The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [39]
Sonoita was easier to trailblaze than the Devil’s Highway. It was a small city, splayed in a northwesterly oblong beside Mexican Route 2 and the Sonoyta Arroyo watercourse. The cemeteries were to the east of town. There was a good paved road to the Lukeville border crossing, and a region between Sonoita and Lukeville was called Hombres Blancos (White Men), which gave newcomers a chuckle. Gringos cut south through town on Route 8, heading to the Gulf of California and Puerto Peñasco, or Rocky Point—Ski-Doo and ocean-fishing wonderland.
For a small place, Sonoita had plenty of cantinas. It had several discos. And it had the requisite border nudie bars.
There were other places of worship, too. Sonoita had been targeted for revival by the great Protestant Evangelical movement battling Catholics to a draw all over the north of Mexico. The war was not merely between Catholics and “Los Hallelujahs.” In the Catholic church itself there was a schism between traditional Roman observance and the new Charismatic Catholicism, which borrowed from the Pentecostal traditions and featured shouting and clapping, folk songs and uproar, prophecy and talking in tongues. Alternatives abounded. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, “Los Testigos de Jehová,” (known by local wags as “Los Testículos de Jehová”) worked the barrios. Karate and kung-fu dojos represented Eastern thought. Northern Mexico has a busy Chinese immigrant community, and it was fully represented by its many faiths, including loyal Taoists. The AA sober club in town introduced a “God as we understood God” twelve-step spirituality. A healthy occult subculture simmered away in the neighborhoods—from traditional and indigenous Curanderas to trance mediums, known as “materias.” Black magic cults worked in the deserts, and Santería cells worked their mojo. Koranic missionaries were the latest wave to penetrate Mexico. The Imams were making their way north, on their way from teaching the Indian kids in Chiapas and Veracruz how to speak and read Arabic. The Baptist missionaries in their little barrio Bible studies knew what they were speaking about when they preached that “Powers and Principalities” battled in the air over every sinner’s head.
Like many border towns, Sonoita offered people better pay than what they could scrape together in the interior; not all locals had plans to cross the border illegally. The San Antonio Hotel was only one of the inns that set aside rooms for “Oaxacas.” The rooms were often crammed with ten or twelve nervous people and the bill was paid whether there was toilet paper or not. Sheets? Who was going to complain about sheets? The tenants were sometimes in the rooms for only a few hours, then they were gone. At most, they’d be there a day and a night; rarely did they last more than two. The hoteliers could have simply kept plain rooms, empty except for a slop bucket in a corner, and they could have gotten full price. Some of them did.
Jesús and Maradona, camped out in their rooms between training runs, smoked and watched TV and read comic books. They went out at night and drank. During the brutal daylight hours, they squatted and sweated out their hangovers in front of fans. In this middle period, Jesús met his beloved, Celia Mendez. Nobody knows if she worked at the hotel, or was visiting for some reason. Later reports list her as “Mrs. Mendez.” Maybe she was escaping a failed marriage.
In love, Jesús left his hotel digs and moved into Celia’s house on Altar. Maradona followed soon after, renting a room down at the dirt end of the street. The runs must have already begun since Maradona could afford rent. And Jesús, now adopting his beloved’s last name as an alias, became Mendez. Mendez and Maradona—it had a nice ring to it.
El Negro had the whole thing worked out, a science. The walkers came in by bus, pulling up the long Route 2 from deep in the interior. Mendez, Maradona, Santos, or Lauro met them at their hotels. They either stayed at the San Antonio, or the appropriately named El Sol del Desierto