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The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason people sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason people go north, aside from the legendary beaches of Kansas, Chicago, and other illegal destinations, is to survive. This is not simply an economic exchange. Unless you are one of those people who own a factory, this is a deal with death and money. Juárez, the pioneer city of Mexico in foreign factories, is full of death, poverty, and violence after decades of this busy notion of the future.

Let me ask you one question: Just what is it you don’t understand that every dead girl here understands, that every dead cholo understands, that everyone ending a shift at the plant understands, and that every corpse coming out of the death warehouse understands?

To sit on the curb by a death house in Juárez is to smell all things that cannot be said out loud in American political life.

And as El Pastor said, “Dementia smells.”

The clothes hang on barbed wire, on old loading-dock pallets that now serve as fences, on bushes and shrubs. Water in many of the new colonias comes by truck and is stored in containers also pilfered from the factories and still rich with toxic chemical residues. The street will be dirt or sand, the electricity stolen off power lines, the wires snake on the ground to the individual shacks. The air feels like a solid because dust and fumes wrap Juárez in an atmosphere that can be chewed.

The city trails along an ebbing river and is cradled by dunes, and when the wind rises, the air goes brown and the dirt is everywhere. This is where the women come into a miracle: Almost every morning, Juárez teems with poor people in clean clothes, and these clean clothes come from the labor of women who lack running water or even conventional clotheslines. They are the secret engine of the city, the cooks and bottle washers, the laborers in the factories where women have been supplanting males for decades, the beasts of burden carrying groceries, the mothers of children, and always the dirt police who turn out family members each and every morning in clean clothes. Their hair pulled back, their lips red, their eyes weary, the women are the washing machines in a city of dust.

Every time I come to Juárez, I swear it is for the last time. And then, I come again and again. I seldom write about these visits, so that is not why I come. I seldom enjoy these visits, so that also fails to explain my returns.

I think it is about tasting the future. Juárez is the page where all the proposed solutions to poverty and migration and crime are erased by waves of blood.

I feel at one with El Pastor.

He keeps telling me of his mission, how back in 1998, when the bad snow came, and “I was driving that day and singing to the Lord and it was snowing. I said, ‘Lord I’m working with you,’ and the Lord pulled my hair.”

That is the moment when he began scooping the crazy people off the streets and creating his asylum in the desert.

Now El Pastor is jubilant because he is talking about Juárez.

“I love Juárez,” he says, “I know it is dirty and very violent but I love it! I grew up in Juárez. I love it. It is a needy city and I can help my city. I can make a little difference.”

As he blurts out his love, we are at a red light. A boy with needle marks racing up and down his arms fills his mouth with gasoline, raises a torch, and then spits fire into the air.

I tell people I hate Juárez. I tell people I am mesmerized by Juárez. I tell myself Juárez is a duty. And I keep going back, month after month, year after year. I tell people I go to Juárez for the beaches. Or I tell people I go to Juárez for the waters.

Often, people tell me I don’t know the real Juárez, a place of discos, party-hearty souls, laughter, and good times. I do not argue.

I go for what I do not know. I go in the vain hope of understanding how a city evolves into a death machine. I watch modern factories rise, I see American