Once More to the River: Family Snapshots of Growing Up, Getting Out & Going Back

Once More to the River

Once More to the River

Each summer, as a young girl, Maria Guadalupe crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico to spend the long months at the ranch that belonged to her family. They rode to the riverbank by taxi, steered by her tío Garcia. “He was fat,” she says, which is all she remembers about him and the drive to the Los Ebanos Ferry, which she calls el chalán.

Her father never went. None of her brothers remember going either, though she insists that they did. It may have just been the women: Maria and her sister Belsa, their mother Victorina, and their aunt Petra and cousin Elvita. The taxi would leave them at the river, and they would board the hand-pulled ferry on foot.

The ferry is named after the surrounding community of Los Ebanos, which is named after the Texas ebony, a thorny tree with horned-moon husks; white-wing doves nest in its branches; the black-brown seeds are eaten by wild, tusked pigs. Los Ebanos is one of those communities that upstate folks cannot resist calling “sleepy” and “quiet.”

The truth is that everyone is miles away at work on the morning that I ride through town with Maria Guadalupe. She’s no longer that young girl of summer, but my mother, a woman in her late fifties, who smells of coconut-scented sunscreen and a stubborn fear, her nerves still rattled by the skin cancer recently removed from the bridge of her nose. This ride out to Los Ebanos was just an excuse to get out of the house.

Most of the houses here are made of clapboard or cinderblock. The smaller, mud brick and straw jacales seem slumped over with the pain of decalcified bones. At the local cemetery, the decorative arch proclaims La Puerta, and pink funeral bows are tied to the sagging chain-link fence.

My mother turns off at the sign for the ferry. The paved road becomes dirt. Up ahead, a line of dusty, Chevy pickup trucks and Crown Victorias with tinted windows are parked on the downward slope toward the river; they’re waiting for the ferryboat, which is banked on the Mexican side. But we’re not driving across. We haven’t risked that since the late ‘70s.

We park under the shade of a mesquite, where a posted sign warns against carrying firearms into Mexico, and walk to the wooden shack that serves as a tollbooth. A man with an apron heavy with coins charges the 50 cents.

“It used to be a quarter,” my mother gripes.

“Pues, ya no, señora,” the man says. “Now it’s 50 cents.”

I hand over the dollar for both of us.

Across from the shack are the Border Patrol barracks. Two khakied agents sit outside waiting for the next load from Mexico. As my mother and I wait for cars to disembark and cars to board (the ferry takes no more than three cars per trip), we spot a pair of swim trunks discarded under the thick brush. The drawstring is knotted, the mesh lining bunched and crawling with ants.

The Mexico-bound cars start their engines. My mother hurries alongside, covering her nose and eyes against the up-churned dust, threatening to stumble and go head-over-tennis shoes into the dirt or the river. 

“’Uenas,” she says to the ferrymen, as we set foot onto the metal ramp.

Down river, between the banks of the two countries, a flat-bottom boat cuts a silhouette against the glare off the water—La Migra. The agents are motionless as they watch us drift. The river current floats us to Mexico (which means crossers must swim against the current to get to the United States).

“How many cars pass back and forth each day?” my mother asks a ferryman.

He turns to the others for an estimate. When they don’t answer, he shrugs, “Maybe around fifty.”