by Robert Fraga
The Road Through San Judas
Robert Fraga
© 2019 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–649–8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949083
Cover image by Gavin Snider
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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PM Press
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WHY THIS BOOK AND WHY NOW?
This book grew out of a stint working as a volunteer on a construction project designed to provide affordable and environmentally sensitive insulation for a humble restaurant located to the west of Ciudad Juárez in the north of Mexico. The work on its insulation is the focus of the first chapter of the book. On my last day on the job, I met the intrepid priest on whom my character Father Joe is loosely based. With his allies, this man struggled month after month to save the homes of his parishioners from being destroyed by a rich and avaricious family of land developers.
Ultimately wealth and influence prevailed, but this book is a testament to the valor of the combatants. Recording their struggle is, I feel, their historical and literary victory.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF A VOLUNTEER
To the north lay Texas and New Mexico. Those states lay beyond the wall separating Old Mexico from the U.S.
In the foreground: a grid of unpaved streets and what looked like sheds. People actually lived in these sheds.
Wood pallet fences enclosed dust-caked yards. Even the gates were made of wood pallets taken from the loading docks of American-owned factories strung along the border. Past the shell of an abandoned school bus, its white paint peeling, its wheels half-buried in sand, we looked across the plain of Anapra, beyond a razor-thin sliver of New Mexico, to the Franklin Mountains of West Texas. This was to be our home for the next two weeks. This was one of the poorest neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez. Its horizontality was punctured irregularly by eucalyptus and scrub oak. The trees rose like eruptions from the desert below.
To the west lay a soccer pitch. No grass, just sand. Just like the rest of Anapra. The local teams, kitted out in white shorts and red and blue shirts, played on Sundays. They yelled and raised sprays of dust as they kicked the ball back and forth across the sand. Beyond the pitch rose a stone-ribbed butte. As flat as Anapra itself but higher, one hundred feet above the colonia. This was the mesa where it stood: San Judas, the barrio that is the focus of this book, a region buffeted by strong winds that we would experience later during our stay.
To the east, there was nothing to see. That side of the house was built of rock and cement. To the south, it abutted a north facing hill. During the day, light seeped through clerestory windows above a sink and kitchen counters. Our (indoor) bathroom lay just to the west of the dormitory space. There were hot-water showers—a luxury in Anapra—and ordinary sinks, but the toilets were dry pits. After a dump or a leak, we would take a tin can that stood beside each of the toilets and toss a mixture of sand and lime down the hole. A series of stick-figure graphics, captioned in Spanish (Si lo usas, usalo bien) and tacked to the wall, illustrated the dos and don’ts of dry toilet etiquette.
This would be our home for the next two weeks. Casa Emaus: an elongated one-room building, partitioned at both ends into smaller cubicles, where we slept amidst a jumble of shelving units. The whole building was tucked into a hillside. On the north side—the side that faced the U.S.—a concrete porch ran the length of the house. The ridgepole, supported by square sectioned brick columns, was home to a pair of sparrows. There the birds had built a nest under the corrugated steel roof. We shared our home with birds. Amicably: no territorial squabbles; no dispute over space. The sparrows had as much right to be there as we did. The birds darted in and out of their nest. They seemed to shoot us quizzical looks when they alighted on their aerie. Were they asking themselves what the hell we were doing there? At night, we stood on the porch and watched the car lights stream silently along the I-10 in Texas. On our side of the border—on our side of the wall—we could hear the nonstop barking of dogs. We could smell the roasted elotes, ears of corn. Peddlers who roamed the streets sold them from their pushcarts.
The sparrows were asking the right question: What were we doing there? Not that there were many of us. For the entire two weeks, there were only our group leader—Alfred von Bachmayr, commonly called “Von”—an American despite his aristocratic German name, José Bernal—a construction worker from California, two volunteers—myself and a young woman whose name was Erin Campbell, and two old hands—Dean Coil and Gary Aitkin. A total of six.
Erin, a pixie blonde from a Catholic convent in eastern Kentucky, was a skilled and experienced builder. Very handy with construction tools was she. So were Dean and Gary. Dean Coil had the physique and complexion of a Viking. He hailed from Minnesota and was about to marry and settle down in Chihuahua. His second marriage, this one was to a local woman who worked as the principal of a Chihuahua school. He was a kind of on-site manager of the project and the only one of us who actually lived in Mexico.
José Bernal was a dark-skinned, lean man. His eyes were grey, almost colorless. People first meeting José sometimes thought that he suffered from glaucoma. His friends had nicknamed him Wolf Eyes, Ojos del Lobo. He was a Mexican American, a man in his thirties, who had been born in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico. His father, a peasant farmer, had gone bankrupt and migrated north. So José had grown up in the barrio of San Judas, where we were living. Somehow the family had scraped together the money to send him to high school and college. He came back regularly to Mexico, although he worked mostly on construction projects in California and other Western states.
Gary Aitkin, the last to show up, had the body and coloring of a greyhound, a two-legged greyhound at that, thin to the point of emaciation and bushy bearded. He had come by bus from Guatemala where he had wintered, holed up on a sailboat. Now he was en route back to his home in Montana. Anapra was like the halfway point on his homeward journey. Gary Aitkin invariably shortened our group leader’s last name to Von. Other volunteers from Santa Fe and Las Cruces worked with us but not for the duration of the project. In addition, we had two Mexican laborers. These guys were actually paid.
Paid for what? Volunteering for what? Our job was to do a straw wrap of a cinderblock building. Von reckoned packing straw against the cinder blocks to be an ecologically sensitive and inexpensive way to insulate the building against summer’s heat and the cold of winter. Almost all the materials were secured locally: Straw from farms to the east of Juárez. Wood pallets from factories and markets of the city itself. The restaurant that the building housed was scheduled to open the day after our arrival.
Von Bachmayr was an architect whose passion was sustainable building. A graduate of the University of Colorado, he once built a house for an eighty-four-year-old great grandmother living on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Von’s volunteers erected a straw bale house for the woman in two weeks. She now had—for the first time in her life—electricity generated by a photovoltaic array and a roof cistern to catch water for her and, if the rains were plentiful, for her sheep.
The straw wrap was not the first of von Bachmayr’s projects in Ciudad Juárez: three years earlier he had directed a project to build a house from shipping pallets. This was similar in concept to what we would be doing in 2008. Land for the earlier project had been secured by a priest of the Columban Order: Father Joe Borelli, a man who plays a crucial role in
the story of San Judas.
Von’s group was called the World Hands Project. It was an offshoot of Builders Without Borders (BWB), an organization he cofounded in 2002. The architect’s interest lay in straw bale structures like the one he had built on the Navajo reservation, but he had also been exploring ways to make trusses out of wood pallets. His work with BWB brought him to the attention of a missionary group called Casa de la Cruz. This group was involved in constructing low-cost housing along the U.S.-Mexican border. This was how Von Bachmayr came to Ciudad Juárez.
A raucous choir of cocks woke us up that first day. To get to the worksite, we squeezed into Alfred’s truck, a Toyota with a topper over its bed. To thwart thieves, we carried our tools back and forth between the worksite and Casa Emaus, hauling heavy chests and electric saws and a blue plastic water canteen down from the house to the alley where the van was parked. At the end of the day, we repeated the procedure in reverse. The routine never varied, even in its details, step by step, Monday through Friday. More often than not, on the drive itself I sat in the rear, my feet dangling over the lowered tailgate of the truck, with the rocks and the sand of the side streets, then the macadam of the main highway through Anapra, slipping beneath them. We bounced over the speed bumps, gripping every available protuberance of the Toyota for fear of being pitched out into the road. These kamikaze runs would have been illegal north of the border. In Anapra, it was the only way to commute if we were to avoid a time- and fuel-wasting shuttle service. Our destination lay half a mile away. The restaurant stood at the northwest corner of a yard where we parked and unloaded the van. And that was what we did, day after day: unpacking in the morning, loading up in the evening. Nothing of value was ever left at the worksite, not even if it could be locked up. Anapra was a very, very poor neighborhood.
The last day in March and the first of our workdays saw the inauguration of the restaurant. For the grand opening, a festive meal of chicken cordon bleu was prepared. While we did our thing outside, the three women proprietors of Las Abejas (The Bees) kept buzzing round the kitchen. The women’s cooperative that ran Las Abejas was the creation of two ex-nuns, Elvia Villalobos and Lina Sarlat. They called their own minuscule operation Las Hormigas (The Ants).
Villalobos and Sarlat had come to Anapra in 2004. Times were bad. The previous ten years saw hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juárez. Few of these crimes were solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Amnesty International did a study of what came to be known as the femicides of Juárez and found that at least 137 of the female victims had been murdered by sexual predators.
“We have found this pattern repeated over and over again,” said Sarlat. “The men expect their women to be at home ironing and cleaning and cooking. They get jealous and accuse them of having other men. Then they beat them or kill them.”
After their arrival in Anapra, Sarlat and Villalobos, then in their forties, opened a counseling center. With U.S. assistance, they schooled children who were thought to be at risk. Another of their projects was to help women in Anapra set up a transport cooperative to provide a commuter service into downtown Juárez where food prices were cheaper. This ship quickly foundered on the shoal of macho pride: male bus drivers stopped the unwanted competition. Next came a spinoff project, a sort of meals-on-wheels venture. Women sold meals out of their van: beef and chili stew with beans and tortillas for the equivalent of $1.80. Then—and this is where we came in—the Women’s collective restaurant: Las Abejas. The ex-nuns persuaded three enterprising women to open a restaurant on the highway passing through Anapra.
While the three cooks buzzed around the kitchen, our team erected an awning to protect us from the sun. The material used was a pair of blue tarps. Bales of straw, to be used later for the insulation, lay stacked against the wall that separated the restaurant compound from the neighbor’s property to the west. The straw came from a feedlot where cattle were fattened up for sale in the U.S. A jumble of pallets, soon to be sawed up and reconfigured as trusses, lay a few feet away. We improvised a workbench under the shade of the tarps. It was supported by bales of straw. Then lunchtime. But first a blessing on the restaurant by Padre Pablo, an elderly American priest with wispy white hair. He was Father Joe’s replacement in Anapra. (Why Father Joe was replaced figures in our story.) Padre Pablo was the guest of honor at the meal that Las Abejas whipped up. Lina Sarlat and Elvia Villalobos were rarely at the worksite, but they came for the opening ceremony. Padre Pablo sprinkled holy water with a sprig of laurel, and we trooped into the restaurant for the chicken feast. There were about fifteen invitees, children and adults, not including our group. That filled up the restaurant. Las Abejas was small: a whitewashed room with four round tables, each with three or four white plastic chairs. The windows were framed with translucent orange curtains, knotted to shorten them so that they hung above the window sills. Yellow balloons floated in one corner of the room to mark the festive nature of the occasion.
After lunch, we went back to work, sawing up pallets and assembling trusses. Von Bachmayr is a pioneer in using discarded pallets as a building material for roofs. He found that the pallets could be taken apart with a reciprocating saw without damaging the individual pallet boards. Erin and Gary then reassembled the pallets as trusses on a jig installed under the shade of the tarps. Dean penciled lines on the jig to indicate the position of the pallet boards, which were then aligned, glued, and clamped to the rails of the jig.
Our Mexican workers—Evaristo and Manny—were experienced at this sort of work. They were unfailingly cheerful, showing up at the worksite early in the morning, day after day, ready to work.
I spent most of my time with Evaristo, a ruddy-complexioned, stocky man. Evaristo was energetic. He was also diabetic. He never ceased to smile and offer encouragement to the less gifted among us. Evaristo had worked for Von Bachmayr before. What improvement I made in my Spanish I owe to him.
Manny was the crew’s Lothario, a rakish man with a pencil-thin mustache. He was married, but his wife was some place down south very far from Ciudad Juárez. Manny had custody of their daughter—unaccountably—but he was still lonely. He kept company with a local woman whom he sought to impress. Why he chose to do it this way, Quetzalcoatl only knows, but day after day he badgered me to translate Spanish expressions into French. These were generally expressions like “I love you.” Presumably English did not measure up as a language of love, and French had a romantic reputation. Manny worked hard to get the pronunciation down right. And if he didn’t quite pull it off, so what? Morning after morning, he would show up looking pleased with himself and satisfied. He attributed his success to my translations and kept asking for more.
Day 2: even in the Spartan living conditions at Casa Emaus, we slept like the dead after our first day’s exertions. April Fool’s Day we awoke with the cock-a-doodle-dos. But this morning, before bouncing over Anapra’s speed bumps back to the worksite, we began the day with a visit to a clinic that Von Bachmayr had designed and built two years before. Literally next door to Casa Emaus, Santo Nino Clinica Guadalupana was run by a religious order called the Sisters of Charity. Their facility existed before Von improved it, but that facility—built of concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated steel—was habitable only in the mildest of weather.
What Von Bachmayr did was to sink a new foundation made of tires—ordinary, tread-bare tires. This was a technique employed by other architects building in communities strapped for cash. Von’s team added two straw bale extensions to the existing structure. Then they coiffed the whole with a pallet truss roof. The clinic specialized in treating children with neurological disorders. The incidence of these problems—described as unusually high in the border region between Mexico and the U.S.—may be tied to working conditions in the maquilas. The Sisters of Charity bathe children in a whirlpool tub. During our visit, we watched a nurse’s assistant prepping one little girl for her bath. She was dressed in a diaper and a rust-red sweater. She could not walk. Her legs were like fleshy spin
dles. Ready to support her weight was a mesh net dangling from the end of a rod.
The clinic walls were painted like those in houses by the Mexican architect Luis Barragán: sienna and turquoise, lemon and grey and grapefruit. They bore crosses and crude renderings of religious subjects, even a traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary, and the word “God” in English—the nuns are North American—above a swollen brace of dove’s wings. A series of sketches offered advice to mothers with disabled children. They reminded me of the instructions at Casa Emaus on how to use a dry toilet: there were exercises on how to strengthen their crippled kids’ limbs and bodies. Another panel—slicker, more professionally executed, against a pale purple background—illustrated the development of a fetus from inception to birth. Below the panel, someone had written instructions on nursing: five steps, each one with an accompanying photograph.
Finally, on to the worksite, more trusses, more studs. For volunteers, we worked with lightning speed. We hauled the trusses up to the roof and nailed them in place. Studs were positioned on the south and east walls of the restaurant. The west wall was flush with the neighbor’s property and would not be insulated. The north wall, fronting the road, would be dealt with a week later. But on two sides, at least, the ribs were in place to gird the straw and mud mixture we used for insulation. One mishap—there were a few in the two weeks of the project—a volunteer from Santa Fe whacked her thumb with a hammer. For the next couple of days she spun a fat white bandage round the injured digit. She even carried her arm briefly in a sling.
That evening, after our return to Casa Emaus, we walked through the backstreets of Anapra to Evaristo’s grocery store. This was one of many abarrotes in our neighborhood. Evaristo’s store was special in two respects: he sold plants in pots and cardboard containers and plastic pails, all lined up neatly in a tiny yard in front of the store. And he was expanding: a stone and cinder block wing was going up just to the right of the door of the store. Beyond that door, his wife Lara sold eggs and long preservation milk, bottled water, food in plastic wrappers, and tinfoil-wrapped sweets stored in glass canisters. Evaristo needed the space. It was unclear where the family slept in this one-room grocery store/house. Maybe under a small, wall-mounted TV that loomed over the counter?