Marcy Hunsacker

The word "immigrant" could be stamped beneath this photograph, but it doesn’t quite describe his status here.

We keep a stereo viewer on the mantel, an antique pair of lenses set in wood so long ago that the velvet around the tin visor has worn away where it touches my temples. The inside of the visor is black, and when I press its frayed velvet edges to my eyes, everything around me goes dark. It becomes a tiny theater for pairs of photographs mounted on thick cardboard, all of them taken in remote places and times such as the road to Gavarnie, France, in 1905. I look through the lenses, slide the card to just the right distance from my face, and a glassy river in the Pyrenees becomes three-dimensional. I feel that I could touch the shoulder of the man sitting beside the river on the road to Gavarnie and make him turn around. I almost forget the mask on my face, the foreign man and his river are so clear to me.

While Samuel is at home in Mexico, his sisters and mother scrub, wring, rinse, and iron his clothes by hand.

Marcy Hunsacker

Perhaps most foreigners remain thus to each other — always trying to enter a situation they can only observe; tricked by the illusion of standing in the same place. In any case, that is how I see Samuel Orozco, aged 21, born at home in Espinosillas, Mexico, but the second generation to earn his living in our north San Diego town. Most of the men his age — 75 percent, he estimates — have left Espinosillas to come illegally across the border, usually to our town, the true sister city, the common-law wife, of Espinosillas.

"We are only poor people, humble people, I’m sorry.”

Marcy Hunsacker

I promised Samuel I wouldn’t give his actual name or the real name of either town, but of his personal appearance I’d prefer to give you something better than those jiggling squares of color that protect the rights of accused men on true-crime television shows. In a black-and-white photograph, in a stereo card that makes him stand out in 3-D, he has high Aztec cheekbones and he is not smiling. He never willingly smiles for photographs. He’s wearing the castoff T-shirt of an overgrown American, and it’s stretched out from digging and planting. His hands are a darker shade of brown, his pants are too long, and his physical strength, though considerable, is not the visible kind, especially now that he’s thin from a bout with intestinal colitis. His black hair, black as a crow, is cut flat on top, like an all-over Mohawk. He looks young, severe, implacable. He wears the expression my ancestors wore a hundred years ago: determination at rest.

He wears the expression my ancestors wore a hundred years ago: determination at rest.

Marcy Hunsacker

The word “immigrant” could be stamped beneath this photograph, but it doesn’t quite describe his status here. He works one day a week for us, and one day a week for other contractors and professional men in our town who build their own houses or run their own groves, who keep his job for him during his visits to Mexico as though he were on sabbatical. In our town he’s a freelance laborer, a dark-skinned expatriate, the disinherited son in a fairy tale who seeks his fortune in a kingdom of orchards. In Mexico he’s the man of the house he built for 12 other people, a house that cost him, as he puts it, “all the money what I had.” That money was earned over the course of three years and totaled $30,000, or around 210,000 new pesos. This is the story of how Samuel built a house before he turned 21, and of our visit there in the early winter of 1996.

He crossed the border into San Diego for the first time on his 16th birthday, June 13, 1990. His cousin Orlando brought him across in 30 minutes on a hill near the San Ysidro checkpoint for cars. “That’s it,” he says. “Just a little run.” He says this wistfully because crossing is now like sprinting across a mined battlefield: he’s never sure he’ll make it. In May of 1995, he made five attempts and spent two days in a Tijuana jail. In January of 1996, he spent two snowy days in the mountains eating sardines and trying to keep his hands warm. After that particular crossing, my husband told him of a proposal to bus deported Mexicans a thousand miles from the American border. “Not far enough,” Samuel said, and shook his head.

Samuel is the 5th of 12 children, 11 of whom are living. His father worked legally in our town for 20 years, and in 1990 his oldest brother had been working legally for 4 years on the property of Mrs. Ash, tending her orange and avocado groves and her five horses.

Thus Samuel came across not to live under tarps in the woods, as some 50 illegal immigrants live in our town, but with his brother Ronaldo in a board-and-batten shack fitted with a bunk bed, a rust-colored velveteen love seat, a television, a closet pole, a paper cuadro of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an electric stove, a small metal table, and a telephone. He started out with access to a bathroom and a washing machine and the knowledge that Ronaldo had used the money he made working for Mrs. Ash to build a house in Mexico on the same plot of land where his father and grandfather live. He knew that Ronaldo had then married a neighboring girl and that Ronaldo spends November, December, and January of each year with his wife before returning once again to the bunk bed in a board-and-batten shack.

Coming to San Diego was not Samuel’s choice at the time. Until he was 16 he went to school on what he refers to as his ranch, a village called La Hacienda de Espinosillas that does not appear — even under its real name — on maps of Guanajuato. The international airport is 30 or 40 minutes away in the town of Silao, which is close enough that a few students from each graduating class of 30 or 35 can take the 6:00 a.m. bus there and become lawyers or doctors or teachers. Samuel passed his examinations, and he wanted to become a lawyer, but his father said college was too expensive, so he did what his father and brother had done. He crossed the border and began to save money for a house.

“If you don’t have a house when you get married,” he says, “you will have to live with the girl’s father, and he will criticize you.” When Samuel crossed the border in 1990, one of his uncles was living in an avocado grove next to a construction project, the house of my brother-in-law Mike. Mike needed labor from time to time, so Samuel’s uncle would recommend his nephews — mostly those, like Samuel, who were too young to pick avocados. Samuel dug trenches and did other unskilled labor, and gradually, my brother- -in-law says, it became apparent that Samuel could do anything you asked him to do, and do it faster and better than anyone else. Mike began to hire him more and more, Mike’s wife, Linda, began to call him “our guy,” and Samuel continued to learn English in the same way that he planted roses or built fences: faster and more intensely than his friends and relatives. He took night classes at the high school and listened even in his sleep to an audiotape course called Lightning! Neither his brother Ronaldo nor his father had learned English, so they teased him for listening to American voices in his sleep. When Mike’s house was finished, Mike became the general contractor for our house on the opposite hill, and Samuel began to work six days a week on his second American house.

I’m embarrassed to say that for a long time we didn’t even say his name right. For at least two years everyone called him “Sam-yule,” a pronunciation that must have made him feel we were talking to someone else. Finally someone heard the correct pronunciation and asked if he would prefer “Sahm-well. ” He said that he would, so after an awkward time, during which the two names were there in stereo, the names merged into the proper one, or as near as our American mouths could come.

For a while, he played the guitar at Spanish Mass every other Saturday night. He formed a band and considered renting a garage for practices, but the idea fizzled out because it was too expensive. He was making $5 an hour, then $6, then $6.50, and on average he saved $800 a month to send home for the house his father was building. Now and then he went dancing with his female cousins and paid their way, but other than that, he spent almost nothing. He lived with Ronaldo and his younger brother Santiago and various cousins in the two-room shack, cooking when he got home first or eating their cooking when they got home first, bringing the leftover burritos to lunch the next day wrapped in foil and a plastic grocery bag. For a long time he worked in dress shoes, and then he got hold of a pair of old lace-up boots. Now and then he took rolls of cash to the post office and converted them to money orders, with which his father in Espinosillas bought bricks, steel reinforcing bar, sewage pipe, toilets, and paint.

Sometimes there were other expenses. He has an ulcer that was diagnosed by one of his employers, a doctor, and in 1995 he became infected with colitis, which required visits to the clinic and expensive medicine in the States and less expensive visits to a curandera in Mexico, who told Samuel that someone in his family envied his success and had put a curse on him. The American doctors all told him, “Don’t worry so much,” but Samuel says he never worries. He believes the curandera’s diagnosis but follows the American prescription of plain sandwiches and milk. No Cokes, no chiles, no Mexican food. If someone in his family does resent him, it’s not because he’s stingy. When his younger brother Santiago and three friends from Espinosillas decided to leave our town and become busboys in Chicago,

Samuel thought the travel was too risky, but he loaned them $1600 (about six weeks’ wages) for one-way airplane tickets from Los Angeles. Santiago and the other men, all between 18 and 20 years old, all anxious to get married (and thus to earn money for the requisite house), bought fake legal alien cards that wouldn’t fool local border patrol agents but would suffice in the Chicago restaurant business. They then planned to walk for two hours on back roads in the middle of the night because the freeways are blocked by border patrol stations. At a predetermined spot on a back road, if all went well, they would meet a car that would take them to the Los Angeles airport, where they might or might not board a flight without detection. The first time this plan was executed, the car that was supposed to meet them failed to start, but the second time, they reached the airport, walked onto planes, flew to Chicago, and began work in the dead of winter at $4.50 an hour. Then they began to pay Samuel back, just as he said they would.

During the three years that Samuel was working here and building his house in Espinosillas, he would occasionally go home with huge amounts of cash strapped inside the waist of his pants. Sometimes he carried as much as $14,000 — his own money plus the savings of expatriate friends and relatives who wanted to transfer cash to Espinosillas. He took the money home, passed it out to the right families, and returned with photographs and videotape of his emerging house. We saw the house when it was a brick cube with steel re-bar sticking out of it; we saw it when gray stucco was applied and when the stucco was painted peach and white. Watching the videotape, we seemed to enter the green upstairs room with the blue ceiling, draw the flowered curtain from the doorway, scan the potted plants of Ronaldo’s wife, and call to his neighbors, who looked up from their patios to wave.

In January of Samuel’s sixth year in the United States, we were invited to visit him in Espinosillas. He said he would meet us when our flight arrived at Leon International Airport so that we could spend a few days at his house before we went to the town where I was going to study Spanish. On the map, everything was close together. I connected the dots with my finger: Leon, Silao, Guanajuato, San Miguel. Espinosillas wasn’t there — too small, like our own town, to appear in the hardback atlas called Our World.

When our plane touched down it had been dark for two hours. Orange, unfamiliar lights flickered beyond the runway, and the blue index cards on which I had written the Spanish translations for “It was/wasn’t my fault” and “Please speak more slowly” were getting soft around the edges. A cool wind was blowing over the fields and into the parking lot where Samuel was waiting with two middle-aged men in cowboy hats and jean jackets.

“Welcome to Mexico,” Samuel said. “This is my father, and this is Enrique’s father. You know Enrique?” he asked my husband.

My husband nodded and shook hands. Enrique is the expatriate uncle who got Samuel his first job in our town, and his father, it turns out, is just as helpful in Espinosillas, where he has one of the only cars in town — a big Dodge truck with a bench seat.

I, being female, was permitted to ride in the cab with Enrique’s father while my husband, Samuel, and Samuel’s father rode like hitchhiking farm hands in the open truck bed. This made me feel a need for conversational patter with Enrique’s father, for fluent, icebreaking comments on the landscape and the Dodge truck itself, which smelled exactly like the trucks in which I rode as a child to Pioneer Days and rodeos. “The smell of dust on truck vinyl makes me swoon” seemed like the wrong beginning, though, and I didn’t know yet that this truck had carried Samuel’s sister-in-law to the hospital when each of her two babies was born, that one of Enrique’s sons had done what Samuel wanted to do — he rode the morning bus to Silao and became a lawyer — or that Enrique got mixed up in manufacturing methamphetamines, something that, besides fruit trees, our town is known for. But I could not have discussed any of this anyway. We exhausted my Spanish when I said, “What trees those?” and “It pleases me the music of Mexico,” which caused Enrique’s father to turn up the radio a little more and say approvingly, “This is a song very old.”

Behind us, my husband was speaking English with Samuel and riding nonchalantly in an open truck bed as though we were not, in our own country, tooth-flossing, seatbelt-wearing vitamin takers.

“Quince kilometros,” Enrique’s father told me as we turned left onto an unlit, unmarked dirt road, and then he translated it for me: “Nine miles.”

Fluttering guava trees, spiny casahuate trees, fearless cyclists and pedestrians appeared and disappeared like phantoms in the headlights. Dust as fine as talc formed a cloud around moving objects and then settled down again on pointed rocks while the Spanish on the radio — sound without meaning — replaced English, which had been meaning without sound. The things we passed were like words in a child’s picture book, one to a page: cart, horse, darkness, and dust.

It was long after ten o’clock when we arrived in Espinosillas. “La casa de Samuel,” Enrique’s father said, pointing to a light on the hillside.

“Where?” I asked, peering up, confused by the sheer number of lights in a place Samuel had always called a ranch.

“There,” he said, and let us all out at the foot of a steep cobblestone road. Dogs began to bark, first a few and then a hundred, all of them protecting dirt patios as we ascended the steep hill with swinging, pendulous luggage.

In this moment I might as well be an Air Force child again, entering a new school where I wish to be instantly invisible. But I am pale, freckled, and much too tall. My husband is even taller, but lucky, I think, in not being pale, in having a mustache, in being a man. I believe they will find liim handsome, but I am certain they will find me odd looking, as speckled as a fish.

I smell, then hear, then see the horses and cows stabled along the winding, narrowing road that isn’t a road anymore but a sandy footpath deeply creased by erosion. The horses study us and chew. The cows turn their heavy heads to see “los americanos, los patrones de Samuel,” arriving to a chorus of dogs. We’re panting and shouldering our bags. We’re starting to sweat. We come in the night as Samuel comes to San Diego, but nobody calls us cabron or puts us in jail. Instead we step forward into the strong electric lights of the house, climb the flight of concrete stairs we watched Samuel’s feet climb in the video, pull aside the flowered curtain, and find ourselves in a blue concrete room with nine people, the family of Samuel Orozco, and they are smiling emphatically at us.

Of this late-night encounter I will say only that Mary See’s image on the candy boxes we offered them looked suddenly religious, as though she were St. Mary See of the Holy Chocolates; that gallons and gallons of purified water had been bought for us; that when

the chocolates were sampled people managed to look pleased and say, muy rico, which means not “very rich” (as I supposed) but “very tasty”; and that I realized, much too late, that the sweets of another country are a foreign language in a foreign alphabet.

I will skip past this vividly awkward, earnest introduction to the time between night and morning when we first became aware of the town. Samuel says that Espinosillas is a town of 600 parents, but in the three hours before daylight it is a town of 600 crowing roosters.

When the sky is still a shade between black and lilac, a long whistle blast announces the early bus to Silao, neighbors turn on their radios, and the crowing fades.

The houses of Espinosillas are built on a slope that faces the Rio Silao and a wide, flat valley of cornfields. From Samuel’s house, which is on the second highest step of the slope, it is possible to look down on dirt patios, blue tarps, cubicle plaster houses, adobe walls, adobe houses, and the cobblestone street that leads through town. On the far side of that street, the dome of the church is as pale and mottled as a fossilized egg, and the walls of the ruined hacienda are smooth in the shade of the river trees. Just after dawn, when the cold air on Samuel’s patio begins to smell of cornstalks burning in the fields and corncobs burning in kitchen fires, women begin to make their way down the cobblestone road to the molino, where they exchange pails of corn for pails of masa.

Samuel’s four sisters, Justina, Veva, Reyna, and Beatriz, live in his new house, as do his mother, father, and the four younger brothers who have yet to see the United States. His brother Ronaldo’s family of four lives in an upstairs flat of the house, which is shaped like a two-story cube that has been split down the center with an ax. There is almost no wood in this part of Mexico, so there is no wood in the house: the walls were framed with brick, steel, and concrete, the ceilings are concrete, the doors and sills are black metal, and the furniture is aluminum, Masonite, or plastic.

When I think of this house, I remember what Samuel said in the house of another Mexican family headed by two generations of men who have worked in our town. The house was in the country, even more remote than Samuel’s, so it had no plumbing or running water, but the unpainted concrete walls had an aged look that paint stylists spend hours trying to duplicate with stains and sponges. The mother of that family apologized several times to me while showing me around, saying, “We are only poor people, humble people, I’m sorry.” I told her in Spanish that I thought the house was beautiful and told Samuel the same thing in English. Samuel only shrugged. “I cannot say whether it is beautiful or if it is ugly,” he said. “It is Mexico.”

While Samuel is at home in Mexico, his sisters and mother scrub, wring, rinse, and iron his clothes by hand. Most women in Espinosillas stand knee-deep in the river to do this, draping the finished clothes over bushes, but the new house has a cistern on the back patio, and there by the goat and the potted plants the women rub the clothes clean with a vigor that would put me in traction in three hours. Samuel’s mother, who also kills her own pigs with a knife, can wash 30 pairs of pants in one day by sloshing bowls of water onto the ridged metal tray and flipping the pants this way and that, all the while pummeling them in a lather of sweet-smelling soap. Almost everyone was wearing some blinding white article of clothing while we were there, and everyone, including the two-year-old, had a crease in his pants.

Besides washing his clothes, Samuel’s older and younger sisters bring him his meals and defer to him as lord, an arrangement that he says has become more deferential since his financial success. “They know that if it doesn’t like me,” he jokes, in his customary use of the word “like,” “I won’t go home anymore.”

Perhaps it goes without saying that the making and bringing of these meals is not something these women do for an hour in the late afternoon. In Samuel’s house, cooking and washing is a daylong occupation for five women, starting with the raising of animals for meat.

The perimeter of the house is loud with animals, some edible, some not. The tethered goats on the laundry patio are mostly pets, Samuel says, but for a special occasion they might be killed. The black pig is kept for his manteca or lard, while the white sow and her piglets are raised for meat. The gallinas nest in a tree, lay their eggs in a little wooden box, and raise their chicks in what used to be Samuel’s mother’s kitchen, an adobe hut five feet tall and five feet square. The non-edible creatures —three burros, three cats, two horses, and five dogs — live amicably, if somewhat hungrily, between the pigpen and the lower patio, where Samuel’s sisters and mother shuck corn and light a fire for the columns of tortillas they flatten in a wooden press every day.

The new refrigerator is empty and unplugged. The electricity in Espinosillas shuts off with no warning, the market is an hour away, and the stairs to the top floor, where the refrigerator sits, end on a tiled, cantilevered deck without rails that cannot be safely crossed in the rain. (Someday there will be rails, Samuel says, but it’s another expense.) The kitchen and the refrigerator are, in any case, at opposite ends of the house. The kitchen is down below in what feels like the cellar. It is reached by navigating the ax-blade crevice between Ronaldo’s side of the house and Samuel’s, a stairway of uneven width, dampness, and cat prowling. The dirt has yet to be fully excavated in the kitchen, which is lit by a bare light bulb. On the uneven shelf of dirt that must be hacked away, Senora Orozco must stack her utensils, her dishes, her tubs, and her tortilla presses. Against the finished concrete wall where the dirt has been leveled for a floor, the gas stove sits beside a barrel of clean water and a tub of dishes yet to be washed. Although the bathrooms have modern plumbing, the sisters have no running water here — neither hot nor cold — no sink to rinse the dishes in, and no counter on which to set the dishes while they wait to be dried. But the stove is easier to use than the old fireplace in the adobe chicken coop, and the women have an electric blender in the room next door, where everyone eats breakfast.

Samuel’s mother Carolina was born in Espinosillas. She was 14 when Samuel’s father, who was working on a hacienda to the east, spotted her. When I ask how they met, she says a word I don’t know. By way of explanation she grabs my arm, gives it a pull, and says the word again. Then she laughs modestly, covering her mouth with her hand. She married him when she was still 14, and her mother and father, two very agile, ancient, smiling people, now live next door.

Samuel says that his sister Justina, who is 31, is the most careful sister, the one who gets his clothes the cleanest. Justina has a very serious way about her, a certain resignation and dignity that suggest she gave up something a long time ago. She had a boyfriend once, Samuel says, but he married someone else, went to America, and never came back.

Veva is 24 and less serious. She has a boyfriend named Agustin, perfect white teeth, cheekbones as high and elegantly slanted as Samuel’s, and the sort of energetic personality that in American high schools would have made her student body president or captain of the field hockey team. On the night that the whole family welcomed us, for some reason I never quite understood, her mother told us that Ronaldo disapproved of Veva’s skirt, which he felt needed to be lined with a slip. Veva smiled patiently, wrinkled her nose, blushed a little, and offered to wash some apples for us in purified water.

The third sister, Reyna, is closest in age and size to Veva, so they share clothes, jewelry, and shoes like college roommates. Reyna nearly died four years ago when she choked on a piece of peanut-flavored candy and was, at the suggestion of a neighbor, held upside down until the pounding on her back freed the candy. Samuel heard about the scare over the phone from Mexico, just as he heard about his paternal grandmother’s illness, and then, a little later, her death.

Beatriz, the youngest girl, is the 13-year-old twin who may, through Samuel’s money, be the first in her family to have a quinceanera when she turns 15. If Samuel gives his consent and sends the money home, she will wear a white dress to Mass, have a party with a cake from Silao, and dance the vu/s with her twin brother as chambelan, her escort in a white tuxedo.

On our first morning in Espinosillas, it is 13-year-old Beatriz’s turn to carry the corn down to the molino, and she does so in a skirt and windbreaker, her legs very thin as she walks by the bus stop and laments that Justina and Veva, not she, should get the day off for sightseeing in Silao and Leon.

The bus to Silao is an old school bus, and it can’t go above ten miles an hour on the pointed rocks of the dirt road, where burros and horses pull wooden carts to and from the cornfields to fetch cornstalks, which lie in high, regular cones in all the fields.

Very dry trees stand on the horizon, mesquite trees so stunted and brown that they look like pressed flowers. The sky is a pale blue that feels hot and waterless by ten o’clock, when we pass the two towns that lie between Espinosillas and Silao. “San Agustin,” Veva says when we stop at a dusty church. “El Monte,” she says in a smaller town, this one inhabited, Samuel guesses, by 200 parents. In each town, dressed-up women climb aboard, some carrying babies in knitted caps, and then the bus moves slowly on, rocking and lurching itself past brief openings in adobe walls and the strangely intimate scenes that trains and buses, not cars, reveal: a white tethered horse, a red tongue of fire, and a flock of ducks on a patio where a girl nearly splashes her indignant sister with a bowl of wash water.

Above all of this, on a cone-shaped mountain, stands the metal Jesus called Cristo Rey, his body shaped like a cross as he stretches his arms over the valley. We saw him on video first because Samuel rented a car and took the camera right up to the top, where he panned the tall bronze statue and the valley down below, all blue and green in the rainy season of May. In January there is no green anywhere, and from the bus on the valley floor, Cristo looks like the heated spoke of a sundial.

We are headed to meet Alexandra, Samuel’s fiancee, the daughter of a shopkeeper in Leon. Leon is the city of shoes and shoemakers, but her father owns a ferreteria, a hardware shop filled with galvanized tin tubs, leather yokes, wooden tortilla presses, and iron tools. When we reach the store, Alexandra is standing between tubs and yokes in a pair of new pointed boots and a zippered coat. Her hair and her shoes reveal her class: she can afford to maintain a blunt cut, and she never has to walk in horse manure. She has small hands, black eyes, unstraightened, charming teeth, and no pretense. In eight days Samuel will cross the border again, and she won’t see him for ten months.

The shop where she stands every day is shaped like a garage, open at the front and dim at the back, filled with the cold smells of tin, leather, and iron. When we arrive, a small, sober man is sitting in the shop beside her, and he studies us as we collect on the curb. Although we are, as always, a large group, this time including Samuel’s father, Ronaldo, Justina, Veva, and a tiny niece in lace tights, the man makes no sign of recognition, so I assume he is her competitor. He is, however, Alejandra’s father, and when we leave the shop Samuel tells us without rancor that the snub of his family was deliberate.

He says he is always treated this way when he comes to visit. Alejandra’s parents don’t approve of a suitor from el campo, but Alejandra is 24 years old. “Very old,” Samuel says, and laughs. “If they do not let her marry me, I will steal her,” which makes me think of that arm-pulling gesture his mother made when describing her own courtship. Samuel met Alexandra at a dance in Espinosillas. She has seen his blue rooms, the empty refrigerator, the kitchen, the flight of stairs, and the river where she would wash his clothes when there is no water in the cistern. She says she will leave the city for him, but sometimes Samuel is dubious.

“She has money there in Leon,” he says later. “Did you see her house?” A long pink house with smooth plaster walls in a neighborhood of la clase media. A newly restored vintage truck was parked outside. “They have money,” Samuel says. “They have a lot of money, and I told her, ‘I cannot give you anything like you have in your house.’ ”

The following day we attend a wedding in Espinosillas. We go on foot to the church with a dome that is, like Samuel’s own ceiling, made of hardest concrete. The windows around the perimeter are inset with cracked, rippled blue panes that make the sign of the cross on the floor. A red carpet leads to the crucifix and the wedding couple: Maria Refugio, aged 17, and her novio Hermenegildo, 19. Her dress is white against pure brown-skin, and stalks of white gladiolus make coronas on the marble altar. A dog wanders in and sits down by the pews. A young man in denim records the whole ceremony on videotape, from the lazo de matrimonio that joins them in a double necklace of pearls to the locking of the chalice behind a pair of gold doors.

I ask Samuel if he will be married here, if he 'was baptized here, and he says yes to both. We watch as the lazo de matrimonio is lifted, as Maria extends her finger for the ring of Hermenegildo. Neither smiles for the photographs that follow, and when I ask why, Samuel’s sister Justina, the one whose boyfriend married someone else and went to America, says in Spanish, “Who knows?” The bride and groom walk out into the white afternoon sun, and little girls beg for souvenirs from a basket.

We follow the bride down the dirt road in a procession as slow and solemn as a funeral, the sun turning her satin train into a thing too bright for shadow or definition, a white cloud held aloft by four children.

Then, since seven or eight of us are together on foot, we keep walking down to the river where a friend is washing clothes, where some boys are tending goats, where it seems like nobody’s wedding day, just a clear, sunny day without obligations. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon when we reach the presa, a concrete dam the color of gold quartz whose diagonal arms sink into a green stagnant pool. All of us ascend the diagonal walls in our Sunday shoes as though we were scaling a balance beam, arms extended. When we reach the top of the dam, I expect to see a cold lake, but there is nothing but land, recently tilled and very dry, stretching out in patches of yellow and brown for miles. The dam, it turns out, is needed only in the rainy season.

We step around cactus and huele de noche, a tiny red trumpet flower whose scent is sweet after dark and whose other name is Espinosillas. At the end of the walk, in the midst of town again, we will say a surprised hello in English to Samuel’s uncle, an employee of a grove service in our town, who is home on a short holiday.

But first we climb along the ridge where a boy of 15 died a few years ago. The story goes he was standing on the ridge in a strong wind. From where he stood among the cactus and the lichen-covered stones, the square houses of Espinosillas descend like uneven stairs, step after step of pink brick, blue plaster, brown adobe, and black corrugated metal. The air smells of burning corncobs and the river is moving. Beyond it the fields are dotted with cornstalks and the backs of animals.

Down there, in one of those brick houses, Samuel says, is where the boy’s girlfriend lived with her parents. Samuel points to her house while standing on the edge of the cliff with his brothers, who aren’t daunted by the wind or the story. The four women, one of whom was related to the boy, hang back on the path.

“Her parents didn’t like him,” Samuel says. The boy climbed up the ridge to give the girl a signal — nine fingers for the time he would meet her. But it was very windy, he must have slipped, and when they found him at the base of the ridge, all his bones were broken.

A month later, back on the other side of the border, which Samuel has crossed by eating sardines and sleeping in the snow, I ask where he and Alexandra will live after the wedding — in his new house in Mexico, or in the United States, where his jobs are?

He says that right now he’s going to save money for a fence, a larger stove for his mother, and a couch. “I built my house because I was thinking to live there,” he says. “But then, the second time when I came here, it was different. I think I cannot live in Mexico. My father told me, ‘What about the house?’ I say, ‘Just keep it for you.’”

He shrugs and looks to the west, where mountains block our view of the sea.

Mexico is to the south, beyond the house, but we don’t look in that direction. I don’t understand precisely why Samuel can’t live in Espinosillas except that I couldn’t live in my hometown either. I left it as fast as I could. Samuel and I are only seven years apart in age, but my father sent me to college and then, when I had received my navy blue passport, to a country several thousand miles away, an aspect of education once called “going abroad.” “What do you miss about Mexico when you’re here?”

I ask, thinking that the air in Espinosillas must be heavy with seared corn right now, that his sisters must be throwing wet kernels to the chickens, that the white wedding garlands still flutter over the bride Maria Refugio’s patio.

“Nothing,” he says to me, and laughs so that I know it isn’t true. After a very long, windless pause, he says, “My family.”