Me and Juan Rulfo Down by the Train Yard

They almost always wore caps, dried salt stains along the edges from old sweat, new sweat jumping off their sun-burnt faces as they hustled between the lines of cars waiting to cross the border in Mexicali. Wet squeegees in hand, they rested under the big shadows of the yucateco trees along El Parque de Chapultepec with Calexico, California so close they could smell the McDonald’s across the border.

Our house in Mexicali had a tree out front. It was the only tree on our street. Its silky, dark-green leaves reached past our gray fence, and in that little stain of shade migrants would huddle to hide from the desert sun. When they tapped on the fence, my mom would come out and fill their bottles and give plastic bags of apples to the kids. From behind our window I’d watch them walk house to house with spent water-bottles, the plastic bent and crumpled. Carrying small backpacks and beaten by the sun, they went tapping on all the closed gates. Our neighbors said it was their accents that gave them away as Central Americans.

I don’t remember ever hearing the word migrant to describe Central Americans. As a boy in the nineties the only names I heard them called were mojados, deportados, and pobres: wetbacks, deportees, and the poor. There was no mention of which countries they had come from, or whether they were or weren’t Mexican. I never found out because I never talked to them.

As I became older I realized that all I knew was my small strip of the border. I didn’t know what the rest of México was like, and if I wanted to write about my world I’d have to come to know it more fully. So, in my mid-twenties, after saving up a few thousand dollars working at a grocery store, I moved to central México, to Querétaro—a booming city three hours north of Mexico City.

~

On my first day there, I took a long walk that led me to a railroad yard. On either side, multiple steel lines stretched into the distance. As the northbound train roared in, I noticed groups of people clinging to the tops of the carriages, and when the train stopped, they all hoped off. Most of them were men, but some were children and women too. I stood there, in front of a graffitied block wall that separated the tracks from squat, box-shaped houses. Some of the people saw me and nodded. I nodded back. Like the migrants I saw as a kid in Mexicali, they carried plastic bags, small backpacks, and crumpled plastic bottles.

Their eyes darted around their new surroundings while their black-oiled clothes and torn shoes told the stories of their journeys. They slipped into the openings in the block wall and disappeared into the neighborhoods with a confidence that surprised me. I imagined them knocking on doors, tapping on fences to refill their water bottles, while residents hid behind their doors or curtains, knowing the migrants needed help that they couldn’t give.

I spent entire days at the tracks. Sometimes by myself, but often with the new friends I had made, all of whom lived in the Campo Militar, the neighborhood next to the railroad yard beyond the graffitied block wall. We made fires out of mesquite branches and cooked chorizo under the open sky. Sometimes the migrants passed by us, silently nodding in our direction, sometimes they stopped to eat a taco and share their stories about where they planned to get back on the train and how far they hoped it would take them. They asked how safe this particular stretch of tracks was or which train slowed down enough and whether it eventually turned north towards the U.S. I didn’t have any answers. It was strange, to feel at home in a place where others were merely trying to survive, but then hadn’t this been the case in Mexicali too?

In Mexicali, the train yard was so close to our house that it was our playground, the only place around that wasn’t completely paved over. We played marbles in the dirt by the tracks, and our games were often interrupted by rumbling trains that made the little glass balls roll away. Migrants refer to the train as la Bestia, or “the Beast.” I had grown up right next to one of these beasts, and years later had found myself right back in the nest of another.

~

I now live in Washington DC, where I teach middle school English. I feel like an alien using an adopted language. As Sting would say a legal alien, but an alien all the same. Sometimes, when I close my eyes and try to remember my past, I see a bright orb, and feel a palpable warmth. I feel the stray sunbeams reach me through the mesquite leaves I sit beneath. Then, I hear voices. The voices tell stories.

Don Rulfo, is this why you wrote only about the past, because it called to you more than anywhere else? Sometimes when I need help writing, I chat with Juan Rulfo. Though he is less known outside of Latin America compared to Gabriel García Márquez or Roberto Bolaño, for me and others in México, his novel Pedro Páramo permeates the culture—a Netflix adaptation of the novel is set to be released this year, while the young México City rock band “¡Diles que no me maten!” claims inspiration from Rulfo’s narrative qualities, and takes their name from one of his stories. I read him years before moving to Querétaro. I was fourteen, on a trip for my cousin’s quinceañera, during which I hid myself away with two books I had chosen from home, purely based on their covers. The first one, with the head of a rooster, bored me with its descriptions and numbers about cockfighting. The second, which had my mom’s name and middle school written on the title page, was a Planeta edition with both Pedro Páramo and The Plain in Flames. The cover showed, against a black background, a procession of women in white hats with crosses on the backs of their red and blue dresses, the ground beneath their feet faintly visible as they marched into the darkness. The image was both strange and familiar. Like the faces of the statues of the saints or the bloodied face of Jesus stretched in pain that I saw every day at my house. The bloodier the Jesus, the holier the house, my brother would say.

The stories in Rulfo’s first book, The Plain in Flames, were full of the quotidian violence of rural México: a place where rivers in the rainy season swell and swallow ranches, cattle, and men; people get stabbed over liquor and shot at as revenge for murders committed years before. The characters who populate these stories aren’t thinking of the future. They’re trying to survive in the present.

Let’s consider Rulfo, as an emerging writer in the late 1940s, living in México City. He writes his fiancé, Clara Aparicio back in Jalisco, as frequently as he can. The fifties are around the corner. Modernization. Corporatization. Coca-Cola in every taquería with its logo sealed on every chair and wall-tarp. Where once open-air markets sold food from local growers, the construction of supermarkets introduced machine-sliced bread and other foods packaged in cellophane from companies like Panificación Bimbo. Juan Rulfo turns his back on the megalopolis and looks instead to his childhood, to the dispossessed and the land that raised him, to the memories that weigh on his shoulders, to the past that called to him, as it calls for me, with stories that I need to understand. Juan Rulfo claims he stopped writing because his tío Celerino, who had told him stories, had died. I never had a tío like that. What I had was the liminal space of the Mexicali-Imperial Valley border, with its wall that grows every year, and Querétaro, with its beasts running on the tracks north and south. These are the places that still speak to me.

I think of the warning from the retired teacher in Rulfo’s story “Luvina.” He drinks at a bar and talks to a traveler who happens to have been hired for the same teaching post he had once had in the town of Luvina:

“It’s easy to look at things from over here, merely recalled from memory, where there’s no similarity. But I have no problem going on telling you what I know in regard to Luvina. I lived there. I left my life there . . . I went to that place with my illusions intact and came back old and used up. And now you’re going there . . . .” (translated by Ilan Stavans)

“I left my life there.” Maybe I’m also old and used up, but I think I can still make it back from the past with my illusions intact. As I take hold of my pen, memories from Querétaro, from Mexicali flood my mind: the man belly down on top of a northbound train, staring at me until he disappears into the horizon; my friends and I smoking atop the same Kansas City Southern train, watching the sun dip down into darkness; the slow crunching of a family’s steps on the rocks that slope down from the tracks; the stench of human shit scattered along the grey block wall; the tired eyes of a man beneath the mesquite telling me as we grill chorizo and warm tortillas over a fire built from fallen branches, about marching through Guatemala only a week ago; the bite of smoke in my throat as I pass off a joint to el Nica, who made it north but then was deported. Early tomorrow morning, he’ll be back atop the metal beast, but for tonight he’ll nod off here beneath the leaves of the mesquite.