The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [20]
The Mexican mestizos south of the border, who traditionally lack our nostalgia for the “Indian past,” call the walkers “Oaxacas,” from the name of the Mexican state that houses one of the largest Indian populations. “Oaxaca” is a code-name for Indian, usually Mixtec. The women are often ridiculed as “the Marias.” Some of the Tohono O’Odham call the walkers invading their rez “Oaxacas.” The Yuma 14 are still regularly called the Oaxacas.
Indians calling Indians Indians.
The majority of the group came from tropical Veracruz. No terrorists, ex-cons, or drug mules. Mostly, small-plot farmers, coffee growers, a schoolboy and his dad. Some of them were used to seeing up to sixty inches of rain a year—the Devil’s Highway would be lucky to get sixty inches in a decade. They walked into the desert carrying soft drinks. Most of them had never seen a desert. Several of them had never ridden on a train, an elevator, or an escalator. Some had never driven a car. Some of them had never even eaten flour tortillas; to them, that was exotic food.
There are two fairly common jokes told about America among “undocumented entrants”—A) Don’t drink the water, and B) For good American food, go to Taco Bell.
What we take for granted in the United States as being Mexican, to those from southern Mexico, is almost completely foreign. Rural Mexicans don’t have the spare money to drown their food in melted cheese. They don’t smother their food in mounds of sour cream. Who would pay for it? They have never seen “nachos.” In some regions of the south, they eat soup with bananas; some tribal folks not far from Veracruz eat termite tacos; turkey, when there are turkeys, is not filled with “stuffing”—but with dried pineapples, papaya, pecans. Meat is killed behind the house, or it is bought, dripping and flyblown, off a wooden plank in the village market. They eat cheeks, ears, feet, tails, lips, fried blood, intestines filled with curdled milk. Southerners grew up eating corn tortillas, and they never varied in their diet. You find them eating food the Aztecs once ate. Flour tortillas, burritos, chimichangas—it’s foreign food to them, invented on the border.
They were aliens before they ever crossed the line.
PART TWO
DEADMAN’SSIGN
2
In Veracruz
The state of Veracruz lies in the southeast of Mexico, its southwestern end anchoring it to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest portion of the country, a slim land bridge that is echoed to the far south by Panama. The steamy waters of the Gulf of Mexico eddy off the beaches of Veracruz, and the air of the tropics is caught here, between the mountains and the sea. The green peaks wear scarves of fog.
Its immediate neighbors to the south are Tabasco and the troubled state of Chiapas. Mexico City lies to the west. Guatemala is less than five hundred miles away. “Veracrtuz” is a name bequeathed to the region by the Conquest. It means “The True Cross.” But its native roots run deeper, and more ancient names still grace the towns and villages of the region: Coscomatepec, Chicontepec, Tlacotepec, Jototepec, Atzalan. Indigenous ghosts haunt the land.
The affix “-tepec” reveals much about the landscape. “Tepec,” in Nahuatl, means “hill.” Although it is a coastal state, Veracruz is ringed by mountains. To the north, the Sierra Madre Oriental begins; to the west rises the massive volcanic range and plateau that encircles Mexico City; and to the south, which, due to the bend in the geographic elbow of the isthmus is Mexico’s west coast, is the Sierra Madre del Sur.
In Veracruz, things weren’t going well.
The people were killing themselves working the ranchos on the outskirts. The