Tales from the Desert Borderland

By Lawrence J. Taylor and Maeve Hickey

Taylor brings an ethnographer’s eye, ear, and many years of experience to this fictional portrait of life along the US/Mexico desert border. In these linked short stories, readers are taken on a wild ride from San Diego to Nogales, into Mexican and Chicano neighborhoods, failed spas and defunct mining towns, rambling Native American reservations and besieged Wildlife Refuges. Along the way they will share the conflicts, calamities, and occasional triumph of an engaging cast of characters. While these tales treat such familiar border themes as drug- and people-smuggling or hybrid and conflicting cultures and identities, they do so with a literary flair that revels in the rich diversity of border life as well as in its ambiguity, ambivalence, irony and often unexpected humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030351335

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© The Author(s) 2020

L. J. TaylorTales from the Desert BorderlandPalgrave Studies in Literary Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35133-5_1

1. Machaca

Lawrence J. Taylor¹  

(1)

Maynooth University, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Lawrence J. Taylor

Email: [e-mail]

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Fig. 1.1

Photograph by Maeve Hickey

Ana Rosa pulls into the gravelly yard behind El Sueño de mi Abuelita to find a clutch of strangers—men, women and children—waiting in the dawn shadows near the kitchen door. She is not surprised; Jimenez had texted the number 10. One of them, a young man, approaches: tentative, shy eyes surprised, comforted, disconcerted.

She looks like us, but different. Teeth whiter. Hair cut short with a blond streak. Will Luisa look like that in a few years, when we are all Americans?

Ana Rosa offers only a business smile, ushering them inside through the kitchen to another door leading into the basement. They troop wordlessly down and settle themselves in among the sacks of dried beans and rice to wait.

At noon, Orozco pushes heavily through the front door of the restaurant as if performing a search warrant. Clark follows, but pauses to admire a colorful mural of life in the eponymous "Abuelita’s" tropical village brightening the walls, padding respectfully through the dining room as if it were a path through the pueblito michoacano. He takes a chair opposite Orozco, who has found a seat in a dimly lit corner facing into a large mirror with a view of everything and everybody behind him. Eyes in the back of his head. Like a Goodfella at a favorite pasta palace. In Orozco’s case, the gun is in plain sight, holstered beside other dangling tools of the law-enforcement trade.

I’ll take that table myself, Ana Rosa mumbles, snatching the pad from a puzzled young waitress and nodding toward the corner where the two men in uniform are leaning over their menus. "I already heard about that fat pocho bastard. Of all the restaurants in this fucking town, they come here? And today? ¡Que pinche vida! Let me deal with him." Patting her already perfect coif, she sets off through the swinging door into the dining room.

Orozco has picked up the menu, his deeply lined face a battle ground between hope and disdain as he recites the names of the dishes, "caldo de albóndigas, pozole de Jalisco, pollo estilo Michoacano," intoning them in his ponderous norteño baritone like poetry, like sacred texts. His eyes well up with longing as the words roll about his mouth. Savory memories: less delicate than a madeleine but fit to conjure the warm chatter and pungent aromas of his Tía Josefina’s kitchen. Then his face darkens, like a toddler whose scoop of ice cream has tipped off the cone and landed on his shoe. If he orders any of those beautiful dishes, he will be served only disappointment.

Clark looks up at Ana Rosa, whose scarlet lips and cocoa eyes say "bienvenidos. He beams warmly in reply, but she is looking at Orozco, whose big head remains buried in the opened, plastic-coated menu. He turns a page and finds a slip of paper: a hasty addition of today’s especial."

"Machaca!"

He reads it aloud with an exaggerated Sonoran lilt, as if the word announced the Second Coming. But the eyes he fixes on Ana Rosa are hooded by a brow arched with irony. As if any place in this town could deliver on such a promise!

Ana Rosa gulps; she hadn’t OK-ed that dish. But she remembers that pedote, Bustamante, the new chef she hired only yesterday, is a Sonorense from some God-forsaken hole near Hermosillo. Chef! Puebla has chefs. Michoacán, Oaxaca, La Capital, Jalisco. But the land of sand, cattle, narcos and kidnappers through which everybody must make his painful way norte? What have they got to cook? Stringy cattle and tortillas de harina are not a cuisine. Chef? A worthless flojo more likely. He showed up for his first day this morning an hour late, hauling a filthy sack she feared was his laundry and emptied it right onto her clean cutting counter—an avalanche of chiles, aguacates, nopales, and a dozen sacks of dried, shredded god-knows-what—all the time raving in what was probably a meth-induced ramble about real Sonoran food and how you couldn’t get it in California, "Not everybody wants esos chingados tacos de pescado!"

Gripping her order pad, she risks a knowing nod at Orozco.

"Señor Bustamante, nuestro chef, es Sonorense. Debe ser machaca autentica."

Authentic? Orozco is sure she’s bluffing and, as if to raise the bet, orders platters for both Clark and himself. He watches closely in the mirror as Ana Rosa strides back through the swinging door into the kitchen, catching before it closes, he is sure, a worried look on her face as she turns toward the stove to repeat the