a real cowboy who took pride in his talents.
Jesusita said, “He is the best horse-tamer in our region.”
He shushed her—he never liked too much talk of home. His tightly curled hair was tinged gray and white. A small peppery mustache sketched itself across his upper lip. He referred to each of us as “usted,” the formal “you,” and it was clear that he expected the same respect. The most lasting impression we took with us was one of dignity and pride.
Their children were remarkably attractive—several girls and two little boys. One of the girls, perha
ps fifteen, had a baby. All their hair was shiny and black, and the girls wore it pulled back in loose ponytails.
Jesusita put wads of newspaper in the hollow stove and lit them. She heated water in the battered pan, and she made Nescafé instant coffee with it. It was clearly the last of their coffee, and she served it in four cups. We men sat at the table. Jesusita and the kids stood around us, watching us drink.
It was a lovely moment. The weak coffee, the formal and serious cowboy, the children, and Jesusita, hovering over us. She broke a small loaf of sweet bread into pieces and made us eat.
It was also a fearsome moment—the water was surely polluted, runoff from the miasma above. A great deal of disease infested the area from the constant flooding and the scattered bodies of dead animals. To refuse their hospitality would have been the ultimate insult, yet to eat and drink put us at risk. Von had the grim set in his lips that said, Here we go again, and with a glance at us, he took a sip. We drank. “¡Ah!” we exulted. “¡Delicioso!” Jesusita beamed. The cowboy nodded gravely, dipped his bit of sweet bread in his cup, and toasted us with it. Outside, the cold rain hammered down. Inside, we all shivered. We could find no way to get warm.
The Serranos
I first met the Serrano family on a Thursday. Halloween was coming. Several women told me there was a very dirty new family living out at the far end of the pig village. The children were sick, they said, and the mother—who was about to have a baby—was dying.
I walked out there, to where the Serranos had thrown together a small compound of stray boards and bedsprings. The roof was low—about three feet high—and I had to bend over to get inside. The only room of the house was a combination bedroom and kitchen. Its floor was dirt, and the room was dark and smoky. The smoke came from a little cook fire in the far corner, dangerously near the wooden wall. Some papers and a couple of pots rested on a cardboard mat in the dirt next to the fire. In the other three corners, pallets of rag and paper lay in the dirt: the beds.