The agents waved the truck into secondary. The trailer was stuffed with Saltillo tile, destined for the kitchen of some Spanish-style McMansion. The agents hoisted themselves in and clinked their way to the back, following Wondo. That’s where they found the duffel bags, stuffed with 280 pounds of cellophane-wrapped marijuana.
Kiko went to trial in 1995. José wasn’t indicted, but his name did come up a couple of times. That probably explained why José wasn’t in the courtroom to see Kiko sentenced to twenty years—two decades in a Colorado federal prison for moving a drug that, by the time he got out, would be legal in the state where he served his time.
With Kiko in prison, the Treviños kept grinding. Zulema earned a high-school diploma online and slogged through the best work she could find. She made $6 an hour working food service at a middle school; $6.50 as a McDonald’s crew member; and, now, $500 a week working full-time for a temp agency.
José found a steady masonry gig with a residential contractor in the suburbs, and he stuck it out there for six long years. In 2007, he landed a full-time job with a contractor who did brickwork on some of the city’s most prestigious projects: the new basketball arena at Southern Methodist University; the new campus of Booker T. Washington High School, one of the country’s best performing-arts schools; and the new Cowboys Stadium, a monument to American excess fans dubbed “the Death Star.”
José surely knew he worked harder than his paychecks suggested. The incomes of immigrants were systematically stubborn, especially in Texas, where so-called right-to-work laws suppressed union organizing and wages. Texas bricklayers made less than those in most every other state, and 50 or 60 percent less than those in Illinois, California, and New York.
José did manage the occasional pay bump, and he was up to $20 an hour by 2009, from $16.50 when he’d started his previous job. He could load up on hours, too. He’d clocked 240 hours of overtime in his first full year at his new job, including 28 overtime hours one week when the average temperature was 104 degrees.
Still, it was hard to do any more than survive. That’s why they were stuck on their stubby street in Balch Springs, one of the inner-ring suburbs southeast of Dallas. Seventy-five percent of the suburb was black or Hispanic. Almost a quarter were immigrants. Half of the people there spoke something other than English at home. A quarter lived in poverty. The rest lived where the Treviños did, just above it, with the city’s median household income barely scraping forty grand.
If this was the American Dream, it was a sweaty, stressful version of it, land of the free but also of the overdraft fee. The Treviños kept a savings account, but it had never held more than $100. Their checking account had topped out in recent years at $8,692, and that was after a $4,900 tax refund. Most months it hovered around a couple grand. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to take the kids back-to-school shopping at American Eagle and Limited Too; to dine on whatever they could afford at Carnival, the Latin-food grocery chain; to load up at Walmart; to make small donations to the March of Dimes; and to pay for Alex’s braces. And, soon, to help Alex pay for college.
She was their biggest investment, really, the asset they nurtured in hopes that it would pay off for future Treviños. In this and other ways, José and his brothers seemed rooted by the same qualities. They were strivers, willing to bust their butts for what they felt they deserved, and willing to take risks to accelerate their return on investment, which was sluggish by design and decree. They just assessed that risk differently. Kiko had tried to complement his legal shipping business with illegal shipping. His other brothers, the ones José was visiting at the ranch, had written off their own futures in pursuit of riches that paid out sooner and bigger.
José was playing a longer game. If he stayed the course, his American Dream would be deferred to his daughter and her siblings. José may never experience the payoff, but perhaps one day he could see it in her round, beaming face. He made sure to pay the orthodontia bill.
Despite the relentlessness of this life, and despite the travel ordeal, José managed to get to Piedras Negras for the party at Miguel’s ranch. There were four or five structures on the property, including stables for the horses and a sprawling house, and outside a cook grilled meat and veggies. José found his way under the palapa and sipped from his beer.
A man named Poncho approached. Poncho was one of Miguel’s guys, known for his skills as a logistics manager, overseeing the exportation of vast quantities of cocaine into the United States, and the importation of millions of dollars back into Mexico.
José told Poncho about his life. How he’d grown up like this, in the country, among the animals. How he worked as a bricklayer—“like a regular person” were the words that would stick with Poncho. They sat there for hours, drinking and talking.
From the palapa, José could surely see that his brother had managed to remake their old life on this ranch. A couple of calls and Poncho could cut José into all this, no sweat. But José told Poncho no, that he “didn’t want to have anything to do with what was crooked.” The code of familism seemed to have found its limit. So they just sat and drank beers while the sun set on the ranch of the man they called “Cuarenta.”
Miguel Treviño Morales was born in 1973, seven years after José. Like José, he was just a kid when Kiko led the family expedition north for Dallas. Like José, he idolized trailblazing Kiko. Like José, he dropped out of school after eighth grade and came to Dallas as a teen, staying with his mom in one of the small brick houses bought by Kiko.
Miguel learned English and worked odd jobs, cutting lawns and sweeping chimneys, taxing work for a scrawny teenager whose family called him “Miguelito.” As he approached manhood in the early nineties, though, Miguel could hardly be described as the baby brother. He was still a raily five foot eight, and his black mustache worked hard to announce itself, but he carried himself with an edge. He could throw back his head and squint his eyes to send a vague but unmistakable message: Don’t fuck with this. Even at the baptism of José’s baby daughter, Alexandra, eighteen-year-old Miguel’s glare overpowered the pastels in his shirt and the chubbiness of his niece’s cheeks.
Miguel talked openly about wanting to lift his family out of poverty, finishing the job Kiko started. In 1992, when Miguel was nineteen, a door creaked open in that pursuit. He married a young American woman named Ana, in a ceremony in Laredo, and they had a baby. They moved in together, into one of the houses Kiko had bought in Dallas, and Miguel’s wife filed a “Petition for Alien Relative,” the first hurdle on the way to securing Miguel a green card.
Along with that petition, the government required Miguel to submit to a medical and psychological examination, which found him to be in relatively good health. He tested positive for marijuana, which he admitted to smoking occasionally, and he said he’d been drinking since he was seventeen, though never heavily. He’d never been violent, and though the doctor found that he exhibited some antisocial behavior, he showed no signs of being harmful to other people or himself. His wife’s petition was approved, putting him on the path to citizenship.
Then Kiko got indicted. It’s unknown what, if any, role Miguel played in his big brother’s smuggling racket, though it’s likely he played some small one, especially in the absence of more legitimate work opportunities. Around the same time, the cops tried to pull Miguel over in an unregistered Cadillac. Police records don’t say whose car it was or where he was going, and Miguel apparently didn’t want