Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants by Ted Conover Read Free Book Online

though, the murky waters of the Rio Grande beyond did not exude the epic quality that I had expected after talking with Mexicans for so many weeks. It looked too tame and weedy, too mundane to serve as the great symbol of division between two cultures, two economies. Though apparently deep, it could not have been more than fifty yards across. And the U.S. side, grassy and treeless with a couple of junked cars visible: this was the promised land?
    From where we crouched, a steep and muddy slope dropped to the brown water. The three boys negotiated the mud with the raft, looked around again, and then signaled that the way was clear. Alonso and I skittered down the bank to the water line. As the small raft was placed in the river, we were told to take our shoes off— “so that they won’t damage the bottom.” Alonso, meanwhile, noticed a rapid stream of big bubbles emerging from underneath one side of the raft. One of the kids smiled sheepishly. “We’ll have to hurry” was all he said.
    Knees to our chins, Alonso and I packed ourselves in between the two paddlers, someone gave a push, and we were off into international waters. As the current was strong, the boys paddled furiously. The tiny raft bobbed and twisted. About halfway across I spotted the trampled spot on the opposite bank for which we were aiming, some twenty yards downstream. The front paddler was slow, and we almost missed the landing spot. Then, all of a sudden, we were there, and Alonso was out— “careful! careful!” hissed a kid, as the raft lurched—and then me, both of us scrambling up the bank barefoot, shoes in hand, heading for a patch of tall grass. It felt like a war movie, guerrillas penetrating enemy lines. “Did you see anybody? Did you see anybody?” I asked Alonso.
    “ No! Relax!” he said, tightening his laces.
    The kids had given us directions to downtown Laredo, and cautiously Alonso led the way, through the grass and shrubs of the floodplain, past larger trees and then a house. Some of the reports on the “flood” of aliens entering the United States had led me to think the path would be well worn, but instead we had to pick our own way, deciding which routes would be least likely to have one of Immigration’s motion sensors—devices which detect the vibrations of footsteps and transmit the information to a main computer—and which ones offered the best concealment. Onto pavement, then past two stop signs and a traffic light, a right-hand turn and ... downtown Laredo lay before us, about two miles ahead.
    Strangely opposite emotions swept over Alonso and me as we walked those streets of Laredo. I suddenly felt a great excitement and wave of relief, a joy at being home again after so many weeks, out of the hands of the coyotes, away from Mexican law enforcement, back in a place, I thought, where I could explain myself out of most predicaments I might find myself in. A joy, in other words, at being alive.
    Alonso, on the other hand, was now out of the frying pan and into the fire: suddenly an “illegal alien,” subject to arrest, almost alone in a foreign land where he didn’t know the language. His nervousness grew perceptibly with his vulnerability. When we crossed the path of two uniformed deliverymen at an intersection, for example, Alonso walked to the other side of me and whispered, “Stay between so they don’t see me!” Then, perhaps in some sort of habitual deference to the gringo on his own turf, he began to walk behind me, as though he were my manservant. The confidence with which he had led the way in Mexico evaporated. It looked very conspicuous. I was about to point this out when down someone’s front steps walked a postman also in uniform and with a cap. Alonso seemed to hop a foot in the air, and the postman looked startled.
    We continued our afternoon walk down the wide, warm, quiet, and paved streets of Laredo. It was probably the poor side of town, but worlds away from the poor side of Nuevo Laredo.