Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

anyone discovered him it would be la migra , the Border Patrol, and not Mexican bandits. The other pollos who crossed with him, they would smell like this while they waited in those drainpipes by the Canyon of the Dead.
    â€œWe going to be out een two, three hour, Buey,” Abel said. “You don’ got to worry.”
    It was the multitudes that Shelby didn’t like. People walking, sitting, standing, driving. Shelby didn’t like crowds. He never went to Jack Murphy Stadium even though he was a fan of both the Padres and Chargers. He watched his sports on TV to avoid the mobs. And these people, many were so small, so dark, so leathery: Indians, without a drop of European blood in them. Like burros, he thought, little Mexican burros, exceptionally strong for their size.
    As a child, Shelby had seen lots of these little Indian migrants working in the lettuce fields near Stockton. And after getting the job at Green Earth he was often astonished at how they could muscle big drums onto the trucks, drums that he wouldn’t move without a hand dolly, and he was twice the size of any of them.
    This Tijuana peasant class, these leathery little Indians, made him very nervous and he couldn’t explain it. Maybe it was those black eyes, fathoms deep, no way to read them. He might be indifferent to them when they were on his side of the border, but now, on their side he was unnerved and didn’t know why.
    â€œHow many people live in this miserable fuckin town, Flaco?” asked Shelby, turning his cap around backwards to signify he wasn’t really scared, not really.
    Abel shrugged and said, “They say one, maybe two millions. They don’ count when three, four families stay een one house. The peoples, they scared of taxes, see? They don’ talk to the tax man. I theenk maybe two millions.”
    â€œWhere we going anyhow?”
    â€œ Colonia Libertad, ” Abel said. “Soltero, he bought hees mamá a nice house there. Few minute away. Best house. Nice garage for cars, but no cars. When trucks come from the north they go to that garage. He pay cash. I know heem good.”
    By then, the van was moving along a more scenic highway, Paseo de los Héroes, where modern nightclubs and discos reassured Shelby.
    â€œThis is more like it,” he said, looking around.
    â€œThees where reech peoples come,” Abel said. “Dance. Dreenk. Very ’spensive.”
    Suddenly Shelby found himself gawking at a sixty-foot statue of an American president, right in the center of the roadway.
    â€œWhoa!” he said. “That’s Abraham Lincoln!”
    â€œUh huh,” Abel said. “We crazy een Tijuana. We make statue of man who was president right after gringos steal our country.” He giggled and said, “We crazy peoples!”
    â€œThat must be the biggest fuckin Lincoln outside a Mount Rushmore!” Shelby said.
    They passed the huge concrete catch basin for the dry Tijuana River; then Shelby saw some of the many maquiladora factories: Kodak, Panasonic, Sony, G.E., and others.
    Abel had told him that the maquiladoras were the hope of Mexican politicians now that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a strong possibility. But Abel, like most of the poor people of Mexico, wasn’t looking for salvation from anything negotiated by the U.S. If the gringos wanted it, it must be bad for Mexico, was how the poor reasoned it out, no matter what their politicians said. Still, the maquiladora program could provide jobs in the short term. Jobs in the short term could buy them time. They were nothing if not patient.
    Pointing to the modern factories, Abel said, “ Maquiladora breeng money, they say. They say we make new Hong Kong right here een Tijuana.” Then he looked at the ox and said, “But I don’ theenk so, Buey.”
    Abel’s relaxed attitude was calming Shelby. “I think we oughtta hold out fer more,” he said.