Caras de la Frontera/Faces of the Border
Josias El Musico
Nogales, Sonora sits right on the border with Arizona. It is a crowded, colorful, relatively safe border town full of people from all over Mexico. In the 1970’s, the town had roughly 40,000 inhabitants. There are now over 200,000. People came from all over Mexico for work in the Maquillas, the mostly U.S. corporate owned factories that operate just on the other side of the border, because traditionally, it was cheaper (why pay out $12 an hour when you can get a young Mexican woman to do it for $2?) and environmental regulation are much lower, which made dumping your chemical excess into the river that much easier. I've gone in and out of Nogales multiple times, and in the process, become friends with a local musician named Josias.
Josias Guerrero is an English teacher by day and a musician by night. Like most others, he and his family are not from Sonora. They are from outside of Mazatlan, a coastal town on the Pacific. He is in his late 40’s, is married with six children, and recently moved into a two-room house further away from the dusty street. “Thanks be to God, we have nothing to complain about, and we’re much further away from the dust. There is enough for all of us”. The last sentence I find questionable. His wife Maria is a schoolteacher. Maria never got to go past high school, so she learns each lesson she is to teach the children the night before. “I learn with them,” she says, “it can be fun, but challenging”. She took a six month long program to be certified as a primary school teacher. Maria is not a dull person.
I ask Josias about his Mexican passport, has it arrived yet, will he ever go back to the U.S.? Josias went to High school in California, but never went back. Without documents, his perfect English is his only testament to his life with the Anglos. “Still no,” he says, “I am not in a hurry, when it comes, it will come.” Two years ago he was saying he only had to wait six more months. Now I get the feeling his passport, and ability to travel back to the country of his adolescence, may not happen at all. Or it’ll come in thirty years, with an official permit to work from the U.S. State Department, when he’s blind, and decrepit and unable to walk. Josias is high a lot. He’s able to go teach English to classrooms of children, tutor adults one on one, give advice and orders to his children, and talk like a completely sober person while smoking joints throughout the day. In addition to his pot intake, he’ll sometimes eat tiny portions of Peyote, a habit he learned while living with the Indigenous Huichol in central Mexico. “I lived with them for four years. I was a hippy, wandering the country, wandering the desert, when I came upon a village of theirs. I had no idea where I was. They took me in. I think they felt sorry for this young, lost Mestizo.” The Huichol, are known by many as the Peyote People. Peyote is a ritual herb to them, which they consider extremely sacred. Josias keeps in contact with them, visiting a religious site and area of wild Peyote growth when he can, usually every other year. He swears by the plant, to cure all ills, from depression, to malnutrition, to lack of connection to the divine. “You know the Universal God when you eat this plant. It is communion!” he exclaimed to me once, trying to entice me to try some. “It connects the broken pieces of your mind; your body, mind and soul are reunited.” he would say.
It would be impossible not to notice the frustration Josias has for his professional circumstances, which by the way have little to do with money. He just wants to make a living as a musician. He is tired of teaching English now, no longer the joyful teacher I remember from just a few years ago. His classes are more musical than grammatical, but speaking to some of his students, I am confronted with the possibility that musical-based instruction actually can create excellent language acquisition.
I sit in the family’s “patio”, which is the dirt yard outside their house that overlooks the sprawling multi-colored concrete blocks all around them, the mountains to the south encircling half the city. Josias plays me song after original song. They are gentle, spiritual, and use an average of nine chords each. He appears to be channeling his soprano voice from another dimension. His face is grimaced, his throat is clinched, he is pulling the sounds out of his depths. And it works. The songs are soothing, and once you’ve heard a few of Josias’s songs, you can recognize the others. His entire body language changes when he begins to sing, and grimacing aside, he is relaxed in a way I don’t seem him otherwise.
Josias is the type of man, which in earlier times, would have played on his doorstep with a crowd of neighborhood locals around him, entertained and calmed. With television and recorded music now available everywhere, this primal function of a man like him seems obsolete. But creating and performing music is what a man like Josias seems born to do.
“I accept my destiny. I am very thankful to God,” Josias tells me later. There is a lot more than just thankfulness and obedience in his voice. There are a lot of emotions. Nevertheless, Josias is not a man who seems very old, nor does he consider himself such. To him, his life is still unfolding. His wife wants to go to the U.S. to make more money. Josias confides to me later he has little interest in ever going back, but he’s not going to rule it out. He gets up from his chair, walks a few steps toward the house, then spins around and throws a question in my direction. “You know what Mother Teresa said about the U.S.A.?” I do, but I shake my head ‘no’, because I’m not entirely sure he’s going to say what I have in mind. “She said it was the poorest country she’d ever been to!” His facial expression displays an unusual elated sadness and a rare political moment. “The poorest! And this was a woman who was from Albania, and lived in India!”
“Entiendo Josias, entiendo”, I assure him. He walks back into the house. I stare out into the mass of pastel pink and blue and desert brown I see below me. The scent of marijuana is slowly wafting from the back of the house.
