Barry Gifford, Border Town
(Chronicle Books)
The Sinaloa Story
(Harcourt, Brace & Company)

Jack Foley

"Out in the west Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl"
—"El Paso," Marty Robbins song

"South of the border, down Mexico way,
That's where I fell in love when stars above came out to play"
—"South of the Border," Gene Autry song

"BORDERTOWN is on the very edge," writes Barry Gifford, "in between, an unholy yet sacrosanct Brigadoon, the place you never expected to find—a beautiful, terrifying, fuzzily lit strip inhabited by hungry ghosts and fearless phantoms unveiled only in the wicked, susurrant, bloody dream you yearn for from the wildest, darkest corner of your desperate heart."

Barry Gifford is a prolific writer who has been active in many genres—poetry, fiction, reportage, drama, screenplays. He gained additional fame recently because of his association with David Lynch, whose film Wild at Heart was based on Gifford's novel of the same title. Gifford recently co-authored the film Lost Highway with Lynch and is currently directing a film based on his own Sultans of Africa.

Bordertown and The Sinaloa Story are companion volumes issued by different presses. Having spent time in Hollywood working on Lost Highway, Gifford told me, he felt the need to "lose" himself somewhere. Comissioned by Chronicle Books to produce a book with photographer David Perry, he and Perry traveled along the US-Mexican border, visiting such places as Agua Prieta, Nogales, Juarez, La Joya and Metamoros. "The thing about borders to me," said Gifford, "is that the border is its own country. Fifty miles above and fifty miles below the border, things are different. You really enter the country. But the border itself is a kind of no- man's land. It exists in a totally separate way. It has its own rules, even its own language. Really, why I called the book Bordertown is because the border's like its own city, and the city stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica." Bordertowns, writes Gifford, are "literally stuck on the border between something and nothing."

Designed by Martin Venezky, the book Gifford and Perry produced is a fascinating mixture—photographs, stories, poems, drawings (many by Gifford), clippings from newspapers, posters. It's less a book with a coherent narrative—though that is an element—than it is a complex energy field which is constantly pulling us in from all directions. There's a photo of Ezra Pound on Gifford's wall: one thinks of Pound's concept of the "vortex." The book has a deliberately "unfinished" quality to it. Some of the text is presented as if typed, errors and all, on an ancient manual machine. We encounter in quick succession text, missing children, photographs from the trip, bloody police images of dead criminals—Gifford's father was a gangster—poetry, comic strips, putas ("I prefer the cheaper girls in their cuartos to the more expensive women in the clubs," writes Gifford, "there is less guile in them").

"The idea of this book and the design of this book," Gifford told me, "was to direct a book as you direct a film and to give you the feeling of this milieu, to put you in this place, so that when you enter the book you're in one place, but when you come out you're in another. You look at the world differently; you have a different feeling."

The book begins with "La frontera del infierno," "The border of hell," a short history of the United States' relations with Mexico. The history is interrupted by a hand-written page with a verse from a folk tune "popular in Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican- American wars":

Yo tengo un pistole
Con manago de marfil
Para matar todos los gringos
Qui viennen por ferrocarril!

Gifford translates that as

I have a pistol
With a marble handle
With which to kill all the Americans
Who come by railroad!

Note that he translates "los gringos" as "Americans." He comments wryly, "We're going by car and on foot"—not by railroad. The history concludes,

There is little on the Mexican side of the border to keep the young people home. The only answer for them is to hustle in the streets or to cross the border into the United States and get something. They have nothing to lose.

The mojados cross the river, dash past border guards, climb mountains, whatever they have to do to get to the promised land. A third of them are captured by the border patrol and returned, others are robbed, raped or beaten by their own people. Most of those who make it across and manage to stay are exploited and forced to live like criminals or worse, on the border between fear and despair.

It's a complex passage, mixing the historical and the political with the personal and with folk modes. Overshadowing everything is a sense of rage ("Para matar todos los gringos") and pity ("on the border between fear and despair"). And that's just the opening. David Perry's enormously evocative, powerful black and white photos—also inhabiting "the border between fear and despair"—would be worth the price of the book themselves. As it is, they interact with much else and achieve through juxtaposition an even greater emotional complexity. "It's about exploitation, Jack," Gifford said to me. It is, but there is beauty there as well:

I see a ten-year-old beauty, a Mexican girl squatting by the side of the busted road. Next to her in a faded rose flamingo chair sits the grandmother; maybe only in her forties, she looks closer to seventy. In a few years the little girl's face could sell bluejeans. I miss her already.

Gifford refers to various films in both Bordertown and The Sinaloa Story, but, unless I'm mistaken, the only film referred to in both books is Orson Welles' 1958 black-and-white border town classic, Touch of Evil. The setting of much of The Sinaloa Story is Sinaloa—Sinaloa, Texas, not Sinaloa, Mexico. "You know how New Orleans is called the Big Easy?" says one of the characters, "Well, southwest Texas ought to be called the Big Empty." Like Bordertown, The Sinaloa Story recalls Mexico's history of oppression:

When [Pancho] Villa assumed control of the government of Chihuahua in 1913, he ordered that any Spaniard caught within the boundaries of that state would be escorted to the nearest wall by a firing squad. When the American consul objected to what seemed to him an irrational and savage policy decision, Villa responded: "Seņor Consul, we Mexicans have had three hundred years of the Spaniards. They have not changed in character since the conquistadores. They disrupted the Indian Empire and enslaved the people. We did not ask them to mingle their blood with ours. Twice we drove them out of Mexico and allowed them to return with the same rights as Mexicans, and they used these rights to steal away our land, to make the people slaves, and to take up arms against the cause of liberty...They thrust on us the greatest superstititon the world has ever known—the Catholic Church. They ought to be killed for that alone."

In both books revolution is a live issue. In The Sinaloa Story we are introduced to an insurrectionist group called "The Countless Raindrops." Gifford writes, "Asa Hand and other military experts had joined them in their struggle for liberty and equality because they were not merely a new version of the socialist and communist Third World guerrilla movements to which Latin America has long been accustomed. This was a legitimate revolution...." But in BordertownGifford is told by a cab driver that there can be no revolution in Mexico unless there is one in the United States.

The central characters of most of The Sinaloa Story are DelRay Mudo and Ava Varazo. "Varazo" means "swipe or blow with a pole or stick"; "Ava" is for Ava Gardner. She is a classic femme fatale—"you'd better watch out for me," she tells the lovestruck DelRay—and for a while the book is a literary film noir, with all the Oedipal accoutrements of that genre. One is particularly reminded of James Cain's Double Indemnity, made into a classic film by Billy Wilder in 1944. But Gifford has more in mind than that. About halfway through The Sinaloa Story, the plot radically changes direction. Certain elements remain—we are not completely at sea—but we are suddenly involved with both new issues and new characters. Gifford risks losing the reader in order to involve him in a larger world than the one he believed he was inhabiting. The book is an attempt to transform our awareness, "so that when you enter the book you're in one place, but when you come out you're in another."

"There are two ways to look at films," Gifford told me. "One is as a continuous narrative. The other way is what Eisenstein did, which is really a compilation of images. So you get this cumulative effect. You hope the images add up to something. This is the theory I subscribe to."

"Things happen randomly," he went on. "People who think that they've got life in their pocket and they know what's gonna happen in the next minute, well, I got news for them. There's a surprise out there sooner or later. Some people appear, they seem to be part of the story, and then they disappear. They might turn up later or they might turn up in another book, because, really, I look at all of what I write as one vast book, one universe. I'm not the first one to think of it in this way, certainly, but really that's what it adds up to. The structure is...iconoclastic. It's not the kind of structure that people are used to, necessarily. But it reflects accurately how I look at life, how I feel life happens."

That kind of "iconoclastic" structure is precisely what one finds in The Sinaloa Story. I'm reminded a little of Bertolt Brecht, who was himself influenced by American films. Violence is everywhere present in both books, as is rage, which is often centered in women. The Sinaloa Story is full of murderous females, including the singer Yolanda del Rio, who, we are told, knifes her father in his heart. One character remarks that "girls and guns has never been a winning combination." Another says, "It doesn't pay to depend on anybody else...men and women, we was born to disappoint each other." Still another says, "Don't trust any man." "Every broad's dream," someone asserts, is to cut off her lover's penis. Is Gifford being "sexist" here? Is he merely projecting his fear of women onto his characters? Is he really talking about his mother?

Perhaps. But, if that's so, there's also more involved. Women's rage is like the rage of Pancho Villa or like the rage of the anonymous folk song: "Para matar todos los gringos." If revolution is to come, it will come from there, from that sense of anger:

"Conditions never been very good for any kinds of women anywhere...."
"That's one of the things we're fighting for."

I mentioned film noir as an element of this book, and the "marvelous, evil Ava" is certainly a film noir heroine. But there is another myth at work here as well: the myth of, as Marty Robbins sings, the "Mexican maiden." Songs like "El Paso" and "South of the Border" express a deep American story about "crossing over," about transgressing boundaries. Rarely do unions with "Mexican maidens" work out well. If the maidens are sometimes religious (as in "South of the Border"), they are equally often, like Ava, "evil." The songs are about the lure of risk and its dangers. That myth is present in both Bordertown and The Sinaloa Story. Gifford deconstructs it, shows its economic bases, parodies it, criticizes it—but, all the same, asserts it. Indeed, he lifts it into the realm of the numinous. Both Bordertown and The Sinaloa Story are in a sense religious books.

When I asked Gifford whether he were Catholic—he asks a cab driver the same question in Bordertown—he told me that his mother was Catholic but that he wasn't. He was, however, given religious instruction as a child. Gifford may not "believe any of it," as he said to me, but both Bordertown and The Sinaloa Story seem to be deeply, if ambivalently Catholic books, "unholy yet sacrosanct." They take place at precisely the point at which religion intersects with sex, death, violence and economics. It is no accident that The Sinaloa Story begins with a quotation from Saint Augustine ("I am waiting for death") or that it immediately moves on to Villa's comment on "the greatest superstition the world has ever known." At the beginning of The Sinaloa Story there is a young prostitute whom Gifford calls "The Mother of the Light." In her room are "rosary beads, silver chains with dangling crucifixes, [and] postcard pictures of various saints stuck into the sides between glass and frame." The woman has been severely beaten and is weeping. Who is she exactly? I think that the answer is that she is an "unholy yet sacrosanct" version of the Virgin Mary. Animating both Gifford's books perhaps is an enormous desire to believe in "the greatest superstition the world has ever known" matched with an enormous desire not to believe in it. The result is neither "truth"—though there is much truth in both books—nor "religion," but "fiction," movies.

The books themselves are "bordertowns."

In one of his "versions" of the French poet Pierre Reverdy, Gifford writes,

                         Man is in sorrow
Who knows what will happen tomorrow
     Everything fails and succeeds
        The wing beats

In both Bordertown and The Sinaloa Story Gifford's sympathy and rage move in various directions, as does ours. They are both expressions of the mind's ability to range widely even in the midst of "sorrow." "My only question is if we ever goin to get out?" someone asks at the end of The Sinaloa Story. The answer is: "The girls in here [in prison] say it aint likely."

Jack Foley