Free Dreamland by Sam Quinones Page A

the uncle plugged in the phone and the calls started coming and never stopped.
    These are customers, his uncle explained over the ringing. We have guys out there driving around all day with these balloons. We give each caller a different intersection to meet a driver. Then we beep a driver the code for the intersection where that customer will be. We do this all day long.
    “We wouldn’t have told you had you not showed up,” his uncle said. “But now that you’re here . . .”
    Enrique saw his chance. He begged to work for them. You’re too young, said one uncle. You need to go to school. Or we send you home. But Enrique pleaded and finally the uncles relented. They put him to work driving the place most Angelinos refer to simply as the Valley.
    The San Fernando Valley comprises 260 square miles, larger than Chicago, and contains the sprawling northern chunk of Los Angeles. At its west end is Canoga Park, a district of sixty thousand people, bisected by boulevards with palm trees. Classic, modest suburban ranch-style houses made of stucco line its residential streets.
    For years after it emerged from citrus groves in the 1950s, Canoga Park and the Valley had been famously white, with only small islands of Mexican American barrios. But the mass migration of Mexicans to Southern California and the end of the Cold War changed the area. Defense contractors departed; so did many white people. Soon, districts of Los Angeles such as Van Nuys, Reseda, North Hollywood, and Canoga Park were largely Mexican. Those changes were beginning as Enrique arrived.
    Though fourteen, Enrique was tall enough not to arouse suspicion behind the wheel. He drove the streets of the San Fernando Valley with his mouth full of tiny balloons, following beeps from his uncles. He learned where Canoga Park ended and West Hills began. He trolled those palm-tree-lined boulevards—Sherman Way, Roscoe, and Sepulveda—that were wider than the highways back home.
    Those first weeks he remembered like a fairy tale, as if everything he had heard about America were true: money, clothes, and good food seemed as plentiful as the sunshine. At the apartment, he turned on a VCR and a porno film leaped to life. His uncles ate often at El Tapatio and Pocos, a seafood restaurant. They drank at the Majestic, a bar that Nayarit immigrants frequented; as long as Enrique was with them the waitresses served him beer. His idea of becoming a state trooper evaporated, as did any thought of school.
    After a few months, the uncles installed Enrique in an apartment on De Soto Avenue and gave him the keys to two cars. He would run the business—roll the heroin into balloons, take calls, direct drivers on the street. The phone rang all day until he shut it down at eight P.M . As he turned fifteen, he was taking orders for five thousand dollars’ worth of heroin a day. The apartment’s closets filled with stolen 501s and VCRs and porno films that addicts exchanged for dope. Enrique no longer had to worry about his jeans fading when he washed them. There were always more. He showered with fragrant shampoo, and exchanged the village pond for the swimming pool at an uncle’s house in a neighborhood full of Americans. His clients were nurses and lawyers—one of his best clients was a wealthy lawyer—prostitutes, former soldiers who’d been to Vietnam, old junkies from the barrio, and young cholos.
    One day he was at an uncle’s house and the phone rang. A caller from home. His uncle’s face clouded.
    “ Problemas ,” he said, his hand over the mouthpiece.
    Problemas—problems—the word seemed so nondescript. But in the ranchos of Mexico, it is a euphemism for tangled webs of murder and lawlessness. Problemas were shootings and feuds that grew from a chance word, a property dispute, the theft of a sister for marriage. Problemas kept rancheros poor and fleeing north to the United States. Some great amount of the migration to the United States was due more to