Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Hanson (books for 7th graders txt) 📗

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. MontereyBay 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