Cuauh always greases the landings. If the winds are strong, he lands in the desert north of Obregon, on a sand strip outlined by burning tar barrels, desert oak, and split saguaro cut lengthwise to catch the neon sun. But if the winds are calm, Cuauh lumbers his aircraft, an aging M20J, onto a neighborhood street in Lomas de Poleo just inside Ciudad Juarez. All of the homes abandoned. Everyone gone from the drug wars.
Storytelling is a great way to turn information into an emotional experience. That’s what Peña’s done here: this story began as academic research. He tells the story’s story in the Houston Chronicle: how, during his own pilot training, he’d seen Mexican planes at lots of Texas airports; how he learned of their connection to drug cartels; how he researched drug cartels, and the effects of American policy, both in graduate school at Cornell and continued his research in Mexico City as a Fulbright Scholar. He could have written something academic or journalistic, but instead he turned it into this story of Cuauh, an undocumented worker flying crop dusting planes in Texas until he’s deported. Nonfiction generates sympathy; fiction creates empathy. At least, this fiction does.
This was in the beginning, when Cuauh was freshly deported. The new pilot from Texas who’d once been a drop duster. He was kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo right after he’d walked the bridge, and ever since, he’d been lonesome in that briny way – sulking, scared, stone hopeless.
Around the time I was reading this story, I saw a news story about one Beatriz Morelos Casillas, deported for driving without a license after 20 years – just a shade too old for DACA – and sent to Nuevo Laredo, “one of the most dangerous places in Mexico and where the State Department issued a travel warning in December 2016 due to violent crime.”
Life meets art.
Cuauh’s crisis begins when he sees the purple cowboy boots hanging out of a familiar truck. He knows whose feet are in those boots. He isn’t exactly friends with Lalo – friendship isn’t a wise investment in their business – but he’s well-enough acquainted enough with the guy to wish him no harm. What he doesn’t yet know is the role he’ll have to play in that harm. And refusing is just not an option.
The cell chiefs kept names and addresses of relatives. Even if they couldn’t find you they would find your brother or your parents. It was the thing that kept Cuauh from simply talking his plane and flying off into the north. It was the fear of it that kept him coming back, day after day, to the desert strip or the little road in Lomas de Poleo.
It’s a grim story, a story I almost wish I hadn’t had to read. But that’s the power of storytelling, for better or worse: it shines a spotlight in places we might not want to think about, and lets us see people we might think we already know in a different light.
A Just Recompense 