Notes from the Borderlands: Rider’s Song

I live in the borderlands. A space between America and Mexico. America because the name is an ideal, not a geographical distinction. And Mexico because it is concrete. Concrete like a sewer pipe. Nothing ideal, nothing unstained. Now, I’m not talking about Mexicans, I’m talking about Mexico. Mexicans, somehow, are the opposite of Mexico, somehow stainless. Not exactly, but you catch my intent; this is anything but a dog whistle.

To feel, see and experience the boundaries of this netherland, wander El Paso’s southernmost, long-established barrio, Chihuahuita (aka Little Chihuahua). Walking south from San Jacinto and Pioneer plazas, a type of antiquated theatricality takes hold as you wander from one filmic ideation to another. The former feels simultaneously old world Spain, yet somehow Texan, though nothing like Houston or Dallas. It's the romantic old Spain you can still hear in the literal translation of an unabbreviated, casual introduction, “Mucho gusto en conocerte. Miguel a su servicio.” “Equalmente. Pilar a servirte.” (“Much pleasure in knowing you. Miguel at your command.” “Equally. Pilar to serve you.” Et cetera.) Filmic in its fusion of these, side by side, in a disorienting daydream.

Such antiquated formality smacks of Don Quixote’s Spain, but it also echoes characters of Chicano writers like Jose Antonio Villareal and Amado Muro. Muro’s description of a bullfighter from “Sunday in Little Chihuahua” personifies this duality: “Luis Castro fights with the gaiety and the abandon of the gypsies who dance nude amid flowering lemon trees in Sevilla’s joyous San Bernardo quarter, where the great torero Pepe Luis Vazquez was born.”

Continuing south on El Paso Street past a variety of clothing shops, tattoo parlors and pawn shops, the vibe changes to bordertown. By the time you reach the Burger King—which the gringos playfully call ‘el reyes de los burgers’ to play on Latin Kings and the fact that only Mexicans frequent the burger joint—it feels like you’ve left the lower 48. If you’re feeling playful, echoes of Dean Moriarty hit your head: “Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?” he cried in Spanish. “Dig that, Sal, I’m speaking Spanish!”

But the playfulness evaporates in the dust and exhaust clotted air. The last seven blocks to the murderous barrios of Juarez are not a formality, even though they seem more Mexican than Texan. If you’ve spent any time in Juarez, you’ll never take the phrase “law and order” lightly again. It’s so bad—to complete the movie metaphor—that movies aimed at capturing its awfulness fail, flat-out, seem too shellacked, too orderly, too framed to capture the literal bleeding of this meat plant known as Ciudad Juarez. And the urge of anything living, whether on two or four legs, is to escape.

Strangely, though, wandering north again past ‘el reyes de los burgers’ you find yourself back within the mecca of hobos known as El Paso.

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I arrive in El Paso via good ol’ Greyhound. We traveled through the night, through thunderstorms that synched up perfectly with the electric hurdy-gurdy of Dan Auerbach’s guitar in my headphones.

This was a relatively short bus ride for me—only two days—and the custom remains true: there is no such thing as real sleep on a bus.

My mind wanders to the little poem I always think about at times like these, Lorca’s “Rider’s Song.” There are so many tiny variations in the translations of this clarifying poem, the variations themselves become part of the rider’s refrain. I open my notebook and click on the tiny reading light overhead to write out my favorite, slightly tweaked translation from memory:

Rider’s Song
Cordoba.
Distant and lonely.

Black pony, full moon,
olives in my saddlebag.
Though I know all the roads
I shall never reach Cordoba.

By the plain, by the wind,
black pony, red moon.
Death looks at me
from the towers of Cordoba.

O how long the road is!
O my brave pony!
O death waits for me,
this side of Cordoba.

Cordoba.
Distant and lonely.

The poem is reassuring, and “olives in my saddlebag” cinches the translation to universal cowboy. But the half-dream of the darkened bus cruising toward El Paso—forest of lightening the only illumination of horizon—is anything but reassuring. It brings to mind residents and visitors to El Paso during the Mexican revolution, of them paying money to stand atop the taller buildings to watch the macabre battles raging on the other side of the Rio Grande. Somehow, this dynamic has also concretized in the two towns’ history. El Paso is the front-row seat to the shit-show that is Juarez and Mexico.

And yet, El Paso remains true to its name. It is a pass between mountain ranges, a corridor for travelers. I remember picking up my father’s dog-eared copies of Louis L’Amour and encountering references to El Paso. Later, wanting to know more about my father—who was very much a wanderer who settled down when he found the right town and the right woman—I read about L’Amour’s adventures in New Mexico and Texas, riding the trains and living the life of a hobo. Back when hobo meant free from poverty and place and not simply ‘bum.’

We arrive in the bus station in the pale blue of pre-dawn. The bus station is just off El Paso Street. A little ways to the left is the El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA), a walk the other direction leads to the border. At 4am, nothing’s open.

Out of habit, I wander and take notes, offering cigarettes to more interesting and peaceful looking homeless guys, in exchange for conversation. Several of them wander back and forth across the border, sleeping on the El Paso side, then hustling tourists on both sides during the day. I think of the times I’ve been homeless, waiting out the night, not in transit, stuck. I think of learning the wisdom of Maya Angelou’s elegant insight the hard way (because there ain’t no easy way to learn it):

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.”

-MRM