The Visitors

We were the lucky ones. Our house—the Gashouse—didn’t have wheels, it didn’t move, it stayed in one place, and it had heat, a stove, running water, a toilet. My father had a steady job. Everyone knew we were the lucky ones—everyone knew we’d made it. In Michoacan, my father’s family (sisters, brothers, cousins) spread the word about my father’s good fortunes. There was a rumor that we were rich, that my father made so much money that my mother didn’t have to work, that I had my own car, that we lived in a mini American mansion. The rumor was somewhat true: my mother didn’t have to work, but only because my younger sister was mentally ill, and my mother had to care for her; I had my own car, yes, but I bought it with my own money, money I made after school, and during the summer, when the white kids in school went to Idaho and Montana and Disneyland.

Every year a new group of refugees would arrive in the middle of the night to ask for my rich father's generosity. They would come in June and leave in November. My rich father never said no. Although our mini-American mansion only had two rooms, a family of 6 or 7 would stay with us, disrupting whatever sense of normalcy we’d developed over the winter months. They would sleep in the living-room and, against every protest, in my room. The house was abuzz from 3:30 to 6:45 in the morning when the last guest would go off to work the tomato or the garlic fields of Southern Monterey County. The Gashouse would loose its familiar gas smell for a few hours while the women prepared the mole and roll the burritos which they stuffed in thermoses and lunch-bags.

One visitor I remember clearly because he slept in my room on a couple of extended stays. His name was Miguel, and he snored, smelled, and stuttered when he spoke. He had a clock which kept me up all night with its tick-tick-tick-tick. I was used to the mice in the stove, the snoring, the smells, but I couldn’t stand the tick-ticking of the clock.

I could never understand why my father couldn’t say no to our visitors. Perhaps he wanted them to keep thinking that he had what he hadn’t--I'm sure they didn't think this for long. Maybe he was just being kind. My mother and I resented them all. I dreamt of stuffing a shoe in Miguel’s throat every night around 1 a.m., after I had tried in vain to sleep amidst the thunderous snoring and the hammering of the clock. I ended by smashing his clock to bits and blaming my little brother, Art, who could barely pick up his bottle, much less smash a well-made American clock to bits.

Miguel was killed in a car accident one winter while driving back to Mexico. All my hate and resentment turned into despair and sadness. I wish I hadn’t broken his clock. I wish I had talked to him about his dreams, maybe I could write about them, or use them in a lecture.  He did tell me once that he wanted to marry a gringa so that he could get his citizenship papers. 

Something on the news about immigration reform got me thinking about the visitors today...I think it was a gringa voicing her concerns about the guys who hang around Home Depot. 

Old Immigrants

My father will be 59 this fall. He’s been working the fields of the central California coast for 40 years. He lost his job last year, and has been collecting unemployment for a number of months. If anyone deserves unemployment “benefits” it’s him, so I never asked him about looking for work or encouraged him to do so. I figured that a guy who’s worked 7 days a week, every week, of every month, of every year for the past 39 years, deserves to rest, at least before regretting never having enjoyed life in America at least one year. But his unemployment is running out. This, together with the fact that he’s driving my mother absolutely bonkers, motivated him to ask his old boss for a job—a guy who swore he would get my father work whenever he wanted it and who just happens to have a new crew working the fields in King City. His old boss, a devout Christian who doesn’t miss an opportunity to preach charity and good will and the magic of Jesus, didn’t hesitate to tell my father that he was too old to work, that if he were 15 years younger, then he might be exploitable, but not at 59! My father said fine, and resigned himself to despair and the memories of a different sort of discrimination. I called him and told him that we should get a lawyer and sue their asses for age-discrimination. What for, he said, they’ll deny it and say that they just don’t need men right now. Would a Christian lie? I asked. Surely, if questioned about his reasons for not hiring you, someone who believes in the Resurrection would tell the truth. My father, who usually doesn’t say much, didn’t say much. “Umm,” he said, “I’ll go ask Rusty if he has work for me.” Rusty is a guy he worked for when we lived in the Gashouse…I have my doubts about my father’s future in the business. Old immigrants are expendable.

The Haunting

After a few years of living with my grandmother my father built us our own house on the banks of a river which ran red as blood most of the year (it was red because of the clay). A small 10 foot-wide road ran in front of the house, into and through town, and continued on into the mountains and then on and on north until it reached the heart of Mexico itself.  This road was used by the revolutionary soldiers during the war—my grandfather’s uncle, I.S., was an ally of the cause, so it was a "friendly" road during those days. As the soldiers headed into the hearland, into war and possibly death, they would bury their belongings on the side of the road, in small holes on the ground or in the hollows of trees, or behind fences. Sometimes they owned gold or money, which they stashed on their way to fight, in hopes, I think, of coming back; most didn’t. 

My uncle, who lived next door to our new house, found a sack full of gold pieces next to his fence. This made him a rich man. When my father was building our house, he dug up some pottery. Those helping him stood around it and asked him to break it and see what was inside. But they jinxed the deal before they cracked it by making elaborate plans with the riches they still hadn't seen--it was a well known fact that you should never spend a dead man's treasure before you have it in your hands. When they cracked it, there was a lump of clay inside. My father threw the broken pot into a trench and poured cement over it. Someone told him that this was a bad idea, since the spirit which guards the pot was sure to continue guarding it, which meant that our house would be haunted. My father has never believed in ghosts. He has no religion. 

We moved into the house before my father finished it. He had to return to the States to work, so he left it without windows (just boards) or locks on the doors (thicker boards) and no electricity (candles) running water or toilets—we had an outhouse. One night, as we lay in bed (I slept with my mother when my father was gone…with ghosts and the spirits of dead soldiers around, why would anyone sleep alone?), and as my mother finished her prayers a light appeared on the hallway. It slowly climbed the hallway wall until it stood suspended halfway between the floor and the ceiling. We looked behind us, as someone might have been shining the light from outside…but we had no windows, and the boards which covered the window-space were tight and nothing was coming from outside. We turned to the light and it loomed there, now with bright sparkling stars in its center, now with colorful boarders, purple, I think, which vibrated. I held on to my mother hoping the entity would not attack or swallow us whole. My mother prayed hard, since, as a good catholic, she has to believe in ghosts.  After a few minutes, the light crawled down the wall and sunk into the floor like a melting ice cube. Then it was gone.

I don’t trust my memory on this one. I think that the constant retelling of the story added details that were never there--I just don't know which details are ornamental and which are real. My mother says she remembers it clearly, and blames my father for throwing that pot into the foundation. We had a conversation not too long ago about getting some money together to dig the thing out and rid ourselves of the spirit which guards the pot, and many pots like it up and down that road and all about the banks of the red river. I was joking about it; my mother was writing things down. But I know there’s not enough money for that, though—or enough determination. Besides, why invest in ghost-eradication in a place which will never be our home...not again, anyway. No one is going back there alive, I know that for certain. It’s too late. 

On Death and Poodles

The irrigation pipe is aluminum, about 12 feet long, with a smaller, 2 foot pipe sticking out of it atop of which is stuck a sprinkler head. These pipes are connected each to each for hundreds or thousands of feet, depending on the size of the field. My job—my father’s job—was to disconnect these pipes one at a time, move them about 20 feet away from their original spot, on a parallel line, and reconnect each pipe again. This requires walking through 2 feet of mud, or 3 feet of whatever plant is stuck to the ground, in cold, heat, wind, and hunger. Sometimes the pipes are still filled with water; sometimes animals will crawl inside and die; sometimes they’re empty, so the wind whips them about.  One of the guys who walked ahead of me was whipped about by the wind which forced him to tilt his pipe upwards, juggling it he stumbled backward, and in the process hit an electric wire which fried him on the spot.

The big local news on television that night revolved around a woman whose dog had been eaten by another dog; the former was a poodle, the latter a stray dog. The dog was caught and killed. The woman, white hair trembling in the wind, cried and begged the public to look after their dogs, lest they kill or be killed in this horrible, violent, world. 

On Death and Ducks

The ancient philosopher Anaximander said: “Whatever has come into existence must also pass away with necessity.” It’s the necessity of passing away which is hard to grasp—especially when we’re used to presence. But death is shocking, and discombobulating, and noisy, and it disturbs the permanence that presence promises.


I remember my first death: a friend of my mother died when I was 9. She took me to the burial, to a town called Villa Mendoza (where my mother was born). Before they put my mother’s friend into the ground, they dug up the woman’s mother, who had been dead some 10 or 15 years. A group of men lifted the broken up coffin from the earth and placed it next to the grave. It was rusty, and the glass was broken, it was muddy on all sides. I didn’t want to look inside, but I did. The skeleton of the woman was fully dressed in a dirty white dress. She had long hair. Her jaw was gone. She was partially submerged in a rust-colored water. They put her daughter in the hole and then the mother on top of her. Two coffins in the same grave…to save money. My second death came much later, when my grandfather died. He was 91. We expected it—I was old enough to know that his passing away was necessary. And after that many more deaths. Too many to count. Each with its own distance. Each with its own denial.

My father took a bus down there for my grandfather’s funeral. He was gone for a few weeks. In the meantime, I learned Algebra and shot my sister in the arse with a .22 caliber rifle. The Sheriff came and asked for the gun. I told him it was an accident, that I was shooting at ducks in the nearby reservoir and one of the bullets ricochet off the water and went looking for my sister, who at that very moment was bending over to pick up a shinny thing on the ground. I wasn’t arrested, but it was close. The doctors who took the bullet out said that if she’d been standing upright or been a little bit shorter I would’ve killed her. I expected my father to unleash the hounds of hell when he returned from burying his father. I told him as soon as he walked in the door, to save me the agony of waiting for the fury. He just asked how my sister was. I said she was fine. I didn’t understand where he was—I do now, but only from this far-away space that projects back a belated empathy and a voiceless compassion. I hover over the rest of their experience in this way.

More Tales from the Gashouse

Somehow I had a room to myself. It lacked insulation, so it was cold and damp. It had blue walls and a window that didn’t close—the screen was gone. My parents slept in the livingroom/bedroom with my sister and my brother on the foot of the bed. Because of the cold, I used to sleep with my clothes on. This saved time in the mornings—I didn’t have to get dressed to go to school, and I was warm. I spent the evenings in my room, thinking about how cool I wasn’t, thinking about the girls I crushed on at school, thinking about the money I didn’t have—regretting everything I had said that day to everyone. I lived in the immediate past.

Since we lived in a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I had to go into town to hang out with my friends. This involved buying beer and drinking under a bridge by the town’s golf course. We drank and talked about what we didn’t have and how we would get it; we drank and plotted strong armed robberies that never took place; we drank and designed our future custom cars; we drank and predicted the best ways to die—we paid no mind to the reality of death, only to its possibility…we were children. After our drinking and our planning and plotting, I would go home and wait for the event. My father, it seems, was tired of his marginal existence and the only way he could express his marginality was through violent rejections of his present condition. He was a black-hole of rage and desperation, sucking everything into his center, luring everything and everyone into his event-horizon where we stood mesmerized, afraid, with no choice but to fall head-first into the clamorous darkness of his soul breaking. I would wait for these events—which happened often. I anticipated them and held my breath. But I had to be there, or else they wouldn’t happen. I had to be there, you see, because they had to happen. The happenings unraveled always in the kitchen, next to the stove, by the flimsy kitchen table, and the chocolate-brown refrigerator.

The Epiphany

When I was 12 my father seized me up, pulled on my arms, kicked my foot with his foot, poked me in the belly with his index finger, and concluded that I was fit to contribute to the well-being of the family. He looked me in the eyes and told me in a loud, angry, voice, that he would no longer clothe me. If I wanted to dress sharp, look good, or just stay warm, I’d had to buy my own shit.


I worked with him in the fields from then on—until I left for college when almost 18. I worked in the summers, starting in mid-June and going ‘till mid-August. Whatever money I made I kept. It usually wasn’t much. The first check was $80 dollars—for the whole summer. I made it by tying rubber-bands over cauliflower leaves—a practice meant to protect the cauliflower head from some harm or other. I wasn’t fast enough to make more than a couple of dollars a day. I bought a pair of pants (Levis’-$24), two T-shirts (plain-$20), a pair of shoes (Addidas—$30), and a necklace that I wear to this day, for which I put my last $6 as a down-payment. When I was fourteen I got a permit to work after school. I would hurry home and put on my boots, meet my father’s mayordomo outside the house and do as he said. This paid a bit more: about $25 a day.

When I was 17 I knew my father’s work. I knew what I needed to do and I did it well. But it was hell. On a warm summer morning in 1992, as I finished moving a heavy aluminum pipe up a green carrot hill, I looked over to my father, who did the same thing some 50 feet away, and yelled: “I don’t’ want to do this anymore!” He didn’t hear me, but I heard me. It was the first time I’d heard anything for years. I shook the mud off my boots and went for the next pipe. But I had a sense that I had made a decision and, for the first time that summer, I was really fucking happy.

Tales from the Gashouse 2

A mechanic welding a piece of steel to a tractor started a brush fire that sped toward the house. I saw it from the step, where I sat staring into the giant eucalyptus trees which hovered above us like gods. I was looking at a nest at the very top of the one closest to me, where a giant bird had once lived. Someone shot it in the chest with a .22 caliber rifle while it perched in its nest a summer before. It was a beautiful bird. I found it dead in the grass and fed it to my dog.

The fire sped quickly. I grabbed a hose and confronted it. The mechanic ran after it with a jacket, swinging it wildly, hitting the fire over the head, hoping to knock it out and stop it from burning us all to hell. My fear was that the fire would get to the propane tank, which sat two dozen feet from the front steps of the house. I poured water on the tank, hoping to get it ready for what might come. I turned my attention to the fire which slithered towards it, as if looking for a fight. I poured water on its head while the mechanic kicked dirt in its eyes and hit it with his jacket. It died.

The mechanic thanked me and walked back on the black earth to what he was doing before. I went back to my step and thought about the explosion that I had just prevented.

It was a Sunday afternoon. My father had fallen asleep on the sofa. He’d been drinking and watching soccer. My mother, pregnant with her fourth, was knitting on the bed. She came out because she smelled smoke.

“What’s the smell?”

“The mechanic burned the grass.”

“Well at least the fire didn’t make it to the tank.”

“Si.”

Smoke hovered over the patch of black earth. It didn’t rise too far into the atmosphere. I was happy something had happened.

The Gashouse

In exchange for housing, my father would put in a 24 hour work day, taking naps here and there throughout the night. The specifics were these: from 5:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. he would work in the fields, moving pipe, digging ditches, unplugging sprinklers with a wrench (mice would get stuck in the pipes and the water would force them out in pieces through the sprinkler head), driving tractors, weeding, and the rest. He’d come home and eat, drink a twelve-pack or two, and fall asleep on the couch until 10:00 p.m., at which time he'd go turn on water pumps, check on reservoirs levels, and chase deer away from the crop with a .22 caliber rifle or a flare gun. He’d do this 3 or 4 times a night…every night.


The housing he got in exchange was criminal. When we first arrived in San Lucas, CA., we were put up in a small trailer that smelled like rotting flesh in the summer and wet dog in the winter. Later, in the fall of 1985, we moved to "the house where I grew up." This was an old decrepit house which stood in the middle of hundreds of acres of farmland. It was immediately surrounded by giant Eucalyptus trees which rocked and swayed during earthquakes and perfumed the air with the smell of medicine and Spring. They encroached on our entire existence, like guardians or annoying animals. Inside, the house was painted a light blue, had thin, worn out brown carpeting, and a yellow kitchen. The bathroom was small and cramped and the linoleum floor was peeling off. There were holes everywhere: rats and mice would watch me pee while eating popcorn with their friends. When I sat on the toilet, they sat on the edge of the sink and stare right into my eyes. They walked on my face when I slept; and when I woke up, they’d jump out of my shoes. At night, they’d play in the stove and it sounded like a million mice typing Shakespearean plays. They damaged the stove and the pipes and the house smelled like gas for years. My mother left a window open to let the fumes out. But the gas was in my palette when I drank milk or ate donuts; if I didn’t smell gas, then something was wrong. No one ever complained, because that wasn’t our style, but my headaches and my asthma went away when I got to college. My sister, who was born in 1989, has severe mental handicaps...who knows why. My father used to smoke in the house and no one ever pointed out the obvious—I guess there were things more explosive than gas in those days--especially when my father was around. I got used to the sound, the smell, the sights, and the vertigo of that house—I got used to its symbolism and its danger, to its weather and its geography; but I never got used to the gas—it was the smell of death or some unknown disturbance.

Morons and their Ideas

If the following had happened 35 years ago, I would've received the best private school education an immigrant farm-worker's salary could afford! Brilliant!

GOP bill aims to retool immigrant birthright citizenship

Stephen Wall

Republican lawmakers in Congress are sponsoring a bill that seeks to abolish birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents.
Federal law automatically grants citizenship to any person born on American soil, regardless of the immigration status of the child's parents.

Supporters of the bill say that many people come to this country for the express purpose of having children who are American citizens, making the family eligible for welfare and other government benefits.

"You have many people coming to this country illegally," said Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, a co-sponsor of the legislation. "They come to this country and have babies. The children are citizens. The children are eligible to go to school. They receive food stamps and social programs. The American taxpayers are paying for it."

The bill does not seek to change the Constitution, which grants birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868.

Instead, it would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to clarify the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

The measure would limit birthright citizenship to children born to at least one parent who is either a citizen, lawful permanent resident or actively serving in the U.S. military. The legislation would only apply prospectively and would not affect the citizenship status of people born before the bill's enactment.

If the bill passes, people on both sides of the issue say it is likely to be challenged on constitutional grounds. "This bill is unconstitutional," said Rep. Joe Baca, D-San Bernardino. "It would change one of the most basic principles that our nation was founded on: If you were born in the United States, you're an American."

Second-Hand History

My grandfather was 9 years old when the Mexican Revolution broke out. He lived in Acuitzeramo, Michoacan, somewhere in the middle of the state, currently 3 hours by car and but back then a few days by horse from Mexico City. His uncle, a guy I'll call "I.S.", joined the “bandidos,” or revolutionaries, and befriended Zapata’s general in the state, another guy named Inez Garcia. Once a month for years, Garcia would march his soldiers through town and would demand to be fed by the locals. My grandfather’s job was to gather all the unmarried girls and take them to the hills that surround the town. They would hide there until Garcia left—for obvious reasons. I.S. wasn’t liked very much by the towns-folk. In fact, those that remain still despise him. The towns-folk didn’t care for the revolution. My grandfather died in 1992 at the age of 91. He didn’t tell me the story—I was too young to care before we left and in the process of learning verbs and English conjugations when he died. My father told me the story after I named my son “I.S.” having no idea about the infamy of this name.

Migrants

I was a “migrant student” until the 10th grade. This meant that I got a free lunch at the school cafeteria and all the Spanish classes I could handle. I developed some guts sometime in the 5th grade and I protested: I wanted to take “regular” classes! With the gueras! I was tired, I told my ESL teacher then, of learning about “apples” and “green” and “run”—I was bored. She said I wasn’t ready. “Ready for what,” I asked. “For English,” she said. I asked when I would be ready. She said: “Well…there’s a lot to learn” and held up a 8 x 11 card with a picture of a guy in a red sweater acting out a verb…I think he was running. I told my mom about it when I got home and she assured me that my teacher knew what she was doing.

My mother was very trusting about other people’s best intentions for us back then. She had confidence that no one meant us harm. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to make noise. Maybe she thought that as long as she kept quiet, no one would notice us. We hid like this for years. In fact, both her and my father got used to hiding, to keeping quiet, and to the silence that comes with that. I guess it's one of those things you do when you come to believe that you're trespassing on someone else's land--or rather, when you're forced to believe it. It took me a while before I got the courage to vote.

The Great Resolution

The headline to the statement below was something about the Obama administration’s fragile hold on the Latino electorate and how it all depends on promises made regarding immigration reform. It was a paragraph, but I schematized it some. I lettered and numbered it so as to really absorb its genius. It reads:

(A) White House spokesman Adam Abrams said the president wanted to sign a bill that strengthened border enforcement and
(B) cracked down on employers "who exploit undocumented workers to undercut American workers."
(C) He also said the president wanted to resolve the status of 12 million people who were in the U.S. illegally,
a. "that they should have to register,
b. pay a penalty for breaking the law
c. and meet other obligations of legal immigrants such as
i. paying taxes,
ii. or leave the country."

(http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100215/pl_mcclatchy/3427344)

Without getting all poli’ical n’ stuff, I’d like to point out how asinine this statement is.

A is ridiculously empty. Of course, the job of a president should be to sign bills that strengthen border enforcement. One of the essential requirements of Nationhood is that it has borders and that they are protected. So every President since Washington been signing bills that “strengthened border enforcement”—this is nothing new.

B just says: “don’t hire illegals or you’ll get it…you’ll get it good.” Again, every president since I’ve been alive has made this threat. The interesting thing about this quote is that it adds that the “undercut American workers” bit. So here we have an interesting logical situation: if the exploited undocumented worker does not undercut American workers, then ...what? Most “illegal immigrants” never undercut American workers. I have never seen an “American worker” cut lettuce for a living—work that requires one to bend over for 12 hours a day 7 days a week without the possibility of a chiropractor…in the mud and without being allowed to spit or pee or talk or shit for fear that wiping will contaminate the hands and in turn the lettuce…. So B is idiotic.

C: Once, while driving past Little Rock, Arkansas, I saw a billboard that caught my attention. It said: “God wants the 11 million illegal aliens out of our country.” I guess God doesn’t always get what God wants, since the number is now 12 mill—this was in 2004. The Great Resolution, or C, will take a variety of forms, each with its own moral twists: a: they’ll register, and wear an I for illegal; b: they’ll register, wear the I, and pay for it; and c: they’ll register, wear the I, pay for it, and (i) pay taxes or (ii) leave the country. Which means, of course, that if they pay taxes, they can stay…or not.

The Great Resolution is, again, nothing new. Most illegal aliens already pay taxes in the hope that they’ll be able to apply for residency one day, at which time they’ll be asked: have you paid your taxes? At which point they can say confidently: well, yes, I have all these 1040’s stretching back 24 years. And, as per certain implied agreements, they’ll be allowed to stay...or not...usually not.

This all means one thing: Obama can easily keep his campaign promise by doing exactly what has been done before. The Illegals, of course, will keep on paying taxes and if they’re "asked" to leave, will leave and turn right around.*

*at the risk of saying way too much about my political sensibilities, I voted for Obama and will continue to support him and his administration. But this policy, or its representation in the media, just sounds illogical...and that's upsetting.

The Crossing II

My parents were in the hotel room with us when I woke up. My mother was asleep in one of the beds, with a red bandana on her head. My father lay next to her—they were both covered in dust and strands of yellow grass. My sister was in my mothers arms. I don't remember were she came from. Anyways, I was happy they weren’t dead.

We were rounded up at about noon and packed into a truck headed for Anaheim. No one said a word. I remember the silence and the fear. After a while, my mom started a conversation with another lady about the weather. I think it was hot in the back, so the conversation was natural. Then the woman said that they had almost gotten caught the night before, but, that as luck would have it, the migra’s truck had overheated and they were able to run for it till they found a hiding place. My mom told her that they had crawled through a tunnel to get across; that she was on her knees for about 4 hours; that the smell of dead bodies had made her throw up; that the dead body was a woman’s. She told me that story many years later, and I recalled the trip to Anaheim when she did.

My father slept next to me with his hat half-covering his face, as he does. It had the word “KING” sewed on it in the shape of a crown (now it sounds like I’m making this image up to reference some sort of unconscious projection on my part, but everyone I knew had a hat that said KING on it. I learned later it was an agriculture supply store in King City, CA. where my father, and everyone he knew, bought their work boots…and their hats). The truck stopped a couple of hours later--or was it days? My father paid the driver and we got to Anaheim. We went into a McDonalds with our bags and my father bought us food. It was the first time I had seen them eat in two days. I fell in love with McDonalds that day. It was the greatest, best smelling, and most delicious place on earth. We had arrived.

The Question

Someone asked me the other day: “Why is it difficult for Latinos to understand philosophy?” The question itself is quite innocuous, as it merely meant to ask why it was that there were so few Latinos who either studied or taught philosophy (as I do)? So I think that by “understand” the person meant “be interested in.” But, as innocuous as it is, it demands an answer, so this is what I said:

It is not a matter of understanding, but of exposure. The idea of "philosophy" does not jive with other ideas familiar to Latinos; it does not "fit" into the Latino picture of the world in any easy way. There are different associations Latinos make when they think of filosofos—and they’re not always positive. However, Latinos are, in fact, extremely philosophical; just listen to our music, attend to our views on death, birth or family, read our literature. I think my father is one of the most philosophical persons I know--he has a conception of human experience similar to the famous Scottish philosopher David Hume. My father is a skeptic, but a philosophical one who recognizes the limits of his skepticism and, in turn, the limits of human reason. But no one would ever refer to him as a philosopher, except, perhaps, to mock him. This referral, I think, would require an exposure to philosophy and to the Western idea of the philosophical life that only higher education can provide; this exposure, furthermore, would require the Latino community to encourage their youth to pursue philosophy as a discipline, which will never happen so long as the purpose of going to college is to get a job and make money.

I'm not saying that Latinos need to study philosophy. The situation is the same with any other discipline. The idea here is that from the beginning my world-view has been limited to my experience, which in turn has been limited by the experience of those around me, but most importantly, by the experience of those I love and respect. My parents could never have encouraged me to pursue the humanities in college, not from any fault (or wisdom) of their own, but because, for one, the concept of the humanities didn’t appear on their radar—it wasn’t part of the conceptual scheme which determined their experience. This is one of the reasons why I claim to be a “second generation immigrant”: my life up to now has been a series of trespasses and relocations, a continuation of the first generation’s journey, but without the violence and death.

Philosophy II

When we returned to California in 1984, my father took a job on a ranch just north of San Luis Obispo. Four of us lived in an old trailer parked beneath some oak trees. It was a decrepit place (I’ll get to that later). Sometime toward the end of 1984, the Rancher—his name was David, a Texan—informed my father that he would be unable to pay him for some time, as the Ranch was in financial trouble. Toward the end of 1985, David the Texan had yet to pay my father for an entire year’s worth of labor. He told my father to keep a diary of his “hours” so that, once the Ranch turned a profit, he could claim his pay. By the end of the year, my father demanded his pay, since, for one, we were starving to death. David the Texan told my father that he would have to wait a while for his money (“till hell freezes over”), and that if he (my father) complained, he would have him arrested and deported. Marx turned in his grave.

Those diaries forged themselves into my memory—I can see the yellowish paper, my father’s clean, refined, almost aristocratic handwriting, the way he wrote the number 9 and the word Sunday. I remember David’s mustache and his detestable 5 foot frame, his broken Spanish and his yellow teeth. Oh, memories!

This brings me back to Agamben’s homo sacer. The “sacred man,” he says, is one who cannot be sacrificed but whose murder is not a homicide. In other words, while homo sacer cannot be thrown into the volcano as a gift to the gods, killing him for any other reason is not a crime. The “illegality” of immigrants (and the consequences of this) comes to mind: we cannot round-up (logistically, at least) every illegal immigrant and place him/her in chains (which would be akin to sacrificing them for the sake of Sovereignty) but we can pick them out individually and rip them to shreds (symbolically, at least) without fear of reprisal. Sure, I might be taking too many liberties with this concept. But the thought of David the Texan, who could not sacrifice my father in any way, instead stripping him of his labor and dignity without fear of retribution by State or man, makes my possible misapplication feel right.

Speaking of my mother

At age 16, my mother was kidnapped by the man who would become my father in a brazen night-time abduction involving a horse, a gun, and a funeral.

The man had met the woman a few days before while she walked home from church. He’d stopped his car besides her and asked for her name. Giving the man her name was an invitation—the man asked if he could visit her at her home and talk. She reluctantly said yes. The next day the man showed up to her home and asked her father if he could speak to her. The father said yes, so long as he stayed outside and she stayed inside with the gate to the outside half open. They spoke for a couple of hours. She recalls his face: she didn’t like his face, it was reddish around the cheeks and white around the forehead. She didn’t like where he was from and she hoped he would get tired of standing outside and leave. On the second day, he asked her to be his girlfriend, to which she said no. This, of course, and they both knew it, meant that he would try to “take” her—as it was common in those days in the early 1970s (yes, you heard right, the late 20th century!). On the third day, her mother died. The funeral lasted a few days, prayers and arrangements had to be made. On the last day of the wake, she saw him circling about in a black horse. On the day of the burial, while she walked home with her sisters, a car pulled up with 3 or 4 men—all strangers—and told her to get in the car. Her sisters knew what was happening, so they waited for it to end. Two of the men dragged her into the car and took her to my future father’s house, whose family waited for her arrival with food and music.*

A few days after the incident, and after my mother’s father was notified (a moment in the event known as “las pazes”—or the peace), my future mother and my future father were married in a small civil ceremony by a municipal judge. In the presence of that judge he made her one promise: he would take her to el Norte as soon as he could.

*(That this practice was customary does not take away from the terror of that event, which haunted us both for years.)

Ombligo II

The “post” in “post immigrant” refers to that complicity of which I spoke about before. It could also refer to the presence of a shared trauma—how could I not share in the trauma of separation, of longing, of criminality, of exclusion, when even if I am “legally” exempt from it, it constitutes me? I’m sure Freud or Lacan have something to say about this. I’ll look into it (or not).

Going back to my father’s buried belly button. This is that part of the umbilical cord that remains attached to the newborn after the "unplugging"; it dries after a while and falls off. My mother saved mine, too. But, since they were constantly on the move, she never buried it. I saw it about 15 years ago. It was in a blue, pleather suitcase, wrapped in a white towel. It looked like a slice of dried nectarine. I’m sure it’s been lost by now, eaten by ants, or perhaps it’s wandering the planet looking for me. If I were to find it, what would I do with it? I could bury it in the back yard of my house, which is not technically my house, but belongs, rather, to capital, which belongs…blah blah blah. I would probably carry it with me everywhere I went—in my wallet, next to a poem I’ve been carrying around for 13 years. It’s by Robert Hayden, and the first stanza speaks volumes:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fire blaze. No one ever thanked him.

That “No one ever thanked him” is the reason I carry it around like I do—among many things, I am guilty of that, too.

Ombligo

My father was laid off this past year after the guy who ran the company which paid him (the plantation owner) embezzled $40 million dollars! This is the first time in my father’s entire life that he has been without work. The work that he does is not enviable: it is dirty, muddy, sweaty, wet, all-day, deadly, back-breaking work which pays just enough to sustain him so that he can keep his heart pumping long enough to die just before he’s supposed to collect his pension. He’s a farm-worker, like many immigrants, past and present. But, it’s work. And now he’s without it. He walks up and down the house all day infuriating my mother—he’s like a caged animal. So, this past summer, he decided to go back to Michoacan for the first time since 1984.

Of course, nothing is like he left it. His parents are dead. His siblings are dead. The house in which he grew up is in ruins, swallowed up by vegetation like an ancient temple. He spent a month just walking the old trails he and his father used to walk when he was a child—through mountains rich with history but not much else. He tells me with uncharacteristic enthusiasm about the day he rode a horse to the place beneath an elm where his belly-button is buried. My grandfather dug a hole and stuck it in deep, then rolled a giant stone on top of it. He told him: aquí estas enterrado, mijo. That was over 50 years ago. With his belly-button buried in a hole in the hills of Michoacan, it’s easy to understand why this man, my father, never found a real home elsewhere—the umbilical cord which ties him to his land, to his past and his destiny, to his burial, is much stronger than the seduction of the “American dream.”

Philosophy I

Philosophers talk of immigration within the sphere of a moral/political philosophy which considers the rights of people and the obligations of others to guarantee those rights. There’s a great deal of discussion, in this sense, about criteria for citizenship and the State’s obligation to its citizens. Ultimately, the discussion settles on conclusions which favor the immigrant experience as something completely a-political, as a natural experience in which all humans are capable of participating. The Italian literary giant/critic/philosopher Umberto Eco goes so far as to say that the most accurate term for this experience is “migration” instead of “immigration,” whose heavily politicized connotations belong to a political discourse of exclusion and persecution. I don’t think that changing the name will change our perception of the experience which the term seems to designate. In fact, in the US it is only “immigrants” who are a problem, not refugees, not exiles, not migrants.

The English philosopher Michael Dummett ups the ante by calling immigration a “human right” (On Immigration and Refugees). The only time when a country can limit immigration across its border without violating this human right is when its “indigenous populations are in serious danger of being rapidly overshadowed” (52). We’ll just assume that we are all in the US, and most of the Americas, due to some magical amnesty that absolves us from guilt. Dummet’s is a strong requirement with little to no application.

Even more interesting for us are the remarks of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. (It is interesting to note that all of the three figures mentioned here are European. That says something.) It is Agamben’s famous works, State of Exception and Homo Sacer, which really frame what could be considered a philosophy of immigration—both because of certain phenomenological insights which really touch upon the reality of the immigrant experience and because of their moral significance. In Homo Sacer, Agamben refers to individuals who exist in the law as exiles. This, the homo sacer, or the “sacred man,” is one who both must obey the law and who is excluded from the law’s protection. Immigrants are homo sacer if just because, at the most basic level, they pay taxes but lack the rights afforded to every other tax payer. Agamben argues that these laws of exclusion give the homo sacer his identity as an outsider. This analysis is amplified in State of Exception where such a state “marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur…and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real referent” (40). The immigrant identity, as the immigrant experience, is codified in in large part because of these exceptions--exceptions which reflect both a love for our fellows and an intolerant, nationalistic, fear of their otherness .