Indios and Atlante are playing at night, after the Caribbean sun has set. On the evening of the game, a couple hours before kickoff, the air is still hot (and moist and sticky) as I walk from my hotel to downtown Cancún. I see only one man wearing an Atlante jersey. Cancún doesn’t seem to care that it has a team in the Primera. It’s like Miami that way, a big-league destination with or without sports. Cancún’s indifference is most evident at Atlante’s lame stadium. It’s just a concrete square, four building blocks of bleachers set down like unconnected Legos. The stands look old and weathered, but when I step into the press area I’m told that that Alain N’Kong, our inept striker, scored the stadium’s first-ever goal, back when he played for Atlante, which couldn’t have been that long ago. One of the local reporters howls at the mention of Kong’s name. He hasn’t scored a goal for us all season; it seems he was a fraud when he played for Atlante, too.
The press section isn’t an enclosed box or anything, just a roped-off patch of bleachers. The rope seems superfluous. It’s not as though anyone’s going to take our seats. There’s hardly anyone here. I pass maybe thirty-five fans as I walk down to the field to watch the Indios warm up. I find Gabino waiting in the tunnel. The players put in a good week of training, the head coach tells me. He and his assistants have drafted a solid game plan, and everyone’s still pumped from last week’s win over Querétaro. He expects another win tonight. Marco jogs past us and onto the field, first plucking a tuft of grass and crossing himself. He throws me a wave of acknowledgment, but otherwise he’s dialed in, serious. He slaloms around a stack of orange cones, running backwards as instructed. I take a walk around the track that circles the field.
Back when I first met up with El Kartel, before I even rode the bus to Monterrey, I was told to get out my calendar and highlight this game. Ken-tokey promised me it would be El Kartel’s best road trip of the year. Three days on the bus just to reach the Yucatán Peninsula, but, in the end—Cancún, man. Big parties. Soccer first, but then an epic night out. Here I am, but where is Ken-tokey? Where is anybody? Not a single Kartelero made the trip. No one thinks the Indios are going to win, so why bother? Atlante is a mid-table team, not the best in the Primera, but good enough to have won a coveted trophy. A banner hanging on a stadium wall identifies the Cancún club as the current champion of CONCACAF, the governing body of soccer in North America and the Caribbean. That’s a major title; it comes with a ticket to the FIFA Club World Cup and a chance to knock off Lionel Messi, Gerard Pique, and the other superstars of Barcelona. When I make it back to the press box (press corral?), the reporters expect an easy Atlante win. No one is worried about a possible Indios upset.
ON LEAVING: IT’S estimated that some fifty thousand Juarenses have moved to El Paso in the past three years. Saul Luna’s girlfriend, a Juarense, hasn’t crossed back to Mexico in more than three years. Neither has an El Paso mechanic I visited when I needed a new set of tires. He and I got to talking, and it turns out he owns a house in my neighborhood, just one block from my apartment, a house he’s simply abandoned. Francisco Ibarra postponed his move to El Paso for as long as he could. As the violence ramped up, and as it became clear his family was a target for kidnapping and extortion, he still tried to make it work in Juárez, to adapt somehow. First he bought a bulletproof SUV, then another. He hired a bodyguard to keep his family safe. It wasn’t enough. His wife was assaulted. The names of his children appeared on kidnapping lists. He went ahead and set up Paco in El Paso. Immigration lawyers advised Francisco that he was free to join his son, to move the family over. But the residency process, in his case, required a full year on the Texas side. No crossing back to watch Indios games, or even practices. No checking in at his Juárez radio station. None of the schmoozing with politicians he feels is essential to his professional success. He didn’t want to cross over. He didn’t want to leave his city. He put it off, and he put it off longer still. But, eventually, he knew the time had come.
On his last day in Juárez, he visited the Indios offices down at the Grupo Yvasa complex. He followed that visit by stopping in at his radio station, lingering much longer than he needed to. He thought of his father, who refused to move to El Paso with him. Francisco recognized that if only he’d been born in Texas, as his mother had suggested, then a residency exile wouldn’t have been necessary. He waited until the last minute. Finally, he told his driver to take him over. They drove on Colegió Militar, past Chamizal Park, and then past the soccer stadium. Their bridge loomed up ahead, in El Centro, coming into view.
“Stop!” Francisco commanded. He wanted to go for burritos. Immediately. Nothing on earth was more important. He demanded his driver double back, steer deep into the city to his favorite restaurant. It took a while to get there—qué bueno—and once there he ordered a full meal. He sat in a booth with his food for an hour, and then a while longer. He couldn’t stand the thought of leaving.
“I love Juárez,” he tells me. “I just love Juárez.”
With their membership in the Primera truly in the balance, the Indios come out with a passion they should have tapped a lot earlier in the season. They look great, right away. Every time there’s a fifty-fifty ball, meaning possession is up for grabs, an Indio seems to end up in control. Edwin, always a feisty scrapper, is battling harder than ever. Gabino’s game plan, clearly, is to retreat into a shell, to concentrate on defense. Our few chances come on counterattacks. As time runs down on the first half, Kong misses a great opportunity, a breakaway he totally flubs. The reporter next to me in the press box snorts. No score at halftime.
ON LEAVING: AT least 160,000 families have abandoned Juárez in the past three years—if not for El Paso, then for other cities in Mexico. At halftime I talk to a young woman wearing an Indios jersey. She caught my ear with lusty cheers every time an Indios player touched the ball. She’s a Juárez native, she tells me. She’s been living in Cancún for a couple years, ever since the violence inspired her parents to sell their Juárez properties and sink the proceeds into an oceanfront hotel, which they run.
“Nobody ever thought we’d make the Primera, and still we did!” she says when I bring up the team’s likely descent. There’s that Frontera optimism I’ve come to know, that found silver lining. Juárez, she tells me, remains in her heart. She still has lots of family there, including her grandmother. The people are warm, the city is generous, et cetera—all that. Yet when I tell her that life seems softer in Cancún, she quickly responds with “Definitely!” When I ask if her family will be going back, she answers even more rapidly.
“Never!” she shouts, startling me with the force of her reply. “I still go up to visit my grandma, but Juárez is so violent. I saw a car get jacked right in front of me at a red light!”
THE INDIOS LOOK a little tired after the break. Road trips are grueling, as I’ve learned. Especially with a cross-country flight like the one the team took only yesterday. The humidity isn’t making anything easier. The biggest factor has to be their play in the first half. It seems to have depleted them. They’ve given Atlante their best shot, and it didn’t produce a goal. It’s going to be hard to play with that same intensity, yet now is when they really need it. They cannot afford even a tie. Because they must play for the win, Gabino relaxes the defense a bit, telling his players to make more runs on net. It’s a risky tactical decision. With the midfield and the forwards pushing ahead, the Indios are vulnerable to a quick counterattack, which is what Atlante pulls off perfectly. Ten minutes into the second half, the home team scores a goal: 1–0.
This is not good. Not at all. The Indios need to score two goals now. They have not scored two goals in a single game all season. Gabino has no choice but to double down, to push even harder. He pulls off Edwin, replacing the veteran with younger and fresher legs. Two more players are soon swapped out as well, to energize the attack. That’s all the substitutions we’re allowed. I find myself feeling nervous, my leg fidgeting like Gil Cantú’s before the Monarcas home game. If you’re not
nervous, then you don’t care, brother. I wasn’t invested in the team when I moved to Juárez. I am now. I don’t want the Indios to lose. I want Edwin’s hard work to be rewarded. I know a loss will pain Marco tremendously. He needs a goal, from somebody. We need a goal. Check that: We need two goals. The team that scores next, though, is Atlante. Again. And again off the counterattack. Two-nothing. Juárez is done.
I can see the Indios deflate. The players still on the field—Marco, everyone—they just dissolve. It’s over. They have been kicked into a pit of fiery skulls. Score three goals in the fifteen remaining minutes? Not even in a fever dream. The moment everyone in Juárez has been dreading—and everyone else in Mexico knew would come—has indeed arrived. Very late in the game, with any chance of a comeback already shot, our goalie Christian stops a breakaway the only way he can: by taking out the opposing player, a move that earns him a red-card expulsion. The Indios have no substitutions left. Someone on the field will have to step into the net. Maleno Frías gets the call. He’s handed a pair of big white gloves and a fluorescent orange jersey that indicates he’s the goaltender from here on in. His first job is to stop a penalty kick. Impossible. Embarrassing, really. His flailing stab at the ball—he comes nowhere close—is a fittingly ridiculous end. Three-nothing, then the final whistle. The Indios will drop to the minors next season.
On leaving: The players shine with sweat as they slump off the field. Marco strips off his Indios jersey as if he’s disgusted to have it covering his chest. Just before he ducks into the locker room tunnel, he throws his uniform into the stands, wanting nothing to do with it. The sweaty shirt is caught by a man named Christian Sanchez. He’s an architect. Seven years ago, after finishing up his studies in Mexico City, he moved to Juárez cold, not knowing anyone but confident the border’s booming population would give him plenty of work. He found clients almost from the day he arrived. He landed so many commissions he was able to start on a personal project, a home of his own.
He gave his house a clean, modern look. Silvery steel railings and trim, walls painted rich cream or a deep, contrasting plum. He wanted the details of the house to signal quality. The garage door is like no other: two steel slabs that appear to be acid-washed. The front door is huge, maybe twice the size of a normal door. While the first floor of the house appears fortified, which is a traditional Mexican look, the second story is unusually public. Glass walls illuminate an upstairs living room. From the master bedroom, a wide porch overlooks the street. Even before construction started, the architect knew it would be the most striking house on his block. It was to be his calling card, the example to show prospective clients. But by the time the builders wiped a final polishing cloth across the granite kitchen countertops, the murder rate in Juárez had exploded. Who needs an architect with bodies stacking up in the street? Why pay for picture windows when they expose you to stray bullets? Families abandoned thousands of the finest homes in the city, flooding the market—if it could be said there was even a market anymore. Sanchez started planning his escape. He put his dream house up for sale, having never moved into it. He prayed someone would buy it.
Marco, after meeting Dany in the gym, began looking for a place where the two of them could live together. He drove all over Juárez, checking out everything available. When he saw Christian Sanchez’s showpiece, he fell in love for the second time in a month. The list price: $180,000, less than it cost to build, but probably still too high, now that all property in Juárez is considered distressed property. Marco offered $140,000 in cash, the bulk of his savings account. The architect accepted the offer immediately, gratefully. Marco probably could have bought the house for a lot less, but he wanted it badly. It was perfect. He thinks it still is perfect, as does Dany. “I love my house,” she’s told me. With everyone else running away from the city, Marco sank into Juárez all he had in the world. At the closing, as he turned over his pesos and signed the deed and other paperwork, he saw himself as Juarense for the long term. At that closing, Christian Sanchez shook Marco’s hand. And then he moved to Cancún to start over. He moved that very same day.
GABINO IS THE first Indio I find. The stadium has emptied—it was never that full to begin with—and the youth teams of both Atlante and Los Indios are on the field for their meaningless exhibition. I spot the head coach in a box seat, along with the Indios’ goalkeeper coach and the team doctor. Gabino shakes my hand politely when I step into the box, but it’s obvious he’s in a bad mood, and not merely the kind of upset anyone might feel after a loss. He’s angrier than that, very mad. He had prepared the team to play their best, he thought, had all his ducks lined up in a just-right row. Yet his forwards failed him, as usual. It’s as if a few key players didn’t care that the loss permanently kills the Primera dream and that everyone, including Gabino, is now stained with red stripes of stink. The goalkeeper coach signals to Gabino that it’s time to go, that the team bus is about to leave. Gabino signals back that he’s going to stay. The team can leave without him.
I slink out of the box as quietly as I can, heading to the parking lot to see if I can catch Marco. We’re in different hotels, and I’m staying in Cancún yet one more extra day—why not, right?—so this might be my only chance to talk to him. I pass Domino’s pizza vendors liquidating their inventories with slashed prices—a whole pie for about a dollar. Beer ladies who’d expected more fans at the game roll coolers full of unopened Corona bottles through the loose gravel that rings the stadium. I watch a young female television reporter navigate the gravel in five-inch stilettos. Her skirt is the shortest I have ever seen in the wild, so mini I really, truly, and honestly cannot help but notice that her panties match her tight black tank top. When she finally makes her wobbly way over to the dressing rooms, Atlante players crowd around her, eager to be interviewed.
There’s significantly less buzz outside the Indios’ locker room. I’m the only Juárez guy here, and only two Cancún reporters collect the obligatory “We feel bad” quotes from the losers. “We knew we were going down,” Marco tells me. “We just hoped it would be longer before it was official.” Marco and I both notice Alain N’Kong—the top forward on my list of suspected quitters—signing autographs and talking to friends he made when he played down here. He’s upbeat, telling jokes, smiling and laughing. It makes me mad, his indifference. I want to pull an Oskar and crack one of those Corona bottles over his skull. “Alain’s living in the past,” Marco practically spits, angry too. He climbs on the bus, and a few minutes later Kong joins him. They pull away from the stadium without their coach. Atlante fans jeer as the bus slips through a guard gate. It rolls onto the street, not to come back this way for a long time, if ever again.
“They lost the game, they lost the city, they lost the people,” states the Indios’ Ramón Morales in an especially melodramatic press release that lands in my cell-phone in-box. I trade in the green bib I needed to wear to sit in the press section, receiving my passport in return. It’s almost eleven P.M. I’m too worked up to go back to my hotel, and I don’t want to go to a spring-break nightclub. I walk Cancún in search of food, hopefully someplace far away from American college students. I cruise up and down side streets until I come across Rolandi’s Restaurant Bar & Pizzeria. It might be a tourist joint—the sign is in English—but when I step inside, everyone is speaking Spanish and the pizzas smell so good and the crowd looks local and I ask for a table. I’m seated near a man and woman enjoying a date. Two women share a table across the room, under a TV showing a boxing match in Monterrey. Near me, a woman absently taps the back of her toddler, his head resting on her shoulder. A family out at almost midnight! I love it. “You’re alone?” my waiter asks, concerned. Yeah, but I’m happy to be here. The ceviche is pushed, but I want comfort food tonight. Those Domino’s vendors at the stadium got into my head. I order a pizza margherita topped with shrimp and onion. The waiter brings me a Negra Modelo and pours it into a tall glass. I take a long first sip and lean back in my chair.
I do
n’t know how to feel about the Indios. Obviously they were going down. Tonight is not a big surprise or anything. “Nobody thought we’d even reach the Primera,” Marco told me once, same as that young woman I spoke to at halftime. It’s been nice, for a while, to be in the fold, to be a city all of Mexico has to acknowledge is indeed in Mexico. However fleeting the coverage on ESPN Deportes, Juárez was still on ESPN Deportes. The Indios games against Santos and Toluca and Club América were broadcast across North America, sometimes even down to Colombia and Argentina. The city’s name appeared in the league standings every week, if always at the very bottom. After tonight, order is simply being restored. Juárez will once again disappear.
It was clear they were going to be relegated. Of course. Not only did they need to beat Querétaro, and then Atlante tonight; they had to win five more games after that. This team that can’t score needed to win seven games in a row. That was not going to happen. But we liked to think it could have. That the team would rebound just like Juárez can still rebound from this violence and become “like Las Vegas but Mexican, so better,” a city where dentists are not shot at and where ambitious architects can build a practice. The end of any dream hurts. It forces us to take a cold look at where we stand. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we know Juárez won’t get better, not any time soon. We know it’s probably going to get a lot worse, actually. Calderón’s social programs will fix nothing. Some of the maquiladoras will pack up and move to China. Some of the bus drivers that serve the remaining maquiladoras will be murdered. In the morning, the Indios will return to a hemorrhaging city.
This Love Is Not for Cowards Page 21