"You've probably heard that Mexican border towns are evil," my Spanish teacher husband wrote to parents of kids traveling to Mexico with him, "And what you've heard is true. Our first stop will be Monterrey(left), sometimes called `The Pittsburgh of Mexico.'" I guess that was intended to soothe them. Monterrey has been an industrial powerhouse, known for its breweries and steel mills. Monterrey was also our first stop as a married couple, and it was rather benign and boring. Our biggest problem there was, uh, a case of constipation, I won't say whose.
A few years later, I went down to Monterrey's prestigious Instituto Tecnológico to study. The "TEC," as they called it, was Mexico's MIT, and the cradle for future business and political leaders. The year I was there, I almost literally bumped into President Salinas, there for a building dedication. And a couple months later, he gave the Institutional Revolutionary Party's dedazo to poor, doomed Luis Colosio, a TEC alumnus. The student body at the TEC was taller, more robust, and a great deal whiter than Regios in general, and a heck of a lot more privileged than most gringo students, including me. It was one reason why I would frequently blow class and hop on the downtown bus to hang out with everyday people elsewhere in the city.
Tonight I stumbled on a diary entry describing such a bus ride, and it led me down a troubling chain of thoughts. Monterrey is wallowing in its own blood, now. This story has blood, marrow and bits of flesh sticking to it. Will it be our story, someday?
La Vida es el Camino al Sépulcro
It's a brisk day in November, 1993, only 11 degrees centigrade. I’m on a teeth-clicking, tit-snapping bus ride over potholes and through pools of grey-green sewage. A large woman in a sweater and stocking hat presses me against the window. In her lap is a greasy copy of ¡Extra!, a rag all about Monterrey's lurid side. As she extracts what may be chicken tacos from the paper, I notice several gory, four-color photos of the wreckage of two Ruta 46 buses that had collided and overturned. Red blood. White brain. Rumpled, stained clothing.
It's always been my impression that Mexicans have an intimate acquaintance with death that manifests in a number of healthy ways. Where we in the U.S. shutter and sanitize mortality, Mexicans invite it right on in for a cerveza. Google El Día de Los Muertos sometime to see what I mean by that.
Then again, perhaps it's an unhealthy fatalism, borne of horrible conditions. In the 1990s I saw stark inequality at every turn down there, nowhere more glaring than the abrupt divides between wealthy colonias (what we would call gated communities in the U.S.) and utter slums, built of cardboard, tin and slabs of highway concrete, with no running water. You could stand in the slum and break a mansion window with a rock, if you dared.
Not that the police were responsive to a heck of a lot.
There is a section of the metro area, Independencia, that to this day can not count on running water. What electricity it has is pirated, something we haven't seen much of in this country since the Great Depression. Food and other supplies are packed in by burro, and conditions in Independencia are only getting worse, these days. Illegal drugs used to be sold there more or less benignly by mom and pop outfits. But in 2010, the Zeta drug cartel moved in and took over drug traffic in the city—ruthlessly. Two TEC students were shot down just outside its gates last year in Zeta crossfire. 71 people died in the city just last month. The government talks about repairing the "social fabric" in colonias like Independencia in order to try to reign in the lawlessness.
Good luck, I say.
25.8, 40.8, 51.6
What with talk of social fabric, I got curious about the wealth gap in Mexico, which has always been atrocious. The UN puts out GINI coefficient numbers that reflect economic inequality, and I looked them up tonight. A coefficient of "0" would indicate the absolute, dour egalitarianism of Ursula K. LeGuin's
The Dispossessed. I told my husband that Norway, one of the most egalitarian countries, has a GINI coefficient of 25.8 and Mexico rates a 51.6. So, I asked him, guess where the United States falls?
"I don't know. A 30?"
The Monster Has Arrived
In fact, we’re riding a Ruta 46 bus right now, but though the driver is careening through the back streets of Colonia Guadalupe at a reckless pace, shouting ¡Pendejo! at every other driver, pedestrian and dog in his way, no one else appears frightened. Perhaps my fellow passengers have more faith in the driver’s talismans than I do, or at least have become inured to the danger.
Pastel plastic crucifixes dangle in an arc across the bus’s windshield, held in place by suction cups. A Barbie doll’s upper torso replaces the gearshift knob. Painted letters above the driver’s head read, La Vida es el Camino al Sépulcro ("Life is the Road to the Grave"). Slanting up onto the ceiling behind the driver is a poster of a welcoming Jesus. The caption translates as "Into My hands thou shalt be entrusted." I hope so! For good measure, the Virgin of Guadalupe watches over the rear entrance, against which a wiry old man has braced himself, waiting for the bus to stop.
When the Zeta cartel moved in on Monterrey, they draped a bed sheet banner across a big equestrian statue across from the government palace in the city's Macroplaza that said, in part, "The monster has arrived."
The result has been stunning. Mexicans have always been tolerant of a certain amount of drug trafficking, and it's been done in a way that disrupted very little in non-border towns, but that has changed. 55 people died in drug-related deaths in Monterrey in 2006. Last year it was 600, a ten-fold increase. When Hillary Clinton buzzed down to Monterrey last January, she did it with the stealth of George Bush sneaking into Iraq to deliver a plastic turkey, so great was the danger. Kidnappings were up, and gang members had beaten the shit out of the Monterrey mayor the previous May.
Part of the explanation for this increase in violence, it is said, is that the aforementioned Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had been a stabilizing force on organized crime, but that went out when the party lost its 80-year lock on things, with the election of Vicente Fox, of the PAN party. Suddenly the market opened wide, you could say, and the drug cartels started feeling their oats.
The Beggar Pocket
But something else stands out to me. The wealth gap, coupled with a longstanding acceptance of gambling. The
lotería and casinos have been more prominent for longer in Mexico than they have here.
When my state, Wisconsin, got its own lottery going a couple decades ago, and gave the green light to Native American gaming establishments, my grandfather, who had been born in 1900, shook his head. "That sort of thing used to be furtive. Done in sewers, and with gangsters."
Growing wealth gap, sclerotic, elitist government, and a something-for-nothing mentality. America, you're in for a rough ride, I fear.
The bus does stop—abruptly, pitching me and my seatmate against the hard orange backrest in front of us. I wince, since it turns out that she has been touching my hair and has inadvertently yanked it. My hair's light enough that people have tried to touch it before. Some good luck deal, I'm told. The wiry old man exits from the rear, forced to leap over a grave-sized pit in the gutter.
That's the thing about Mexico . . . it keeps reminding you that you could so quickly be swallowed up by the grave, shit out of luck. My seatmate is now looking at a story about a pedestrian crushed by a big steel conduit that bounced off a truck.
You know, to be fair, U.S. media has gotten a heck of a lot more bloodthirsty since 1993 . . . as long as it has nothing to do with our overseas wars, of course.
In the front, a guitar-carrying teenager climbs aboard. He gives the driver some coin and starts toward the rear of the bus, holding guitar aloft. Is he trying to sell it? I’ve seen kids try to sell candy, gum, pumpkin seeds and other trifles on buses, but never before a guitar. The teenager sits on the edge of the seat behind us and begins to play.
He plays remarkably well, and sounds a little to my ears like Carlos Montoya. I can’t quite make out what he’s playing because the radio is still playing a crappy pop tune about some chick who ends up dying, poor thing.
I try to filter out the radio and listen as the guitar player begins to sing. He’s singing "Moliendo Café" ("Grinding Coffee") and doing a wonderful job.
As he sings, I thrust my hand into the left pocket of my skirt—my "beggar pocket" where I keep big, brass ten-centavo pieces to give to mendicants. I decide to give him the entire contents of my pocket—possibly almost a whole peso. The singer finishes to scattered applause and a few coins. He accepts my clunky handful on his way out.
Do you suppose we're all on a Ruta 46 bus?
I'll bet you could build something pretty sturdy with pieces of I-94.