Free Dreamland by Sam Quinones Page B

problemas—escaping murder, fleeing feuds—than to simple economics and poverty. Problemas could empty a rancho in less than a generation. Sometimes a village would see the problemas die out only to be reignited by a chance meeting of old enemies on a bus or a street corner years later. Rancho dances in particular bred problemas. At dances, people drank, and sex and machismo roiled just beneath the surface. In some towns, the saying was “ Baile el viernes; cuerpo el sabado ” (“Dance Friday night, body Saturday morning”). A shooting at a dance could embitter a family against another for years. Keeping track of the bewildering history of conflicts became an essential ranchero survival skill.
    Something like this had divided the family of Enrique’s mother. Enrique never knew the cause of the feud between the two sides of his mother’s family, nor why his grandparents had married if the problemas were so serious. But the feud would come and go like bad weather. The phone call that morning in Canoga Park brought news that it had come again. A mass shooting in the village. Two were dead, fifteen wounded. One side of his mother’s family was to blame; the victims were mostly from the other side.
    News of the shootings mainly served to remind Enrique of why he was in Canoga Park selling drugs. Back home, drug users were the moral equivalents of pedophiles. But drug sales were his pathway out of problemas. He saw dayworkers on Sherman Way, exploited, sometimes not paid—yet that wasn’t treated as a crime. They tried to work the right way and look what happened. He wasn’t forcing anyone to buy his dope. With that thought, and the problemas he was escaping, he felt peace. And the 501s didn’t hurt either.
    For seven months he worked for his uncles in Canoga Park. Finally, they packed him a suitcase and gave him two thousand dollars for all his labor and sent him home. He thought he was due more, but the rancho’s ethos of poverty reigned, even in the San Fernando Valley: They could exploit him, so they did and he couldn’t object. Heroin had not changed that. In fact, he thought his uncles remained cautious villagers in many ways. They had been in the San Fernando Valley for almost a decade. Yet they still ran their business for a few months, made some money, and shut it down, less afraid of the police than of what people back home would say.
    Dozens of villagers welcomed Enrique home to his isolated rancho and the Toad, a few miles outside the town of Xalisco, Nayarit. The poor kid from the Toad was now admired as the only village boy to cross the border alone. He gave his money to his mother, keeping two hundred dollars. He bought a bottle of Cazadores tequila and the party that night was big. Older folks besieged him with questions. A few friends took him aside and asked for help finding the kind of work he was doing. He put them off, but saw that apparently word had spread more than his uncles had realized. He wanted to get back to California himself in a few months.
    He was only fifteen and people were coming to him for favors. It was a luxurious feeling and he bathed in it. As the night mingled with tequila and took the edge off the stifling heat, the stereo played his favorite corrido, “El Numero Uno,” by Los Incomparables de Tijuana.
    Enrique pulled his Beretta 9mm and howled as he held it high and fired it into the air.
     

The Poppy
    The story of the opium poppy is almost as old as man.
    Opium was likely our first drug as agricultural civilizations formed near rivers. Mesopotamians grew the poppy at the Tigris and Euphrates. The Assyrians invented the method, still widely used today, of slicing and draining the poppy’s pod of the goo containing opium. “The Sumerians, the world’s first civilization and agriculturists, used the ideograms hul and gil for the poppy, translating it as the ‘joy plant,’” wrote Martin Booth, in his classic Opium: A History .
    The ancient Egyptians first produced