Hard Landing
By Frank Clancy
Photo by Jonathan Barkat
(page 2 of 6)
I know little about Juan Antonio Rangel, except that he lived here, in the capital of the state of Guanajuato, before he came to the United States. And that his father’s name is Nestor Rangel. I find Laura, who is in her late thirties, via the website of an American-born tour guide. She has lived in the United States, working as a nanny in Beverly Hills and Davenport, Iowa, and studied at Oxford. She has also worked for the state of Guanajuato; we figure the government must have some record of a corpse imported from the United States. Laura makes one call, to a former colleague. Fifteen minutes later, we have an address of sorts: Domicilo conocido San José de la Luz. Known residence, San José de la Luz.San José de la Luz is a neighborhood of about 500 families on the highway six miles southwest of the city center. The second person we meet, at a vegetable stand, knows the home of the Rangels, and gives us directions. It’s near the railroad tracks. A woman in a tiny convenience store nearby points out the family compound. The shiny black ribbon above a curtained doorway, a symbol of mourning, suggests we’ve found the people we seek.
Using her car keys, Laura raps on the iron gate. A small, bowlegged man wearing jeans and a cowboy hat responds. Greeting us, Juan Antonio’s paternal grandfather, Don Yeyo, surreptitiously slides a bolt sideways, locking the gate before we can enter. The woman I will come to know as Maria Chagaka joins him, leaning against a brick wall.
Depending on how you count, there are four or five buildings on this small plot of land, surrounding a dirt courtyard. Three families live here with Don Yeyo. There’s no running water; government trucks deliver water to five blue plastic drums, which hold about 50 gallons each, at the front gate. At the rear of the yard, a few dozen stalks of corn struggle for life. Chickens wander freely, hunting for food, sometimes pecking at kernels of the scraggly corn. Talking through the gate, Laura and I introduce ourselves.
We stay for 20 minutes, then return that evening, after Nestor Rangel has come home from his job collecting payments for furniture bought on credit. Both are awkward get-acquainted meetings. The Rangels are suspicious of me and my Mexican assistant, who speaks English fluently. They cannot conceive of a stranger, a gringo, traveling so far to inquire about their son. What do I really want? What do they have to gain?
The Rangels refer to San José de la Luz as la ciudad, the city. They moved here eight years ago from a ranch in the mountains, where they owned about 150 acres of land. They made charcoal, which had to be sold in the city. There was no transportation, little water, no medical care. They came to the city for a better life.
Ironing clothes that she has washed by hand, Maria Chagaka says little. She did not want her son to go to the United States. “If we hadn’t left the mountains, he might still be alive,” she says, her voice barely audible.
Don Yeyo explains, “He left for the same reason everyone leaves. Here you can find work, but for very little pay. He wanted a better life.”
Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, July 5 and 6, 2006; San Antonio, Texas, July 22, 2006
The young man who was injured in the accident that killed Juan Antonio is Jose Dolores Zúñiga. Nestor and Jose’s father, Marcelo, are family, but Nestor can tell us only that his cousin lives in the city of Dolores Hidalgo, about 30 miles northeast of Guanajuato. So Laura and I set out to find the Zúñigas much as we searched for the Rangels. Except it’s more complicated in Dolores Hidalgo, since some 50,000 or so people live here. We park on the central square, near a car with Mississippi plates whose owner struts the sidewalk, showing off the expensive clothes he bought in el norte. We spend hours crisscrossing Dolores Hidalgo on a hot summer morning, talking to dozens of people—in social services agencies, various branches of city government, the post office. We question a man selling newspapers on the main square and a woman in a pink T-shirt that says “Minnesota.” One stop is at a radio station that broadcasts community announcements. We put out a query, and Marcelo calls that evening, inviting us to return the next day.The Zúñigas live in a small brick house about a mile from the church where Father Miguel Hidalgo ignited Mexico’s struggle for independence from Spain in September 1810. Their tale is very similar to the Rangels’: they left the mountains when Jose Dolores was an infant, “for the same reason people go north.” And so in turn, Marcelo Zúñiga told me, his son went to the United States “out of necessity—we are very poor.”
The Zúñigas call their son “Lole.” He crossed the border first, in November 2004. He was 17.
Traveling with a friend, Lole had taken a bus north to Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas. A coyote—a smuggler—paddled them and eight others across on a makeshift raft made of inner tubes. The river was only a hundred yards wide.
Together, they made their way north, walking at night through the vast, nearly roadless expanse of ranchland that stretches west from Interstate 35 to the river. They slept during the day, in the shelter of mesquite trees.
Several days into the trip, Lole’s friend began to struggle. He eventually fell behind. Lole stayed with him. On the fifth day, the coyote abandoned them. They had no idea where they were.
For days, Lole and his friend wandered past trees, blackbrush, and prickly pear. The nearest thing to a hill in that part of Texas is a freeway overpass. A hundred yards from a highway, the road is invisible.
Cows meant water. With luck, a rancher would be pumping it from the ground, cool and clean. More often, it was in a concrete trough or earthen pond, brackish and warm. “We had to drink whatever we could find,” Lole told me.
The young men ate canned beans and tortillas until their food ran out. Ten days after crossing the border, they reached a road. For six hours, they walked east along the two-lane, in broad daylight. “After all those days, he was lost and hungry, and thought he was going to die,” Lole’s mother tells me. “He was hoping to see the Border Patrol. He was begging God to see the Border Patrol.”
Finally, 39 miles north of Laredo, the pair stumbled into Encinal, Texas, a battered town of about 600 residents just off Interstate 35. They had enough American money to buy food at a gas station. Nearly everyone who lives in Encinal is Latino. For $1,300 apiece, they found shelter and another coyote, who several days later drove them 400 miles north to Dallas.
