One Life by David Lida

Author:David Lida
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944700249
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2016-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

FREE TRADE

Esperanza and Hilda wake just before dawn. Their alarm is the belching caw of roosters that strut outside in the dirt. Arising from the mattress they share on the cracked cement floor, Hilda heats water for Nescafé on the hot plate, while Esperanza flicks a switch and a bare bulb lights the tiny bathroom. It’s back to the basics: when she’s finished on the toilet, she will go outside and, using a hose, fill a bucket with water so she can “flush.” Next to the humming refrigerator, Hilda has hung a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a heart-shaped frame and another of the mother and child she left behind in Cucaramácara.

Before setting off for work, their faces will be scrubbed, teeth brushed, clothes chosen from “shelves” of blue plastic milk crates. Hair will be combed, tightly pinned, and pulled back in ponytails. Breakfast will wait until they get to the factory. The cinder block shack where they live is an add-on behind a house where distant cousins of Hilda’s live. The relatives don’t ask the girls for much rent—they know how little people earn in factories here.

After waiting, huddled in the wind for ten minutes, Hilda and Esperanza encase themselves into a minivan alongside twelve other women. Their upper arms and thighs meld into those of the ones sitting next to them. It will take the women an hour to get to work. Most of them will sleep along the way, but the insomniacs can watch the dawn break over Rancho Amargo, one of the furthermost neighborhoods in the sprawling outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, one of many communities in the endless horizontal spread of the city. These shantytowns were constructed in a makeshift improvisation to accommodate the tens of thousands who poured into Juárez after the Free Trade Agreement was passed with the gringos, and the maquilas—assembly and piecework factories—opened up or expanded their business.

Rancho Amargo has an unconstructed, do-it-yourself appearance. No matter how long its residents live there, there is an air of the temporary. There are no sidewalks or paved streets, just steep hills and dirt paths, where unpainted one-story cinder block shacks with rebar popping out of the roofs have been ground into the terrain and feebly assembled. The houses are interspersed with piles of rocks and rubble, and empty lots overgrown with weeds. It is a landscape of discarded tires, abandoned mattresses, upturned plastic buckets, empty bags that once contained potato chips. Cracks in the windows are covered with masking tape. Discarded grocery bags flap in the breeze.

Whole families of drained plastic bottles are embedded or impaled in fences of clapboard, chicken wire, razor wire, barbed wire—all of it sagging, somehow unable to contain the wilt of the populace. Graffiti, odd combinations of letters and numbers, decorates most available wall space. Raggedy clothes slump everywhere—drying on a line, hung outside a house in a hopeless jumble sale, mysteriously forsaken atop a clump of earth. It doesn’t rain for most of the year in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.