The Guardians (9 page)

“A honey
and
an eco-activist. What more could you ask for?” is what Uriel said on the phone. I didn't know who to tell about my guardian angel in boot-cut Wranglers. Curled up on my TV chair, devouring a half-pound of sunflower seeds, I went on like a chiflada. My amiga got me all worked up, thinking of el Miguel as a honey. That's why Mamá didn't like me having girlfriends, who, in her opinion, were bad influences and boy-crazy Chifladas, she called them. Chiflada now means I'm more flushed than usual. It was either my plant know-how or pollution that brought me and my “honey” together again. “Whatever it takes,” Uriel said.

For years Miguel's greatest enemy has been a sleeping giant. The sleeping giant is Asarco, a smelter company, which was closed down in
1999
after more than a century of belching fumes into our skies. When I was a girl and came up to work in the fields, I'd see the humongous swirls of smoke coming up from the smelter. I'd feel like the way immigrants must've felt seeing the Statue of Liberty. Those puffing chimneys were a pair of lamps, calling the huddled masses. I didn't know no better. Now the American Smelting and Refining Company that had reigned over the region might open again. The company officials have been trying to renew their air-quality permit. That's where my “honey” comes in. Not just him, but all kinds of gente must do a whole lot of huffing and puffing to prevent the waking of the sleeping giant. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality decided to postpone making any decision until further information was submitted to the state.

Miguel My Honey takes it personally. “The personal is political,” he says all the time. Not only did the smelter take his great-grandfather's life, but Miguel believes pollution affected his own son. His hijo stays home from school half the time because of asthma. The ten-year-old also sees a speech therapist. “You tell me if all the tons of lead, zinc, cadmium, and arsenic the smelter emitted into the atmosphere for years doesn't have anything to do with people being sick around here,” Miguel said to me one day. My eyes blinked in response like a flashing red light. Tests done by the New Mexico Department of Health and others had overlooked
Anapra, la colonia right next to Sunland Park where he lives. The residents became distrustful so they decided to do it on their own.

“We started getting these kids tested to see if they have lead contamination in their blood,” Miguel said. They got some help from the local branch of the Sierra Club and others but hadn't gotten the results yet. Me and my honey decided to start a project in Anapra. We didn't forget that what brought us together in the first place was searching for my Gabo's papá. But I will be the first to say, being a teacher's aide and seeing what I see at the school every day, that me and my sobrino are not the only ones with problems. Anapra is located in a sink in a bend of the Río Grande at the foot of Mount Cristo Rey Mount Cristo Rey is a holy place where people make pilgrimages to the top. A holy place desecrated by contamination. Impurities from the smelter settled there that either got blown or washed down los arroyos that drain the mountain into the community. A levee protects los Anaprans from the river but holds the pollution inside.

Container gardens seemed like a good idea if you were in doubt as to whether your soil was safe. We went loaded down with packets of seeds for planting basil, squash, lettuce, epazote, cilantro, and chiles, and a couple of twenty-pound bags of dirt he got at a nursery. I brought dozens of small plastic trays for seedlings from so many years of gardening and took them to start us off. We worked at the run-down house that his organization uses as a community center. They get it rent-free because the güera landlady who lives in El Paso believes in their cause. Their cause seems to be fighting every single problem that could afflict an American town at the same time. Pollution is only one. But with it, they figure, comes other complications. Children full of energy one day can't get out of bed when the air changes. They suffer everything from pulmonary infections and headaches to behavioral problems.

Five kids and two moms showed up for planting. All of them had been told that whatever they grew they could sell at a nearby farmers’ market. The kids, ages seven to fourteen, seemed okay. “It's gonna take a lot of work, patience, and time,” I warned our new gardeners, “and you can't be afraid of bugs.” That got a little kid going. He started fussing so much and then screaming, the mother picked him up and they left. We hadn't even started. I wished Gabo wasn't working on Saturdays. Being young himself, he could set an example, I thought. He'd been growing food all his life. “Kids listen more to other kids,” I whispered to Miguel My Honey when the fourteen-year-old wearing a tube top and low-riding pants quit next.
She didn't leave. She sat there contemplating her ombligo. It was a little more interesting than most belly buttons since there was a ring going through it. The girl looked about four months pregnant.

“Do you know that by piercing your ombligo you won't be able to give your child a blood transfusion if he ever needs it?” I asked the girl.

“Huh?” she replied.

“Whatever happened to ‘¿mande usted?’?” I said under my breath. I was ready to quit myself. “You're doing just fine,” Miguel assured me. “Don't mind her,” he added, pointing to his head and making circles with his index finger. Loca. A loca or living la vida loca. Whichever it was, she was a girl on the way out. Not just to herself and her familia but to everyone. “Come on, muchacha,” I called to her. “I need your help here.” I handed her an apron. She dragged herself over. “After we're done today, we're gonna go see a doctor, okay? Okay?” I kept saying okay until she said okay back. Now what? I said to myself. Then I decided that Miguel had to know a doctor who might volunteer her services. One project at a time, I thought. When we were done I told them all the dos and don'ts for the seedlings. Before taking the kids and one mom home, we assigned a rotating schedule for the new gardeners. I promised Miguel My Honey I'd go down to Anapra every Saturday morning to keep an eye on things. I'd better stop calling him that before I slip one day and say it to his face.

REGINA

As soon as Gabo announced that he was going to be an acolyte I figured I'd go check it out. Miguel came with me to Mass as my “backup,” as he calls himself. Backup for what? We weren't sure. Instead of my archangel showing up, it was George Strait. George Strait is one of my favorite country stars, so that was okay by me. But Miguel's ostrich boots and Stetson did cause quite a stir in church. In Cabuche not too many people dress up for la misa. If they do, it's for a wedding, quinceañera, or a baptism and there's gonna be a pachanga afterward—the men in big hats and fist-size belt buckles, the women in silky rayon, and all the niños in their Christmas clothes.

My sobrino joined us afterward outside as the crowd came out. It was the first day without rain or clouds in a couple of weeks. Gabo gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Oye, Gabito,” I said, feeling his forehead, “are you okay? You looked kind of sweaty up at the altar.” He wasn't just sweating; I was positive he was about to faint.

Gabo nodded.

“Listen,” I said. “If you want to be a priest when you finish college, okay. There could be worse things.”

“Like what—joining the army?” he asked.

“For one, smarty-pants,” I said, “although you have to have your residency to do that, anyway.” Which choice for his son would enrage Rafa more—clergy or serving in the U.S. military? I couldn't guess. I know it's not fair to say, but Rafa had better show up soon if he is going to talk some sense into his son. Every evening I sit in front of my TV with a
bowl of lentejas (which I eat a lot now during Lent), and with la Tuerta at my feet, we watch the news. They show the pictures of American soldiers who have died that day in Bush's war. At ten o'clock, the local news reports on the boys who have killed one another in local drug and gang battles. The president says, “No child will be left behind.” Some of our kids at the middle school, chiquillos, eleven or thirteen years old, are not just left behind. They're plain abandoned.

Then Gabo asked, “What do you want me to do with my future, Tía Regina? Get married and have kids to carry on the family name … ¿o qué?” It wasn't like him to be hurtful. It infuriated me that my sobrino thought that all I would want from him would be to produce an heir. Why? To carry on the name of Metatron, who had disinherited us?

“O qué,” I replied, forcing a smile. Placing my hands tight against his temples I brought his cabezahead down to plant a kiss on his pimply forehead.
Cabezahead
is one of our made-up words. Gabo's and mine. A hybrid vocabulary for a hybrid people.

After Gabo left for work Miguel suggested we go out to the coyotes’ house again. “We might get lucky and spot something suspicious this time.”

“More suspicious than crooked coyotes who disappear people?” I asked.

“Suspicious as in—what specifically are they doing that people who cross over with them ‘disappear’?” he said.

All the gente who had been in Mass were slowly making their way to cars or trucks or walking down the street to El Sombrero, the one restaurant in town that made carnitas and barbacoa on the weekends.

“Hey, you hungry?” Miguel said next. “How about this?” He pushed his hat slightly off his forehead and then he made kind of a lunch invitation. I had not had a lunch invitation in a long time. This one was okay. “How would you like to come with me to my abuelo Milton's? He's near where los coyotes live. I take him menudo, fresh tortillas … all his anto-jos, on Sundays. My grandfather has no teeth left and a bunch of stomach problems but he still enjoys the aroma of comfort food.” Miguel smiled, straightening his bolo tie. “Do you know the Chihuahuita barrio?”

Of course I did. It was next to the Puente. Before my mamá died we used to go right near that old barrio to buy used clothes. That was my mamá's get-rich-quick scheme, purchasing used clothes by the pound to sell to people in Cabuche and nearby colonias. We used to live in town and every weekend Mamá would have a yard sale where she'd sell used
clothes. People came from all around, going through the tables of near-rags and the racks of the half-decent trapos we had washed and ironed.

Long before my mother died we stopped our venture as used-clothing retailers. Some people had made themselves millionaires hustling ropa, but it wasn't us. It was those who sold to us. They had bought tons of garras, which they stored in warehouses right by the Puente. Mexicans crossed over to purchase in bulk and sell them in México. Mamá and I didn't go south with our goods but up north to New Mexico. There were a lot of needy people here, too, but not enough came around. Mamá and I both eventually concluded that neither of us wanted to be washing and ironing all week and spending the whole weekend home just to make no more than twenty dollars in total.

Until her last year, my mother had been pretty active. She drove her own car. She got involved with the Church. She gave haircuts and permanents at home. Most of my life she forced her home perms on me. I looked like Harpo Marx, red hair and all. That wasn't too bad when the Afro was in style in the seventies and I could pretend I was going for that look. She thought my natural hair was too straight. Since she died I have not touched my hair once. Along with the canas coming out, it goes every which way. And I couldn't care less.

My Sundays are usually a solitary continuation of whatever chores around the house I didn't get to on Saturday so I had no problem saying yes to the outing for whatever reason. And obviously, we were not going to do something dumb like knock on the coyotes’ door again, just check it out, like Miguel said.

So off we went speeding around the other side of los Franklins, which is where you'll find El Paso—the big city for us in las colonias, where you can count a few thousand, if you include the daily labor brought in from across the border to work on all the ranchos and in the vineyards and hatcheries.

El Paso is the last stop before México. Like Miguel said, as he talked about it on the way there, “Once upon a time Texas was México.” Back in
1846
the United States invaded its neighbor. “People who are all astounded today at the idea that this country would go and invade another country minding its own business should talk to a Mexican,” Miguel said. “It was all about Manifest Destiny—the WASP philosophy that the U.S. had a right to expand its territories.” Since then, El Paso was delegated to the United States and the city of Juárez to foreign soil. “Two
cities that coexist in an arranged and loveless marriage,” Miguel said. I had always thought about la frontera as neglected, but a word like
loveless
would not have occurred to me. Miguel's got all kinds of hardly used words. My new friend is not only a history teacher, he's a writer. He talks like a book. A book with a quiz at the end of every chapter.

He even had a lesson about the Segundo Barrio, where the coyotes live. While we parked, right in front of the green house, Miguel kept making small talk. The coyotes’ house didn't even look like anyone lived there—it was shut up, with basura piled up in the front yard. “In my class I assign
The Underdogs
by Mariano Azuela,” Miguel said. “Dr. Azuela—he was a physician—was a Villista. He wrote the first novel about the Mexican Revolution while living right in this neighborhood.”