In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 3 Since I had worked in El Paso before, a year in 1984, I could actually do my job when the railroad sent me there in March. And I had old friends. What had changed was that I now spoke Spanish. This to them was an event more incredible than if I had gone to the moon. “Si, hijo de la chingada,” my foreman said as an aside, while on the phone with the yardmaster. “Cuidate, entiendo todo,” I said, watching his jaw drop. I was there ten years earlier and I didn’t speak Spanish. Now I did. How could that happen? “You just learned Spanish? Nobody does that.” All I can say is that the border culture is entrenched and each side is resisting and assimilating the other. This time, though, the language opened the border to me and I heard the stories, as numerous as desert trails. Iwassittinginthecompanymotelcoffeeshopbetweeneight-on eight-off shifts in the yard, talking to a friendly New Mexican down from San Jon. J.D. was a sunny guy, blonde hair, blue eyes, with a kind of cowboy aura about him. He seemed innocent, as if he lived in the world of the cowboy mural of ghost riders painted along the main drag of San Jon, something I had driven out from Tucumcari to photograph in 1983. “Oh, that,” J.D. said. “It’s gone now. They painted it over.” The cowboy mural wasn’t all that was gone. A new presence was on the border now; it had gone corporate in a big way. Like magnets, huge maquilladora factories lined the border, “finishing” AmericanproductsandevadingAmericanpollutionandlaborlaws. Theyattractedyoungworkers,mostlywomen,fromalloverMexico, who moved to the border and lived in sprawling cardboard colonias without sanitation, water, or adequate transportation. The turnover was 100 percent, but central Mexico had wave on wave of workers to send north. The men crossed over and rode our trains to the north; the women worked the factories. J.D. had been out drinking in a singles bar and met a man with a story. There was something compulsive about it; when you heard it you needed to tell it to someone else, maybe to figure out what had hooked you. “This guy Bud,” J.D. said, “is sleazy looking. Ostrich boots, wrong hair, young but women wouldn’t like him. He’s trying too hard. He don’t fit his jeans. Kind of guy looking for a fast score, easy money. But doesn’t have the guts to be an outlaw. Try to lay you on the first date, ’cause he knows you ain’t comin’ back for no second date. Well, he meets a man in a bar. The guy recruited him. Needed a manager, a white man, to oversee a plant in Juarez. Someone who spoke Mexican and could run things. “‘It’sadifferentdealoverthere,’themantoldhim.‘Yourunyour own show, just so you produce. Are we on the same page, Bud?’” So Bud got a new suit and a moustache trim and drove across the Freedom Bridge to Juarez. T H E B O R D E R 9 RailroadNoir.indb 53 12/17/09 2:01 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 5 4 “The workers are all young girls,” J.D. told me. “All about 16. They only stay a couple of years; they work ’em so hard.” Bud had clearly filled him in about this point. He kept repeating it. “They give ’em sandwiches for lunch and lemonade, but they water that down. If they come in late one time, they’re gone. Their boyfriends meet them in the parking lot and beat ’em up and take their money. They really work ’em hard.” Bud, the manager, had an aerial view of the workers, perched in anofficeonanopensecondfloor.Railroadmanagersoftenactedlike boys with keys to their father’s Porsche, but this temptation was of a different order. A divide was opening up between J.D. and me. Because I was “one of the boys,” railroaders respected my work. But they went to strip joints, paid for lap dances, and badmouthed the Mexican women working there. “You’retheonepayingthem,”I’dsay.“Theywouldn’tbeworking there if you weren’t employing them.” “Well, you don’t do that kind of work,” they’d say. “I don’t have to,” I’d say. “I’m one of the 1 percent of women who can have this kind of job.” Caseinpointwasthemaquillaworkers.Theywerewomen.They were workers. But still, there was this sexual greediness surrounding...

Share