Riding to Mexico on a Bicycle Made of Trash

Until the spring of 2009, Bikes Across Borders was housed at the Rhizome Collective, a group of converted warehouses that housed a dozen or so people and served as a hub of community activism. The warehouse also provided space for the Inside Books Project, a program that sends books to Texas prisoners; Food Not Bombs, a national organization that advocates peace by feeding the homeless and needy; KPWR, an online radio station; and other programs and events that needed a space to operate. But building code violations forced the collective to close; now Bikes Across Borders shares space with Austin’s Yellow Bike Project on East 12th Street.

Since the first ride, the group has brought more than 500 bicycles to Mexico, Cuba and Central America, often by riding some of them to the border and meeting a truck pulling a trailer full of bicycles, parts and tools. In the past, Bikes Across Borders teamed with Pastors for Peace, a national group that runs occasional caravans of supplies all the way to Cancun, where they’re shipped further east and south. For 2009, though, the group decided that they didn’t want to use motor vehicles at all and wanted to bring only what they could ride.

The group promotes bicycle use not only for the beneficial environmental impact but also for its economic feasibility. The League of American Bicyclists estimates that bicycle commuting costs $120 per year on average; the American Automobile Association says it costs nearly $6,000 per year to operate a car. For Austinites and the Mexican workers the savings can be significant.

January 3, 2009 — Day One, 0 miles — Austin, Texas

Nineteen riders head for the border — 15 men and four women in their 20s and 30s. Most of the group are Austin residents, but some come from as far away as Maryland. For some, their bicycle is not only their sole mode of transportation, it is their livelihood. Four deliver food on bicycles for a downtown burger joint, and several others operate pedicabs (pedal-powered taxis).

After a long day of getting everything ready for the ride, about half the group rides to a brownfield, a piece of land reclaimed from its former life as a municipal landfill and later illegal dumping ground. The city donated the land to the Rhizome Collective in 2004 for them to clean up and use. We set up camp, erecting a community shelter out of a large tarp and some tree limbs, and then sit around a fire, talking excitedly about the upcoming weeks. The lights of Austin’s skyline are splayed on the horizon, but somehow it feels as if we’ve already begun our journey into the unknown.

Only later do I realize the symbolism of this first night, all of us sleeping on top of green, vegetative mounds that had once been trash. It’s hard to tell that just five years earlier this spot was covered with “680 tires, 10.1 tons and 36.5 cubic yards of trash, and 31.6 tons of recyclable metal,” according to the collective’s press release. Our first night’s stay at the reclaimed brownfield in Austin stands in stark contrast to the expanse of trash-covered fields we will find nearly 400 miles away in Derechos Humanos, which means “Human Rights.”

January 6, 2009 — Day Three, 102.6 miles — Kosciusko, Texas

We wake up in Seguin to a steady rain, but soon the clouds part and it’s a beautiful, cloudless day, a welcome change after two days of riding through cold drizzle and wind. We spent the night in the yard of a woman we had met at the coffee shop downtown. She’d been working behind the counter when we arrived, and by the fourth or fifth person in line, she started asking us who we were and what we were doing. When we told her, she immediately offered up her home and her yard to 19 strangers for the night. It seemed a fluke, but it would soon prove to be the norm.

Later that morning, we hop on our bikes and head south, unsure where we’ll spend the night. When we finally arrive at a gas station in Kosciusko, the sun is starting to set and a chill has entering the air. It seems like a good time to start looking for a place to camp.

The gas station doubles as an after-work hangout for the locals, who look at us curiously as we pull up. One man, a large, lumbering fellow named Harvey, walks up while we’re sitting outside discussing what to do next and asks us where we’re from. We are obviously an unfamiliar sight in Kosciusko, a town that doesn’t seem to be made up of much more than this gas station and a church.