Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (8 page)

Subsidiary industries of illegality also tempt the workers
-
 
mostly
the fencing of stolen property (lawn mowers, scooters, bikes, hand tools and such) at rural swap meets. When cash, not credit card and checks, is the common currency, and there is no confirmation of citizenship, then one buys almost everything on the spot and without proof of sale. And when an illegal alien makes less than $30,000 a year, he is more likely to discount the moral implications of buying goods that are clearly stolen from others. Receipts are not needed or wanted; possession, not title, is the rule of ownership. When I lose a valuable piece of yard or farm equipment I often venture two miles down the road to the Selma Swap Meet on Sundays to see whether I can buy it back at ten cents on the dollar. Shovels, yard tools, electrical tools - anything not tied down or locked up - have all vanished from my farm. Their simulacra are on sale in an open-air mart a few miles away at a fraction of the replacement expense.

Two rural households just a mile away from mine routinely arrange cheap, second-hand bicycles, motor scooters and power tools on their lawns for cash sale - no proof of purchase, no receipts,
no
questions asked. Just today I shooed away Raul Ochoa, who went to high school with my son, when he showed up with an entire set of hydraulic chain saws, clippers and other accessories - brand new, obviously stolen. Careless as to how to use them, he offered them all to me for $20, about 2 percent of their real worth. But then Raul was just released from jail for his second felony grand theft conviction, and had plenty of things in a prior cache to move before risking a life behind bars to steal more and replenish his stocks. The other vatos in his car, I noticed, seemed to be eying my car, truck, lawn mower - and me as well.

In spring 2003, during the editing of the present book, all the mailboxes on our rural road were vandalized; our shed twenty yards from the house was broken into and ransacked a few hours after four Mexican youths stopped to inquire about "buying gas"; and twenty-four hours later our garage had all the spare furniture looted in the middle of the night. Roberto, who lives half a mile away, said he spotted three young Mexicans rifling through his mailbox, but could not catch them on his tractor as they sped away with all his just-paid bills. I reminded him that putting his mail in his own mailbox in rural Selma was like writing a blank check to a gang-banger.

Worse are the meth labs that seem to spring up throughout rural
California
- the nation's drug capital for do-it-yourself chemists. Workers in these operations can make thousands of dollars in a summer. Such potential profits explain why the drug is ubiquitous on our streets and why aliens who use and sell it are cramming our prisons. Unlike the heroin or cocaine trade, meth is particularly attractive to the rural immigrant. It is usually concocted among familiar trees and vines, in a rented barn or shed miles from town, where the immigration authorities and sheriffs rarely intrude. It is a natural outdoor activity ancillary to farm work, likewise conducted in solitude and with the same network of smugglers and contractors known from the illegal trek into the United States. On two occasions, tough-looking men have shown up in my yard inquiring about renting my barn as a future "dormitory" for workers - code for a drug-making lab. If a man is here illegally and living in a stealthy world to begin with, having come from a culture where drug dealing and manufacturing are endemic among the bureaucrats and the police, then the occasional straying from the vineyard to the lab need not be so radically defined in Manichean terms of good versus evil. One year of drug chemistry might earn an illegal alien $40,000 in cash, and give him the much-sought-after victorious return to Mexico in a way farm wages never can; or, contrarily, it can earn him twenty years in Folsom Prison, a body illustrated with tattoos, and lifelong membership in a Mexican prison gang.

Despite the dangers and drudgery, however, the wage for menial labor in America is far better than anything earned in Mexico. An unskilled laborer from the Sierra Madre is lucky to make $25 a week; in
California
he can easily earn nearly $10 an hour and often more. To the worker, the initial realization that there is such an El Dorado is dazzling, quite unbelievable. Young males under thirty years of age in their first tour of duty in America seem starved for work. They toil ten hours a day - amazed that they have more money in their wallets in a week than they once had in an entire year.

I sometimes think that only the vast contrast with Mexico keeps the illegal alien in America alive; only the memory of the former harshness of real hunger, dirt floors, untreated illnesses and outdoor privies in Mexico steels him for what he must face in America. I once asked two raisin-tray rollers how they felt after ten hours of labor on their knees in 110-degree weather - "Better than in Mexico," one said. I thought to myself, "Well, better than in hell too, I suppose." I paid them $100 each, but noticed that their car's starter was just about out, and figured they had rolled all day for the cost of getting home.

To talk with these young men is to hear of extravagant
dreams
 
-
all culminating in a grand and permanent return to their village in central or southern Mexico: a ranchero, a new block house, two Chevy pickups, alligator boots, black felt hat, jewelry - all the Mexican signs of material success in America. Of course, the university activists who see themselves as illegals' advocates ridicule such notions of instant wealth as impossible to garner through unskilled labor. But they err in two ways: Much of the wages for yard work, cement, roofing and farming is paid on a cash basis, without the deductions for Social Security, Medicare, workman's compensation, state and federal taxes - the miasma of debits that easily can shrink an American's paycheck by a third to a half. Our young professors at California State University, Fresno, some with Ph.D.s from Berkeley and Stanford, will be lucky to take home $2,000 a month after deductions - appearing on the pay stub in some ten categories including state, federal, Social Security and Medicare taxes, health, dental and vision insurance fees, state retirement, parking and union dues. Some undocumented workers in construction can put in 200 hours of work per month, and at $10 cash per hour they match the English professor - without the tie, the decade's worth of degrees, the need to master the lingo of postmodernism, and the entire drain of life insurance, lawn care and braces for the kids.

Second, there is the much-remarked-upon gulf between the cost of living in
California
and the cost of surviving in rural Mexico. Everything from tortillas to changing a tire is a fraction of the price south of the border. If the campesino can go south with a van full of consumer goods unavailable cheaply in Mexico - stereos, cell phones, televisions, washers and dryers - the daily tab to eat, sleep and relax in his home pueblo is otherwise rather low. The dream of the young worker, then, is that he might earn money as a Mexican in America and then go home to live like an American in Mexico.

There is also a third mystical force in play that explains the alien's zeal to work so hard to acquire American dollars for a dream of retuning home. Mexico is a hierarchical society, where skin color, accent and ancestry determine one's social place, from the upper echelons of Mexico City to the governor's office in
Yucatan
. Not so in America, whose crass plutocracy has always valued money above breeding, diction, education, even hue and religion. In this connection, I think of Pepe Madrigal, who used to run crews of some six hundred men in
Selma
,
drove a Mercedes, had two diamond rings, and lived in a beautiful home in nearby Sanger, not far from my farm. A millionaire here - before the IRS shut him down for failure to forward the FICA deductions of his workers - he claimed that he was a virtual billionaire in his Mexican hometown. There, in the eyes of his former compadres, he was apotheosized from a rural campesino into a nuevo rico who claimed he could buy the entire landscape of his birth, its petty aristocrats, snobs and bigwigs thrown in for good measure. ("Hell, I'll buy the church and the padre too if they will sell it," he once remarked to me.) For the rustic Mexican who occupies the bottom rung of a static society and has virtually no chance of upward mobility, America represents not just an escape from drudgery, but the phantasm of redemption - a way not so much of getting rich, but of getting even.

Yet most Mexicans in America never return home permanently, and the dream of Pepe Madrigal remains mostly a fantasy; Mexico, after all, is still a class-bound society where an Indian with ample capital can never quite make it. Oh, they may go back and forth yearly, but few choose to stay south. And here we collide again with the dilemma of illegal immigration. For all the brutality of America, the immigrant senses a weird sort of kindness here. Or at least he senses the presence of a select and liberal group of Americans in health care, law, education and government who feel it is their duty to help him, of all people - the lowly immigrant! And their efforts are not paltry. The well-intentioned Americans can deliver to the illegal immigrant housing, medicine and food at a level beyond almost anything found even among the well-off in Mexico City.

I often fly eastward via Phoenix with aliens from Fresno on their way to Guadalajara; the overhead compartments on the plane are stuffed with wrapped fishing rods, fax machines, and boxes of vitamins and medicine. But what follows from that? Is there an ophthalmologist in the town square back home to treat your glaucoma? Can you show up with a 103-degree temperature at the local clinic and be given an instantaneous shot for strep, with free sample bottles of new antibiotics accompanied by kind words of encouragement from a
Stanford
Medical
School
intern? And will your children come home with notices from the local school advising you about free study halls, college scholarships and mental health counseling - along with a printed lecture from an ambitious principal about his own proven commitment to "diversity" and the richness of a multicultural perspective"? Is there a chance that being "Hispanic" in America bodes better for your children than

remaining
an "Indian" in Mexico? The finest universities of Mexico do not scout out Indians from
Oaxaca
to redress historic imbalances in their enrollment; America's Ivy League does.

No, the immigrant senses that - whether out of altruism, guilt or coercion - the crazy gringos in America treat him better than his beloved amigos in Mexico. So it is harder than one expects to cut this new umbilical cord he has grown in America. Tricky also it is to forsake the mall, the summer blockbuster movie fare, or the free and modern emergency room. Mexican television in America broadcasts not dry notices of immigration reform or Mexican consulate seminars, but splashy Jerry Springer-like talk shows, where Chicanas with dyed blond hair, breast implants and bare navels wiggle in the audience and chatter in hot tubs, unlike anything that used to be aired in the village plaza in Mexico. America, it turns out, gets into one's blood. A Mexican once told me, "I'm Siamese twins - my Mexican and American heads so glued together I can't turn in either direction."

But just because the illegal alien visits Mexico without staying permanently does not necessarily mean he is happy in America. Within three years - five at most - a series of stark realizations about the United States begin to crystallize in the mind of the alien. Most of those under twenty-five that I encounter are perpetually smiling. They bounce, not shuffle, on the sidewalk. They laugh out loud. Not so their elders forty and above. I see the Great Awareness etched on their faces. These guys grimace and wave their hands in anger, exhibiting more frustration than can be attributed to the ambiguity of middle age.
A Mexican male who may be fifty often looks sixty and walks as if he is seventy.

He begins to see that he is the beleaguered root, while a myriad of others are the fleshy stalk, leaves and fruit of the immigrant experience. He goes to bed at 9 P.M. so as to rise at 4 A.M. - unlike the others who profit far more and off him. In his immediate circle there are the contractors who take him to work and bring him home. For that easy effort, they make not $10 an hour, but $100. (Californians deplore the dismal safety record of farm labor vans.

Hundreds with crude wooden benches, no seat belts, bald tires and intoxicated drivers, overloaded with fifteen workers, overturn each month - prompting the California Highway Patrol to bring in new rules, inspections and education programs. We lament all that, but must remember that these mobile coffins are not "vans" so much as taxis, which can bring the unlicensed and unregulated owner-driver of a dilapidated $600 vehicle a profit of over $1,000 a week.)

The agricultural leeches are only the alpha, not the omega that surrounds the unskilled laborer. Beyond them is a virtual army of parasites. The coyote who smuggled him in makes tens of thousands of dollars. The forger who gives him the false identification earns hundreds. The landlord who rents him - and two others
-
 
the
use of a bed, not a room, garners as much or more. The woman who provides him sex, the local market that cashes his check for a cut, the used-car salesman who has him sign twenty-two pages of guarantees for a car with a cracked engine block - all these and more profit from the arms and back of the illegal alien.

Soon he butts up against the bizarre and pricey world of white America - the strange country that sends things in the mail and on time like parking tickets, hospital bills and collection notices, and on occasion can haul away your car even as you sleep should you not pay the final $300. I have had dozens of aliens bring me all sorts of byzantme papers, from welfare applications to 1-9 forms; often they are bewildered and at times outraged that such mystic runes should apply to them and that I, with a Ph.D., cannot figure them out either. Better, they finally say after I have thrown up my hands, to ignore them - or in extremis hire a sharp Mexican abogado who knows the ropes.