The Road Through San Judas

by Robert Fraga

  They closed off all the streets. We thought that only the municipality had the right to open and close streets. But San Judas has become a law onto itself. It doesn’t seem to matter that the Federal Electoral Institute has registered the nomenclature of our neighborhood. Although Pablo Schmidt claims that San Judas does not exist, there is evidence that contradicts that. See, here is Lucy Carrillo’s voter registration card.

  She handed around Lucy’s papers. “You can see the name of the street and the house number where she lives.”

  At this point, the conversation turned to the neighborhood school. Lucy Carrillo’s guests rose and walked to the building so that we could see for ourselves what had happened. The school was now abandoned. The door was missing. The windows had all been smashed. I could make out what was left of the ditch that the Schmidt cholos had dug around the building to control access to it. Guards had slept at the gate beside a rickety bridge that led across the ditch into the school.

  “We have photos of children scampering across that ditch to get into the school,” Lina said. “And we have testimonials from parents telling about the threats that the guards here made when children tried to cross the bridge.”

  Father Joe and his allies had put up a helluva fight to save that school, the Alfredo Nava Sahagún Primary School of San Judas. In the fall of 2011, volunteer teachers organized classes for the children of San Judas in front of the offices of the secretary of education in Ciudad Juárez. The children shared a few plastic chairs and one plywood table or squatted on the floor beside a big banner that read “Justice and Liberty for San Judas.” A couple of teachers made do with one portable blackboard and a fistful of colored chalk. The authorities were indifferent, even hostile, to the functioning of the school in San Judas. They had stopped the delivery of instructional materials to the school. The secretary of education for the province of Chihuahua had ordered an investigation of the situation in the neighborhood. It never happened. After four months of their children’s sit-in, the parents and their supporters threw in the sponge. On a day in mid-January 2012, after an all-day fast, the settlers discontinued their protest. In a statement issued to the press, they pledged to continue looking for “other forms of peaceful protest” and to continue looking until they had secured justice.

  “The sacrifice of those of us who have confronted the hostility of economic power in San Judas is an education that, sooner or later, will come to a good end,” they wrote in their statement. “It is a seed that will make the desert fertile.”

  Sup Marcos had said: “In order to rebel, neither messiahs nor saviors are necessary. One only needs a sense of shame, a bit of dignity, and a lot of organization.”

  The dinner at Lucy Carrillo’s ended on a somber note. Looking out from the terrace of her house, we could see little apart from desert sprawl. Few of the original houses of the neighborhood were still standing. They were as dark and quiet as a long forgotten cemetery, silhouetted like lonely sentries against the twilight sky.

  The one building still intact and unscarred by the battle for the land, the one that we could see from her patio, was the clinic previously staffed by the Sisters of Charity. For some reason, this had escaped destruction at the hands of MS-13. But the nuns who used to work there had long since departed. I remembered our single visit to the clinic years before. It had specialized in treating children with neurological disorders. These were unusually high in the border region between Mexico and the U.S., possibly because of working conditions in the maquilas. The Sisters of Charity would bathe children in a whirlpool tub. During our visit years before, we had watched a nun prepping a little girl for her bath. Her eyes were like luminous lumps of coal, glowing in her emaciated face. She had been dressed in a diaper and a rust-red sweater. She could not walk. Her legs were like muscleless spindles. To support her weight in the tub, there was a chain and a mesh net dangling from the end of a rod. An assortment of bathing suits, turned inside out, hung like laundry limply drying on the rod.

  Apart from this one derelict clinic, there was little to see but the road that ran through San Judas, a road that had displaced so many families and caused so much grief and injury, had gotten Father Joe thrown out of the country, and had cost the lives of at least one adult and two children. José Bernal approached me. He looked me in the eyes. It was an aggressive stare, eyeball to eyeball. Los Ojos del Lobo. Very personal and impossible to evade. He asked simply, “So?”

  I pondered that one syllable challenge. It was a challenge no writer with a commitment to social justice could ignore. Then I replied, “I’ll think it over.”

  How could I write the story of San Judas? How could anyone do justice to what Father Joe and the colonos of the neighborhood had done and what they had endured? And all those, both in Mexico and in this country, present and past, who had sacrificed for the cause they believed in, for land and liberty? How could any writer offer an inkling of their devotion to that cause or pay adequate homage to their courage? One could start by quoting a line from the speech that La Pasionaria had given to the International Brigades on the eve of their departure from Spain at the end of the Civil War of the 1930s: “You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic examples of democracy’s solidarity … in the face of … those … with their eyes on hoards of wealth.”

  I did think about it. And I decided to write the story. Why? There is no answer to that question. Maybe simply so the saga of San Judas will not be forgotten. Nothing can be done to right the wrongs inflicted on the colonos of San Judas. But at least their story would be told.

  Insulating the Hormigas’ restaurant is where it had all begun, at least for me, as we stood on the porch of Casa Amistad looking out over San Judas, past the shell of an abandoned school bus, its wheels half-buried in sand. That’s where it began, and this is where it now ends.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND ADMISSIONS

  What does one say at the end of a book like this?

  Woven into the fabric of the story are references to actual persons, to what they said and did and wrote. The organizations that appear in the second half of the book actually exist. I have adapted their reports to fit the fictional skeleton of my story. Apart from that adaptation, none of the quotes attributed to them have been made up.

  San Judas—Saint Jude in English—is the patron saint of lost causes. Father Joe is my creation, but the character owes much to Bill Morton, the parish priest who lived in Anapra on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez until his expulsion from Mexico by government authorities. The Schmidt family is my invention, all four generations of it. So is my chthonic demiurge José Bernal.

  At one level, this book is about a land dispute in the north of Mexico. At another level, it deals with the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexico and the United States. Canada is also a signatory to that agreement, but to have included it here would have led me too far afield. At bedrock, the book looks at the eternal struggle between good and evil, viewed from a uniquely Christian perspective.

  This book would never have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the guidance, the critical advice, and the suggestions offered by a host of friends. I am deeply indebted to them and to my sources. I shall list some of them, in no particular order, and indicate why I am grateful to them. Apologies to those I have inadvertently omitted.

  First there is the intrepid Bill Morton. For years, he defended the residents of his neighborhood against the avarice of Mexican property developers. His courage in fighting these people was legendary. It is the stuff of which sainthood is made. I am indebted to him for having piqued my interest in the subject. I thank Barbara Zamora for taking so much time out of her busy schedule to talk to me about her role in the struggle for land and liberty. She and Bill Morton are among those to whom this book is dedicated.

  My exposure to the subject of this book came about when I worked as a volunteer on a construction project in the barrio of Anapra. The leader of the project was the Santa Fe archit
ect Alfred Von Bachmayr, who died in 2013. I have used our work as the basis for the first chapter of the book. Thank you, Von, for the opportunity to join your team. Rest in peace, good man.

  Patrick Lynch gave generously of his time to answer my questions about Boston’s North End and the Boston Latin School. He also read the manuscript of this book and made many helpful suggestions about ways to improve it.

  Molly Malloy and Charles Bowden (1945–2014) were both supportive when I approached them for help. The State University of New Mexico made available to me the valuable thesis by Jon Williams. His advisor Neil Harvey had alerted me to the existence of this work. Dr. Harvey also took the time to talk to me, and for this I am grateful.

  Father Daniel Welch of Duquesne University was very helpful in clarifying some points about the Congregation of the Holy Ghost. I am pleased to acknowledge his assistance.

  Of course, I consulted a number of authors and journalists in preparing this book. I have listed these in the bibliography at the end of the book. Let me single out for special thanks Mary Jo McConahay. Her conscientious reading of the book was invaluable, and it was she who drew my attention to the Leonardo Boff quote.

  Most of all, I need to acknowledge all of the work done by my collaborator Gavin Snider, whose sketches begin all but one chapter of the book. The cover is also Gavin’s.

  The errors in the book are mine, no one else’s. I just hope that there are not too many.

  I want to thank my editor Terry Bisson of PM Press for his patience and sympathy in working with me to bash this book into its present shape. Muchas gracias, Terry. Tu trabajo fue muy apreciado. My copy editor, Michael Ryan, did a smash bang-up job of whipping the text into readable shape, and I thank him for that.

  Lastly, I dedicate the book to the freedom fighters in Mexico and the United States, some of whom lost their lives in the pursuit of truth, justice, and honor.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Fraga is a mathematician by profession. Born in Massachusetts, he grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his father worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He himself worked as a summer student at the Los Alamos National Lab. He has taught both in the U.S. and abroad, principally in the Near East. He currently divides his time between Lawrence, Kansas, and the southwest of France, where he and his wife have restored a medieval/Renaissance house. They have two sons, one a computer entrepreneur in San Francisco, the other a pathologist at the University of Kansas. Both are married and have families of their own.

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