the technique for subjugating the wild Indians of the Río Grande is to give them rifles made of soft metal with long, flimsy barrels so they’ll depend on Spain for their replacement parts, “The more rifles, the less arrows,” says the young, energetic Río Grande peacemaker and future viceroy of New Spain, Gálvez of Galveston,
let the Indians lose the ability to shoot arrows, which kill more Spaniards than badly used rifles:
“Better a bad peace than a pyrrhic victory/” says Gálvez for the ages,
but just plain peace requires inhabitants, and there are only three thousand in the río grande, río bravo, they invite families from Tenerife, they give them land, free entry, the title of hidalgo, fifteen families from the Canary Islands come to San Antonio, exhausted by the voyage from Santa Cruz to Veracruz, colonists come from Málaga, exhausted by the voyage to the Río Grande,
and the first gringos arrive:
the territories were lost before they were won
Juan Zamora had a nightmare, and when he woke up to find that what he’d dreamed was real, he went to the border and now he’s here standing among the demonstrators. But Juan Zamora doesn’t raise his fists or spread his arms in a cross. In one hand he carries a doctor’s bag. And under each arm, two boxes of medicine.
He dreamed about the border and saw it as an enormous bloody wound, a sick body, mute in the face of its ills, on the point of shouting, torn by its loyalties, and beaten, finally, by political callousness, demagoguery, and corruption. What was the name of the border sickness? Dr. Juan Zamora didn’t know and for that reason he was here, to relieve the pain, to give back to the United States the fruits of his studies at Cornell, of the scholarship Don Leonardo Barroso got for him fourteen years earlier, when Juan was a boy and lived through some sad loves …
On his white shirt, Juan wears a pin, the number 187 canceled by a diagonal line that annuls the proposition approved in California, denying Mexican immigrants education and health benefits. Juan Zamora had arranged an invitation to a Los Angeles hospital and had seen that Mexicans no longer went there for care. He visited Mexican neighborhoods. People were scared to death. If they went to the hospital — they told him — they would be reported and turned over to the police. Juan told them it wasn’t true, that the hospital authorities were human, they wouldn’t report anyone. But the fear was unbearable. The illnesses too. One case here, another there, an infection, pneumonia, badly treated, fatal. Fear killed more than any virus.
Parents stopped sending their children to school. A child of Mexican origin is easily identified. What are we going to do? the parents asked. We pay more, much, much more in taxes than what they give us in education and services. What are we going to do? Why are they accusing us? What are they accusing us of? We’re working. We’re here because they need us. The gringos need us. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t come.
Standing opposite the bridge from Juárez to El Paso, Juan Zamora remembers with a grimace of distaste the time he lived at Cornell. He doesn’t want his personal sorrows to interfere with his judgment about what he saw and understood then about the hypocrisy and arrogance that can come over the good people of the United States. Juan Zamora learned not to complain. Silently, Juan Zamora learned to act. He does not ask permission in Mexico to attend to urgent cases, he leaps over bureaucratic obstacles, understands social security to be a public service, will not abandon those with AIDS, drug addicts, drunks, the entire dark and foamy tide the city deposits on its banks of garbage.
“Who do you think you are? Florence Nightingale?”
The jokes about his profession and his homosexuality stopped bothering Juan a long time ago. He knew the world, knew his world, was going to distinguish between the superficial — he’s a fag, he’s a sawbones — and the necessary— giving some relief to the heroin addict, convincing the family of the AIDS victim to let him die at home, hell, even having a mescal with the drunk …
Now he felt his place was here. If the U.S. authorities were denying medical services to Mexican workers, he, Florence Nightingale, would become a walking hospital, going from house to house, from field to field, from Texas to Arizona, from Arizona to California, from California to Oregon, agitating, dispensing medicines, writing prescriptions, encouraging the sick, denouncing the inhumanity of the authorities.
“How long do you plan to visit the United States?”
“I have a permanent visa until the year 2010.”
“You can’t work. Do you know that?”
“Can I cure?”
“What?”
“Cure, cure the sick.”
“No need to. We’ve got hospitals.”
“Well, they’re going to fill up with illegals.”
“They should go back to Mexico. Cure them there.”
“They’re going to be incurable, here or there. But they’re working here with you.”
“It’s very expensive for us to take care of them.”
“It’s going to be more expensive to take care of epidemics if you don’t prevent diseases.”
“You can’t charge for your services. Did you know that?”
Juan Zamora just smiled and crossed the border.
Now, on the other side, he felt for an instant he was in another world. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of vertigo. Where would he begin? Whom would he see? The truth is he didn’t think they’d let him in. It was too easy. He didn’t expect things to go that well. Something bad was going to happen. He was on the gringo side with his bag and his medicines. He heard a squeal of tires, repeated shots, broken glass, metal being pierced by bullets, the impact, the roar, the shout: “Doctor! Doctor!”
the gringos came (who are they, who are they, for God’s sake, how can they exist, who invented them?)
they came drop by drop,
they came to the uninhabited, forgotten, unjust land the Spanish monarchy and now the Mexican republic overlooked,
isolated, unjust land, where the Mexican governor had two million sheep attended by twenty-seven hundred workers and where the pure gold of the mines of the Real de Dolores never returned to the hands of those who first touched that precious metal,
where the war between royalists and insurgents weakened the Hispanic presence,
and then the constant war of Mexicans against Mexicans, the anguished passage from an absolutist monarchy to a democratic federal republic:
let the gringos come, they too are independent and democratic,
let them enter, even illegally, crossing the Sabinas River, wetting their backs, sending the border to hell, says another energetic young man, thin, small, disciplined, introspective, honorable, calm, judicious, who knows how to play the flute: exactly the opposite of a Spanish hidalgo
his name is Austin, he brings the first colonists to the Río Grande, the Colorado, and the Brazos, they are the old three hundred, the founders of gringo texanity, five hundred more follow them, they unleash the Texas fever, all of them want land, property, guarantees, and they want freedom, protestantism, due process of law, juries of their peers, but Mexico offers them tyranny, catholicism, judicial arbitrariness
they want slaves, the right to private property,
but Mexico abolished slavery, assaulting private property, they want the individual to be able to do whatever the hell he wants