Yuma, Arizona was the destination for the train in the 1957 western movie, “The 3:10 to Yuma.” A couple of years after the fall of the Berlin Wall I spent a month wandering around Cuba, which was suffering great deprivation after the death of their sugar daddy, the Soviet Union. I saw zero other Americans during that month. The only other foreigners leftover Russians. I made some bike riding Cuban friends who taught me all their Cubanismos. They often referred to the USA as “La Yuma.” I asked them why. It turned out that this slang for the USA came from “The 3:10 to Yuma,” which first played in Cuba long after its release elsewhere. In the following years I thought often about Yuma, in Arizona, but I never went.
Then, during the few weeks when Arizona had the highest rate of Covid in the world, I found myself tooling around the state, talking to people and marveling at the fact that hardly anyone wore a mask. I ended up at the border, as I usually do when wandering, parked in a two story motel type place on the edge of nothing. The pool was closed due to the virus, so I passed through the crowd of geriatric cigarette smokers at the lobby entrance, and made my way to a big cemetery in town.
The cemetery felt ancient, connected to the old west and to Mexico. To Calexico and Mexicali, the two towns that straddle the border an hour down the road. I walked in the dirt among driftwood crosses, altars made of tin ornaments, concrete memorials and hand painted signs, artificial flowers and ribbons everywhere. All the dead had Mexican names. Rosario, Quiñones, Guadalupe.
And then, through a portal in a hedge, I saw an expanse of green, so bright in the desert sun. I passed through, and suddenly I was in a verdant, treeless cemetery with few baubles and no hand-painted signs. More like granite, letters carved in stone. All the names were Anglo. Heather. McNulty. Jonathan.
Oh, I realized. The story of America.
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