Confessions of an illegal alien.

In 1998, I snuck into Mexico with my wife, Carissa.  We paid an old man $5 and he rowed us across the Rio Grande.  I tipped him another $5 once we crossed the river and hit terra firma in Mexico.  He seemed unimpressed by my generosity.  We then rented two burros from a group of young men waiting for gringos on the Mexico side of the river. We rented the burros to ride them to a remote border town named Boquillas, perhaps finding a cantina and enjoying a cold beer on a hot day.  The great singer/songwriter Robert Earl Keen's Gringo Honeymoon is based on trips to Boquillas back in the day.


I should clarify about the burros.  We paid $20 to rent to them and then we led them to Boquillas, rather than ride.  When I sat on my burro’s back, both of my feet touched the ground.  I could stand and clear the saddle by two or three inches.  The stirrups were set too high and I couldn’t get my hiking boot into them anyway.  I was one of those large Russian bears riding a tiny bicycle.  Carissa got the bigger of the burros. The young caballeros were more impressed by her than me, obviously.  Nonetheless, we soon discovered that her burro preferred standing in place to walking when someone sat on its back.  So I led both rented burros to Boquillas while Carissa took a photo and said: “Look, an ass leading two asses.”  Had circumstances been reversed, I would have said the same. Only it would have been way funnier.

We soon came to the outskirts of Boquillas.  A young girl and a weathered old woman were standing along the dirt road outside an adobe hut.  They were selling braided bracelets.  One dollar.  It suddenly became apparent that we had erred significantly.  Most of our cash was locked in our vehicle on the Texas side of the river. My wallet held a single one dollar bill and three twenties.  We used our last dollar bill to buy a bracelet and continued our trek to town.  From the next adobe hut, two young girls appeared with bracelets indistinguishable from those the little girl and old woman at the first hut were selling.  We tried to explain in broken Spanish that we had no más dinero.  A man with a pot gut and dirty wife-beater t-shirt yelled at the girls.  I felt bad, but not bad enough to pull out a twenty.  Looking down the road toward the main part of town revealed we still had a gauntlet of huts to pass before finding the heart of Boquillas. Meaning a beer joint.  Each hut represented a new opportunity to buy $1 trinkets. Vendors were already establishing their posts.

Carissa had not been comfortable with the idea of sneaking into Mexico in the first place.  She was now ready to skip cold beer in a sketchy bar and get back to Texas.  We were the only gringos in town, we had advised no one of our plans, and we weren’t making any friends with our failure to spread the wealth.  I agreed it was time to head north, but when I attempted to turn the burros around, one of them dug in its hooves and slipped out of its halter.  A kid appeared at my elbow, grabbed the halter and slipped it over the burro’s ears.  He held out his hand and "requested" a quarter.  Which I didn’t have.  And I was too cheap to give him a twenty.  I pointed to my pockets, shrugged, and said “no tengo más dinero.”   As we headed back toward the river with our burros, the little shit threw a rock at us.  To him, I was just another cheap gringo bastard. An ass leading two asses. Un burro llevando dos burros.

Back at the river, we returned our burros.  The old man was waiting and rowed us back to Texas.  We’d spent less than two hours as illegal aliens and spent $31 in support of the local economy.  More valuable to me was the act of earning the right to tell people I had snuck into Mexico. Soy un hombre muy malo.

Sadly, like many travel related events following 9/11, the trip to Boquillas has become more difficult than looking up an old man napping under a cottonwood tree along the Rio Grande and paying him to row you across the river. Something else the terrorists have screwed up.  But efforts to create an official crossing are under way.  Good news for the people of Boquillas, who not only depend on tourist dollars, but who also depend on groceries and other services more readily available on the Texas side of the border.  An official border crossing, though, is bad news for wannabe outlaws who want to tell the story of sneaking across the border.