All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  At a nursery near Brownsville, she told a gardener that she wished to buy a Monte de los Olivos tree from the Holy Land. What luck, he said: they had one in stock, “all the way from Jerusalem,” for three dollars.

  “When I buy, it is this high,” she says, holding her hand a foot off the ground. “And I pray to God, ‘Send me miracles, send me people to heal their cancer, to heal their tumors,’ and I tell the tree and I plant it. It grow and grow and grow and then when is like this,” she raises her hand another foot, “I listen and it sound like running water.”

  She waited until the tree was two years old (“so is not so skinny”) before she spread word of its powers. Her first two visitors were a man and a woman who prayed around the tree until God appeared. The man ran away in fright, but the woman continued praying. “She stay and pray and is healed.”

  Soon, people were traveling across Texas to visit her tree. After a Mexican television station aired a special about it, pilgrims even crossed the border in tour buses. I ask how many had visited in all. One thousand? Two thousand?

  “Fifty,” she says.

  “Fifty thousand?”

  Blinking sassily, she continues on for the better part of an hour. A miracle lurks behind every handwritten letter propped upon her floor, behind every photograph pinned upon her wall, behind every rosary woven through the chain links of her fence, and she wants to share them all. And at that moment, I want to believe them. I want to be that six-year-old upon Tío Valentin’s knee again, the girl who lit candles before Mass each Sunday and prayed to someone she thought could hear. For a moment, my ability to rebuild a life in South Texas after a fifteen-year absence seems contingent upon such belief.

  I glance over at Greg. If he believes in talking trees, I can believe in talking trees.

  His posture spells rapture. He sits perfectly erect in his hard metal chair, his hands folded inside his lap, a smile upon his lips. But his eyes have gone glazy. His head leans forward, then pitches back.

  Metaphorically rising from my tío’s knee, I thank Estella for her time. Greg stirs awake and follows suit. As we approach the truck, a caravan of eighteen-wheelers hurdle past, each one hauling an unmarked tank. Dust clouds swirl behind them.

  “Where are they going?” I ask. We are miles from the nearest highway.

  “Aye,” Estella says and shudders. “They dump their tank.”

  “Dump? Where?”

  “Across my street.”

  There doesn’t appear to be anything across her street but a grove of mesquite, yet Estella says a waste pit lurks behind the trees where trailers dump their tanks late at night.

  “How do you know they are dumping?”

  “I hear them!” she says. “The city come to test my water and they say is no good. All these ranches, the water is no good.”

  Who came? When? What did they determine? My inner reporter demands three-ring binders bulging with certifiable facts. But Estella cannot supply them. She knows only that her well has been contaminated for fourteen years by something so strong, not even her miracle tree can cure it. She must buy bottled water from Premont. And since “the city” has been no help, she built a shrine to beseech the spirits instead.

  We exit her property, my thoughts ablaze. Even if no one is outright dumping here, the area is littered with natural gas wells. Their reputation for tarnishing water is memorialized in the documentary Gasland, which shows families lighting their drinking water on fire as it pours out of the tap. We continue down the road and, after a time, come upon a clearing. An open gate reveals a slender dirt path. Beyond it, a herd of bulldozers paw the earth. As we idle on the side of the road, wondering what to do, an eighteen-wheeler with an unmarked tank pulls up behind us. We watch it enter the gate and vanish inside the brush.

  NOTES

  1. Throughout the seventies, people traveled to Tía Eva’s chapel from all around, Santa says. Eventually, however, she started getting ill from handling so many spirits and had to stand in a pan of water while conducting her healings to avert the negative energy. Then the Catholic church accused her of witchcraft, so she closed the chapel altogether. Though Tía Eva has since passed, she lives on in the mystical elements of Santa’s work.

  2. An evangelical Christian, Santa’s father believed the olive oil was holy because it had been perched atop the radio when it broadcast a service by the Galvan Revival Church. He deemed the miracle tree sacrilegious, though, so Santa had to use its leaf discreetly.

  3. Nope, not fried chicken, but chicken-fried chicken. Similar to its cousin, chicken-fried steak, it is a chicken breast pounded thin, heavily battered and deep-fried, then drowned in white or brown gravy and served with a heap of mashed potatoes and a slice of Texas toast (that is, one that’s bigger than your plate).

  4. Like many illuminating ideas in border studies, “spiritual mestizaje” was first theorized by the writer Gloria Anzaldúa. The scholar Theresa Delgadillo defines it as the “transformative renewal of one’s relationship to the sacred” as a way of defying oppression via “alternative visions of spirituality.” Through this lens, Estella’s shrine can be viewed as an act of resistance.

  5. Cascarones are colorfully painted eggshells filled with confetti that get hidden in the backyard and then cracked on unsuspecting heads on Easter Sunday sometime after the barbacoa is served but before the poker games start.

  2

  The Rebel

  DEPENDING ON WHOM YOU ASK, LIONEL LOPEZ IS EITHER JIMINY Cricket—the “conscience of South Texas”—or else the region’s most unrelenting pest. A sienna-skinned man with broad-rimmed glasses, he gels his hair back and razors his moustache straight. Sixty-six years of sun lines burrow into his face. When I climb into his Ford F-150, he flicks off the norteño music jangling on the radio before grinning. “Are you ready to go to Mexico, mija?”

  We won’t be traveling within 145 miles of the border today, but Lionel is being metaphorical here. He means that in less than twenty minutes we’ll be witnessing poverty so desperate, it will seem we departed the United States long ago. We glide past the million-dollar mansions and palm trees lining Corpus Christi’s ritziest street—Ocean Drive—and then ride Cesar Chavez Memorial Highway out of town.

  Estella’s poisoned well has curled my fingers into a note-taking position. Miracle trees are a matter of faith, but contaminated water can be proven by science. When I started asking around for resources, people directed me to Lionel. He is said to know this swath of Texas better than anyone.

  “Back when I was a firefighter, we used to ride around in the ambulances a lot, and I saw the conditions people were living in out here,” he says. “I saw their shacks. I saw their dirt roads. I saw their suffering.”

  Upon investigation, he learned that many were residents of colonias, the unincorporated communities that began cropping up in the borderlands in the 1950s, when developers foisted off cheap plots of land lacking running water, sewage systems, electricity hookups, fire hydrants, and paved roads to low-income (and largely Tejano) families. Such communities have not only proliferated in the sixty years since but also migrated north to areas surrounding Corpus, Austin, Houston, even Dallas. The secretary of state’s office has counted nearly 2,300 colonias housing more than 400,000 Texans, though Lionel thinks there are several times as many.

  About thirty years ago, Lionel asked his wife, Juanita, if he could take a bag of groceries to some residents he met on an ambulance run. Although they were squeezing nickels to support their own five children, she agreed. That bag evolved into turkeys at Thanksgiving. Toys at Christmas. Ice during heat waves. Soon, the two were organizing clothing drives for the colonias and teaching classes about nutrition and other life skills. Gradually, they noticed how unhealthy the residents were, compared with their neighbors back in Corpus. Diabetes was rife, as was asthma. Scores of babies had birth defects. Many people were dying of cancer. And when the colonias flooded each year during the rainy season, outhouses and septic tanks did too, causing outbre
aks of infections and diarrhea. Children had to trudge through raw sewage to catch their school bus each morning. Housewives lost their toenails.

  That’s when the Lopezes got political. They started ringing the state’s chief environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), demanding that area creeks and water wells be tested for toxicity. They petitioned the Texas Water Development Board and South Texas Water Authority for the installation of fire hydrants or at least cisterns. They lobbied lawmakers for sanitary sewage systems. They even founded a nonprofit called the South Texas Colonia Initiative to make their requests more official.

  Yet time and again, they clashed with the same foe: the odometer. Many federal and state programs finance projects only for colonias closer to the border, as geography is a key component of the government’s definition of a colonia.

  “We are in no man’s land out here,” Lionel says, shaking his head. “Our people are the forgotten ones.”

  On the outskirts of Robstown, Lionel hangs a left at the Exxon gas station and rumbles down a county road. The land here is so level you could shoot marbles across it, but in time some flat-topped hills crest the horizon.

  “The little kids call this their mountain,” he says as we draw near.

  In fact, it’s a hazardous waste dump with an Orwellian name: U.S. Ecology Texas. In 2010, it was processing some 78,000 containers of waste a year—including petrochemicals, agricultural chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and certain radioactive materials—and injecting the remains deep inside a multilayer landfill liner system. It is owned by U.S. Ecology, Inc., the same company that under a different name shuttered a similar plant in Winona, Texas, in 1997, after more than 600 area residents filed personal-injury lawsuits against it. Among their grievances: scores of two-headed or stillborn barn animals as well as a host of human illnesses ranging from Hodgkin’s disease to lupus to albinism. Lionel has tried to rally opposition here in Robstown as well, but too many people applaud the jobs the facility brings to the cash-starved region (around 100).

  We bump along a chain-link fence crowned with razor wire, then turn onto a swampy road bisecting two of the “mountains.” Houses cluster just a quarter mile away. Lionel parks by the nearest one, a yellow brick ranch house. Its front door and windows open to a panoramic view of the dump—a jumble of trucks, tanks, and towers rising from otherwise flush fields. Judging by the rusted security gate and drawn curtains, the owners don’t peek out much. We walk instead to the back of the house, which faces farmland, and are greeted by the Ahlriches, one of the few non-colonia families around. Virginia is a Nordic-looking woman who speaks with the precision of an attorney; Kenneth is a thin but spry seventy-six. They are eager to share the dossier they’ve been compiling on their neighbor. Kenneth’s family has lived on this land for nearly a century, so he has had a front-row seat to the facility’s forty-year reign.

  “At first, we couldn’t find out what it was moving in here. They said it was going to be waste incineration, but as soon as they got here, they started burying the stuff. They said there’d be no odor, no runoff, no water contamination, but they’ve had all that and more. In the seventies, they were so careless with their odor, my daddy would get sick and have to step off his tractor to vomit,” Kenneth says, doffing his Texas Farm Bureau cap for emphasis.

  The odor, he says, has “a petroleum smell,” and they still catch wind of it every few days or so. Like Estella, they had to abandon their water well years ago and worry about the way their milo and grain sorghum fields extend right up to the dump’s fence line—crops that will someday become someone’s syrup and flour. “There’s a constant flow of foul air coming over our fields. There has to be some poison in there,” Kenneth says.

  And so, the Ahlriches have become self-appointed industrial watchdogs. They estimate they have filed more than thirty complaints with the TCEQ over the years, including after a gas leak in March 2008. Virginia was cooking dinner when a sheriff pulled up the driveway to warn her of “a situation” over at the facility. Once outside, she caught a dizzying whiff of what she guessed to be chlorine gas.1 She sought refuge at a church, where her throat started burning.

  “Two people went to the hospital because of it, including my piano student,” she says, her ice-blue eyes never blinking. “I am uninsured, so I didn’t go, but I had four weeks of throat difficulty after that.”

  Despite its occasional explosions and spills, U.S. Ecology Texas does make an effort to be neighborly. The company has extended multiple invitations to the Ahlriches to tour the facility and enjoy a company barbecue over the years. (They always refuse.) And each Christmas, a company representative knocks on their door to offer a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to H-E-B2 and an apple pie.

  “We throw it back in their faces!” Kenneth says, clenching a sun-speckled fist. “Well, not literally, but we never accept it. They go into poor communities full of minority people who are too scared to do anything, and they sweet talk them and say everything is all right.”

  With a harrumph, he escorts us outside to his barn. The door flings open to a veritable museum of the farming industry, from the mule-drawn plows and planters his daddy used to his own John Deere monster-tractor outfitted with the newest GPS satellite system. Standing in the middle of a century of equipment, Kenneth flings out his arms, as if to embrace it. “This land means something to me. Our heart is here. That is why this hurts me so. I used to be a happy-go-lucky person, but that dump has turned me into a grumpy old man.”

  LIONEL AND I CONTINUE DOWN THE ROAD. We’re in colonia territory now. Most houses are constructed of aluminum siding and wood, and several seem on the verge of collapse. Single- and double-wides abound, as do campers and trailers. Bedsheets flap in the wind. Auto carcasses rust in the sun.

  “That one there used to belong to an old man named Mr. Vera,” Lionel says, pointing to an abandoned camper enclosed by a fence. “He used a bucket for a toilet and cooked his meals outside. All he had inside was a mattress. One day I brought him some ice and found him sitting in his underwear. I said, ‘Mr. Vera, why are you naked?’ and he said, ‘Pues, today is wash day.’” Lionel laughs at the memory.

  Evidence of such survivalist pragmatism is everywhere. Clusters of wires strung along poles reveal as many as six different homes sharing a single electrical source. With wells costing anywhere from $4,000 to $7,000 to install, running water is also a communal commodity. Everyone complains about the groundwater’s salty taste, though. Mixing in packets of Kool-Aid is a common solution, as is sticking to Coke.

  After a time, we come upon a mobile home in especially bad condition. The siding looks as if it has been chomped on by something large and hungry. A tarp covers the more ravaged sections. We park in a mud pit and walk toward the door, dodging children’s bicycles and auto parts as we do. A Mexican national in her early thirties opens the door and greets us warmly in Spanish. We enter her home, which is entirely dark save for the glow of a flat-screen TV playing a cartoon dubbed in Spanish. As my eyes adjust to the lack of light, I realize we are surrounded by pot-bellied garbage bags stacked several feet high and covering much of the floor. The kitchen doubles as a closet, with clothes and shoes strewn among stacks of tortillas and pots of beans. Cheerios speckle the carpet. With an old T-shirt, she wipes off a space for us at the table and we all sit down. I try to follow the conversation that ensues—something about how her husband has just gotten his papers after fourteen years of working here—but am too mesmerized by the condition of the house to focus. Lionel will later explain that colonia families have to pay for garbage collection. Since most can’t afford it, they do without, allowing it to pile to sometimes hazardous heights and then burning it or bribing someone to take it away.

  Lionel talks to the woman with the tenderness of a tío. How are the kids doing? Pues, bien. How have they handled this cold spell? Yesterday morning it was twenty degrees inside. Have they thought any more about selling the house and moving to Annaville? Si, pero
who would buy this? It would cost a fortune just to haul the trash away. What about a septic tank? Pues, we can’t afford that either.

  Promising to look for a septic tank, Lionel rises from the table. We exchange another round of pleasantries and return to the truck. I glance over at Lionel, and he shrugs his shoulders sadly. “Ni modo,” he says.

  This is an expression I first learned in Mexico but have been noticing a lot here, too. No funding for your colonia because it’s five miles too far from Mexico? Ni modo, that’s a law; can’t do much about that. A hazardous waste dump opens in your backyard? Ni modo, that’s a corporation; there’s no changing that either. Risk your life crossing a 2,000-mile border to wash dishes in Texas, only to dwell in squalor because you can’t pay the garbage man? Ni modo, that’s what you get for chasing your dreams.

  SEVERAL MILES DOWN THE COUNTY ROAD, we come upon a private prison that recently opened to confine undocumented workers rounded up by the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I ask Lionel if it incarcerates its own neighbors, but he says that the majority of colonia residents are Tejanos who have lived here for generations. Undocumented workers usually stick to urban areas, where they can find work. The family we just met is an anomaly.

  Residential houses stand a couple hundred yards away from the prison. The owner of the closest one is erecting an eight-foot fence around his property. “Every time he gets a paycheck, he adds a few feet more,” Lionel says.

  Lionel’s chief concern about the prison is its pollution. When he learned that it had applied for a permit to release up to 150,000 gallons of treated wastewater a day into nearby Petronila Creek, he organized an outcry. As a concession, the prison cleaned the waterway beforehand, hauling out decades of debris. We drive out to see it. Swollen from the recent rain, the creek smacks of fermented soup, and its consistency is just as thick.