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I am sitting with a gang member—one in his dotage now, his late thirties. He straightened up for a spell, became a trucker in the United States, married, had children. To keep his long-haul schedule, he started using amphetamines, and then the pills took over, he became surly, beat the wife, went to jail, got out and beat the wife again, was back in court. And leapt up at his hearing and attacked the judge. After prison, he was still angry and still busy with the pills. The United States shipped him to Juárez, and there he tried to kill his mother and father and siblings. And so they cast him out.

Now he has been clean for nine months and still he is not really anywhere. He is not in the present, except in a blank way, and living on thirty dollars a week. He cannot see the future. He can remember being a leader and killing, and this is as close to a dream as he is likely to get. His eyes glimmer with intelligence and yet look as empty as a tomb. This is the place those with safe, fat lives call a fantasy. But here, fantasy seems like a sound decision because what people like myself call fantasy throbs with reality.

I meet these people with dreams who paint rocks outside towns, who take old cars and make them mosaics with steer horns sprouting off the hood, and that wa-wa horn shouting out, the driver with glazed eyes and a leather hat roaring with laughter as he cuts through the fiesta. Sometimes they create sculptures, sometimes drunken poems in the cantina, sometimes murals of cheap pigments and distorted beings, but always they dream and drift into a place called fantasy.

Listen to the sensible people, the governments that have told you since before you were born that everything is getting better. Skip those failures—they are bumps on the road, and the road leads to Shangri-la, to the bright, light-skinned children, good jobs, fine schools, public health, and women who lick your toes and men who respect your body and safe streets and nights where the darkness holds no dread.

Or consider the market forces, the magical pulse of an economy now global, and hitch a ride on an information highway or bask in the glow of market forces, become part of a giant apparatus that is towing us all toward the golden shore. And you’ll have a bathroom and the toilet will flush every single time. Lady, you will be beautiful and your hands will be smooth and soft and never will a single wrinkle touch your face, nor will your breasts drop a single degree. And they will be full—we have our ways.

So I am sitting with the gang guy who is violent and will die, or I am sitting with the man full of art dreams who has no schooling but explodes with paint on cliff sides, or I am sitting with the young woman who banks it all on cosmetics, thong panties, and a sullen face protecting a heart full of hopes.

Here’s the deal: Given the choices, what would you do? I’d kill to get in the gang, I’d put on the high heels and the perfume, I’d pick up the guitar, I’d go through the wire, I’d open the bottle, I’d sniff the glue, I’d say tell me the lovers are losers and I’d certainly piss on the winners anointed by the authorities. And I’d maybe kill in Juárez, but far more certainly, I would die in Juárez. With a shout and a scream and a head full of dreams.

And I imagine sitting with Miss Sinaloa, who should have known better. I can hear the voices of reprimand in my ears that announce with certainty that sensible women of good features do not go to private parties in Juárez, where many men will gather whom they do not know—yes, I can hear these wise voices telling me the facts of life. I say dream, I say fantasize, I say escape, I say kill, I say do not accept the offerings of the cops and the government and the guns that have slaughtered hopes for generations and generations.

I say fantasy.

I say go to Juárez.

I say, Miss Sinaloa, will you take my hand?

The nights grow more difficult. The Mexican newspaper photographers learn to