Snapshots of a Life in Flight: An Essay in Cardinal Directions

Abstract

Snapshots of a Life in Flight:An Essay in Cardinal Directions Daniel Peña (bio) South Diego says we must caffeinate before the Satanic tour. In a French press, he pours boiling water over coffee grounds, grown and roasted in his village outside of Tulancingo, Hidalgo. We're sitting at his dining table in a nondescript flat in the guts of the Centro Historico in Mexico City. He says it's his apartment, but it really belongs to his girlfriend. The décor is a blending of Bauhaus and Mexican rasquache. The table is lacquered with wobbly layers of dusty red paint that complement the red corn and beige husks nailed into an altarcito above a bookshelf. Scattered pell-mell about the apartment are various alebrijes of jaguars and armadillos made of clay and wood. Next to the table, a large poster of an encuentro between the Black Panther Party and the Zapatistas. Next to that: some yellow curandero soap which, once used, is supposed to bring in money. Next to that: an actual armadillo's claw, severed from the body, that's supposed to bring in money too. On the wall above the bookshelf hangs a fake Zero Euro note with Karl Marx on it, and beside the bill, a Käthe Kollwitz print. All of this belongs to his girlfriend too, he says. As for him, he only has a few things: his t-shirt making business (appropriately named F*ck La Migra Print Shop), the Satanic tour side hustle, and the coffee, which he offers me. Diego speaks softly with a child's demeanor that belies his thirty-eight years and hard-edged persona, which fits him more like a costume than a way of being. A wispy devil's goatee, a triple six tattoo on the back of his neck, a pentagram on his bicep, a Megadeath t-shirt one size too small. He admits this persona was something built to survive his time in Mexico City, first in the late 90s as a homeless teenager, having escaped from rural Hidalgo to the big city, and then again in 2016, as a deportee from Dalton, Georgia. [End Page 129] It's mid-November in Mexico City and besides providing a jolt of warmth, the coffee will keep our wits about us. Mercados Sonora and Merced require sharp wits. The markets aren't particularly dangerous—not like Tepito, the oldest and largest black market in the world—but they're dangerous enough. There are some pick pockets, some petty thieves, some small-time crime rackets, like the selling of alligators and bald eagles. Enough danger to give white folks on the Satanic tour something to write home about, but not enough danger to kill them, which is all they're looking for when they come on this tour: some danger, some freak show, some Atlas Obscura shit to photograph and say that they survived. Diego thinks they want to see the Mexico they had in their minds before they got here: the cartel iconography, the drugs, the gringo heaven, the Mexican hell. Brown person purgatory. It isn't in the realm of their imaginations, he thinks, to conjure up something beautiful about Mexico. Like the hills outside of Tulancingo, where he grew up with the Totonac indigenous people who, like the rest of his family, migrated there from coastal Veracruz generations ago. Hillsides of corn and slash-burning fields. Blue smoke and streams full of fish. Sometimes he wonders why he traded that for Mexico City as a teenager. But kids want what they want. And it was true he was a kid once, before he was a homeless teenager. Before he was a bus driver. Before he lived with an estranged sister in Mexico City, which proved unsustainable. It was in 1999 when he went north. He paid a coyote, found himself in the west end of San Antonio after a long ride. There, a man gave him a new name, Jesse Torres, and a usable Social Security number. He found work at a carpet factory in South Carolina first, then another carpet factory in Dalton, Georgia, where he found love and found himself the father...