Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (9 page)

Such lawyers, in fact, abound for taking care of things that finally can no longer be put off - everything from workman's compensation claims to personal injury suits. Remember, the alien legal industry is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that ultimately depends on the backs of those picking, pruning and cleaning. Mostly, lawyers are there to "help" you find papers, bring up your mother, avoid jury duty, buy a house, start the process of citizenship, evade deportation - all at $100 an hour, "special" for a fellow paisano. The Fresno Bee is full of their ads. On Spanish-speaking television they are every bit as obnoxious as English-speaking shysters. They are amusing to the white legal community - snobs and fools who have no idea that a good Spanish-speaking lawyer with a mail-order degree who specializes in immigration or civil law can make far more than a Boalt Hall graduate in Sacramento's top firm.

The alien realizes that even his nether world of undocumentation is still not so
undocumented
. Even if he sleeps in a southwest Fresno apartment building, paying $200 a month for ten hours' use of a bed; even if he catches a ride in a labor van for $10 round-trip; even if he buys beans and soda in bulk at Food-for-Less for $100 a month, there are still those who can steal his $3,000 roll of cash - legally and with impunity - and all in the noble service of keeping him in America, out of jail and away from notice. Rodrigo Pena, a brilliant crew boss, summed it up best for me something like this:

There are only the two kinds who go to the bank - those to check on their money or those who go to get some. No m-betweens. $25,000 in cash a year isn't bad, but
walk
into a bank with that and try to get a loan, and they point you to the door. Mexicanos are the only people with cash stuffed in their pockets and still are worth no money.

Chewey Escobar, now thirty-eight, whom I met when he was looking for work at fifteen, at last has noticed that all the people in the American Southwest who do the least sought-after work are, like himself, Mexicans - whether washing windows, making beds at the hotel, hauling trash or picking lettuce. Why is this so? Chewey has a vague idea that the absence of education, degrees, contacts, perfect English and years (if not centuries) of family roots in America can mean that you blow leaves while some pink person in slippers and bathrobe sips coffee and watches you from a glass-enclosed solarium by the pool.

Someone like Chewey cannot help but think something like: "I work, she does not. I sweat and lift and pick, and they sit and talk." Envy, it turns out, is a powerful new force in the life of the alien - especially when so often he is not mixing with America's middling classes, but hired as a gardener, nanny or unskilled laborer by our more affluent. That I tell him there are millions of poor whites who far outnumber impoverished Mexican-Americans makes no impression; it is the contrast - Mexican help, white helped - that he is obsessed with.

Since the age of Cortes, Mexico has been a distorted medieval economy in which a few thousand manorial families own the entire country. But even this great disequilibrium of wealth in a feudal Mexico is not
so
psychologically injurious to the peasant as is the ubiquity of the American upper-middle class. In Mexico, real money is far distant, never sprinkled about the countryside in the form of luxurious haciendas or sparkling condos. The far fewer Mexican wealthy act differently; they live in castles, so to speak, and remind you that they are the patrones, and not the sort of folk that clientes can chat with between spraying shots of malathion and Miracle-Gro on their petunias, as they do in egalitarian America.

You can snip the roses of an orthodontist who is worth a cool ten million and yet stands a few feet away from you, talking on his cell phone.
His garage, which you wheelbarrow weeds by, is filled with a Mercedes, a Lexus and a BMW.
You can skim his pool with Jacuzzi and treat it for algae while he sits by its side. In fact, you may be at his estate - painting, spraying weeds,
changing
diapers - more than he, who after all must somehow pay for it all. In America the wealthy - often rising from the middle and lower classes - are ostentatious, familiar, accessible, and so a generous and constant reminder that while you may be royalty compared with those of your station still in Mexico, you, the service worker, are still a peon in the American plutocracy.

The alien's water is, of course, as clean as a millionaire's. He drives on the same freeway. His windbreaker from Wal-Mart looks no different from the Wall Street tycoon's informal wear. All that and more makes America the most superficially equal nation in the history of civilization, where skill and luck, not just birth and breeding, gain money. America is what Rome once was to hustling Jews, Greeks and Numidians, whose millions of sesterces allowed them to buy the privilege of wearing an ancestral toga with a purple stripe and a signet ring of onyx - to the exasperation of old Italian knights.

But again, envy - what the Greeks called phthonos - is not logical. Rather, it is inborn in man. You can have ten times what you had in Mexico, but still be miserable that you have one-tenth what others in America do. In Mexico a flush toilet, clean water and a warm bath make you a rural aristocrat; in America, access to such amenities is expected and considered only the beginning of the good life, not the summum bonum. How soon one metamorphoses from being a guest grateful for the privilege of having plentiful, clean food to being churlish because his house lacks central air conditioning cannot be calculated exactly; but the divide between appreciation and resentment is not wide.

Many Americans who live in suburban houses, drive SUVs and go to a fern bar for predinner drinks have forgotten this age-old elemental drive to surpass your neighbor in the most visible ways. True, Americans engage in cold war over the quality of a rye-grass lawn or the size of a stained glass window on an oak front door, but they rarely feel in their gut the angst over working hard and sweating, trapped in menial labor in proximity to others who are not - and who are quite oblivious to one's plight.

So the alien must deal with a strange new schizophrenia that begins to consume him. Success in America is too often a relative rather than an absolute concept - and felt as such by the alien most of all. We are, after all, notorious for our constantly rising expectations and appetites. Many Americans no sooner have satisfied their material dreams than they begin to feel either bored or furious that someone else - someone "undeserving" or "lazy" - has more.

As the illegal immigrant begins to learn about this strange new country, he notices another truth every bit as bothersome as the gulf between the sweaty world of muscle-power and the air-conditioned world of paper-pushing. The immigrant life cycle turns inexorably: the wheel of fortune tears him up alive - unless he gets off before it begins to go south. The world of grapes, shingles and nails is a young fellow's universe. Between eighteen and forty the shoulders, back, knees and elbows can withstand the daily hefting, bending and pounding. Such bodies are paid that princely $10 an hour precisely for their energy and stamina. Cuts and abrasions heal in days, not weeks. Colds and flu do not linger. Time in itself is a swirl of emotion and sensuality, not a period for sober reflection that money should be bankrolled while cartilage is still supple and not yet arthritic.

I know this in my own bones. At twenty-six I could sulfur 120 acres of vines in a day, racing the tractor in sixth gear to cover ten acres an hour, oblivious to a sea of chemical and vineyard dust, careless as to the effects of pounding on the ears and the shaking seat on the kidneys. I liked the fact that I was not behind a desk. At dusk I could hop off the tractor and shower,
then
forget that I had ever spent twelve hours on the same seat, losing money for the effort. Not so at forty-eight - two hours on the Massey-Ferguson are misery. Grime in the nose triggers allergies; ears ring for days from the blast of the machine. The body can take two decades of such daily punishment, but not four. With increasing debts and obligations, I am now very bothered by the thought that I lose money sweating on the tractor, and make money only when cool and rested and sitting at a desk.

All these contradictions the immigrant also slowly senses as he looks at the weak picker in a crew of ten who at age fifty can scarcely scale the ladder. He doesn't like hombres with gray hair on a four-man gondola team. They are too slow and don't carry their weight in getting the cut grapes into the pan. They shuffle rather than trot down the rows. They represent his bleak future rather than his optimistic present. There is a reason why el jefe, the contractor, has a belly, ridiculous snake-skin boots, three golden teeth and a stiff cowboy hat that would blow off in a minute of real work: he is fifty-five, not twenty, a veteran of the fields, not an amateur, and often ailing and wizened rather than fresh and naive.

But the aging of the unskilled worker is not merely degenerative in the physical sense. It encompasses what one described to me as "the whole thing" - which I take to mean wife, kids, dog and house. A man alone may be wealthy even at $10 an hour; he is an utter pauper at the same wage with a pregnant wife, two children in diapers, and a three-bedroom apartment with a clunky car in the stall and one in worse condition on blocks.

If you chain-saw firewood or clean bedpans at the rest home, as a single person you can still go to the movies, eat out now and then, and put a down payment on a nice car. That freedom is nonexistent when there are six of you who depend on the wages of house-painting and brick-laying. The greatest hazard to the illegal immigrant is a large family - the truth that is never mentioned, much less discussed. Everything that he was born into - parents, priest, reigning mores - tells him to have five boys, better six or seven, to carry on the family name, ensure help in the fields, give more souls to God, provide visible proof of virility, and create a captive audience at the dinner table.

In contrast, everything America values - money, free time, individual growth, secular pleasure - advises the opposite. Quite often for the unskilled laborer, five children instead of two is the difference between death and life. I must mention here the even surer form of suicide: the presence of not one family, but two. A common-law woman and kids in Huron and a simultaneous wife with eight more in Jalisco prescribe a heart attack at forty. A tile setter I know tells me that he works every evening to pay for the wife and three dependents in Monterey, Mexico - and every morning and afternoon for the wife and twins in Madera,
California
.

Just as his body slows down, the alien's obligations mount. Such a physical metamorphosis is as apparent to him as a darting tadpole's change into a tired old frog. Quite simply, the last thing America wants is a Spanish-speaking man fifty years old with dependents but no skills and a bad back. He has a tendency to stay home more than he works; he is bitter rather than upbeat; his romance with America is now more like a nightmare. He can become a baleful influence on his numerous kids, who hear of doubt and anger, not of retirement accounts and a vacation home in the mountains. If we wonder why the hardest-working alien in
California
sires sons who will not do the same kind of labor, who have tattoos, shaved heads and prison records rather than diplomas, we need look no further than the bitterness of the exhausted, poor and discontented father. His back and knees, after all, won him no victory at fifty, but in his mind they won a four-car garage for someone else.

When the alien can no longer stucco a house or plaster a pool, most contractors must turn him loose - falsely confident that all those years of expensive deductions and bothersome paperwork should at least pay for workman's compensation, state disability, Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, unemployment or some other government dole that will keep a tired Manuel or an ill Ramon alive. Most aliens in their fifties and sixties who are worn out, obese, diabetic, alcoholic or injured stay indoors, do indeed live on some sort of assistance, and venture out for a day or two each week to pick a few plums, lay four yards of concrete, or dig some trenches for cash between afternoon cartoons and Oprah. Drive into any central California town at 11 A.M. and you will see hundreds of adult males walking the sidewalks, sitting in cafes, milling around at the stores, or loitering in front of their apartments - all of them not working, all of them on some sort of donation, and most of them wounded veterans of some of the hardest jobs in America. Our government says that local Central Valley towns experience a 15 percent unemployment rate. The naked eye suggests instead that a quarter of the populace lacks a full-time job.

Meanwhile, America needs replacements for these undecorated veterans. Thus an entire new cohort comes north to renew this strange, unspoken cycle in the traffic of humankind. In almost every city in
California
, there is a familiar street, park or lumber yard parking lot where dozens of healthy Mexican men, fifteen to thirty years of age, congregate to hire themselves out for a day as laborers - hoping that a contractor will bid well for ten hours' use of their backs. Because we are an instinctual, rather than an explicitly expressive, society, we have no placards on the
border
 
-
something like the entryway admonishment of Dante's Inferno - to warn the newcomer.

Beware all you who would enter. Here are the rules: You are welcome to work hard between twenty and forty. But then please retire at fifty and return home. Stay young, healthy, single, sterile and lawful - and we want you; get old or injured, marry, procreate or break the law
-
 
and
we don't.

The alien soon realizes that there is also an eerie disruption of his culture going on in the United States, or at least a complete reversal of what passes for normal in Mexico. America really is a revolutionary place. The shocking thing about the United States is not its burdensome traditions and stereotypes, but rather its sheer absence of shame and protocol - and of much continuity with anything past. To the alien that means muscles and manhood can mean far less than diction and looks. So far we have talked about the universe of the male laborer and the drudgery of the maid or nanny. But another strange phenomenon is also affecting the Mexican immigrant, one of radical gender reversal. Women in America seem to do better than men. They stay in school at twice the rate of boys. To establishment America, an attractive Latina with good English is much less threatening and more easily assimilated than a sunburned and calloused hombre who has not learned to say much more than "thank you."