The Blythe Archives:
The Emperor X Online Journal

|20100117
||TORNADO LIMOUSINE! GREYHOUND IS ON ITS WAY DOWN.
The first thing you should know about the Greyhound bus terminal in El Paso, TX is that it's located next to a massive reinforced concrete egg, and that's also the last thing you should know about it. Under absolutely no circumstance should you use Greyhound to enter or leave the city by choice. There are just too many other fun options, with names like Tres Estrellas, Los Limousines, and Tornado -- small-scale Mexican-run bus operations with express service to anywhere Spanish is spoken.

Their buses are hand-me-down charter coaches or Greyhound leftovers that announce the name of their company in blazing neon Comic Sans letters. Their terminals and ticket kiosks sprout in squat buildings of cinderblock and corrugated tin that often double as a swap meet full of pawn shops, import retailers, taquerias and courier dispatchers. Some say the Mexican lines are illegal fronts run by dangerous gang interests, which is mostly laughable and entirely irrelevant: if the cheerful children and kindly grandmas and honest-looking workaday men who rode with me to El Paso are criminals. they're the friendliest evil-doers you could ever hope to share a twelve-hour red-eye bus ride with.

It's Sunday morning, and I'm in the El Paso Tornado terminal, a grey tiled room in a building of indecipherable origin. White plastic lawn furniture sits arranged neatly in a small cluster towards the center of the cold room. The only sound comes in a steady buzz from a dozen fluorescent tubes hanging from the black metal ceiling. Across the street, a bar in a crumbly building blares narcotraficante ballads. It was open for its sad, rowdy business when I passed by a few minutes ago. At 10am. On a Sunday. Two dangling transparent plastic strips served as a door, through which I could hear a woman on the crackling PA inside, singing overdriven Spanish praises to the Lord. "O God, they're drunks, and they're good people," I heard her declare in confident, accented English as I walked past.

Based on what I saw out of my windows when we stopped to pick up passengers, it's like this all over North America. All night, every night, just out of sight of the heavily-trafficked parts of town, buses with garish livery and packed with beleaguered, docile travelers stop at unpredictable hours next to gas stations, abandoned mall parking lots, and the offices of bail bonds vendors. It's a little overwhelming to a non-initiate like myself. Many companies lack web presence, and since these operations change frequently, internet searches often deliver out-of-date information. There are only two reliable ways to figure out when and from where a bus leaves: word of mouth and the phone book. People must find out, though, because every bus is packed. In fact, many routes are double-served by competing lines, who jockey for business with fierce discounts and impressive schedule improvements.

So, how do these little companies compete with Greyhound's monopoly? Loyalty. I noticed few non-Hispanic passengers and zero non-Hispanic attendants or drivers. I'd bet research would show that immigrant loyalty to a Mexican business operating in the U.S., along with cheaper fares and faster service, attracts the itinerant immigrant client base, giving these anti-Greyhounds a built-in revenue stream. Only something as powerful as a mass migration has enough demographic inertia to take down a monopoly like Greyhound. This is a thrilling example of raw capitalism taking action like a mushroom, its spores carried in the current of a slow, unstoppable exodus, its stem taking root and growing on the rotten old organism, consuming it, improving it, putting it to new use. It's the closest an economic system comes to resembling life itself. It's beautiful and heartening to see this many-headed Latino bus hydra try to take down the 'hound. It's ironic that Republicans, the most enthusiastic pro-capitalism boosters in the States, tend also to be anti-immigration, since this particular capitalist success would have been impossible without a strong Mexican community in the U.S.

The Mexican bus lines lack Greyhound's central organization, but I have yet to see a downside to this other than the slightly-less-frequent service to some remote destinations and the eyebrow-raising building conditions in the impromptu bus terminals. The buses arrive at their destination faster. The drivers and attendants are far more friendly. Bureaucracy is used only when absolutely necessary, and then with fervor. Baggage claim tickets are checked to match those on the checked bags, for example, which Greyhound is too lazy to do in most cases. At the same time, Tornado was happy to hold my luggage while I walked around town during a layover, a simple courtesy Greyhound stopped years ago for paranoid and vaguely insurance-related reasons. Even though the facilities are run-down, the feeling in the terminals is one of familial concern, or at least a kindly tolerance. The panic and confused hostility in Greyhound's unbearable stations is shockingly, wonderfully absent.

Just outside of this little bus and bar district, whole city blocks teem with businesses specializing in cheap manufactured goods, either from Asia or the factories just across the border in Juarez. They didn't seem to have anything vital or valuable -- just a lot of cartoon character backpacks, beauty supplies, and false brand name electronics. Families playing hooky from mass strolled slowly, chatting and seeking bargains. The clear strong voice of an old man reminded them of what they were missing, though: "Ladies and gentlemen, please permit me to explain to you God's plan!" he declared, gallant and forceful and radiant.

My bus doesn't leave until late this evening, so I'll be walking across the border in a few minutes to see Juarez and maybe score some tacos or something.

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