1994 was a very good year

Luis Reséndiz

One of my dad’s defining features was the magnetic pull he seemed to have on failure.

This, of course, would be a kind rationalization. A man, a proverbial good man even, is brought to his downfall by the push and pull of the inescapable forces of the universe. This rationalization exempts him of his responsibilities. It also turns him into a tragic character. In this version of the story he is a local Josef K., a subject to the incomprehensible moral values of the court. He is Job, a man in the land of Uz (in my father’s case, the land of Coatzacaoalcos), and that man was upright, and one that eschewed evil. He sinned not. And then accepted the painful but divine Will with shrunken shoulders.

But that’s neither precise nor fair. The precise thing to say would be that his downfall was nothing more than a consequence of his actions. At forty, after being an employee with a steady income for some decades, he decided to begin an economic independence of sorts. One day he just quit his job as the manager of a construction company, and decided to follow ventures that seemed to deal in futility.

He was an acolyte of the bad idea, a leader of the lost cause, an advocate of the unmeasurable, and he danced around the bonfire of failure for several years. Each of his better-known mistakes had a volcanic repercussion in the family fridge. Even after all this –hey! at least his stubbornness must be commended– he never gave up his biggest dream: a taquería. Not just some generic taco place, but a romantic gastronomic serenade to the football team he loved most: Cruz Azul.

@ Carlos Castillo / Vice

(You of course know that Cruz Azul is a football club based in Mexico City. It has been called La Máquina Celeste, the sky-blue machine, the sky-blue train engine, a force of nature as blue as the bluest of skies, since way back then. Since its inception in the nineteen-thirties, probably, but records are not reliable.)

The idea was kind of like this. Some sort of food truck –food trucks didn’t even exist back then in Coatza; remember, kids, this is 1994–, concisely called La Máquina, that, parked strategically by the Coatzacoalcos boardwalk, would serve beef head tacos. The twist here, the one that would make our truck stand out, dad said, wasn’t just our team’s parafernalia decorating it, but also the color of the meat we were going to sell: a technologically-created blue that my father claimed to have studied and mastered, a perfectly credible and delicious Pantone 287 XGC.

Dad was never very good at business.

Full of spirit and free of money, he started off with what seemed the easiest thing. The thing that was pure joy and dream: designing the truck. I had shown a sort-of inclination for drawing –an inclination that I pursued with a certain passion and no talent– so it seemed like a good idea to put me in charge of creating our logo. Why not? We had no budget, and no one’s work would get any cheaper than zero pesos. My childish excitement forbade me to see the blue impossibility behind the task.

So after several all-nighters and a couple dozen broken pencil tips, I managed to create a locomotive with a fiery face that moved at an incredible speed with a football in front of it, as if Carlos Hermosillo himself was riding it through a field of emerald. It was no secret that my creature was heavily influenced by the anthropomorphic pigs and chickens that decorated the signs at the local taquerías and rotisseries. It didn’t matter. My father lifted the precarious drawing with the pride of a world champion.

Somehow, in a way that my six-year-old mind didn’t quite comprehend, my dad found money to buy a truck. (I didn’t really inquire into it; who would dare question a dream of blue tacos?) One day, the sun rose on the city of Coatza and there was a truck parked in front of our house.

It was second-hand, but also sturdy. And once a friend of my dad’s had given the truck a full service in exchange for an intangible part of the business, the tin of La Máquina shone spotless. On its immaculate surface we could see a future less fucked up than the present. And on it, too, on that metallic blank canvas, drawn almost as a ghost-copy in pencil, was my creature: angry, fast, riding a football to victory. It looked unstoppable. Taquería La Máquina was possible. It is true that even as he grows older, a man doth not know which is the way of hope.

But, unlike what some idiots believe, not a single family has come out on top of a destroyed national economy. That really is one powerful machine. During the dirty year of 1994 –that’s the way I see that year in my memory: dirty, stained, as if a newspaper seller had touched a shiny white mug and then left it on a table– a meeting between the members of the Mexican Wellbeing and Economic Growth Pact was enough to vanish the strength of the Mexican peso from reality. With it, every single possibility of investment, every entrepreneurial dream, and every chance to become a logo designer disappeared. The dream to hear my Máquina’s horn also vanished. A house that never had an overspilling fridge now didn’t have enough to eat at all.

And of course Cruz Azul was kicked out of the tournament by fucking América in the quarterfinals.

Forced to face ruin, but also refusing to ever come back to the yoke of a 9 to 5 salary, my father dragged us into a financial crisis from which we almost didn’t come back. My mother left him and took me with her. The few things we had were given to the bank, to creditors, loaners, and a friend of dad’s who wanted his investment back.

The truck was one of the last things to go. But the last time I saw my father, the truck was still parked in front of the house. Rusty wheels, chipped paint, a train engine logo covered by a thick layer of dirt and sand and dreams. My dad and I ate chips as we sat in silence on the porch of the house. He looked at his truck with increasingly sad eyes. Minutes passed like empty trains in front of us, leaving dust on a car that was just parked there.~