That didn’t help the Treviño boys. The Treviño boys—all the Tamaulipas boys—needed jobs. José and his brothers washed cars and worked as gardeners, doing whatever they could to bring in money. But it wasn’t enough. If they didn’t want to smuggle drugs, the best place to find work was north of the river.
José’s big brother Kiko—short for Juan Francisco—went first, in 1978. He had shaggy black hair and a jawline that cast a shadow on his long, muscular neck, which was often exposed by a gaping shirt collar. Kiko was the oldest of the thirteen Treviño children, and he was smooth, able to talk himself up without stumbling into braggadocio. He was savvy, too, not just dreaming of a better way but figuring out a plan. He served as the de facto patriarch after their dad left, and he modeled manhood for his six younger brothers, marrying a local girl and raising a border-zigzagging family in the tradition of Los Dos Laredos.
Kiko’s in-laws were bricklayers in Dallas, so Kiko decided to try laying bricks in Dallas. It was a good time, and a good place to start a career in construction. Thanks to an oil boom, Texas’s population was growing twice as fast as the country’s, as workers and moneymen came to cash in. By 1980, one hundred thousand people were arriving in the Dallas–Fort Worth area every year.
Some of the new Texans were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans like Kiko and his family, but many were middle-class and wealthy white Americans. They needed houses, and schools, and strip malls. They needed Mexicans to build them.
Kiko had never laid a brick, but he learned to do it by watching his in-laws work the trowel. José came a few years later, when he was fifteen, bailing on high school. By the mid-1980s, Kiko had his own company, Treviño Masonry, and a crew of thirty-two fellow Mexicans building three houses at a time. He and José got their work visas, and got their Social Security numbers, and got their tax bills, and paid their tax bills. They banked enough money to buy a few shoebox houses in the working-class neighborhoods southeast of downtown Dallas. After laying bricks all day, they spent their nights remodeling those houses for their families. More work as bricklayers would mean more houses to buy and remodel, and more houses would allow more of their kin to move north. Their sisters had already made their way, and Mom was spending a lot of time in Dallas, too.
By the early 1990s, José was pulling in $43,500 a year, a decent wage for a no-diploma son of Tamaulipas. Kiko was doing well, too. But Kiko craved more, and he saw it in the arrival of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
It was well known that NAFTA would open the floodgates all along the United States’ two-thousand-mile southern border, increasing imports from $40 billion to almost $300 billion over the next two decades. Laredo would benefit especially from its place at the southern tip of U.S. Interstate 35, a thumping artery that stretched north from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and beyond. Once NAFTA passed, Interstate 35 would be clogged with thousands of eighteen-wheelers, carrying goods through Texas and into the Midwest.
In 1992, the year before lawmakers passed NAFTA, Kiko bought a 1958 tractor-trailer and returned to the Mexican side of the border. He started moving loads of raw materials from Nuevo Laredo to the maquiladoras of interior Mexico. But he wasn’t just preparing for NAFTA’s promised impact on U.S.-Mexican trade; he was also betting on the effect both governments refused to acknowledge: the increased flow of drugs across those same borders.
By truck, train, car, and foot, traffic across the border was expected to skyrocket when the law took effect on January 1, 1994. Every vessel that crossed offered an opportunity to satisfy America’s unquenchable thirst for illegal narcotics—cocaine, from the wilds of Colombia but shipped through Mexico; heroin, from the poppy fields of Sinaloa; and weed, from whatever patch of land industrious growers could find. Kiko started using his new truck to transport marijuana.
Not much is known about Kiko’s previous history as a smuggler, if he had any. But he had come up during a golden age of pot smuggling, after America developed its taste for weed but before its government declared war on it. If you grew up poor in Nuevo Laredo, the business, and the connections, came easily whenever you decided you wanted in.
Kiko wanted in. He bought weed from suppliers in Mexico and smuggled it across the river into Laredo, presumably tucked away in his new tractor-trailer. Then he hired couriers and paid them a few thousand bucks a load to transport it to Dallas.
In previous eras, shipping narcotics north on Interstate 35 was the easy part: keep the speed limit and stay inside the lines and no one would bother you. But in the 1970s, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that Border Patrol agents at checkpoints within the country’s borders could stop and question motorists regardless of whether they suspected wrongdoing. Now, at checkpoints like the Laredo North station, located thirty miles north of the border on Interstate 35, agents could stop and question any motorist. And they could pull cars and trucks into hard secondary with only the slightest hint of probable cause.
Kiko’s drivers moved a few hundred pounds of weed at a time. Usually they concealed it amid construction materials in a trailer. Other times, they used a ranch just off the highway to avoid the checkpoint altogether. They paid a few hundred bucks per trip to enter the ranch on one side of the checkpoint and exit on the other.
Kiko was hardly a kingpin. Other Texas smugglers around that time imported ten times what he did. But he made enough to expand his trucking company. He moved back to Nuevo Laredo, sleeping in a small living space behind his office while his wife and kids stayed back in Dallas. He had nine employees, including a bookkeeper, messengers, and drivers who delivered paper, aluminum, and other raw materials to factories across Mexico.
Between legitimate shipping and marijuana smuggling, Kiko was making enough to keep expanding the Treviño clan’s nest in Dallas. He bought new trucks for his shipping business, a new pickup for himself, and a motorcycle for his son.
José, now in his mid-twenties, stuck to bricklaying. He met a woman named Zulema, an American citizen eight years his junior. She had dark-chocolate eyes and wavy black hair, and her round cheeks gave shape to a determined face. She shared José’s Mexican heritage, privilege-free upbringing, and bottomless work ethic. She was just seventeen when they married, around the time Kiko pivoted into smuggling. She gave birth to their first child, Alexandra, a couple of months later.
José became a naturalized citizen and kept working the trowel for whatever contractor would take him. He rose before the sun and put in long days, building homes and schools and stores in and around Dallas. He wanted nothing to do with smuggling. If he lived with some festering indignation over his family’s economic abandonment—by his father, by his fatherland, by his adopted homeland—he never expressed it to the people around him. Instead, he was building a life the way he stacked bricks in the morning shade: slowly and dutifully, actively rejecting the smuggling heritage of his hometown.
But occasionally, big brother Kiko called in a favor.
José likely longed to say no. But he was lugging that word of rejection uphill. He possessed a deep sense of what social scientists call “familism,” a commitment to family over self. Social scientists routinely pin that quality on immigrants, especially Mexican ones, citing a cocktail of factors: religion, large family size, and economic necessity. And maybe immigrants do rely more heavily on family, as a tool against marginalization, using flexibility and fluidity as antidotes to systematically limited opportunity. But also, it’s just what some families do: They stick the hell together. They say yes.
The Treviño brothers’ early years in Dallas would have tantalized those familism-obsessed social scientists. The siblings found each other work, built each other homes, shared cars, and cared for each other’s kids. This unflagging devotion to family may or may not dissipate in future generations, but José’s generation was the first. If big brother asked, José said yes.
Whenever Kiko’s drug couriers arrived in Dallas with the weed, they would hole up at the La Quinta, the Travelers, or some other access-road dump, waiting for one of Kiko’s workers to pick up the delivery. Before they returned to Laredo, they wanted their few-thousand-dollar delivery fee. A few times, they beeped José to collect it. He got the cash