The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant Page B

for the amnesty because he was in el Norte so long already. He is still there and always he sends money to his wife and his parents, but he never comes home. Maybe he has his own pond of goldfish now.
    Papá never forgave Tío Martín for that—for his good luck of getting away. And he never forgave himself for not going up there when Tío Martín first asked him. But how could he know that the amnesty was only for Mexicanos who were there before 1986? I was just a baby then and if Papá had gone maybe I would never know him. Maybe I would never even exist. But here we are and there is mi papá. Envy is the dog and Papá is the bone. Or maybe it is the other way around because he can never put it down. I think life is always complicated for him, but there are reasons for it.
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    After they caught us, la Migra sent us to Brownsville, Texas, on a bus with other migrantes from all over the place. We were only allowed to get off once a day and the toilet was broken so the smell was terrible. My father was silent for most of the trip—three days, but one thing I remember he said was, “It is because of your school they found us.” I don’t know if it’s true or not, but when we returned to Oaxaca there was nowhere for us to go but back to the pueblo and for Papá this was a humiliation. “Why do they deport
me
,” he said to Abuelo, “when half of those pendejos up there can’t even mix cement? I have a right to work as much as that pinche Martín.”
    â€œMaybe,” said Abuelo. “But how can they know it when you talk like such a mojado and can’t even read?”
    That was the last time my father sat down in his stepfather’s house, which is the house where he was born. It was also the first time I saw him hit my mother. He was drunk and shouting in her face, saying he wasn’t going to live his life behind the oxen staring at their culos. “Walking all day behind them,” he yelled, “every time they shit, it’s like they’re shitting in your face!”
    The next morning, Papá drove away in the Chevy Apache and from that day he lived most of his time in el centro, coming back only once in a month. Because he grew up making adobe bricks with Abuelo and his uncles, my father was good with plaster and cement and he worked on roads and buildings and made deliveries in the Apache. Often he did these jobs for Don Serafín, the same man who paid for our bus tickets home from the border. It was around that time el cacique Don Serafín tried to put a McDonald’s on the Zócalo, which is the heart of el centro and also a UNESCO site. There were protests and he did not succeed, but Don Serafín got his revenge. Now, at night, if you look out over the Valley of Oaxaca, cradle of the Zapotec civilization, you will see stars above the dark and ancient mountains, shadows of pyramids on the ridges, maybe the moon rising behind—and down by the baseball stadium, the great golden chichis of Santa McDoña. It is the biggest sign in Oaxaca—as tall as a church and bright like the sun, and it marks the only McDonald’s in south Mexico with the playground and the tunnel slide. My father told me this—it was him who built the walls around the flower beds.
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    We left the pueblo—my home—when I was thirteen. That’s when Papá had enough money to move all of us into a two-room cement house he rented in Mártires de Río Blanco under the Milenio Cross, thirty minutes walking from the Zócalo and la Basílica de la Soledad. The only water we had came in the garrafón, the electricity we took with a wire from the transformer down the hill and the same with the phone.
    I never liked it there and I was glad to go away to secondary school because I had my own plan, you know—to go to university. I am smart enough for it. I did not win the scholarship like César, but the tuition is not