Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (22 page)

‘It's not bad,' says Michelle. ‘It's safe; I stay at school till six o'clock to get my homework done.' Do they know she's homeless? ‘I didn't tell them.' Why not? ‘They didn't ask.' This means she does not show up on New Mexico's register of homeless children, which already numbers 5,500.

She's trying to keep her Latin dance class going; Larry is still working on his screenplay ‘about a biker who gets accused of doing something he didn't do'. His eyes drift towards some inner memory, and Michelle smiles. Larry says:

The job market was supposed to make progress a little in May, but it levelled off and now it's dropped back. The government needs to stimulate this somehow: they're not very imaginative—they need to look at how Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it. It's a lack of vision. We managed to keep our apartment for an extra twelve months because of the stimulus money, so I don't know what they are talking about when they say cut the Federal budget!

It's from Larry that I hear the beginnings of what Steinbeck heard sixty years ago: the simmering wrath of Americans who regard themselves as ‘middle-class' but have been thrown into penury. They express thoughts you never hear on the holy-rolling radio stations. Larry says:

How much does it cost for one fighter plane or one bomb? And we're not doing anything to stop terrorism—just blowing people up and pissing off the rest of the world. They're getting stronger and we're getting tired of it: and there's some money that could be cut loose instead of wasting it on that. One multi-million aircraft could sure feed and house a lot of people.

A few mattresses away are Maurice Henderson, Roseangel Ortiz and their three children, including Maurice Jr, four months old. Maurice Sr, who's African American and built like a football player, begins the answer to every question with a three-second silence, during which he takes a deep breath, stares intently and eventually manages to stem his inner rage:

I was an auto fleet maintenance mechanic; I've been unemployed about eight months. I was living in a motel. Nice motel with a full kitchen. And my unemployment ran out: I couldn't certify Sunday, so Monday I had to be out by 12 a.m. We called everybody, but…

He does an awkward grimace to indicate the end of the story. He's just managed to sign on again for benefits, and expects $200 in the next few days. But this will barely cover nappies and juice for the kids, certainly not re-entry into the ‘nice motel' sector. How come somebody like him ended up here?

‘I could go get a job, but the kind of jobs I could get right away are not going to pay me as much as I get on welfare: eight dollars an hour.'

Where would you start to put things right? He stares over my shoulder, searching for a way to put this nicely. ‘Needs to start with President Obama.' What does he need to do? ‘Help! Start helping, and he
is
helping—but people gotta help too—stop playing games.' He is bitter about the war spending:

‘They say they're spending too much Federal money, but on what? Too much money on that war they got over there. Sure, they created jobs, but …'—and Maurice heaves another deep sigh—‘if you're not the first layer to get there, you're not getting the job.'

Hostility to war spending and bitter disillusion with President Obama run through this dormitory like a grassfire, and there is more. A man crawls over to me across two mattresses crowded with his own large contingent of children:

I'm a Native American, we're Navajo. What I want you to report is: where is all the money going from the casinos? Our nation has a casino but they keep all the money. It's the same everywhere. Why don't they use the money to help their own people?

In the morning Reynalds takes me to a street corner, right by the Interstate, where the poorest motels are clustered. Outside one stands a drunken woman in tears: her sister is about to be evicted, together with her sister's boyfriend, who's in a wheelchair. ‘He's disabled, but they don' even have a shower.' Reynalds and his co-worker go into the Evangelical spiel that will soon bring three more people to sit around the table and hear Bible stories, repent and put their heads down on a clean mattress.

He tells me: ‘The motels fill up at the beginning of every month, when the social security checks get paid; and then about two weeks later they migrate over to Joy Junction, as the money runs out.'

He's not against these cheap motels, because, while they will sometimes ask the unemployed to work in return for their keep, they extend unofficial credit, and if they didn't exist there'd be thousands more on the streets. There are at least fifteen motels like this in Albuquerque, he says, and, of course, ‘It's like this at the edge of every American city.'

This is what the automobile stupor and the bluegrass music and the Glenn Beck monologues numb you to as you speed along America's highways. Those vintage motel signs, which summon up the era of Elvis and full employment, are in reality flagstaffs for the hidden homeless. They are right next to you, on every highway in America.

And, just like in the 1930s, there is a president in the White House elected on a platform of hope, radicalism and concern for the working poor. And like in the 1930s, Congress is determined to stop him—insofar as he has not stopped himself.

As I leave Albuquerque the landscape becomes drier. The spectacular red canyon walls of the Mogollón Rim dwarf the mobile homes of the Pueblo nation, whose land this once was. There are no Native American shacks in Steinbeck, and no red canyons; no giant cacti, no endless days of blue sky, no vast gulches and ravines. That's because Steinbeck himself never made the whole journey.
The Grapes of Wrath
gives little sense of the vastness, the emptiness, the distances of the south-west. To real-life Okies, this land must have seemed like a different planet.

But Steinbeck's book isn't really about the journey. It is about the conflict and injustice that the Joads find at their journey's end: the strikes, vigilante squads, roadblocks and anti-migrant prejudices that greeted them in California. Today, you don't have to get to the end of the journey to find all that.

They call you Alien

They were hungry, they were fierce, and they had hoped to find a home. And they found only hatred.

Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath

Phoenix, Arizona.
It's a world of pink and green: the tent awnings are olive drab army-issue, ‘from the Korean War', says the prison guard proudly. Pink is the colour of the inmates' socks, towels, pillowcases and underpants: it's been chosen to humiliate them. Their overalls are, of course, striped black and white. Their skin, in the ICE wing, is usually a shade of brown.

This is Arizona's notorious Tent City jail. The ICE wing is where those arrested for migration crimes are segregated: about 100 men out of 500 in the jail. They live in the tents twenty-four hours a day, the side-awnings open to the elements. As they crunch across the gravel in the harsh sunlight to fetch water, they sling their towels around their necks: the guard yells at them if they try to cover their heads. On the day I was there the temperature reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit, but it's been known to hit 122.

In heat like this you mostly sleep; numerous young men are stretched out on the close-packed bunk beds. Others read: there is a high level of literacy in Tent City, and a low level of menace and craziness compared to other jails. That is because most of these men are not hardened criminals: their crime is being Mexican.

In May 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law called SB 1070. This required migrants to present proof of their legal status on demand: if stopped for speeding, if questioned at work, if questioned as a witness to a grocery-store heist, if noticed existing by a bored cop. It's a crime if you cannot prove you are American.

That's a problem: officially there are 11 million undocumented migrants in America. Unofficially, it could be as high as 20 million. In any case, around a million live in Phoenix, Arizona. You can see them hanging out for work on the corners of the car parks at big hardware stores; their hands wash the linen at hotels and make the burritos and the tacos in fast-food joints.

Migrant children already had poverty, dislocation and the language issue to contend with (Arizona declared itself an English-language-only state in 1986). Now they have something else: the skin-crawling fear that if your mother goes to the corner store she will not come back. Leticia Ramírez, mother of three and an activist in the migrant group Puente, tells me:

We are living in a state of fear. We can't even go to the store—can't even go out to the park, the zoo, the mall—because the kids fear the police might stop their parents. So we just stay home. They say: ‘If you go out, you may not come back.' One family bought three months of groceries so they don't have to leave the home.

To enforce SB 1070 and the other laws that criminalize Hispanic migrants, Phoenix has Sheriff Joe Arpaio. And Sheriff Joe has Tent City, and boy, is Joe keen for the media to see Tent City.

My guide, John, a prison guard, is dressed in Iraq-style combat gear and carries a Taser on his belt. As we pass the row of blue telephones, positioned in full sunshine on an outside wall, John tells me proudly:

‘The phone calls are at a premium price; we make 'em pay over, to help fund the cost of their own detention.'

In fact, much of Sheriff Joe's operation here is designed to keep costs down. The tents themselves are sixty years old; there are only two meals a day, ‘to minimize catering costs'; the guards drink out-of-date Gatorade. There are no heating expenses in winter (on the coldest desert nights the inmates steal plastic refuse sacks to stuff between the sheets); and the a/c in the prisoners' mess room comes cheap—as one prisoner says, sotto voce: ‘They only turned the a/c on for you.'

The average sentence they're serving is twenty-six days, the maximum a year. After that they'll be processed by ICE, the Federal deportation service.

Fernando López's mistake was to drive without a licence: he couldn't get one because he has no documents to prove he is a legal migrant, and that's because—though he does not say the words to me himself—he did not come here legally. In June 2011 he got stopped for speeding.

They took me to Fourth Avenue Jail, Arpaio's jail. They questioned me for four days. I won't lie to you—in the first twelve hours they must have had me in eight to ten different cells. It's a psychological game, the way they talk to you, even look at you. You don't see the sun; you don't know what time it is. And they're always telling you: sign this and you'll be deported immediately. But it's not true. I refused to answer questions and didn't sign, so they made my process even longer. They took me to the ICE department—eight hours; then Florence, a Federal clearing jail, for three days; then detention. I was there for a month—for a traffic violation. When you're there you don't have a name: you're just a number—and they call you Alien, like you're from another planet.

López is slight and soft spoken: he leans forward to explain in a semi-whisper the effect of Arizona's ‘attrition' law: ‘They cannot deport eleven million people, so they play this game. They are trying to scare them, so they don't have any other option than to leave—they are going to make us self-deport.'

When I ask if the strategy is working, he answers with a question: ‘I don't know if you've heard about NAFTA?' He says the trade deal between the USA and Mexico, together with other bilateral deals, is making poverty south of the border worse:

When I was in jail I met guys from El Salvador, Ecuador, Honduras—conditions are really hard—they cannot live there; they got no option but to go to other countries. It's not that they want to be here, but they just don't have any other option. SB 1070 won't stop them coming. Arpaio made videos of prisoners in the chain gang under the sun: people see this, but they still come.

Latino migrants work, but for precious little: it is a certainty that the impact of illegal immigration is to reduce wages for people like Maurice and Larry in New Mexico, who are US citizens. Fernando tells me that some of his friends are working a 100-hour week, for below the minimum wage: housekeeping, landscaping, kitchen work.

‘They should be creating jobs instead of jails, building schools instead of jails.'

But as Fernando and I sit there in the sweltering heat of the migrant centre, beneath posters with the slogan ‘We Are Human' and a grimly humorous bumper sticker saying ‘I'm Mexican, Pull Me Over'—President Obama is getting ready to sign away two trillion dollars' worth of money for building schools and creating jobs. His only beef with the majority in the House is whether it should go to $2.5 trillion.

‘I don't trust him,' López says, pointing out that Obama also promised a law to offer illegal migrants ‘earned amnesty'. But that did not happen.

In fact, by the summer of 2011 Obama was in trouble: healthcare reform got whittled down to a minimum and was now gridlocked at state level; a law to lift obstacles to trade union organization never got to first base; the promised pullout from Afghanistan turned into a surge of troops; and the Dodd–Frank Act, aimed at curtailing the power of Wall Street, had become a toothless object of derision on Wall Street.

But Obama was so determined to stick at two trillion dollars' worth of cuts for the needy—instead of $2.5 trillion—that, at one point, he walked out of negotiations with the Republicans. ‘I'd rather see my presidency destroyed than give in on this,' he's reported to have said. And this rancour, this left—right stand-off, is now buzzing and twanging on every radio station as I head out of Phoenix, west, for California.

A museum of the twentieth century

As I leave Phoenix the radio sings out adverts for repossessed ranches in the desert: ‘You can hunt there, ride—anything you want: it's your ranch!' urges the disc jockey. It's a reminder of the basic problem: America had a house-price boom that is now bust—and twenty years of credit-fuelled growth are over, so even the mild recovery in 2010–11 is failing to create jobs. Meanwhile, the money that fuelled the recovery has pushed America into deep and unsustainable debt.