Al Sur de la Frontera
There is a certain rite of passage, a proving ground, that comes with changing countries. This one, this frontera, has to be the most significant that I will cross, the greatest difference from one country to another. And despite the fact that I’ve been to Mexico some ten times already, spent the better part of a year in that country, that everyone I’ve ever talked to who traveled to any part of the real Mexico (meaning not some resort place in Cancun or Cabo) had only good things to say, I have taken in enough of the absurd way we view our neighbor to the south that I find myself apprehensive about crossing over.
I sleep through much of very southern Texas- the Turimex bus I am riding is a little shabby but very comfortable — probably a luxury charter bus in its last life some years ago — the soft cushioned seat backs extend all the way so to be almost horizontal. Sometime around 5 I wake up with the feeling that it is time to get serious.
Between southern Texas and northern Tamaulipas there is very little difference in terrain…they are scrappy, scrubby desert places. I look out the window at this dusty ranch land, and eventually there emerge strip malls and outlet stores and vast warehouses with dozens of semi trailers coming out of them, and then we are in a small city, Laredo. We stop for a while at the bus station there, which is very quiet. Many of us visit the convenience store next door, which is just like any other convenience store in the US, as far as I can tell.
Right in the midst of this town, there is a green river, and this is the Rio Grande. There are some streets, stores and restaurants, and then there is a bridge, with a lot of traffic, the Juarez-Lincoln International Solidarity Bridge, and I realize that this is it, the border.
On the US side, the last thing that I notice is that there is no one there. Not a soul. Some fences, razor wire, some pavement, large government buildings, but not a soul in sight. The first thing I see in Mexico is that their side of the river is a park, and as we sit in traffic on the eight lane bridge, I see that there are families barbecuing at little built-in grills. Then that there are people wading in the river- are they attempting some kind of a crossing? No, they are fishing. On the browned grass above on the floodplain, kids are desperately…playing soccer.
How can this be? Isn’t there a Narco War here? I am transfixed, watching a man with tongs flip some kind of meat on a grill below, another casting his fishing pole into the green currents, at life in its most ordinary and leisurely forms taking place. Somehow their tranquility seems a protest: against this bizarre idea that on one side of the river it is one world, and across, an entirely other one. It is absurd, made-up, but we make it real. It was not at all what I expected from La Frontera — a multi-family barbecue.
There was only one sign of the darkness that surrounds this place: when our bus had crossed the bridge but was sitting in line to enter Mexican customs, a fast-moving green boat came tearing upriver, a US military boat, men stationed at the back at gun posts, but they roared through with a big choppy wake and were gone, and the fishing and soccer and grilling went on.
Mexican immigration is sleepy. We visit a little customs office off to the side, with some soldiers talking in the parking lot. Inside three men of different generations and non-matching improvisational uniforms had to complete a highly ritualized dance involving various papers, semi-functional machines, stamps, signatures and random questions. I got the feeling that there’s not a big flow of tourists coming through Nuevo Laredo, that they were a little excited and proud (and trying to hide it) to make up my tourist card. I paid them thirty dollars American, the older man making me change out of his own pocket, and they were wishing me “bueno suerte” and I was about to get back on my Turimex bus, which has been sitting there waiting for me, all the while. One last look across the river, but the US has nothing to say, just a big white building, blank, as if no one was home.
We got straight on the highway from the border, but what I did see of Nuevo Laredo was not what I was expecting: vestiges of war; instead what I saw was an impoverished area, houses and stores and abandoned, boarded-up businesses, half-built structures in concrete. But maybe that’s what a war can look like.
The bus stopped for dinner twenty minutes from the border at a Pemex station, and the food offering was, preposterously, Church’s Chicken- cajun-spiced fried chicken and honey biscuits. I abstained. This was not going to be my first Mexican meal. I bought an Orange Fanta with American dollars and looked for awhile at a giant map of the country. Standing outside looking at desert a mostly ruined-looking man came up to me carrying a garbage bag of possessions, held up with a splintering piece of wood with nails coming out of it. In spanish, he told me he could make me very happy, and came close to my ear and said “Co-cay-een”. When I politely declined, he asked then if he could have one dollar, in English.
Fifteen miles out of town we passed unannounced into the state of Nueva Leon. For hours we rolled through desert scrub, surprisingly green, really nothing of note for miles and miles. Around dusk the terrain turned into rolling hills of the same scrub and juniper, then, improbably, on the horizon appeared giant mountains, rocky spiry mountains that reminded me of the Tetons. We passed up and through a low pass and not far beyond, even more improbably, appeared a great and vast city, Monterrey, the 3rd-biggest city in Mexico, lights extending as far as the eye could see.
Down into the valley were traffic-choked suburbs, giant hulking malls with a thousand cars outside, then right past a very impressive stadium, which amazingly was not for soccer but baseball. All the banners along the freeway there said Somos Beisbol — “we are baseball”, which I couldn’t help but agree with, and the stadium lights were on and people in the upper decks, and as we passed I could see on the Jumbotron a pitcher getting ready to throw and suddenly wished that I didn’t have so far to go, and could linger. Stay here in Monterrey another night, come out and see a ballgame.
But the bus carried on bravely through the night traffic, and we finally came to the Central de Autobuses, which was a lot like an airport, a colossal structure of transport and commerce. There were twenty ticket counters for different bus companies, and big computerized boards with hundreds of destinations to all points south and west, and travelers waiting in line. I took a bad rate of exchange at a travel agency counter to get some pesos, and then it was time to meet the city.
I walked out front, and the first thing I noticed was how hot it was. Couldn’t really be that hot, but it was, like the air from an opened oven. The second was that this was a real Mexican city street, with the smells of delicious cooking meat coming from taco stands and a block full of discount clothing stores and car exhaust and lots of people coming and going in the middle of their lives. There were fifty green taxis waiting, drivers calling to me “taxi, taxi” as I walked their gauntlet, but I felt it was a good test for me to figure out the Metro, a block away, a cavernous concrete place with stairways going up and down and signs that I didn’t understand for “Andens” and “Contrasena” and without much difficulty caught Linea Dos going downtown.
Monterrey is a big, fairly modern city, with giant mountains all around, city lights climbing up the lower slopes. There are tall buildings, a grand area of leafy parks and plazas and monuments, and a quaint old district called El Barrio Antiguo, whose narrow cobblestone streets I found myself walking at ten-thirty at night, sweating through my shirt. There were pedestrian-only streets with young people smoking and making out in front of bars, clubs with jazz playing, street vendors, a good scene. My first choice hostel was out of business — my second choice had a thirteen year old working the front desk, and a rate 33% higher than advertised online, but I was way past the point of being choosy. The pre-teen showed me to my bed in a stuffy dorm room, crowded full of bunks, that felt a lot like a sauna, but it was a place to put down my bags. I paid the 260 pesos plus tax and figured I’d go out for some dinner and eventually it would cool down. I was wrong.
Walked back out into the steamy night, and wandered the barrio, already too hungry and tired to make food decisions. I ended up at a little bar cafe called La Chunga with a guy in the corner playing too-sweet classical guitar. My first meal in Mexico was an order of Gringas, flour tortillas folded in half and filled with quesillo and red marinated pork, grilled onions and salsa, delicious, washed down with a michelada, beer with lime juice, salt, hot sauce and worcestershire (which they call salsa inglesa).
Ate it like an animal and gave the guitar player singing for some lost love twenty pesos and went back to my room, ready for bed. Not a bit cooler than before, and now with five humans producing body heat. This was the hottest night that I can remember. At midnight it was still ninety degrees outside, and this room was much more than that. Even a sheet was out of the question and sleep unlikely. I lay there and tossed and sighed deeply and sweat and suffered. Whatever part of my body touched the bed was soaked. It was like having a fever induced from outside.
A night like that will make you question everything. Most important for me as I lay there not sleeping: do I have what it takes at nearly 40 years old — the mettle — to accomplish 8000 more miles of this, the unknown, the unsettling, the uncomfortable? Somewhere in the early morning I slipped into a hazy half-sleep and made passage through the night.
Woke in a fog, lips salty, trying to ask my roommates in spanish how they handle that level of heat, none of them having good answers. Went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea and drank it in a courtyard shaded by tropical foliage. Despite the fact the border-crossing was uneventful, and that my first eighteen hours in country were objectively speaking, a success, I sit there exhausted and worn down as if I had been through some kind of spiritual test.
Out on the street there are lovely crumbling old buildings in bright colors and grand doors out of the medieval world. This Barrio Antiguo might be a quite nice place to visit at a different time of the year. Found a plate of chilaquiles and a melon agua fresca where the waitress had “Fuck” printed fifty times on her shirt. Went up to the MacroPlaza to sit on a park bench and sweat in the shade and bought a copy of the local newspaper, El Norte, and tried my best to read it.
The article that caught my attention was about the Battle of Monterrey, in 1846, in the Mexican-American War, and how the remains of US soldiers that were died there were repatriated last year. It was the hope of a quoted Mexican official that the dignified way these remains were returned would improve relations between the countries. Apparently this battle I’d never heard of was brutal, with 531 Americans killed, and they had fought for three days to take this very Plaza where I sat. Seemed impossible to imagine that thousands of US soldiers had come all this way through the desert and mountains to fight a war. And it’s not anything that anyone ever talks about in the states, but here it was, on the front page. I finished my agua fresca and strapped my pack back on and made my way to the Central de Autobuses to get out of town.
