Freeze there: See Gabriel Cardona march backward, away from the stun grenade and the Laredo safe houses, away from the Texas jails and the Company lawyer, back to that zone of impunity. See la policía clear out a restaurant so an enemy ate alone, idle prey, practice for a new soldier. See a pickup truck: Hear the screams of the bound men inside who killed Gabriel’s boss’s brother fade to the whoosh-whoosh of towering flames. See Gabriel, months earlier, arrive at the training camp, primed for the work but not yet a frío, his aptitude raising eyes among la gente nueva, the new people.
And keep rewinding, back a decade, to Laredo, Texas, in the mid-1990s. It was as hopeful a season as there had been in the oldest ghetto of the poorest city in America. A city of new immigrants and Mexican-Americans whose mother country, next door, was finally set to democratize after seventy years of one-party rule. A city on its way to becoming one of the busiest trading posts of the world’s greatest economy.
September mornings arrived at a cool ninety-eight degrees—“the late-summer cold spell,” locals joked. Mrs. Gabriela Cardona—known among her children as “La Gaby”—rolled out of bed quietly. Best to let the drunk sleep it off. On her way to the bathroom, with its ceiling that caved in a little more each year but never broke, she slapped the feet of her four sons, who slept together on a queen-size mattress. “Es-school! Es-school! Es-school!” she yelled in her accented English, and flicked water on the boys—ages eleven, ten, six, and four.
Despite La Gaby’s troublemaking brother and her good-for-nothing husband, neighbors considered the Cardonas a capable family. La Gaby inherited an old family house across the river in Nuevo Laredo, and she occasionally collected rent on it. She worked hard, and always had a job. CPS never visited their address.
If she was going to have problems with any son, she doubted it would be with the second. Gabriel had started reading earlier than other children, consuming every volume of the Sesame Street series and Selfish, Selfish Rex, a parable about the virtues of sharing. He ran about in Batman shoes, scored perfect attendance at both regular school and Sunday school, and read the Bible. Teachers remarked on his generosity, and how he looked out for smaller kids.
“Oralé, al agua pato!” La Gaby yelled. Listen up, hit that water duck!
During elementary school mornings Gabriel showered with his older brother, Luis, while La Gaby shouted soaping instructions from the kitchen: “Cabeza, cuello, arcas, wiwi, cola, pies.” Head, neck, armpits, penis, butt, feet. Combing the boys’ hair into Ricky Martin pompadours, she repeated the instructions until they learned to do it themselves: “El partido por la orilla, lo demás pa’ca y levantas al frente.” The part should be on the side, the rest toward here, and raise it up in the front. Then Gabriel helped his younger brothers get dressed, ate a breakfast taco of egg and chorizo, grabbed his notebook, and ran outside, where a tree dropped sour oranges and threw shade on the multiplying kittens that shat in the dirt by the rusty gate in front of 207 Lincoln.
Situated on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande, El Azteca—their six-square-block neighborhood known simply as “Lazteca”—was 250 years old. The streets were narrow, the sidewalks high: a closed feel. Early morning was Gabriel’s favorite time of day. Dawn came quiet in the hood, as cops and Border Patrol switched shifts. He preferred it to the chaos of Lazteca by night, when the streets came alive with the spotlights of beating helicopters and the squeal of tires as drug runners and coyotes—immigrant smugglers—tried to outrun the authorities.
Interstate 35, the biggest smuggling corridor in America, began a hundred yards from the Cardonas’ door. On the way to school—north along Zacate Creek, west through the I-35 underpass that led to J. C. Martin Elementary—Gabriel and Luis passed men coming off night shifts packing narcotics for the drive north, illegal immigrants looking for a ride to a hotel, and the daily queue outside the bondsman’s office. Such were the signs of Lazteca’s economic health. And like any friendly neighborhood, generosity was community. Fathers and boyfriends and uncles and brothers came home after a successful trip to Dallas, giving here, giving there, buying pizzas. La Gaby would tell the boys, “Vacúnalo!”—Get a lick out of him!
Uncle Raul, the smuggler who blasted speedballs, injecting heroin and cocaine at the same time, was always in and out of prison, but Raul taught Gabriel and his friends to play football. Gabriel was the quarterback. One of his homies from Lazteca, Rosalio Reta—younger by three years and shorter than a kitchen table—was always trying to prove himself to the older kids. He took big hits and sprang back up, smiling, his huge cheeks swelling like avocados around the upper-lip birthmark. They played violent video games like Mortal Kombat, and listened to the rap music of Tupac Shakur.
On the way home from school, Gabriel and Luis played along Zacate Creek’s slimy bank. If they came home stinking like fish, they received a beating from La Gaby, who always stood at the ready with an extension cord in hand, nose active. But she had a soft core. Gabriel and Luis’s best friends, the Blake brothers, were allowed to sleep over whenever they brought La Gaby a bottle of Big Red soda or a Coke. She cried when CPS moved the Blakes to foster care in Brownsville after their mother was picked up again for heroin.
Mr. Cardona was good for certain things. An out-of-work security guard, he took Gabriel and his brothers to the park for barbecues and out riding bikes. He played guitar and sang. On weekends they walked across the border to visit extended family in Nuevo Laredo, passing from the fresh air of America to Mexico’s wilder aromas: carne asada, horses, old leather. With air-pump guns, the cousins played “shooting.” Gabriel would catch pellets in the face but never relent. They called him loco, crazy.
GABRIEL’S AMERICANNESS GAVE HIM A special status south of the border. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 1994, eliminated tariffs on goods traded between Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Not only could Wal-Mart now ship raw materials to Mexico, manufacture goods with Mexican labor, and reimport the finished product to American consumers without penalty, but it could also establish retail outlets in Mexico and drive mom-and-pop stores out of business. Wall Street smiled. Investment flowed. American goods lined the shelves of supermarkets and U.S.-style department stores all over Mexico: Adidas and Kodak; Coke and Cheetos. Willie Nelson poured through speakers. All-day dry cleaners set a new pace. As cheap corn and wheat imports from the United States hurt Mexican farmers, rural Mexicans flocked to northern cities for work in maquiladoras, foreign-owned factories, where they became inundated with American consumer culture. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and even Taco Bell lit up skylines from Monterrey to Mexico City. The tendency was to idealize everything American and discount everything Mexican.
After family visits, when the Cardonas returned to Laredo, Gabriel’s father became insecure, then violent, having seen himself through the eyes of his Mexican family: an American who did no better than they did. Gabriel and Luis watched their drunk father beat their mother, punching her like a man would hit another man. When Gabriel went to school with a palm imprinted on his face, his teacher asked if he was okay. He nodded. He knew the rule: No te identificas. Don’t say anything.
One night, La Gaby stabbed their father with a kitchen knife, then kicked him out for good. Gabriel was proud of La Gaby for being strong. He resented his father for drinking while his mother worked, and didn’t consider his leaving any great loss. Though a sense of deep loss came a few days later, on Gabriel’s tenth birthday, when Tupac Shakur died from gunshot wounds. Pac was his perro, his dog. Even years later he would feel coraje, rage, at whoever pulled that trigger.
IN JUNIOR HIGH, GABRIEL WON certificates of excellence for outstanding performance in math and English. Several of his adoring female classmates remembered him as the person to beat in seventh-grade algebra. He had a head for numbers, and a talent for memorization. His English teacher asked everyone to memorize a song and perform it. Gabriel appeared in class with a fake diamond nose ring, and a blue handkerchief around his head. The class rolled in laughter as he sang Tupac’s “How Do U Want It?”
He quarterbacked the football team through two undefeated seasons, and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. In the summer between eighth and ninth grade he enrolled at Workforce Center, through the Texas Migrant Council, and made a hundred dollars a week. He gave money to La Gaby, and purchased Polo shirts and Tommy Hilfiger boots for himself. He bought a bus ticket to Brownsville to visit a girlfriend whose family had moved away. They went to South Padre Island and ate pizza. Gabriel Cardona appeared to be one of those rare Lazteca kids whose energy might take him somewhere other than prison. Looking at the industrious fourteen-year-old, no one could have imagined that the $896.10 he made during the summer of 2000 would be his first and last legal income.
NAFTA, meanwhile, meant huge changes in cross-border trade, with tens of thousands of trucks coming through Laredo every week. Laredo’s population doubled during the 1990s, making it the second-fastest-growing city in America after Las Vegas, and the largest inland port in the Western Hemisphere. More than 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies invested in Laredo’s transport facilities that warehoused Mexican goods before they headed north.
But aside from some extra minimum-wage jobs in the warehouses, none of the new revenue seemed to make it into the pockets of the working class. With a median income 30 percent below the national average, and 38 percent of its residents living below the poverty line, life for most of Laredo, still a front-runner for poorest city in America, had changed little after NAFTA’s passing. Despite the new orgy of commerce, it remained a giant, unimproved truck stop.
If the city of a quarter-million people didn’t look as poor as it was on paper, it was because the black market buoyed the legitimate one. Many of Laredo’s small businesses—perfume and toy stores; used-car lots and restaurants—were money-laundering fronts. The Mexican Mafia, a California gang with a strong Texas presence, owned slot machine halls known as maquinitas, and a bustling chain of beer drive-thrus, Mami Chula’s, staffed by bikini-clad teens who accepted tips like strippers. Other big gangs, such as the Texas Syndicate and Hermanos de Pistoleros Latinos, known as HPL, also owned businesses. The tallest building in town belonged to the DEA.
Gabriel stopped looking forward to their Mexico visits. His family didn’t have much, but he still felt bad going across in his Sunday best to see cousins who had nothing. Some of them picked pockets, washed cars, or performed sidewalk spectacles for tourist change. He did like sneaking out of church with his cousin, putting chewed gum on a stick, and fishing cash from the donation box. But Mexico, he felt, was dirty. Flies buzzed around garbage. He smelled urine, saw gang graffiti on brick walls, and watched plastic bags blow against fences, trapped like wounded birds. He didn’t like having to be careful where he sat or roamed. His opinion would change, later, when he got some money. But for now he appreciated America for its relative glimmer.
When high school started, he hoped to become quarterback of the junior varsity football team. No Laredo team had ever made it past the third round of state playoffs; in most years, Laredo carried the dubious distinction of being the largest city in America not to have a football player win an athletic scholarship at any level. Still, a Laredo kid was a Laredo kid: five foot seven, not very fast, but played hard. Gabriel had read Friday Night Lights, the famous book about Texas high school football, and he dreamed of entering that world, of experiencing the American rite, as H.G. Bissinger wrote, of playing under the “full moon that filled the black satin sky with a light as soft and delicate as the flickering of a candle.” He dreamed of something glorious to fill the blah of life.
The boy grew up handsome, talented, and popular. His ego knew little of rejection. So when the coach benched him in favor of a sophomore, he quit. It was a decision in which loads of portent would later be vested. Had he been a starter, he would’ve stayed in football, remained after school for practice, and kept getting the grades required for participation. Instead, after leaving practice that day, he hooked up with two brothers connected to Laredo’s street gang scene, smoked pot for the first time, and drove around vandalizing houses.
A few days later some terrorists knocked down some buildings in New York.