CRISTIAN MIJARES, the WBC and WBA 115-pound champion, climbed into the ring on November 1 as he always does, with a smirk across his lips and a Santos Laguna soccer jersey over his shoulders. Vic Darchinyan waited in the opposite corner, surrounded by his handlers, bearish Armenian men decked out in gold chains. Mijares’s chin was cocked slightly upward, a display of nonchalance, or arrogance, or disrespect. Anything but self-doubt.

In Mijares’s hometown, the northern Mexican city known as the Laguna, a restaurant called Opa’s was showing the bout as it took place thousands of miles away in Carson, California. I sat in a booth among a roomful of Mijares partisans, everyone boisterous but polite and as confident as their fighter. When the bell rang from the fourteen pairs of TV speakers, the aimless chitchat turned to focused attention.

It quickly became apparent that something was off. Mijares, a master of space and movement, was listless. I’d never seen him look so helpless and befuddled. The Televisa commentator, Ricardo “El Finito” López, a legendary Mexican champion who fought for sixteen years without a loss, began imploring Mijares to use his jab, to throw more punches. But Darchinyan, a southpaw like Mijares, approached his opponent easily and connected with bludgeoning lefts. One of them, an uppercut, put Mijares on his ass, and the crowd in Opa’s gasped. A woman in front of me clutched the nape of her neck as if channeling the blow.

This was the first round. By the ninth, Mijares, who had absorbed hundreds of punches without revisiting the canvas, was trailing so badly on the scorecards that he needed a knockout to win. Instead, Darchinyan landed a straight left, flush on the chin. Mijares fell violently to the mat and remained supine, his eyes hopelessly glassy as the referee’s count reached ten. The woman at Opa’s raised her hands in a show of despair. Then the restaurant manager changed the channel and the room erupted in whistles and boos. Cristian Mijares, the pride of the Laguna and arguably the best boxer in Mexico an hour before, had been knocked out.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO once wrote a story with Mijares’s hometown as both setting and title. “Gómez Palacio” is not a happy tale. The protagonist, a poet exiled from Mexico City to teach a handful of hapless writing students, dismisses the place as “some godforsaken town in northern Mexico.” Much of the city indeed looks as though a stiff wind would blow it over.

Gómez Palacio is one of the principal municipalities of the Laguna (which is actually an agglomeration of four adjacent cities); so is Torreón, where I moved from Chicago in 2005, essentially to learn Spanish. It didn’t feel like exile to me, but there’s no denying the harshness of the environment. The weather is extreme: windstorms, floods, and, for ten months of the year, a desert heat so unyielding that local men call the Laguna La Ciudad de Huevos Congelados, the City of Frozen Balls, for the ice-cold beers they squeeze between their legs. The city’s principal landmark is an open-armed Jesus statue on a foothill overlooking Torreón. With charming disingenuousness, locals describe the statue as a reflection of the Laguneros’ hospitality and decency. No one mentions it’s a copy of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer.

The Laguna sprang up around a railroad hub about a hundred years ago. In 1914, Pancho Villa and his División del Norte took Gómez Palacio and Torreón from the Federales during the Mexican Revolution. But the fame the city earned for Villa’s exploits quickly dissipated; by the ’80s, the Laguna had little more than its soccer team to distinguish it from dozens of other underdeveloped Mexican metropolises.

Then, a decade and a half ago, NAFTA was signed and the multinationals began arriving, in search of cheap labor and real estate. Today, John Deere, Caterpillar, and Delphi all have factories, and the Laguna has become the ninth-largest metropolitan area in Mexico. As you walk through town in the 110-degree heat, the dusty one-level houses that occupy older neighborhoods suddenly give way to the French wine shops, Brazilian steakhouses, Starbucks, and Crown Plazas found in all the world’s new-money boomtowns.

The drug trade has long been a presence in the Laguna, but even after NAFTA’s passage, this meant only periodic reports of crooked politicians and money-laundering front companies. “Don Carlos” Herrera, a former mayor of Gómez Palacio with links to famous kingpins from Juárez and Sinaloa, kept the peace; his Laguna was more a logistical center than a locus of violence. Then, in 2007, gunmen from the Zetas, a rival drug gang, pumped hundreds of bullets into a car carrying Herrera and his wife. They both survived, but the Zetas succeeded in chasing Don Carlos into his own exile, in Spain, perhaps, or maybe Cuba—no one seems to know for certain.

The Zetas were a more entrepreneurial bunch than Don Carlos; aside from smuggling cocaine and meth northward, they began extorting from local businesses and stealing cars. Turf wars erupted between local dealers; businessmen and police were executed for betrayal, or merely to send a message. Starting last summer, federal troops began attacking the Zetas in Torreón. They also went after the police suspected of protecting them, arresting three dozen officers last September. As in the rest of Mexico, the effects of the government offensive have been

limited: In Gómez Palacio and neighboring Lerdo, the murder rate doubled in 2008, and in Torreón, generally considered the safest of the Laguna’s municipalities, it tripled. No suspect was ever arrested in 80 percent of the killings.

THE CRIME WAVE has transformed the rhythm of life in the Laguna, but the Laguneros’ affection for sports, which runs broad and deep, hasn’t changed. Soccer is of course paramount, and kids regularly block traffic with their street games. When Santos Laguna won the Mexican league title in 2008, anarchic parades erupted everywhere.

Boxing comes in a close second. One gym manager told me the Laguna has forty gyms—this in a city with a population of just over a million. Cristian Mijares trains at Rochmar Box, as tidy a facility as you could hope to find. Membership costs about thirty dollars a month; for slightly less, you could join one of the no-frills operations squeezed into semi-abandoned shopping centers, where you can’t jump rope without tagging the ceiling.

A generation ago, Jesús López was a terror in the local gyms and a lightweight standout. His nickname was Pascualito, though everyone now calls him Champ. This is something of a misnomer; López held his own against a couple of future titleholders (including two scraps in which he went the distance against Hall of Famer Daniel Zaragoza), but, unlike Mijares, he never got a crack at a world championship. I spoke to him one night at the burrito stand he runs, a simple operation tucked against a gas station along a busy stretch of Boulevard de la Revolución.

“I debuted in 1980. Twenty years old,” he says.

“How long had you been fighting amateur?” I asked.

“Amateur, no, no, no, I didn’t do amateur.”

“How long did you train before your first fight?”

“About half a year.”

“How did that first fight go?”

“Good, in that first one I knocked him out in three rounds.”

“How much did they pay?”

A sound that captures all of the nostalgia, bemusement, and exasperation he’s feeling escapes his lips. “Aaaayy, I debuted in 1980, in Matamoros, Coahuila, in the Arena del PRI. I made thirty-five pesos.” Thirty-five pesos is less than three dollars. Champ sells his burritos for seven pesos, and in a busy hour he can sell thirty.

If Champ were making his debut today, he’d probably walk away with several hundred or even a couple thousand dollars. Mijares’s promoter wouldn’t tell me how much his charge was paid for the fight with Darchinyan, but I’d be surprised if it was less than three hundred thousand dollars.

PROFESSIONAL FIGHT NIGHTS in the Laguna are smoky,
beer-soaked affairs in run-down coliseums, dragging on past

2 a.m. when they don’t have a TV schedule to meet, which most don’t. When I arrived in 2005, cards usually featured either Marco Antonio Rubio or Rubén Padilla, the two established local stars. Both men are big punchers with face-first styles, but Rubio is far more accomplished. He has won a handful of regional belts, but the knock on him is that he always loses his biggest fights. Last Saturday, February 21, he fought the American Kelly Pavlik for a world middleweight title; after Pavlik battered him for nine one-sided rounds, Rubio didn’t come out for the tenth. On Rubio’s first trip to Las Vegas, in 2004, he was knocked stiff by the heavy-handed Ghanaian Kofi Jantuah in thirty seconds.

After Mijares won his first world title in 2006, he became the most prominent fighter in the Laguna. His fights became community events. Twelve thousand people gathered at the arena in his hometown to see Mijares overwhelm the scrappy Teppei Kikui in July 2007, and another eight thousand disappointed fans waited outside, myself among them. This past August, eighteen thousand people filled an arena in nearby Monterrey to watch him dismantle light-fisted and lighter-chinned Chatchai Sasakul in three rounds.

Mijares wasn’t the first Lagunero to win a world title, but he was the first to hold on to it. He was also the first to make himself conspicuously wealthy through boxing. He has endorsement deals with half a dozen local businesses, from a natural-gas retailer to a private ambulance company; his management wants to branch out into sportswear and credit cards, the idea being to turn him into a five-foot-six, 115-pound Peyton Manning. Already, in a city where donkey carts still stalk the streets, Mijares drives a late-model BMW 325i.

THE TYPICAL MEXICAN FIGHTER starts his pro career in adolescence. Unlike a talented American prospect, he isn’t protected. He doesn’t build his record against cab drivers but against pros, and even if he’s good, he’ll lose once or twice. After he bounces around, fighting on small cards for five or ten years, maybe he’ll be discovered by a promoter who can secure him big bouts, televised if possible, first in Mexico, then in the United States. Then he not only needs to win, he needs to entertain.

When I visited Mijares at his gym in October, one month before he fought Darchinyan, he entertained even while training. Cumbia and norteña music blared while he worked out, and he stopped short every few minutes to dance a few steps. All around him, adolescents (both boys and girls) and men of varying ability threw their hands at the heavy bag, the speed bag, the double-end bag, the trainer’s hand pads, and one another. Children with oversize gloves kept leaping up to drill the speed bag, oblivious to the serious business going on around them.

Mijares is the scion of a boxing family. Two uncles are trainers and former fighters, and a pair of his cousins also box professionally. “You grow up in that atmosphere,” he said, and you want to fight, “because of my uncles, Vicente Mijares, Ricardo Mijares…. We always went to the gym to sweat when they were training. You are born with that restlessness. You get to a point where you want to be like them or be a world champion. I think all my cousins and I felt the same.”

Both Mijares’s uncles help train him, but Ricardo, whose face wears the marks of a long career in the ring, takes the lead. His voice is soft, and his style is understated. Ricardo doesn’t bark instructions or order his nephew around; instead, he pulls him aside every so often to offer a pointer, after which Mijares nods accordingly.

Mijares started training when he was twelve and made his pro debut in 1997, just months shy of his sixteenth birthday. For the better part of a decade, he honed his skills on the B-side of small cards, often booed by knockout-hungry fans. He lost three of his first fifteen fights and tied another, all in bouts far from home.

Nacho Huizar, a veteran promoter who’d had his eyes on Mijares for years before signing him, finally turned him from a mere talent into a contender, sending him to Japan in 2006, where he won in a split-decision over world champ Katsushige Kawashima. But it wasn’t until he fought Jorge Arce in April 2007 that he crossed over into mainstream fame, becoming a recognizable face with a marketable name.

Arce, who bounces into the ring wearing a cowboy hat and sucking a lollipop, was Mexico’s best-known fighter at the time. Being a clownish aggressor is part of his shtick, and he’d predicted a knockout to the press repeatedly. Arce is a slugger; when the bell rang, he wasted no time charging forward with a flurry of punches. Mijares dodged or blocked them all and answered with two, three, four punches of his own, every round for twelve rounds. By late in the match, Arce’s face was pouring blood, and the decision in Mijares’s favor was unanimous. The next Monday, a coworker named Angélica, who’d never once mentioned boxing in my presence, asked me, “Did you see Mijares? What an ass-kicking he gave him!”

After that it wasn’t only sportswriters who wanted to interview him, but the social magazines as well. His circle expanded from boxing heavyweights to political ones. He began making appearances with the mayor of Gómez Palacio and received a gracious tribute from the governor of the state of Durango. He was even feted on the field before a Santos game.

ON NOVEMBER 1 IN CARSON, Mijares was making his ninth defense of the title he had held for just over two years. Vic Darchinyan, the IBF super-flyweight champion, had left one challenger in a coma and knocked out twenty-four fighters in thirty-two fights. I asked Mijares what worried him about the fight. “His strength, nothing else,” he said. “I think I’ve squared off with fighters who punch a lot harder than him. But that’s what they say about him, mostly, that he punches hard.”

Darchinyan, an Armenian fighting out of Australia, had held a press conference in Los Angeles about a month before the bout, and he did his best to get under Mijares’s skin. “They said that Mijares is pound for pound the best fighter out there,” he told the assembled media, “but after I get finished with him, we’ll see what number he is. I'm going to give a lesson to the little boy.”

As I discussed this with him, Mijares became emphatic: “He wants to intimidate by saying a thousand things, by talking too much. I’m not interested. In this boxing you speak with punches, not with the mouth.”

The punches did speak. “What can I say?” Mijares told a local paper after he was knocked out. “I never solved his style. He’s a difficult fighter, it was my time to lose. He’s a strong boxer and there are no excuses.” The Laguna was disappointed, but Mijares was no less beloved. His face remained as ubiquitous as the summer sun, and after a couple weeks his fans, like Mijares himself, simply moved on.

ON MARCH 14, Mijares will gain three pounds and a weight class, making his comeback against Venezuelan Nehomar Cermeño. Cermeño is undefeated, but after only sixteen fights against middling competition, he is as untested as he is unknown. The victor will walk away with a 118-pound championship belt. Should Mijares win, he’ll be the first two-division titleholder in the history of the Laguna. If he falls short, well, he won’t be the only Lagunero struggling through a difficult 2009.

Don Carlos’s criminal heirs have transformed the city into a scene from Traffic. On January 1, scores of federal troops rang in the New Year with a four-hour gunfight featuring automatic weapons and grenades in the streets of El Campestre de la Rosita, Torreón’s toniest neighborhood. After seizing the house where the suspected drug smugglers were hiding, authorities found a small arsenal of AK-47s and AR-15s, a shrine to a Grim Reaper–like figure known as the Santa Muerte, and, in the local paper’s formulation, “a room equipped with chains and articles for the infliction of torture.” A gang of bank robbers known as Las Fresas (the Snobs) have begun operating in the region, assaulting as many banks in January as were targeted in all 2008. In February, an average of two people were killed a day, including eleven in one violent night.

The American recession has hit export-based cities like the Laguna particularly hard. Empty stores abound in the malls. In posh neighborhoods, one house after another is adorned with a “For Rent” or “For Sale” sign. Factories are operating at half speed, and employees dependent on the auto industry are being cut in droves. The thousands of line operators and engineers

who produce head gaskets and drivetrains for Ford and Chevy were as anxious for an American bailout as their counterparts in Detroit. But back on the Boulevard de la Revolución, among the exhaust from the F-150s and Silverados, Champ says the seven-peso-burrito business has never been better.

Photos by Mario Aspland, except Champ (above) and TV by Patrick Corcoran.