Perpetual West

by Mesha Maren

Genres: Hispanic & Latino

Synopsis

When Alex and Elana move from rural Virginia to El Paso, they are just a young married couple, each the other’s best friend, intent on a new beginning. Born in Mexico but adopted to white American Pentecostal parents, Alex is hungry to learn about his heritage and spends every free moment across the border in Juárez—perfecting his Spanish, hanging with a collective of young activists, and studying Mexican wresting, lucha libre, for his graduate work in sociology. Though Elana has enrolled at the local university as well, she feels disillusioned by academia and struggles to find her place in their new home. She also has no idea how close Alex has become with Mateo, a lucha libre fighter.

When Alex goes missing and Elana can’t determine whether he left of his own accord or was kidnapped, it’s clear that neither of them has faced who they really are. Spanning their journey from Virginia to Texas to the heart of Mexico, Mesha Maren's thrilling and fiercely intelligent follow-up to Sugar Run takes us from missionaries to wrestling matches to a luxurious cartel compound, and deep into the psychic choices that shape our identities. A sweeping novel that tells us as much about America and Mexico as it does about our own natures and desires, Perpetual West is an utterly engaging look at the false divide between high and low culture, and a suspenseful story of how harrowing events can bring our true selves to the surface.

Release date: January 25, 2022

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

August 2005

They came by way of the Blue Ridge. Crossed the first state line at Kingsport and tracked the whole of Tennessee. Memphis at night in the rain. The Mississippi charging angry under them. Past the bluffs were floodplains, Arkansas, and then nothing but Texas. They came by way of the Stay-Inn Motel, Krystal, Taco John’s, and Dixie Cafe. Burger wrappers shifting under their feet. Receipts on the floorboard like a poem of their journey: Aquafina, Butterfinger, medium coffee. They came by way of brown grass and thirsty names. Sulphur Springs, Mineral Wells, Sweetwater, Big Spring. They came for their schooling, for his past, her getaway.

When they reached the border it was late August, evening, and still hot outside, but the sunlight was thinning. It fell through their car windows in long slashes that illuminated the dust on the dashboard, the cracked windshield, and expired inspection sticker—details that the police would eventually note in their report after finding the Honda abandoned in the Candy Club parking lot, but that was still four months away. On this August day the evidence suggested only that Elana and Alex were too poor to fix the windshield and too distracted to keep the inspection up to date. Behind them, a slope of treeless mountains hunched in shadow and before them, past the squat concrete bunker of the Paso del Norte border station and the brown gulch of the Río Grande, Juárez rippled with headlights and neon signs.

Alex drove or, rather, he sat in the driver’s seat and stared at the line of Jeep-Toyota-Chevy-Mitsubishis behind them and the equally jammed vehicles in front. After days of whip-by miles, they’d arrived in a funnel. US stagnancy and, to the south, the flash of Juárez. Elana sat in the passenger’s seat with Wuthering Heights open in her lap.

“Maybe we should stop and eat before we get to Jorge’s,” Alex said.

Elana’s eyes traced the same page, the same few lines, over and over again, but the point was not really reading. She’d read Wuthering Heights at least four times before.

“Just grab some tacos and a beer,” Alex said. “There won’t be any beer at the mission.”

Elana found it funny that he should worry about beer. He hadn’t drunk alcohol at all until he turned twenty-one, just two months ago, but now he’d incorporated it into his vision of how to be an adult. Adults drank beer at the end of a long day.

“We should find our way to the mission before it gets dark,” Elana said, without looking up.

Alex fished a cassette out of the shoebox that sat between them and pushed it into the tape deck. The staccato drums and frenetic screams of Orchid reeled out and formed a screen between them. They’d kept the Honda more for its tape deck than anything else. The air conditioner was long gone, the gas mileage was not great, the heater worked only half the time. Alex turned up the volume. The line of cars inched toward the border, but the maroon van directly in front of them did not move. Alex edged closer to it.

“You don’t want to stop for one beer?”

Elana looked at him, holding her finger on the sentence she’d been reading.

“After eight hours of driving.”

She blinked.

“You’re afraid,” he said.

The cars beside them jerked ahead. Alex lifted his foot off the brake. He looked at Elana again. The Honda rolled forward and: smack. Elana’s arms slammed against the glove box as the windshield darkened above her, tumbling with movement. A series of dull thuds. The back doors of the maroon van swung on their hinges and box after box of Froot Loops, Cheez-Its, Hamburger Helper, Chips Ahoy!, Honey Nut Cheerios, and finally, a case of Pepsi wheeled out and landed on their windshield in an explosion of dark sugar.

Alex pulled up the emergency brake and leapt out. Elana opened her door slowly, watching as a blonde woman emerged from the passenger’s side of the van.

Alex pushed the boxes out of the way, inspecting the point of impact. No one in the border station up ahead seemed to have noticed, though there was a growing cyclone of noise, horns honking and voices barking, as cars swerved around them. Elana watched the blonde woman light a cigarette.

A man came around from the driver’s side of the van, paunchy and sunburnt.

“Damnit,” Alex said, glancing over at him. “I’m sorry, I should’ve been paying better attention, shouldn’t have been so close to your bumper.” Alex touched the place where the Honda had dented the metal and suddenly the sunburnt man was moving fast. The look in his blue eyes, wet and vulnerable, like physical pain.

“Don’t touch my van, boy,” he said, and as he drew close to Alex, his expression changed from pain to disgust. It was the look of rusted wheels beginning to turn inside his brain and he did not seem to have any control over it.

“Chester?” the blonde said quietly, stepping forward. There was fear in her voice and she was looking at the man with a strange focus.

Alex stepped back, hands out at his sides.

“I never wanted to come down here in the first place,” the man said, his eyes still locked on Alex. “But Lindy says it’s a good idea. Start over fresh, she says, south of the border!”

The woman looked away before he even turned to her. The cigarette in her hand was shaking.

“A white horse. Isn’t that right, Lindy? Something about dreams of white horses you had.”

He had not touched her, but her body shrank as if she’d been slapped. She dropped her cigarette and looked down at it. “And you’re the idiot who thought we could use our EBT down in Mexico,” she said, barely loud enough for Elana to hear.

“What’d you say?” The man lunged.

“Nothing.” She hugged her skinny arms across her chest.

For a moment Elana thought the man might hit her, but he just watched, his eyes focused on her ass as she bent over and picked up a bag of dill pickle potato chips.

Elana looked over at Alex. His face was tight and his hand gripped the door of the Honda, but none of them moved except for the woman tossing the boxes and bags into the open van.

Up ahead, against the pinkening skyline, a white and red and green billboard announced: ¡hola amigos! welcome to juárez! And behind, the final rays of sunlight struck the glass buildings of the El Paso business district, burnishing them in liquid opalescence.



December 2005

The counters at Susie’s Tex-Mex Cafe were long and yellowed, with menus laminated right into them, covered over with bubbly plastic. Elana sat at the far end beside the jukebox, holding empty ketchup bottles while Rubi refilled them from a large plastic bladder.

“No, you know, I’m just like asking because I’ve never seen a white boy’s junk in real life before,” Rubi said, wiping the edge of a ketchup lid with her thumb. She glanced at Elana’s face. “You’ve never like fucked a Mexican, huh?”

“Yeah.” Elana pushed her hair behind one ear. “My husband.”

“Oh, right, I forget. He’s so pocho, sorry,” Rubi said. As she moved, her bra slid up. It was exactly the same color as the ketchup. Elana looked back down at the bottle. The thick corn syrup and tin tomato smell and the wet fart sound of the squeezed bladder pushed her hunger away. A little bile in the back of the throat and she was glad again to be empty. Waitressing was beautiful in that way. The more food that passed through her hands, the more ugly it became. The same plate of chilaquiles that she carried steaming to the table would, momentarily, chill and congeal into a yellow-brown mass that slurped as she scraped it into the dumpster. Most of the other waitresses didn’t eat during their shifts either. They complained of hunger but opted for cigarettes first. Here, she was not so unusual. Here, no one noticed she consumed only coffee, coffee, coffee, cigarettes, a bag of jalapeño-flavored sunflower seeds, and a house salad—the cucumbers thin and cool on her tongue, the iceberg like half-frozen water.

“What about a black guy?” Rubi set the bladder down on the counter where it wobbled like a fat sea creature. “You ever fuck a black guy?”

Elana shook her head. She was no good at lying, though she didn’t like to come right out and say she’d never fucked anyone besides her husband. It felt too weird. A virgin wedding was not something she’d ever imagined for herself.

“Where’s your family from?” Rubi sat down on the stool beside Elana, the rhinestones that studded the sides of her jeans catching in the light.

“Uh, West Virginia and New Jersey,” Elana said.

“But where are they really from, before that?”

Elana shook her head. “Poland, I think, on my dad’s side, he’s Jewish.”

“Is that where you got your black eyes and black hair?”

Elana shrugged. She liked Rubi maybe best out of all the other waitresses at Susie’s. Sometimes she tried too hard to get Elana to share an order of huevos a la mexicana, but at least she talked to Elana. The other waitresses went silent whenever she entered the kitchen or spoke to one another in a hushed Spanish that she was slowly beginning to understand. And then of course there was Lisa, the only other white girl, who was perhaps the reason the other waitresses were so distant. If Lisa was what they thought all white girls were like, no wonder they wanted nothing to do with Elana. Lisa was a single mother from Alabama with a body like a giraffe who had moved to El Paso for Cormac McCarthy. She estimated, out loud to anyone who was within earshot, that she had written him one thousand pieces of fan mail. She liked his earlier works best, she said, but all of it was untouchable. When he didn’t respond to her letters, Lisa had moved to El Paso and over the course of several months had somehow located McCarthy’s residence, or at least what she claimed to be his residence. At night she prowled around the house, collecting trash from his bins and spying with binoculars.

“I’m gonna go have a cigarette,” Rubi said. “You coming?”

Elana shook her head. She was trying not to smoke during the day so she wandered instead into the hallway where her coat hung and slid her hand into the pocket, searching for a cinnamon toothpick. There was a crumpled bit of paper there. A note from Alex. She did not even need to read the words to know he loved her, hoped she had a good day. He’d left her notes for as long as she had known him—four years’ worth of big, looping cursive script—but lately the note leaving seemed more frantic: every morning, on the mirror, in her purse and her pockets. For a while he had left them on the fridge, but now he’d noticed that she didn’t touch the fridge in the morning. Sometimes when she looked at his paper scraps crumpled in the folds of her purse, she thought of the Alex-origin: tiny dark-eyed baby nestled inside the clothing donation box outside the Heart Cry Holiness Mission House of Juárez, yellow blanket, no note.

Their first night in Juárez, back in August, Elana had asked Jorge at the Heart Cry Mission House about the donation box—the basket in the reeds, the beginning. She wanted to see it. Alex got embarrassed and then Jorge said they couldn’t leave donation boxes out anymore, the whole place was fortressed now. The street-facing wall of the mission was embedded on top with shards of bottles in jeweled greens and browns and blues. The outside was a blank face, no sign, no number, just a high wall and a big metal sliding gate with a smaller human-sized door cut into it. Outside was all deflection, but inside was the heart. Elana had called it the walled-in yard, which Jorge thought was funny. Alex told her it was Spanish-style, porches were American—put it all on display—but in the Old World they guarded their privacy. The street was no place for home and family. The rooms at the mission faced the courtyard. High ceilings and rounded doorways. Elana thought of paper wasp nests, all channels and corridors.

When she pictured those first few days, Elana remembered chalk drawings and the ricochet of basketballs. She remembered diesel fumes. At night her loneliness had beaten loudly while Alex talked with Jorge in the green-lit kitchen on the far side of the courtyard. Between them: a small saguaro in a painted pot, an empty basketball hoop, their Honda, and the mission van. Between them: words she could not understand. Alex’s Spanish was both sharper and slower than Jorge’s, each word enunciated carefully, book learned. The drip of the faucet in the courtyard made forever-ever sounds. Elana lay on an army cot beside Alex’s empty army cot. When she tried to sleep, all the Spanish words she did not understand had filled her ears and mouth, pushed down on her tongue. Agua prieta. Agua turbia.

They’d lasted in Juárez for only a few weeks before Elana begged to move over to El Paso. Now, in December, it was hard to recall the oppression of the heat, but it had ruled her then. She remembered sitting in the patio at Heart Cry and the heat coming on from across the open plain—the sun feeble at first, slanting and thin, causing long shadows, her coffee cup stretching across the whole table, while Jorge shuffled out in plastic sandals to pour water over his plants. Then the sun rose above the skyline and the city woke as if to a bad hangover, the sky brightening from gauze white to blue, horns honking and the birds silencing, all pressed into total submission.

A record heat wave had struck their first month on the border, highs of 115, 120. Elana could not move, the sun a constant enemy. Out here the sky felt so different from Virginia—the very quantity of it, a pulsing wash, huge and terrifying. And at night, when the sun was gone and slip-song cricket breezes slid down into the city, Jorge warned her not to go out alone, not even to the tienda around the corner, send your husband instead. Juárez was a feeling of watching and being watched. All day there was the sun above with its withering, godlike view and something else, unnamed but always coming, like a hawk circling on high, its shadow darkening the ground and whooshing on. Every morning Jorge had driven Elana and Alex in the mission van to the border, where they waited in sun-struck lines to take the bus to UTEP for class—master’s-level sociology for Alex, undergrad English for Elana—and in the evening he drove them back, rattled down and latched the mission door. Cloistered. She might have lost her mind.

El Paso was maybe only a bigger cloister or, worse, a mausoleum, but it worked for her. She could breathe. The streets were wide and empty, just the coo of a mate-searching pigeon and the riss of wind through the sabal palms. They had found a basement apartment tucked up under the tail of the Franklin Mountains in a neighborhood spiked with cypress and huge turn-of-the-century brick houses. There, it felt as if everything, including any real danger, had already passed. The neighborhood businesses—cafe, taqueria, convenience store—were all closed, either permanently or for today, right now, this afternoon. The tienda across the street from Elana’s usual bus stop was called La Solita. When she had pointed this out to Alex, he told her it meant “the usual,” but Elana preferred her mistranslation. Solita: alone; La Solita: The Alone Girl.

Rubi was still outside smoking, so she gathered the ketchup dispensers from the counter and loaded them into a plastic bin. The clock on the wall above the register read 2:47 p.m. Her Twentieth-Century British Lit class had ended an hour ago. She felt a little dip in her stomach at that thought, but she’d known that she was going to skip class from the moment she’d woken up. She’d decided weeks ago that she wasn’t going to school at all next semester. There was no reason to keep attending class now except that she hadn’t quite figured out how to tell Alex that she was dropping out.

She carried the bin of ketchups across the room, setting a bottle on each table. The restaurant had plate-glass windows across the front wall, booths along the back, and strings of faded tinsel garlanded across the ceiling in reds and whites and greens. It was almost always empty this time of day, after the business lunch hour but before family-dinner time. Through the front windows she could see the sleet-gray street and people passing with their collars turned up against the wind, while inside Susie’s the heaters ticked rhythmically, mixing with the ranchera songs and the voices of the kitchen guys who’d left their prep work to stand in the hallway and flirt with Rubi.

When the front door opened, Elana was at the counter, stacking up her tips. She turned to see Alex in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his jean jacket. Even after four years together, there were times when his beauty still shocked her, moments when he appeared like this, unexpected, and she was slapped by the loose confidence of his slim but not too skinny limbs, beautiful mouth, dark eyes.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

He needed a coat, a real winter coat, instead of that same old black jean jacket with a hoodie zipped up underneath. Elana didn’t nag him about it, though. She didn’t want to be the kind of girl who mothered her lover.

“I waited outside your lit class,” he said. “Then I went back to the apartment. I called your phone like twenty times.”

“I ran out of battery.” Elana untied her apron and laid it on the counter.

“You ran out of battery?”

“My phone.”

“Why do we even have the fucking things? You never answer and I think something happened and then—”

“Your mother—”

“I know, I know.” Alex stepped in and let the door close behind him.

Elana had never wanted a cell phone, never liked the idea that she should be accessible at any moment no matter where she was. But Alex’s mother had insisted on buying them and paying for the lines when they moved out west.

“So you couldn’t bring yourself to go to one more class before leaving town for a week?” Alex sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were too concerned. She looked away.

“We’d already discussed The Quiet American in the last class. I don’t like it when they cram more and more of their theories down your throat. It kills anything I’d been thinking about on my own.”

“That’s the idea of discussion, though, right? You raise your hand and add in what you’ve been thinking about on your own.”

Elana folded her apron in half and half again and then rolled the ties around it in a tight bundle.

“Fine, whatever,” Alex said. “Your dad called and asked if I thought he should arrange a party for your brother, decorate the house or something.”

Elana looked up. “I don’t think they make ‘Welcome Home from Rehab’ decorations.”

“Yeah, I told him Simon probably wouldn’t care, but you’ll be landing in Roanoke at three tomorrow if he needs help.”

“Why’s he calling you?”

Alex laughed, reached over the counter, and plucked a twenty from her stack of tips. “He’s all worked up. He canceled his classes for the rest of the week. Says he wants to be there for Simon. I’m sure Simon will really love that.” He held the twenty-dollar bill up under his nose. “Money smells so weird.”

Elana took it from his fingers and folded it with the rest of her tips, tucking them into a black leather billfold. “He canceled all his classes?”

“Tenure, baby. Hell, they love him so much he could probably cancel the rest of the semester and no one would complain.”

“I know. I’m just saying, he’s gonna be there, in the house all day long, the whole week? We’re all gonna be there with nothing to do. I wish you could come. He loves you.” She exhaled. “What do you want for dinner?”

Dinner was the pivot point of their days lately, a tension that built up and then ebbed in the hours afterward. When Alex had started noticing Elana’s weight, he’d insisted they eat dinner together every night, but then he tried embarrassingly hard not to make a big deal out of watching her eat.

“I knew you’d forget.” He stood and flicked at his barstool until it spun with a loud rattling sound. “I left you a message, but of course no battery, right?” He looked over at her with his eyebrows raised. “The art opening at Voces Unidas and then dinner at Kasa de Kultura.”

“Oh right, shit.” She tossed her apron into a large canvas bag alongside her billfold. “We have to go?”

Alex rattled the barstool again. “Before we moved here, you were so worried that we weren’t going to make any friends, there wouldn’t be any people our age who liked the same things, and then we find a collective of punk kids and every time it’s ‘Do we really have to go to dinner?’”

“I smell like I’ve been dipped in ketchup.” Elana slipped on her parka and waved goodbye through the kitchen window to Rubi and the cooks. “I’m tired and my flight leaves early tomorrow and I’ve been working all day.”

The Kasa dinner was a monthly obligation that felt worse each time for the fact that it was supposed to be fun. She and Alex had found the Kasa de Kultura kids back in August before they’d moved across to El Paso. Actually, the youngest Kasa kid, Chucho, had found Alex in the market one morning. Alex was out buying avocados when Chucho had called to him from three stalls over, pointing to his Los Crudos T-shirt and hollering to him, “Hey, güero, that’s a good band.” Alex had walked with Chucho back to the collective house in Colonia Monterrey where he and four other juarenses had a little library—Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The Uncomfortable Dead, vegan cookbooks—and a space for groups to have meetings or bands to play shows and a zine shop with their own photocopied publication, Gritos de fronterlandia. Alex came home that afternoon, grinning and talking too fast, avocados forgotten somewhere along the way, and Elana had never seen him so happy. It was almost enough to make her forgive him for those hours in which she’d been positive he was dead.

“You’ve been working all day?” Alex pushed the door open and ushered her outside.

She glanced back at him.

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” he said. “You’ve been slaving in this shithole cafe instead of sitting comfortably in a classroom and furthering your undergraduate degree so that maybe you won’t have to smell like ketchup for the rest of your life.”

“Fuck off.”

The wind out in the street was picking up, blowing newspapers and snack wrappers around their feet and needling its way in under Elana’s coat. She tucked her head down and Alex grabbed her arm.

“Hey, hey, slow down.” He linked his arm through hers. “I just wish you could have been there for Viviana’s talk. I tried to find you before your class so you could go with me. I sat in on most of it. I think you really would have loved it, she’s fucking fierce.”

“Viviana?”

He laughed and the sound rang out like a bark in the cold air. “The opening we’re going to.”

“Oh, she does paintings?”

“Mixed media, a lot of photographs of the land art she’s done in the desert. You’ll see, I think those pieces are mostly what she has up at the show.”

They crossed Campbell Street and headed east on Magoffin. A few downtown businesses were warmly lit from within, windows decorated for Christmas and blinking signs advertising hot coffee or half-off department store sales, though most of the neon came from the jail bond offices along San Antonio Avenue. The darkening streets were almost empty. Farther east they cut through the back lot of Texas Foam & Fabrics where two teenage boys shared a single cigarette. Most of the buildings around them were boarded up, whole blocks gone dormant.

Though she’d been there for four months, Elana still could not get used to how starkly dead El Paso was in the evening. In the pearly-cold mornings and sun-bleached afternoons the downtown bustled, vendors crowding the sidewalks with tables of bright plastic wares and the clipped strut of young bankers revolving in and out of their chrome-glass doors, but after 5:00 p.m. the place froze while just across the river Juárez amped up and up and up. Sometimes Elana imagined the two cities from above—hip to hip, spine to belly—the one going dark and curling quietly in on itself while the other unfurled in lights and night movement. It occurred to her that the officials on the US side—the ones who touted statistics about El Paso’s low crime rates (Top 5 Safest Cities in the USA!)—liked the wild west of Juárez being so close. It served as a great contrast. So much pain so close to home only bolstered that feeling of being chosen: the promised land, the magic line. They wouldn’t really want the violence to go away, Elana thought, because then what would make the US so special?

“If you don’t like listening to other people’s theories about dead writers, switch your degree.” Alex pulled her in closer, slipped his hand inside her coat pocket.

“No, I—”

“As long as it’s something else in humanities, your credits could—”

“No, it’s not that, it’s the whole academic—”

“Believe me, I understand. That’s why I chose sociology over history for my master’s, to your dad’s horror. I needed it to feel relevant, applicable. That’s why I’m reorienting my whole thesis now. I can’t write about something that feels done and already talked about to death.”

“Dead writers are not the problem.” She picked up her pace, fairly dragging him along beside her now. Her pet project, the thing she worked on when she should have been preparing for class, her deliciously pointless ongoing project, was all dead writers: strings of quotes from Rebecca West, D. H. Lawrence, and Graham Greene—a collection of their colonialist impressions of Mexico. “It’s the institution itself I think, the noise, I can’t—”

“You’ll find it, though—that feeling when you finally stumble on the thing you can’t not write about—I know you will. You’ve just gotta be patient.”

Elana looked over at him, but he was watching his feet. She let go of his arm. “You’re embarrassed by me.”

Alex stopped walking. The muscles around his mouth twitched. “Fuck you. How could you be hearing that in what I’m saying?”

Elana itched for a cigarette. They were there at the bottom of her bag, but she didn’t like to smoke around Alex. When he smelled it on her, she told him she’d bummed one at work.

“You’re putting your dad all over me. That’s not me.”

“His most promising protégé.”

“Not anymore. Not since I swapped history for sociology.”

“Okay, enough about my dad, let’s not get all Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Elana turned to keep walking, but he grabbed her shoulder and spun her toward him. His eyes were a little wet, from the cold? from emotion?

“Lana, please, I just want you to be happy.”

He reached over and pushed her hair behind her ear and she shivered at the gaudiness of it, that claiming action.

“No,” she said, rearranging her hair so that it fell back over her ears. “I don’t think so. There are so many moments of happiness in my days—my first cup of coffee in the morning, the perfect blue of the church door on Ochoa Street—but they don’t count in your system.”

Alex’s mouth was twisted with annoyance again. “I’m not talking about sensory perceptions of happiness, Lana. Bigger picture. I don’t care if waitressing in a Tex-Mex cafe is what makes you happy, I just—”

“Working in a Tex-Mex cafe does not make me fucking happy. I’m trying to hear myself think. Okay?” She shook his hand off her shoulder.

They were walking again, not holding hands but walking at a matched pace.

“I think you’re scared of what would actually make you happy.”

Elana laughed. “Is getting a master’s degree actually making you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Happy? Oh, so that’s why you complain about how stupid your program is, how everyone wants to fit everything into their formulas, how they don’t actually see anything around them. That’s your happiness?” She turned to face him and he was smiling. He grabbed the front of her parka and pulled her in until their lips met, jarringly at first with a bump of teeth and chins, their escaped breath fogging up between them in the darkening air.

On the corner of Myrtle and Palm they passed the bronze plaque that told the much-abbreviated story of the women of Voces Unidas. Elana paused, though she already knew about the dramatic last stand of the female factory workers. The women at the Levi’s jeans plant had seen the end coming. They could not know exactly which day, but they had seen the factories all heading south after NAFTA, they had seen the wage theft and had seen their sisters turned away until only the bare minimum remained on the ghostly factory floor. They had talked at the bus stop, in the break room, and in the barrio after work. They had talked and in the pockets of their aprons they all carried chains and locks. But still the day began, like every day, before the sun came up, with a baby’s cries and a husband’s deep snores, with coffee, fresh tortillas and reheated beans, the call of roosters in the backyards, and on the tin roof, the tic-tic of pecans falling from the trees. It was only after they’d arrived at the factory and been called, all of them, immediately, in for a “meeting,” that the day wrenched itself into the unusual. Ignoring the announcement, they sat down at their sewing machines—those whirring