Free The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor

statehood. During World War II American soldiers commandeered it for a lookout. But then, in 1951, a year after the last Arguello descendant died, the historic casa was bulldozed during construction of the I-5 freeway. The native Kumeyaay village marked at the south end of San Diego Bay by Don Juan Pantoja’s 1782 map is now the province of third-rate strip malls cornered by discount gas stations. Charles Howard’s sprawling thoroughbred ranch, where Seabiscuit trained, is now freeway-adjacent and obscured by subdivisions of asphalt-roofed track homes. Even the eight-ton marble obelisk—inscribed in both Spanish and English and, as Bartlett noted, visible by land and sea—has been permanently gated into Mexico by Homeland Security’s eighteen-foot-tall steel fence. In the early 1900s, the monument drew as many as one hundred thousand visitors a year. Now, you can touch the American monument only by traveling to Mexico.
    In crime writer Joseph Wambaugh’s narrative nonfiction account, Lines and Shadows , the border canyons are given menacingcharacters. The book profiled a real team of San Diego police officers who dressed as poor campesinos and cased the boundary for criminals. Their aim was to capture a gang of bandits that preyed on migrants when they were at their most vulnerable, just as they crossed. The true tale highlights a unique period in border enforcement. In the early 1980s, the Border Patrol was a fraction of its current size. Undocumented migration was yet to become a partisan political issue, and the boundary was porous. This maverick SDPD squad may have been the last of a breed as well. Some of them were Vietnam vets, many of them Latinos. They filled in for a Border Patrol agency prohibited from working the boundary at night. Much of the action took place in a basin Wambaugh called Deadman’s Canyon. In one scene, the undercover officers are beset by a covey of bandits. The wily campesinos pull their guns. “Suddenly [another] group of thugs poured out of the shacks on the hillside, heaving rocks.” It dawns on the cops that they are outnumbered. Then, in this canyon that serves as a natural amphitheater, something odd happens. The regular people of the Mexican neighborhood adjacent to the fence come out of their own shanties in droves. They howl at the rock throwers. They begin to march toward the thugs, who quickly melt back into the barrio night. As the officers cuff their criminals on the American side, the regular people of the shanties cheer the officers. They applaud. “There were lots of weird things happening in these canyons,” Wambaugh writes, “but this was one of the weirdest.”
    Wambaugh’s Deadman’s Canyon is sometimes referred to with the equally ominous name Death Canyon. Both are just lazy misinterpretations of the Spanish, Arroyo del Matadero, or Slaughterhouse Canyon. This wasn’t the setting of a Quentin Tarantino movie either, just the site of an everyday butchery on the fringe of the city. As Matadero enters the United States, its name changes to Smuggler’s Gulch, and this moniker holds up to history. Cattle rustlers, goatherders, gunrunners, Mexican revolutionaries, bootleggers, traders of highly taxed lace undergarments—they all made use of the canyon. The problem started in the 1880s, when the United States initiated customs duties and prohibitions a couple of miles away, at the port of entry in San Ysidro. In a wide-open country, this tax thing just would not fly among locals and traders accustomed to crossing freely. Mostly ranchers used the canyon. Then smugglers came along, and maybe, at first, the ranchers and smugglers were the same people.
    The drug trade, Iaon Grillo pointed out in his book El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency , was kick-started by a Chinese community suspended in Tijuana by the United States Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For nearly three decades Chinese laborers had been