This Love Is Not for Cowards (3 page)

I walked around Juárez for most of the day, meandering up Calle Otumba and down Avenida 16 de Septiembre. When I finally started back to El Paso, I carried with me the nativity set and two bottles of Victoria beer, the light brown cousin of
cerveza
Corona.
I like the energy in Juárez,
I concluded.
I could live here, for sure.
I took the Santa Fe Bridge back, waiting for half an hour in a long line of Mexicans, not realizing until we got closer to customs that there is a special line just for U.S. citizens. I switched to the proper line (is it a line if no one is standing in it?), showed my passport, and declared my purchases.

“What was the purpose of your visit to Juárez?” I was asked. The agent seemed amazed I'd even been there.

“I just wanted to check it out,” I replied. “I find it attractive.”

“THE WHOLE TEAM is together, with one mission,” Marco is telling me. We've made it, appropriately, to Las Misiones, the brand-new shopping center Marco tells me is a demilitarized zone of sorts, considered off-limits for drug violence. It looks like a typical mall. Two stories, glass railings, skylights. Walking on polished marble floors, we pass clothing stores and shoe stores. Major retail outlets include a Sears and a Liverpool, Mexico's Macy's equivalent. There's a fancy health club where Indios players work out for free, and there's the attraction that drives the mall, a twelve-screen IMAX movie theater. The true anchor is the new United States consulate across the parking lot, less than a block away. The consulate is the only place in Mexico to obtain immigrant visas, the first step toward permanent legal residence in the United States. Applicants from as far south as Chiapas must wait six to eight weeks or longer for their paperwork to clear. They must apply in person, too, so they often stay at one of a dozen new hotels in the consulate district, the new El Centro. Brand-new restaurants serve the area, along with nightclubs patronized mostly by local teenagers. In the shopping-mall food court, Marco waves at three Indios loitering at a table. (“They don't have wives, so they have nowhere else to go.”) I tuck into a gordita: chicken, cheese, and green salsa folded into a thick flour tortilla and fried. Marco, the athlete, spoons a cocktail of fresh fruit.

“This is our livelihoods,” he continues. “This is our reputations and the reputations of our families. This is everything. Our lives are on the line in the next four months.”

When Marco was growing up in Dallas, the plan, always, was to return to Mexico. Marco's father had slipped into Texas intending only to mail a few bucks back to Mexico City. Under-the-table construction paid so well, he stayed longer. And then longer still. Marco's mother and two sisters, all born in Mexico City, moved up with him. Marco joined the family last, an American by birth. His father found a better job as a mechanic. Sister Claudia attended college in Boston. The Vidals upgraded to a two-story brick house in a suburb where American flags fly outside every front door. But when Marco started showing real ability in the competitive youth leagues of Dallas, the family hoped he'd take his soccer talent back to the homeland.

He certainly had talent. He was smart for his age.
Calm
. He played so well that Mexican superclub Chivas offered him a contract when he was just twelve years old.
Twelve!
There was no question of refusing the offer. Marco packed a suitcase with cleats and shorts and the hairspray he needed to maintain his then-puffy mullet. (Think early-period Andre Agassi.) He and his dad flew down to Guadalajara, where they enrolled Marco in the youth system of Mexico's greatest team. Then his dad flew back to Dallas, leaving Marco to fend for himself.

“He'd call me up crying, every night,” recalls his mother, Patricia. “I would cry, too. It was very painful for both of us.” Twelve is twelve, and Marco was homesick. His mom visiting every other weekend didn't help. Turning thirteen didn't fix the problem. “Every day I would go into my room and just crumble,” Marco tells me. “Every day.” He stuck it out for a year and a half before fleeing back to Dallas and his family and his old bedroom and the life he knew best.

Marco's talent helped him rebound. He won a title playing for a Dallas men's team when he was just fifteen. He started for the varsity as a high school freshman. At age seventeen, Marco returned to Mexico, joining a team in Monterrey called Tigres. Three years later, at age twenty and without once playing for Tigres in the Primera—
Eres un poco bajito!
—Marco up and quit. He tried out for FC Dallas of Major League Soccer but was cut after four months. “The coach felt he was too short,” one of the assistants told the
Dallas Morning News
. Marco took a job at a Dallas radio station, selling advertising. He got serious with his Dallas girlfriend. He was an American living in America dating an American while working for an American company. Without the Primera to aim for, the trajectory of his life seemed set. He could see how it was all going to play out.

“I was very disappointed,” recalls his father, also named Marco. “I thought he could make it, but he didn't get his chance.”

Then the Indios called. Out of the blue. We're a new outfit, explained Gil Cantú. A minor league team relocated from the central Mexican town of Pachuca. The goal—an audacious goal, yes—is to rise into the Primera. A former Tigres coach now works for the Indios, and he brought up your name. He says you might be a good fit here. You want to come down and try out? You interested?

“Juárez is a city of opportunity,” Gil said to me one morning while we watched Marco and his teammates practice. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have relocated here to fill jobs at more than three hundred borderland factories. Few of these maquiladora jobs pay a living wage, and turnover at many factories tops 100 percent, meaning the average employee doesn't last a year. Yet when there is absolutely no work in Oaxaca or Zacatecas, a Juárez assembly line has its appeal. Most new arrivals intend to continue on to the United States. Those who can't breach the border often find reasons to stay. “This city gave me a chance,” I was told by a systems engineer at a maquiladora. (I'd struck up a conversation when I noticed the Indios jersey he was wearing.) “Juárez has become my home. It's the home of my family. I love this city, and I will fight for it.”

Marco didn't succeed with the Indios at first. The team's head coach (a new guy, not the Tigres executive who had recommended Marco) didn't think much of the short midfielder.
Can the kid not grow a couple more inches, please?
Marco passed a whole season on the bench, once again not seeing even a minute of game action. The only reason he stayed with the club, the reason he didn't run back to Dallas and his girlfriend and his job at the radio station, was the creation of Indios USA. Gil Cantú had started up a side project, strictly amateur, a team based in El Paso, where Gil has lived for years. There'd be no salary, but Marco would finally see the pitch.

What happened in El Paso is what has always happened when Marco's been given a chance. He played great. In its first season, right out of the gate, Indios USA won a title, the United States Amateur Soccer Association National Cup. Marco emerged as a team leader, such a star that Gil demanded a spot for Marco in the Juárez Indios' starting lineup. Back in Mexico once more, Marco's poise helped the main Indios club win its fall 2007 season and the right to face León five months later, after the spring season, in that two-game series for promotion into the Primera.

“Those two games were the most important games of my life, obviously,” Marco tells me. “We were big underdogs going into the games. But we took it seriously. We went to Monterrey for two weeks just by ourselves, just to train. We …” He stops talking for a moment. He puts down his plastic spoon, then looks at me with a nervous smile. “It's making my hair stand on end just to think about it.”

As YouTube can confirm, the Indios won the promotion that sent
la gente
of Ciudad Juárez into the streets. Down in León, at the stadium after the decisive game, Marco crumbled into his locker. He cried as hard as a twelve-year-old left alone in Guadalajara. He cried like he told me he'd cried when he washed out with Tigres and believed his career was over. He thought of his family and what they must be feeling. He thought of his dad most of all. Marco was twenty-two, in the tenth year of a professional career plucked from the remainder bin. And now, with the victory over León, he was what he'd always wanted to be: a player in the Primera. At the top, back in Mexico.

Marco bought a house in Juárez with his promotion bonus. His new wife, a Juárez native, came attached to an extended family that all live close by. The immediate goal, Marco tells me, is to save the Indios, to keep the team in the Primera. He wants to stay in the big leagues. He wants to remain in the city that gave him his opportunity.

“I go to Dallas now and it's not home anymore, you know?”

MARCO AND I don't go to lunch every day. I might eat at the Indios' clubhouse commissary and catch a ride home from someone in the front office. When Marco and I do hook up, and when we finish eating, we usually swing by his house to pick up Dany. It's a nice address they share, especially for Juárez. Modern, two stories tall, with a garage and a small yard in the back where Dany's purebred shih tzu can play. This afternoon I try climbing into the backseat so Dany can sit up front, but she won't hear of it. She's twenty-one, just back from her classes at UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso. Her hair is jet black and straight, shoulder length. She favors skinny blue jeans and severe black stilettos the way Marco favors Ed Hardy T-shirts. Her parents own a bus company that transports workers to maquiladoras every morning, taking the workers home again in the afternoon. She and Marco have been married for eight months.

“Aren't you scared to be here?” she asked when we first met, about a week after I'd arrived. “Yes,” I said. “Aren't you?”

I'd spent my second day on La Frontera searching for an apartment. After touring what I had been told were the better parts of town, I ended up choosing Colonia Nogales, one of Juárez's oldest neighborhoods. The other options were way out there, isolated from the city and hidden behind guard gates. I wasn't blasé about my safety, but I didn't want security to consume me. Colonia Nogales is about a mile square, a neighborhood of mature houses in the Mexican style, meaning from the street they appear to be only a wall and a door; everything interesting hides on the inside. Several of the houses are impressively large, real mansions sprawling across as many as seven lots. The other houses are more modest, and are often kind of cute. There are only a few apartment buildings, the largest of which I've decided to live in.

My place is a furnished two-bedroom, one of forty-five identical units dispersed among five rectangular buildings—or barracks, if we're going just on looks. Each building is two stories tall, and each is painted a different, admittedly obnoxious pastel, making the complex look like military housing for an army of Teletubbies. My billet isn't fancy, I'll admit, but it only costs me three hundred dollars a month. (
“Still too much!”
I've been chastised.) There's a small park nearby and a decent burrito restaurant up the street. I can walk to a gym that I've joined, and also to two grocery stores, a butcher, and a full-on shopping mall. Although practice is held too far away for me to taxi, I can at least walk to the stadium where the Indios play their home games.

On the day after I moved in, the front page of
PM
, a bloody tabloid newspaper, featured a photo of a
gasolinero
murdered in the men's room of his station. I'd washed my hands in that same bathroom the day before, which was the day the man was murdered. Not three days later, still in my first week in the city, I tried a torta for lunch. Tortas are a Juárez staple, the functional equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: chicken or ham or beef plus pineapple and avocado on a bun. Not really my thing, but I was glad I tried it. And glad, in retrospect, I left the restaurant when I did. That night, Channel 44—the popular broadcast equivalent of
PM
—showcased the bleeding torso of a man lying outside the same restaurant, shot more than a hundred times by bullets fired from three different guns.

Nothing has spooked me as much as the murder of Pedro Picasso. He was the head coach of the Indios' youth program. He was shot dead, along with his uncle, inside his uncle's cell-phone shop. I learned about his murder on the very day I signed my new lease.

“You know the real story behind that, right?” Marco asks. We're still in his car, not far from my apartment building. We've just zipped under the Rotary Bridge, Dany reminding me that it was only a few weeks ago a body was found hanging from its girders, then smiling because she knows that freaks me out. “It was extortion,” Marco continues. “Like I've been telling you about. They targeted his uncle's cell-phone shop. They said if he didn't pay up they would kill him. Picasso happened to be there on the day they came to collect. The uncle refused to pay, so they killed them both.”

Marco delivers this analysis casually, like it's no big deal. Everyone around the Indios has been acting as though the murder was just a bad break Picasso suffered, the emotional equivalent of a lost wallet. In the days following my arrival, not even a week after his murder, I never heard Picasso's name mentioned. No one seemed particularly distraught, even though when I'd ask about Picasso everyone would insist he was a great guy, a humble family man, the last person to ever get mixed up in the drug game, totally innocent of all wrongdoing. A tragic loss, in other words. But not tragic enough to keep anyone from their business.

Marco pulls up to my street, rolling his
fronterizo
to a stop so I can climb out. I thank him, I help Dany out of the backseat, and I give her a kiss on the cheek. After dropping me off, they usually proceed to one more restaurant for Dany's first and Marco's third lunch of the afternoon. A three-hour workday with three lunch breaks—nice gig. I speed-walk to my apartment, turning the four locks on my front door and slipping inside before quickly bolting the locks behind me.