Where hell is an empty water truck
An unforgettable tale about why Mexicans flee their homeland
John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children is a devastating portrait of contemporary life in Mexico. There’s the strife-torn southwestern city of Oaxaca, an impoverished nearby Zapotec Indian community where centuries-old traditions are being destroyed, a border town prowled by gang-linked human smugglers. And there is a uniquely Mexican version of hell.
The “inferno” in the novel is, paradoxically, an empty water truck in which a young man named Hector Maria de la Soledad Lazaro Gonzalez, his friend Cesar Ramirez and 13 others hoping for a better life in el norte — the U.S. — are trapped.
Having made their way to the northern Mexican town of Altar, the two friends — like hundreds of thousands before them — paid some “coyotes” to take them to the Promised Land. The metal tank holding the migrants is welded shut so the human cargo can’t be detected by American immigration officials.
But what was supposed to have been an easy, three-hour trip to Arizona has gone horribly wrong. The coyotes have abandoned the broken-down truck and the occupants, still sealed in, have very little water.
The dank compartment is sweltering by day, freezing at night. In the perpetual darkness the captives argue, despair, drink their urine, cry out.
And, in a series of “soundfiles” that he creates using Cesar’s cellphone, Hector tells the back story of their journey, and of his family and community, to a woman whose name he finds on the device. He hopes that somehow “AnniMac” will send rescuers.
This is the debut novel by Vancouverbased Vaillant, who won the 2005 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction for his first book, The Golden Spruce, and was widely acclaimed for 2010’s The Tiger.
And, for the most part, he’s pulled it off brilliantly: The Jaguar’s Children is a brutal, unforgettable tale about the cancer in North America that makes so many Mexicans flee their homeland illegally.
Alarge number of those stealing into the U.S. are from the impoverished state of Oaxaca, but Cesar and Hector, both “Oaxaquenos” and Zapotecs, are not desperate.
The gifted Cesar won scholarships and earned a PhD at university in Mexico City. Also bright, Hector has had some post-secondary education, though his father has long exhorted him to seek a future in America.
The two flee after a run-in with the law. It turns out Cesar has compelling reasons to get out of the country and Hector, who has always looked up to him and is emotionally bruised from the 2006 civil unrest in Oaxaca — in which a cousin was killed by the authorities — decides to go along for the ride.
As Hector creates his soundfiles for AnniMac, the engrossing saga of his family unfolds: the tough agrarian life of his field worker/savant grandfather, that abuelo’s time working for an American anthropologist named Professor Payne, the brutality and disappointment of Hector’s father.
Vaillant, who spent a year in Oaxaca in 2009, clearly has a deep knowledge of and connection to the region. Apart from his descriptions of the horror in the water truck, the passages focusing on Hector’s now-dead abuelo provide the most vivid writing in the novel.
The old man, whose feet were “thick like a car tire,” worked like a beast from childhood but easily learned to read Spanish with the help of the professor, becoming hungry for books and knowledge.
The memory of this man with a ribald sense of humour and a deep sense of his Zapotec roots is a source of strength for Hector as he languishes in the truck.
Less successful, for me, was the Cesar narrative.
His academic research, sponsored by a multinational company, involves genetic modification of corn, the lifeblood of the Zapotecs and most other Mexicans.
This storyline feels too deliberate, too heavy-handed, however much it might reflect the truth about how NAFTA and corporate greed have made things worse for our southern trading partner.
But this remains a bold, heartbreaking novel suffused with love for a beleaguered country.