Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (10 page)

A wife, sister or daughter is less likely to listen to men while residing in America, more likely to make more cash - and far more prone to become an American quickly. If our culture prefers looks, money and the office over muscle, handwork and the fields, then a young Mexican girl of twenty in tight slacks who speaks English well can outperform her twin brother who toils on his knees.

Quite simply, the lifeline to America for most immigrants is often found in their womenfolk who follow the men in a few years, and who inevitably soon feel no need to defer to a male who makes less and has more trouble with the language. I drive from rural Selma to Fresno each morning on a congested freeway, fighting traffic with thousands of young Hispanic girls in new Hondas, on their way from rural towns like Fowler, Parlier and Woodlake to jobs in health care, law, government and education in Fresno. More often than not their boyfriends and husbands are back at home, looking for work or laboring for cash five rather than nine hours a day.

A final note on the turbulent mental landscape of the immigrant: The university pundits who insist that aliens suffer from the plague of material impoverishment once again have it wrong. Immigration is more complex and frustrating a problem than mere poverty. I live in one of the poorest sections of the poorest counties in
California
, and people of all sorts are just not starving. Wal-Mart is packed. The local Blockbuster video store is teeming. Obesity, not emaciation, kills aliens. I can go into town and hear no English spoken at all, even as I see women with carts full of food, clothes and electronic goods. New Kias, Ford pickups and space-age baby strollers dot the shopping-center parking lot. The new China seems to be supplying us all with the cheapest consumer goods in history, as everything from tennis shoes to television sets costs a fraction in real dollars of what it did three decades ago.

There has never been a more affluent society in the history of civilization than is America of the early twenty-first century. I would wager that an illegal alien in America may have more buying power in his pocket than a subsidized university student in Athens or Oslo. Our own new American robber barons may live on islands, rig the stock market and represent greed incarnate, but something is definitely trickling down from their malfeasance. In Selma I see vast new housing developments for newly arrived Mexicans; they cram the fast food outlets and carry computers out from Office Max.

In global terms - compared with life in the Congo, Cambodia, Yemen or Bolivia - illegal aliens in
California
are not materially poor. They may not have HMOs, but they are treated at emergency rooms. Their houses may not yet be three-bedroom, two-bath, but their apartments have carpeting, air conditioners, heaters and appliances.

Aliens are also consummate and generous buyers, not overly cost-conscious, and far more affable in the store than affluent white or Korean shoppers. For years I peddled my fruit at farmers' markets in Carmel and Santa Cruz. As a crass generalization, the Asians and whites complained about the price, demanded samples and seemed always to eat at least one fig or plum without paying.
Monterey
Bay
housewives wanted special discounts for their lavish dinner parties. They asked a litany of questions about sprays, fertilizers and farming techniques - all as a prerequisite for buying $2 worth of tomatoes.

But Mexican shoppers who
spoke broken
English? They came up silently, put twenty pounds of fruit and vegetables in a bag, joked about picking such produce themselves, and then slapped down a wad of bills (always cash, never checks of dubious trust) -
 
never complaining about the quality of the produce, the price, or their own poverty. Had they been dressed in white pants, deck shoes and chic sunglasses - and the Carmelites in garish, glittery shirts and cheap polyester pants - you would have thought the aliens were the munificent gentry, the Monterey Hills crowd the boorish poor. For a man who works on his knees, food is simply fuel - not an aesthetic experience, not an occasion to present an impressive table for discriminating peers, and not part of a holistic health program that prays for longevity.

There is another type of impoverishment, which I can also attest to from my own life between 1980 and 1985. Then in my late twenties and early thirties I never made more than $10,000 a year as a full-time farmer, despite two children in diapers and a wife who labored to carry the laundry from a creaking farmhouse to a jerry-rigged washer in the shed. The immobility of such a rooted existence, without disposable income of any great quantity, created a poverty of dwindling expectations. All the material goods in the world cannot disguise the fact that you are chained to your environs. You can have an ample beer belly and still feel hungry if your four walls constitute a monotonous landscape. For the immigrant there is a trip to Mexico perhaps, or two days in Disneyland just maybe via a Greyhound bus, but the alien knows he can never really buy a Winnebago or fly off to pick up a cruise to the
inland passage
. To enjoy the good life of the
California
native, this man would have to make $50 an hour hammering shingles and have 1.5 children, not six.

The world that the alien sees on the magazine rack in Safeway - Martha Stewart's flagstone patios, the Greek islands of Traveler magazine, the glossy ads for summers in the Sierra cabin -
 
all that might as well be a glimmering on Venus. The alien senses that there is a vague, though very nice universe somewhere nearby where wealthy white and Asian people go - and where he never will. And that inexperience with travel, new landscapes, exotic people - a blinkered existence of never straying more than a few miles from home that most of the six billion people on the planet grudgingly accept as their birthright - can be hard to stomach in America when so many come and go as they please. There really is more to life than bread and circuses.

Those who have not worked for low wages at exhausting jobs without respite or escape cannot be expected to understand the growing sense of despair that leads to helplessness and real bitterness among those so much better off than they once were in Mexico. But when you are tied to your trowel or your pruning shears, the world even in America can seem an unfair place. Again, all the mature acceptance of truth in the world - life is still far better than it was in Mexico, one is free to make money and go to school and incrementally better his lot here - does not mitigate the perception that others have so much freedom while you have so little and will die with so little.

When I drove a dirty diesel tractor with spray rig hours on end, I would wonder at the insurance agents, pesticide salesmen and agribusiness representatives in immaculate clothes who drove out to our vineyard in air-conditioned cars and had the freedom to chat on their company's time. How and why, I worried in my immaturity, when a man sweats and works so hard, does he make so little, when another who is clean, fresh and seemingly listless can make so much more? Lectures about complex economies, the delegation of authority, rare skills and education, control and use of capital, free will and responsibility - all that wisdom means little if you are on the hot tractor and someone else is in the cool Lexus.

We should remember that fact in all discussions of the illegal alien: whatever the mess we may feel we are in, most aliens from Mexico, despite their hard work, will never in their lifetimes enjoy the lifestyle that most of us Americans have. In this sense, the reasons that they are in the fields and the kitchens and we are not, and the fact that they are better off than they were before are in one sense irrelevant; for they will still pick and scrub while we do not, and for them that makes all the difference in the world.

In short, this illegal alien business is a hazardous odyssey in America, replete with modern-day Sirens and Cyclopes that can lure the immigrant onto the rocky coast or even eat him outright. A few deftly navigate their way home, but more, increasingly, flounder on our shores.

THREE

The Mind of the Host

Most Americans avoid unskilled routine labor. It is not that we are lazy. No one, in fact, works harder than we do. Europeans and Japanese labor far fewer hours each year. Even our office workers are exhausted: there is something especially stressful and unhealthful about sitting inside a carpeted office forty hours a week between artificially cooled and heated sheet-rock walls, dealing with numbers and names flittering across a computer screen.

Still, most of us are wise to the pitfalls of our own system. We realize that there is a "future" in the antiseptic high-tech office, while being the fourth man on a cement crew or making beds all day is a dead-end job - perhaps permissible as a way of initiating youth into the values of discipline and hard work, but after the age of twenty a growing guarantee of failure in America, in terms of both achieving fiscal security and keeping an aging body healthy. Getting cash wages off the books is not a sustainable proposition, even for our young with good joints. The compensation for menial labor brings entertainment and occasional gadgetry for the single young male, but seldom results in a house, two good cars, and adequate clothes and sustenance for a wife and kids.

Because everyone has hands and feet, however, we believe that menial or stoop labor can be done by anyone with the proper resignation and permanently lowered ambition. Increasingly we realize that our own children cannot or will not do such tasks as part of their growing up, so we basically cover our ears and eyes, and let others do what they must. Thus we ignored the sudden entry of millions of rural Mexican poor. But what at first was a relief became a troubling dilemma, and is now a near-disaster.

We all can become hypocritical and at times amoral, admiring illegal aliens as individuals - housekeepers, gardeners, kids' friends - but feeling less kindly when we see them in long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or scan their pictures in newspaper ads for Crime Stoppers or reports from the police blotter.

I start with impressions gained from observing the roadside in front of my vineyard. There are five stretches of replanted vines. I habitually replant vines. As part of that task I also put in new stakes and patch wire. I also fish out cars of inebriated illegal aliens - five now in twenty years. I own a very small frontage on an underused rural avenue, so I cannot help but assume that the phenomenon of illegals leaving the road at high speed is surely widespread. There is an unwavering pattern in all five crashes on my land. A large Crown Victoria or Buick Le Sabre of decade-old vintage veers off the road at seventy miles per hour, ploughs through the vineyard and comes to a halt three or four rows in from the asphalt. The vine canes, stakes and wire serve as a cushion for the driver, who is never seriously injured. By the time I reach the scene, he has hobbled off through the vineyard - leaving beer cans, his crushed car, and $5,000 in ruined vines. The car was practically worthless, but now is totaled and less than worthless
-
 
and
of course without license and registration.

The California Highway Patrol arrives two hours later to impound the wreck for the price of towing it away. If I am particularly upset, I make a follow-up call and learn from the official accident report that the crushed Impala had either nonexistent or fraudulent paperwork. So I shrug and spend a day clearing out the mess from the vineyard, picking up the glass, plastic car parts, broken stakes and decapitated vines. Then in winter I replant rootings and wait three years for them to bear - and write off the lost income and added expense. If I tell the officer who investigates the accident that I wish he had at least apprehended the criminal, he usually sighs off the record, "What would it matter? When we do catch them they have no license, no registration and no insurance - and it's a hassle to call the INS anyway." One time, and one time alone, the CHP officer arrested the miscreant in my devastated vineyard. Why? Before he plowed into my vines, he had sideswiped a county bridge down the road. Three feet of aluminum railing remained enmeshed in his grill - proof, as it were, that the State of
California
itself had been attacked by this illegal alien and therefore was finally within its rights to jail him and sell off his wrecked car.

I once got a chain and tried to drag the wreckage out with my tractor to impound it for scrap metal - until I was told by the authorities on the scene that this constituted "theft" and I must leave the demolished car in my vineyard until the county tow arrived to cart it away and store it in case the owner should later try to reclaim it. The law seems to say that the vehicle of the illegal alien who destroyed thousands of dollars' worth of vines is more sacrosanct than the property of the citizen.

About once a month I also systematically clear the roadside of trash - not just the usual beer bottles, tires and occasional fast food debris that accumulates as if by a law of nature, but entire plastic bags of foul wet garbage, soiled diapers and assorted household items: plastic toys, dishes, boxes and magazines. Sometimes the litter is tossed well into the orchard, where it pops tractor tires and clogs the cultivator. About once every six months, sofas, beds, televisions, washers and dryers, and entire bedroom sets and dirty mattresses appear on our property. If they are clustered in piles, they must be removed within hours. Otherwise the neglected flotsam suggests laxity, and laxity sends the message that the road by or through our farm has become a free dump.

Twice I have caught the dumpers, who despite curses agreed to pick up their offal. Twice I have found receipts in the trash for power or other bills, and so have had the sheriff track down the owners and order them to come back and clean up the mess. But mostly I just pick it up and forget about who did it. This pastoral drama is endless, despite the fact that city garbage pickup is cheap, and county dumps are not uncommon. There are even plenty of big dumpsters in shopping centers. Yet for some reason - perhaps it is an atavism from the old country where trash is everywhere dumped outside city limits? -
illegal
aliens still go out to the country to dump their refuse, furniture, cars and pets on farmland.