Mexico

Mexico becomes the testing ground for Mike Milo’s attempt to bring Rafo north and for his reassessment of the rodeo culture that shaped him. The journey unfolds amid border inspections, police scrutiny, punishing travel, and the pursuit of Mustangs; the country is both a physical route and a setting in which familiar ideas of courage and toughness acquire a harsher meaning.

Border Crossing and Official Scrutiny

Mike enters Mexico at the crossing between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in a dark-blue panel truck supplied by Howard Polk. He has taken nearly a day to prepare his paperwork and expects a routine passage, but the officials inspect both the vehicles and the travelers’ documents. A small can of 3-IN-ONE Household Oil is the one item that makes him uneasy. After the guard examines the toolbox and the official stamps Mike’s tourist card, Mike describes his purpose as a vacation. The exchange ends without incident, but the careful inspection establishes that movement across the border depends on official approval as well as a plausible account of one’s purpose.

That control reappears farther north. On the road toward San Luis Potosí, Mike encounters a long line of stopped cars and armed officers searching drivers and passengers rather than simply inspecting vehicles. He suspects they may be looking for a boy, and sees the roadblock as a threat to his attempt to travel with Rafo. When a whistle sounds, Rafo gets into the truck; Mike then reverses, turns around on the highway, and directs him toward back roads. The journey through Mexico is thus shaped not only by distance but by the need to evade a system of surveillance and road checks.

The Road North

The detour takes Mike and Rafo onto a remote, exposed road. After a day of extreme heat and little traffic, they have no ride out and debate whether returning to the main road would risk an encounter with the Mexican National Patrol Police. A man traveling with a loaded burro and a herdsman with goats are among the few people they see. When their food and water run out, Rafo refuses to continue walking, and the pair’s strained cooperation gives way to bickering. Mexico’s roads test their endurance in practical, unheroic ways: distance, heat, dwindling supplies, and uncertainty about where the road leads.

The landscape also determines how Mike approaches the Mustangs. Near Janasco, he reasons that wild horses favor open tablelands rather than wooded or hilly ground, where obstacles and the risk of falling make movement more difficult. The surrounding mesas guide his search. In a later nighttime attempt, Mike jumps onto a white Mustang from the truck and holds on as the animal tries to throw him. The country’s open terrain is not merely scenery; it becomes part of the method by which Mike pursues the horses and the means through which he hopes to earn enough money to leave.

Arenas and the Meaning of Macho

Mexico also extends the book’s examination of performance and violence. Mike’s career has taken him through rodeo arenas in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Mexico, where the audience’s celebration of toughness links competitive riding to other spectacles of domination. After seeing a cockfight, he connects the praise of a fighting rooster as macho with the arena culture he has known: in both, courage is celebrated through one opponent’s defeat or injury. The association turns his former professional identity against itself. The macho ideal that once made him a celebrated performer now appears inseparable from cruelty toward people and animals.

This recognition does not immediately free Mike from that identity. He still thinks of breaking Mustangs as a way to earn money and keep moving, even as he grieves that the arenas no longer want him. Mexico therefore holds together both sides of his predicament: the physical labor by which he may continue, and the spectacle of toughness whose values he has begun to distrust.

Flight Toward Texas

The northbound journey culminates in another confrontation with official scrutiny. An officer asks Mike to produce his tourist card and then questions him about Rafo. Later, Mike speeds away from an inn as the sergeant and others follow. Watching the pursuing vehicle in his mirror, he hopes to reach a ravine, lose himself among trees and scrub, and find a route to Texas through the thicket where the border runs. The evidence leaves the outcome of this flight unresolved, but makes clear that Mexico remains the contested ground between pursuit and escape. Its border is at once a line on the landscape and a practical obstacle that shapes the choices Mike and Rafo can make.