Free Dreamland by Sam Quinones

property and broadcasted their wealth in the United States. The Xalisco traffickers were the only immigrant narcotics mafia Chavez knew of that aimed to just go home, and with nary a shot fired.
    Denver became a Xalisco hub as their operations expanded, and probably no cop in America learned more about them than Dennis Chavez. By the time I met him, hundreds of arrests and sweeping federal indictments had not stopped them. They had spread like a virus, quietly and unrecognized by many in law enforcement, who often mistook Xalisco franchises for isolated groups of small-time dealers.
    “I call them the Xalisco Boys,” Chavez said. “They’re nationwide.”

Enrique Alone
    Tijuana, Mexico
    Chaotic Tijuana was the biggest city Enrique had ever seen. Thousands of people flowed like a river through the central bus station before crossing into the United States. The station roiled with humble, hungry folks from ranchos like his. Boys darted in and out of traffic, washing windshields for change. Men who’d tried to cross and were turned back had fallen into alcohol. They reminded Enrique of the drunks in the rancho.
    Enrique slept on the bus terminal’s chairs and wandered the city streets during the day. He found a coyote and asked the price to the place called Canoga Park. When he told the man he had no address for his uncles, but figured he’d just ask around, the coyote laughed.
    “Canoga Park is huge. It’s not like your rancho.”
    Still, he hung on in Tijuana, fearing to return home a failure. He washed in the bus station bathroom, every morning looking more like a Tijuana urchin. Finally, famished, his prized clothes filthy and stinking and his money almost gone, he dialed the village’s telephone in tears. His departure was the talk of the rancho. Aunts and uncles crowded around the phone. On a second call, his hysterical mother answered. She gave him a number for uncles in Los Angeles who were coming for him. They arrived and arranged for him to cross the border posing as the son of a man with papers. Two mornings later, Enrique was sitting in an uncle’s apartment in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley.
    “Now,” the uncle said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars and a suitcase and you’ll go home.”
    “No, what I want from life you can’t buy with a thousand dollars.”
    His uncles took him to eat and then to another apartment. One uncle opened a closet and there, like a glorious revelation, were dozens of pairs of Levi’s 501s, with labels and price tags attached.
    “Take what you want.”
    With that, the boy who had never had more than two threadbare pairs of pants now had his first new, tough dark-blue 501s. 501s marked his time up north. Much later he would remember the first time he bought a pair for himself in America, and then the first time he came home wearing 501s.
    Back home, villagers, and Enrique himself, had always assumed his uncles were working hard in some honorable trade up in the great El Norte, one that paid enough to fund bountiful gifts every time they returned. Now they sat him down. One uncle pulled out a shoebox filled with golf-ball-sized chunks of a dark, sticky substance and balloons of every color.
    “What’s that?” Enrique asked.
    “ Chiva ,” his uncle said. Goat, the Mexican slang term for black tar heroin. “This is how we make our money.”
    Cora Indian campesinos grew the poppies in the mountains above Xalisco. They harvested the opium goo from the flowers and sold it to cookers whom Enrique’s uncles knew. A newly cooked kilo of vinegary, sticky chiva would head north in a boom box or a backpack within a couple days, virtually uncut, and often hit L.A. streets only a week after the goo was drawn from the poppy.
    As Enrique’s uncle spoke, he rolled little pieces of the gunk into balls the size of BBs. He put each one in a tiny balloon and tied each balloon. Finally, he wrapped the telephone in a towel to muffle the ring. As Enrique was wondering why,