In early April, Rafael Ortega’s band played a concert in an empty lot in Puerta de la Muerte. Rafael invited Xavi and Octavia. Xavi invited Felipe Munoz along, too. It was a Thursday night. Winter was finally releasing the city from its grey vice. The days had regained the suppleness of spring.

Octavia drove the three of them. She parked on an abandoned baseball diamond. They climbed the road into Puerta de la Muerte, flanked by young kids smoking cigarettes and older men walking emaciated horses by hand. The neighborhood sat on a plateau overlooking Santa Teresa cemetery and was home to many of the city’s immigrants, those working in the maquiladoras or those killing time while waiting to cross the border. It was a mélange of Salvadorians and Hondurans, Guatemalans, Columbians, and Peruvians. Newcomers inevitably found their way home, so to speak. Guest houses and brothels accepted the wayward at all hours. Generators huffed and puffed; tangled clusters of wire crossed and re-crossed the street, spliced and diced, providing residents with inconsistent and illegal power. The streets were mostly unofficial, labile, unmapped. They were mostly unpaved. They began and ended without warning, like fitful dreams. They were palpitating, polyphonic alleyways, many of them running a few meters and then petering out into repositories of trash, or barren earth where a few scraps of cardboard served as beds for vagrants and vagabonds. A thousand different varieties of music streamed from scrap metal shacks and cement block speakeasies that sold drinks from the south: guaro, pisco, aguadiente, chicha. Young men with tattoos wandered like stray cats and the women watched them warily. The brothels operated openly. Women as young as thirteen or fourteen sat sullenly outside, smoking joints, dressed-up like rag dolls. Illegal electronics were sold from truck beds. If you needed a car battery or a girl or an ounce of dope, a few minutes spent in the maze of Puerta de la Muerte would solve your problem.

It was Semana Santa, of course.

They walked through the Peruvian sprawl. Old women with broad, indigenous noses and long, tattered dresses sat in the dirt and hawked idols or prayer beads. Men sold sweaters from the backs of wooden carts. The side alleyways were lined in white rose petals and brass bands moved down them, bleating their dirges. Great vats of chupe de viernas bubbled over open flames, spewing brine and flesh into the mealy night air. The storefronts were darkened, but small groceries gave away bread and wine, ladled out violet bowls of mazamorra morada. Men carried wooden crosses on their backs, or held aloft effigies of Christ, the Virgin, Peter and Paul. Women followed them bearing candles. Some of the side streets were completely dark but for these women, moving slowly, singing softly, their hands cupped and flickering. Processions of flame. Prepubescent girls in chatoyant gowns danced over the rose petals, twirling like whirligigs. Bombastic boys watched from the corners, from the fronts of tavernas and brothels, smoking cigarettes, fingering their crass crucifixes, ears gleaming with diamonds. They barked at the girls, laughed amongst themselves, ducked into darkened doorways and openings when a customer ambled up, his offering crumpled in shaking hands. Little children sat in their mother’s laps, or sang wordless hymns, or danced with the older girls. Flowers kicked up in their wake, little bursts of white. Priests held forth on some of the unoccupied corners, offering confession, communion, the absolution of a year’s worth of sins.

Octavia led the two men, pushing them through the masses, smiling at the girls, bantering with the boys, kneeling and purveying the old women’s wares, letting them touch her face, take her hands, whisper a prayer. Occasionally a car would honk and sputter its way down the congested dirt roads, music bumping, windows tinted, headlights cascading over the colors, the fabrics, the wooden effigies so detailed that one could make out the wrinkles of St. Peter’s eyes. Illuminated the exalted faces for an ethereal second. The crowds would part and press outward, into the rabble of the shacks and cantinas. Octavia took Xavi unexpectedly by the hand and diverted him and Munoz into one of the bars. She ordered three piscos. She flirted with the bartender, asking him for directions. While she flirted, two girls approached Xavi and Munoz, who were grimacing and drinking down their pisco. They were stilted girls, unskilled and comely, uncertain of their bodies. One kept adjusting her cleavage. The other appeared to be holding back tears. They were dressed like old Vaudeville acts. Their faces were caked with dahlia lipstick and garnet blush. Munoz tried to slide them a few pesos, but the one with the fidgety cleavage raised her eye brows at the bartender and Munoz pocketed the money instead.

“Let’s get out of here,” Xavi whispered in Octavia’s ear.

The bartender had drawn a crude map on a napkin.

“They bring these girls up in the backs of trucks, like they’re livestock,” Munoz said once they were back out on the street, yelling into Xavi‘s ear to rise above the cacophony. “You’ll see them on the road sometimes. They go into these small villages and they promise these poor families to get their daughters into the States, to get them jobs. They say they’ll send back money and that the parents will live comfortably.”

“You’d think the parents would learn.”

“Some of them know, and do it anyway. Others just hope for the best.”

They followed the bartender’s map into the Guatemalan section. The sinuous main road, Avenida Ascension, was roped off. People clogged the side streets and the sidewalks. Alfombras were draped fastidiously down the middle of the Avenida. Older women hurriedly applied finishing touches to the lapidary carpets. They were made of pine needles and sawdust, the dyes of fruit, the wilting petals of chrysanthemums and carnations and roses. They depicted scenes of the crucifixion but also pastoral scenes with turtles and jaguars, bicephalic serpents that hung in the branches of ceiba trees. Drums beat in the distance, the smell of incense heralding their coming. Men walked ahead of the main procession carrying tall poles equipped with hooks so that they could hold aloft the sagging bundles of wires. Behind them were children burning incense. Then came the cucurochos festooned in deep purple robes. They stoically held the andas, the elaborate floats depicting Christ on the cross, Christ the resurrected, the Virgin at the tomb. Behind each float was a generator, huffing and puffing, that powered the garlands of light that decorated the tableaus. Brass bands solemnly played funeral requiems. Men in Roman garb rode horses and recited, in Latin, Pilate’s proclamation of death. Women moved up and down the sidewalk, selling cheap crucifixes, bowls of corn meal, or puerile ears of charred maize. The bands bellowed over the generators, the entreaties of the desperate, the prayers of the saved. Latin garbled amongst a hundred dialects of Spanish and the slang of the malandros, who swam through the rivers of people like sleek simpering sharks.

Behind the procession the crowd contracted, spilling back into the street, marching behind the procession, singing or praying. Children sat wide-eyed on their father’s shoulders. After they passed, all that was left were the ruined, tattered alfambras, so meticulously constructed, so quickly demolished. Xavi knelt down and ran his hands through the sawdust and flowers, picked up a handful, crumbled it between his fingers. He thought, then, that the slum was a body without a heart, or maybe it was a body with a hundred invisible hearts, all beating and thrusting, reverberating into the indifferent night. Already women were sweeping away the refuse and laying down a fresh layer of pine needles, beginning the exhausting work of preparing for the next day’s march. The music and the voices receded down the plateau. Xavi imagined the procession moving into the Peruvian neighborhood, then the Hondurian, then the Salvadorian, the rituals merging, the faithful joining together and marching out of the slum and into the heart of the city, through the somnolent suburbs and the ponderous bureaucratic mansions, finally flooding into the maquiladoras, an endless cortege of bodies and voices swamping the factories, blaring their horns and beating their drums, closing down the assembly lines, disrupting production. What happened? they’d ask in the boardrooms in Beijing and Tokyo and New York. We don’t know. We’re being inundated by Mexicans. By Central Americans. By singing and dancing. They’d scrunch up their faces, their flabby, bleached gringo faces, as if someone had unleashed an unimaginably awful fart. What the fuck? they’d think. What the fuck is going on? They’d pucker their assholes, text their mistresses on their Blackberries (circuit boards built in San Rafael, keypads in Longhua), double and then triple check their stock portfolios, frantically transfer funds to their accounts in the Caymans, drive home in their Lexuses (brake pads built in San Rafael, wheel axes in Taipei, headlights in Laos) to their submissive wives in their spotless manses (cleaned by Columbians or Guatemalans or Argentines), turn on their colossal televisions (cathodes constructed in San Rafael, deflection coils coiled in Zhangjiajie), smoke a cigar that was machine rolled in the Cigatam (subsidiary of Philip Morris) maquiladora on Calle Domingo Garcia Ramos, and try to ponder the colors and sounds, the texture, of their factories (which they’ve never visited, of course, though they’ve got top men - top men - who’ve assured them of the exemplary health and sanitation conditions) pulsing and sweating and vibrating with the songs of the resurrection.

Octavia and Munoz were standing about a hundred meters down the road, looking back at him, waiting.



The concert was held on an empty lot that was surrounded on all four sides by high, uneven fences of corrugated metal. At one end of the lot was a stage. A band, not Rafael Ortega’s, played something loud and indecipherable. At the other end of the lot was a shoddy plywood bar behind which young boys were selling cans of beer directly from old oil drums. Munoz bought four beers, chugged one, and then he, Xavi, and Octavia each drank one. The lot was about half full, but more and more people seemed to be leaking in. They waded into the crowd, which was mostly Mexican, and mostly young. A lot of the men were shirtless, despite the night being cold. The temperature inside was at least ten degrees warmer than on the street. Xavi admired the profusion of tattoos, the eagles and snakes, the names scrawled in faded lettering, the memorials to cousins or brothers or friends. Closer to the stage some of the younger men had formed a circle, inside which they bounced rambunctiously off one another, throwing fists and kicks, bloodying each other.

They found Rafael Ortega leaning against a fence far from the stage. He was drinking a beer and smoking a joint. His band wouldn’t go on until one or two in the morning.

“Xavi, Octavia,” he said smiling, kissing both of them on the cheek. Rafael was a tall, affectionate man with long, greasy hair. He wore a white button down shirt that was stained beneath the arm pits and behind the collar. Only the bottom two buttons were buttoned. His face was long and lean. His eyes were small but deep. He was the kind of person with whom everyone was friendly but that no one had ever been alone with. Still, Xavi liked him immensely.

Rafael introduced them to his cousin, Hector, a chicano from Abolition, Texas, a few hours across the border, and Hector’s best friend, a white boy named Adam. Hector talked quickly, with the shifty bravado of a kid trying to prove that he was still a native, after all these years away. Adam was gigantic, quiet but imposing. He spoke very little, and his Spanish was muddled, but Xavi sensed that he understood more than he could speak. Xavi felt uneasy about both of them - the punk who wouldn’t shut up and the gringo who heard everything - and this made him uneasy and ominous about the whole night. A new band came out to play. The lot was filling up: more tattooed men, and girls who were either whores, or in high school, bedecked in jewelry and perfume. The stench, of all the perfumes and the beer and the pot and the cigarettes and the sweat and just a hint of blood, was nauseating. Xavi and Munoz chugged two beers together. They smoked a joint with two girls from Arizona who had come down because they heard concerts in Puerta de la Muerte were an authentic experience not to be missed. Strobe lights pulsed over the convulsive crowd. People danced lasciviously against one another. Some of them were practically fucking.

“Isn’t this great?” one of the girls said to Xavi. She was short and blonde, wore a leather skirt that was too tight and too short. But she had sturdy legs that he liked.

“No, not really,” he said, and she looked at him for a moment, puzzled, before simply walking away.

It struck him as remarkably sad that all these people were here, throwing their bodies together, desperate and lonely and mortal. Then he thought that maybe he was the one who was remarkably sad because he couldn’t allow himself to relax, to not worry about such things, to not analyze every situation from this strange remove where he was somehow superior because he didn’t allow himself to thoughtlessly grind and fuck and press himself against strangers, hoping they would press back. He chugged another beer. He found his friends.

“Xavi,” Rafael said, pulling him aside. “I want you to meet someone.”

“Ok,” his voice sounded distorted by the music, the alcohol and pot.

Rafael introduced Xavi to his father, who had arrived, and looked more out of place, even, than the gringo Adam. He was a middle-aged man wearing khakis and a sport coat. He held a beer and stood by himself, looking like some sort of anthropologist. He was, of course, the poet from Mexico City. He’d been wildly successful as a young man, his verse marveled over for its vivacity and its vibrancy, but somewhere around the age of thirty-five he seemed to lose his energy and vitality, and his lines wilted. It was remarkable that that could happen to a writer, but it could. Images that were once clear could muddle. Rhythms that were once urgent could slacken. What caused a writer to lose his power? It came down to the question of what gave a writer his power in the first place (assuming, as Xavi did, that there existed such a thing as objectively forceful writing). A man could spend his lifetime studying theory, reading every book ever written, trying to find some equation for the perfect sentence or perfect verse, and then extrapolate those minor structures to create larger ones. And those structures could still feel false, mannered, inconsequential. There was no perfect theory of literature. There was luck and intuition. A writer was lost in a cave, groping for a way out. And the lucky few who found that way out were greeted by yet another labyrinth, this one more imposing and convoluted than the next.

“Would you hold this for me?” the Poet asked, handing Xavi his beer.

“Ok.”

The Poet reached into his coat pocket and produced a flask. He offered it to Xavi, who accepted. The two of them passed the flask back and forth in silence until it was empty. Xavi produced his cigarettes, and offered the Poet one. He accepted, and provided a light.

“I’ve read your poetry,” Xavi said.

“Ah,” the Poet said, staring away blithely at a group of young women. “Not the later stuff, though, I bet.”

“Well, not much of it, no.”

The Poet smiled tersely. “What’s the point, right?”

Xavi laughed.

“I’m not sure how the hell my son ended up in this city.”

“Have you heard his band before?”

“No, I haven’t. I live in Mexico City. There’s not much reason to come up north if you’re down there.”

The big gringo Adam approached Xavi, and in broken Spanish asked for a cigarette.

“Sure, here,” Xavi said, handing him a cigarette he’d dropped earlier in the night that was now crumpled and sagging. The Poet, again, provided a light. The three of them stood watching the group of young girls dancing. There were five of them, all wearing skirts varying in length from short to miniscule. Three of them wore precarious boots. The men watched in impressed silence.

“The women down here,” Adam finally muttered.

“Incredible,” the Poet said. “Get to them while they’re young though, boys.”

Then he nodded at Xavi and walked off.

Rafael Ortega’s band finally came on stage a few minutes shy of two in the morning. Their music was milder than the bands that had played before, more traditional. They combined long, laconic improvisations with the folk lyrics of traditional music: pastoral ballads, songs about unrequited love, lonely journeys through the desert. Rafael Ortega sang in his coarse voice, grumbling his way through the set. After one song he gripped the microphone.

“This is a song about a lost civilization, a civilization burned in the desert,” he growled. “We are that lost city. All of us, right here. We are from the atoms. We are the atomic bomb and the atomic bum. You know these weird things that I speak of. We all speak the same language, even if we’re separated by time and space, here, in the lost desert city.”

What the fuck is he talking about? Xavi wanted to ask somebody. But everyone else seemed to be digging it, they were nodding in unison, some of them held their drinks aloft. Octavia finally found him. He’d barely seen her all night. Seeing her beneath the strobe lights, under the influence, she looked like a different person, her eyes more rapacious, her face somehow more rigid. He thought, then, that we all carry secrets, secrets about loneliness, and they’re impossible to share with anyone. We might try, we might tell them about our loneliness, but the words always came out wrong, or maybe putting those secrets into words trivialized them beyond the point of truth. She was sweating and took him by the hand.

“Come on, kid.”

They danced slowly, not quite against one another. She’d stripped down to a white tank top that showed the slight paunch of her stomach, the dells of her hip. He put his thumbs on her hips, and pressed them into her, held her by the belt loops. She smiled at this, with her eyes closed, and curled her arms behind his neck. He was very drunk. He danced poorly, but she guided him as best she could, laughing at times, sweetly. At one point she took a finger and ran it over his forehead, down his cheek, along the crescent of his jaw.

After the concert they waited - Octavia, Xavi, Munoz, and the Poet - for Rafael and his band. It was late and the slum was as quiet as it would be, meaning that the only sounds were coyotes somewhere in the desert, the gentle susurrus of voices conferring in kitchens, or bedrooms, the shouts of fighting lovers, the incoherent babbling of drunks. Xavi sat on a patch of broken ground, smoking. Octavia sat next to him, her head on his shoulder. Occasionally she would reach out and take the cigarette from between his fingers.

“Sometimes I disappear, you know,” she said.

“I know. You’ve told me.”

“Well I’m just reminding you. It’s nothing personal.”

“Ok,” he said. Then he did something funny and kissed her on the top of her head. He didn’t know why he did it. It wasn’t something he’d been planning on doing, or even something that he had a particular desire to do. But he kissed her, and she let out a slight but audible sigh. Life, he thought, is complicated and difficult, but often very beautiful.

Rafael and his band emerged. He embraced his father, and shook hands with everyone else.

“Hey, wow, thanks guys. Thank you. That’s the biggest show we’ve played. Pretty good, I think. Pretty good. Anyone hungry? I’m fucking starving. Let’s get some food. I’ll buy, everyone come along.”

They walked back through the labyrinth of mostly quiet streets. The remains of disintegrated alframbras were like multi-hued snow, and trash was everywhere. A few men scavenged through the trash, picking out discarded bones, or cans of beer. A few families were hard at work on the next day’s carpets, weaving and dying by lamplight or candle, talking softly amongst themselves, drinking coffee that steamed into the cold night. Near the bottom of the plateau a three-piece band was sitting outside a darkened cantina. They were older Guatemalans drinking bottles of beer that were scattered about a melting puddle of ice. They serenaded anyone who passed by, singing drunkenly. The group stopped and listened to the band. Rafael took out his guitar and soon his band was playing with the Guatemalans, and the Guatemalans were sharing the beer. Everyone sang, even the Poet. Octavia had her arm hooked through Xavi’s, and she sang sleepily into his shoulder while Munoz clapped his hands and laughed. The Guatemalans produced some dope, and Rafael rolled up two joints which were soon passed around. Everyone smoked, and sang.

“What time is it?” Octavia asked Xavi.

“I don’t know. It must be close to dawn.”

Xavi remembered, then, the year after his mother died, when he was 18 and his half-sister was 16, and one of their uncles, who spent most of his time at the brothel or bar, came to live with them. They were still in their mother’s house, in Invierno del Hibisco, but by then Tomas had moved further west, to a bungalow in Luz de la Montanas. Xavi spent most of his time sleeping on Tomas’ couch, reading, listening to the poets that came and went. When they went out on weekends his half sister would tag along, and they’d go to the bars dotting the mountainside where washed up bands, or bands that never were, would play, and where the lonely single women of the maquis would dance with strange men, men who were sometimes rapists or maybe worse, but the women were so lonely that they were willing to take that chance, just for a little human contact. Tomas and some of his poets would dance with the older women, pirouetting them, picking them up off the ground and spinning them in circles while the women shrieked in terror and glee. Xavi would watch, drinking cheap mescal with his half sister, and then they, too, would dance. They’d go from bar to bar, staying wherever was open latest, and then they’d walk home in the gloam of dawn, drinking warm beer and singing, or shouting, racing one another down the mountainside, riding on each other’s shoulders. Those were good nights. He missed them.

By the time they reached the cars - Rafael had parked his truck in the same baseball field - the eastern sky smouldered a frail white. Xavi drove Octavia’s car while she curled up in the backseat and Munoz smoked cigarettes in the passenger seat. They rolled the windows down and turned on the heat. The car’s innards rattled and cranked, struggling.

“Octavia, dear,” Munoz said, “your car is a piece of shit.”

“Hm?”

“Nothing, dear. Nothing at all.”

The road back into the city was crowded with trucks bound for the maquiladoras. Xavi followed Rafael to an all night café in Colonia Jardins, which was south of Colonia Canto de los Pajaros, and was named because, during the brief French occupation of the city in the 1860’s, the neighborhood had been home to a series of beautiful, romantic gardens. Most of them had been filled with cement, or bulldozed and built over, or scavenged for building material; a few still remained, though they were meeting grounds for the mendicants, who roamed with their beards and their rags, and the penitents, who came out of the mountains to preach that the end of times was fast approaching.

They went to an all night café on Calle Baudelaire. There was a long, wooden bar that needed polish, and a series of large, irregularly shaped Formica tables. The lights were bright and modern. Rafael ordered beers and coffees for everyone, and a few plates of tortillas, eggs, beans, and pork. He held court over the table, guzzling coffee like water, talking loquaciously about the need for a Mexican musical identity, about the need to connect to the heritage of musicians from not just the revolution, but from even before the revolution, the music that was played in basements and in caves, away from Spanish ears, the music that told the stories of generations.

“Music had a unifying purpose then, as it can now, right? That’s what we need to be doing, is telling those stories, stories about family, and about community, about perseverance and equality. That’s what those songs were about. They were creating a voice to subvert the established order. And now, we’ve got two established orders in this city, oppositional to one another, but really all a part of the same force. The maquiladoras, which keep us poor, and the cartels, which promise us riches. And what we need is a voice of protest against both the exploitation of the maquis and the false idols of the cartels. Look, this is history, man. Think about Javier Solis, think about all of us growing up listening to him on our parent’s record players. These are our forms. The ranchero, the stories of the frontier and the desert, small stories, because our lives are small, but small stories that connect us to one another.”

“What about corridos?” Munoz asked, stuffing a bulging tortilla into his mouth. Munoz and Rafael were doing most of the eating. “What about Valentin Elizalde, or Sergio Vega? Corridos are as much are part of our musical history as any form.”

“Yeah, sure, sure Lipe, absolutely corridos are, but times were different, right? Corridos were sung with a conscience back then, they weren’t about narcissism, or self aggrandizement, or debasement, right? They were about an oral tradition, about education. That’s how people in these villages stayed connected. A band would come through and sing their songs about what was going on in the world - slightly idealized songs, sure, performances no doubt - but still songs about the world, songs that connected one village to another. You could sit and listen to the music and imagine, somewhere far off, another person, just like you, listening to the same song. Think about La Carcel de Canenea. That’s a song about revolution, right? And about solidarity, Lipe. Not national solidarity but class solidarity. It’s a song that was used to unite all these disparate villages and factions as one, oppressed voice, calling out for justice. The form that exists now, man, it’s just bastardized, it’s bullshit, it’s onanism.”

Munoz smiled and raised his glass.

The Poet touched his son’s arm. He’d been sitting back in his chair, drinking his beer, watching with a bemused smile on his face. “First,” he said, “we never listened to Javier Solis in our house. I don’t know where that memory comes from, but it’s invented, if you have it.” Everyone laughed, Rafael hardest of all. “Secondly, you have to remember that your great-grandfather dragged your great-grandmother with him out of the Amazon. And that your grandfather, born in Peru to Amazonian parents, married the daughter of a Nicaraguan fisherman…”

“No, no, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to get at!” Rafael protested. “These forms, these Mexican forms, are all just cobbled together, like a patchwork quilt, or a broken sidewalk. This idea of Mexican, as some Mexican identity, has always been something of a myth, right? Something imposed on us by the Spanish, the French, the fucking Americans.” Rafael used his whole body to talk, ducking and weaving like a boxer or an addict, hands modulating like a professor’s. “I’m saying we’ve got to salvage the indigenous forms, and from them, from all these different forms, create our own musical identity, one that tells stories we recognize in forms that we recognize. Lipe, the corrido, to come back to that, it’s been bastardized by gangster rap, which isn’t one of our forms. It’s a gringo form. It’s trying to take one of our forms and make it more like their's. The cartel as a whole is some vehicle for this gringo idea of success. Or maybe it’s become a vehicle for that American idea, because it wasn’t always. Once the cartel and the corrido was about fighting the established order, once it was about pride, man, about subverting the forms. Now it’s just another corporate form. Now it’s just about the money and the jewelry, the cars, the clothes,  all that hollow fucking shit that ain’t worth dying over.”

“So what’s the way out?” Munoz asked. “The way out is backwards, that’s what you’re saying. Regressive progress.”

“This is what happens. What was once conservative becomes progressive. The notion of a fractured but proud history, of these traditional art forms as subversive, that’s a novel idea now, especially in this city.”

“These are the same arguments we used to have about poetry,” the Poet said to Xavi in confidence. “One idea devours another, regurgitates it. And on, and on.”

Xavi smiled; Octavia had fallen asleep against his shoulder, somehow.

“He thinks music’s going to save him, and then the world. I’ll bet you think the same thing about writing. I remember feeling that. It’s still in me, buried beneath everything else, but it’s still there. I wish it weren’t. I don’t know what the way out is, or if there is one. I gave up trying to stop him long ago.”