My Mother’s Unspectacular Affair*

We had lived in the “Gashouse” for a few months when my brother was born. He was born in October of 1985; I was 10 years old. We’d been back in the States less than a year. My brother’s an anchor baby! When he turned three, he wanted nothing but to be outside, in the weeds, the dirt, mud, and hazardous materials, poisons, and sharp objects that populated the surrounding area around the house—we lived in the middle of a working agricultural farm, after all. My father was gone most of the day—starting at about 5 a.m.—and he would stop by once in a while throughout the morning just to see his youngest boy. I was at school. After lunch, he wouldn’t be seen until he was off work, at around 7 or 8 p.m.

My mother never left the house. She would take my brother out for walks around the God Trees, but she was tethered to the house by the gas leak. My father’s supervisor, the Foreman, began stopping by the house sometime after my brother turned 2 or 3—he got a kick out of him, his cheeks, and his penguin-like way of waddling about. He would chat it up with my mom and bring them treats…ice cream, chips, sodas. After a while, the Foreman would take my brother with him as he did his supervisory things around the ranch. He would take him to see my dad. My brother would ride on the Foreman’s truck—he loved nothing more! The bouncing and the dirt, the speed—it made him laugh and giggle. The Foreman would bring him back after a few hours and the boy would fall asleep on the couch, exhausted. This made my mother very happy.

A few months passed. That the Foreman would take my brother and tire him out was routine. My father expected to see him; my mother expected the break. At some point—I don’t know when—the Foreman began the ritual of waiting for my mother to put my brother down and hanging out with her, in the front steps of the house, talking. He was an average sized Mexican man with a Pancho Villa-mustache that made him look authoritative and elegant. He wore a baseball hat and his pants were never as muddy as my father’s. He smelled like Old Spice and Spearmint gum. He didn’t smoke or drink. He later died of testicular cancer. It was the first of many deaths for that group.

They became closer as they talked. I don’t know what they talked about most of the time. I wasn’t there. I would see him leave when I got home from school. I became jealous once and asked my mom about it. She said she was just talking. She seemed happy. Relaxed. She walked with purpose. I had never seen her like that before. When she argued with my father, it was easier to tune him out. She did. He screamed, but she didn’t care. She walked confidently through the terror.

After a night of violence, my mother pulled me into the bathroom and told me that she was leaving with the Foreman. That he had asked to go with him—where, I don’t know—and that she was ready to do it. That she had a real chance at happiness, and she was going to go for it. That I would see her later…when things with my father calmed down. I asked her if she was having an affair with the Foreman. She said no. But that the long afternoon conversations where enough reason to follow him to the ends of the earth. I don’t know what he told her, but it must’ve been promising.

She didn’t leave that night. She never left. But she knew she could…or she believed she could. The Foreman was married. They had no children. He lived in a trailer with his wife. She was pushy and overbearing. He was ready to leave. My mother’s imagination took over from there—anything was possible with the Foreman. My father, whom she had never agreed to marry in the first place, didn’t appreciate her like he did. The spectacular affair lasted months. He never crossed the threshold of the house. He never climbed a step. He just made gestures with words which glided out of his mouth, filtered through his Pancho Villa-mustache, and punctured holes in my mother’s reality.

My uncle, my father’s brother, found out about the affair one day when he was coming to the house to pester my mother. He told her that if she didn’t sleep with him, he would tell my father, his brother, about the goings-ons with the Foreman. My mother said nothing was going on with the Foreman. He cornered her and insisted. I came home just as he was making his move and kicked him out of the house. I think I threatened to kill him. I was about 13, but I think I would’ve tried. Dejected, my uncle told my father about the affair. I corroborated my mother’s innocence and my uncle’s perversions. My father, for once, believed us. But the affair was over. The opportunity had passed. The Foreman died a year later, and so did my mom’s imagination.

*By writing this “memory” down, I am crossing a very thin line that I had drawn for myself a while back. I had deemed certain things un-writeable, and, some, un-recallable. Their sanctity lies in their silence: no one has ever spoken of them before, leaving them repressed in my memory to fester and make me ill. But I near the end of this blog-adventure, and I want to get some things out for myself…just to see them laid out in public, to insert them into the American narrative, if only in this narrative I’m creating and which I’m calling “American.”

Then there's Jenny, Part I

There was something liberating about our poverty. We knew exactly where we stood—what we had, what we didn’t, what we wanted but knew we couldn’t have. We knew that little could be taken from us; that death was a price we would readily pay. Of course I didn’t understand this last part. But I understood the rest.


The violence was necessary. It kept the place loud with voices. It made us bleed. And we knew we were human because we bled. Of course, the resentment was necessary, too. The hate. The terror. And this was normal. So when my sister, Jenny, was born we expected life to continue being what it was. There was something liberating about our misery: it couldn’t get any worse.

The cloud of pesticides that slept in our porch crawled into my mother’s womb and made a nest. There it lingered while Jenny was being shaped into her human form. When she was born in late December of 1989, she didn’t cry or scream. A few years later she matured into a healthy 3 year old; twenty years later, she’s still 3…or maybe 6.

This was different than poverty or terror. My mother asked God to explain this to her; she’s still asking. After all, this would be her burden. Doctors figured out early on that Jenny would not grow up. That she would not reason with us about the things she did or wanted or feared. But Doctors didn’t explain this right; they still haven’t clearly explained what it is that makes her who she is. This means that Jenny is alone in the world; that my mother is alone with Jenny; that to misery and terror we add solitude and insanity.

I don’t know what will happen to Jenny when my mother migrates to those unknown lands that Dante talks about. But it makes me sad. My mother is the only one who understands her burden—despite her resistance and her refusals.

The Point

Offenses like AB1070 invalidate the legitimacy of documents.

Documents

When my father first brought it home, he laid it on the table and stared at it for a few hours…drinking and thinking, maybe praising God (although, as an atheist, his God is the God of his mother, not his own—for if he had a God, He would be the silent type). I walked over to the table to look at it, too. So did my mother, although she had seen one before. It looked like…well, like an ID, except for the holograms and seals and multitude of numbers. It had his name, including that J which refers to his middle name, but which is not really his middle name, but his last name, or the name of his father’s father. It was, of course, green.

Emancipated, situated, defined, constituted: words made relevant for the first time by a document. A piece of plastic with ink, numbers, a picture, and a signature. The signature was his universal seal. It was his document; he had a name; he was a subject. After all of that, he could walk amongst the citizenry without fear. He could demand his rights. He could testify! At least in theory. But he was now different than his fellows, than those who surrounded him, even my mother, whose documents wouldn’t come for another 10 years. This document legitimated his status as a worker, as a legal entity, and, as a man. So long as he carried it, he carried the weight of a matanarrative that said he was not to be fucked with.

The news soon spread. Cousins, uncles, friends, came to the house to congratulate him and take a look at the thing. A cousin took his out and compared it with my father’s: “see,” he said happily, “mine almost looks real!” He had bought his at the Tropicana parking lot, in San Jose. It was then that I saw the document’s real power. Those that heard Cousin say this blushed—they felt sorry for him and his deception. He was a false man, a fabricated subject, an illusion! Sure, they didn’t say this, but they didn’t have to. Cousin’s subjectivity was tied to his lie. He was committed to it—in social spaces, he couldn’t take off his mask even if he wanted to. He was, in fact, still human; but only in fact. As an “undocumented,” he was still on the fringes of humanity—at least in the US. And they all knew it, or believed it. My father, on the other hand, was documented, written into the archives, into the narratives of the just and the free.

The Genius, I

The Salinas River crawls its way through the Southern tip of Monterey County, through the outskirts of King City, avoids Greenfield completely, and heads Northwest just before hitting Soledad. It is a shallow river, filled with more will than water, which surprisingly makes it all the way to the Pacific somewhere by Monterey. This is Steinbeck Country! Of Mice and Men takes place just a few miles from my parent's current home; East of Eden starts off half a mile from where I grew up. Steinbeck’s father claimed to be the first permanent resident of King City. I knew none of this growing up. I learned these things my second year of college, when I first read Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Small towns have this effect: they yank you out of history.

And so I thought I was a-historical. That everything I did was new; that no one had lived like me before. So I did those things which can only be done once; things which could only be done by me. For instance, no one had ever figured out how to grow secret marijuana gardens in public property until I came along. First, I drew a map of places I had found along the river bank where no one had been before; next, I cleared these spots of weeds and rocks, dug some holes in the ground, and planted the tiny plants all throughout the river bank, spread out about 15 to 60 feet. My most ingenious idea was to develop an irrigation system that I didn’t have to monitor. What was genius about this idea was its simplicity: I filled plastic bottles (gallons) with water, poked a hole on the side, and tilted them against a stick near the base of the plant: drip irrigation! I restocked the water supply every 5 to 8 days. About a month into my operation, my father grew suspicious of my late afternoon hikes into the river. He asked my mom what I was doing, and she said, “ask him!” which he didn’t, but I caught him following me in his truck anyway, at which point I took a different route to get him off my tracks and once he caught up to me I pretended to be immersed in nudy-magazines, which I carried everywhere with me anyway; he was embarrassed to have witnessed me spreading out the center-fold in the afternoon air, so he never followed me again, although he never stopped suspecting me of some sort of trickery, of which I was completely guilty. A few months later the plants blossomed. If you looked closely from far away, you could see them radiating green in concentric circles all around them: they were the greenest things around. But, in those days, no one was looking closely. And, besides, I was a genius, and since no one had done this before, no one bothered to look for it. But now that they were ready for harvest I encountered a new problem: how to get them out of the river bank and into my house. My father detested drugs and everything that they stood for. He called them (drugs), “la chingadera esa.” That fucking thing. So he would say things like: “you better not be doing esa chingadera!” Or, “I don’t want you near Ramon; his uncle likes esa chingadera.” He never called weed marijuana or cocaine cocaine…so I was stuck. I was 16 years old, with thousands of dollars waiting for me, and all I had to do was figure out a way to cut it, smuggle it into my house, dry it, trim it, package it, sell it, and not get caught doing any of those things. And I couldn’t trust anyone. Thinking back, if I had put the planning and vigilance that went into this project into my studies, I would’ve been a Rhodes Scholar!

Talking to my father about death, 2

The sadness is spreading. My mother calls at 1 p.m. and says she can’t get out of bed. That she feels like dying. She says my brother feels the same way. What are the dogs doing? I ask, knowing that we know how animals feel by the way they act. My father’s unemployment has run out; he has no job prospects. He gave it his all—he gave it away…he gave it when he had it, and now it’s no longer there to give, so there’s no hope—the work is done. I told my mother I was looking into field-worker retirement communities, where immigrants go to die in peace. She says that you can’t die in peace; that’s what death achieves, not what dying is like. I think she sound philosophical. But maybe I’m looking for wisdom in the sadness, in the helplessness. Maybe there’s none.

Talking to my father about death, 1

I think he’s dying of sadness. He’s unemployed, 59, and paralyzed by the failure of his American experiment. He sleeps all day, drinks till midnight, and dies a little each night before waking to find himself alive and un-recognized by his younger self, the one who dared, the one who sought a something long forgotten. My own successes (whatever they are) only remind him that maybe he already did what he was meant to do, to carry me as far as those lines on the floor which father’s don’t cross, and drop me off and see how far I got before I start seeing the lines on the floor myself. And I can’t accept that: that he had no other ambitions, no other dreams, than to open up paths for me! He tells me that a $25,000 IRA he rescued before losing his last job should buy a casket and the hole in the ground where he’ll be buried. I tell him that we have time to discuss this. But he already made up his mind. He’s resolute in his commitment to the impossible, like always.

Getting Even With Pablo*

My mother's cruelty had its limits. She would, for instance, pray for the sick if they were "really" sick and not just "pertending"--she claimed to have an uncanny ability to tell the sick from the pretenders. She would also defend animals of all sorts when they couldn't defend themselves, but so long as they were not guilty of any crimes against her person or property. If animal or person (kin or not) dared cross the line, her fury had no equal...at least to me. Pablo benefited from her saintly generosity.

Pablo was a baby when my mother first brought him into the house. His mother had abondned him and, my mother said, he would've died out in the cold if she didn't bring him in. As a two-week old he was a small, furry, yellow ball of adoroableness. Because my mother had rescued him from the cold, he thought she was his mother. He followed her around like a normal depenant, although she never sat on him to keep him warm. She baptized him Pablo and loved him like a son.

Pablo grew up fast. He soon became an awkward teenager. His feathers were unevenly distributed, and his color was an off-brown; he looked like a mangled eagle or a recently rehabed vulture. My father came home one day and almost stepped on him; Pablo screamed, my father jumped and avoided falling by holding on to my neck, he chased Pablo all over the house, cursing and throwing whatever he could find in Pablor's direction. Pablo ran to the kitchen and took cover behind my mother's legs. My father yelled: "Let's eat that fuckin animal already!" and "What's he doing in the house?" My mother responded clamly: "Leave him alone" and "you need to watch where you're walking." It was during this time that I realized that he was a part of the family and not just a charity case. More than that, Pablo knew he was my mother's ward. She was his protector.

In a year, Pablo was clucking his way about the house with his chest out and his long tail-feathers, beutifully colored, fanning the air behind him. He fuckin annoyed me. He was a cocky little cock (actually, he was a fighting cock who had never thrown a punch). But my mother wouldn't kick him out, even though he was already full grown. He slept in the porch, in a box with blankets and water. He'd wake everyone up at the crack of dawn, which sucked for everyone but my father who had to go to work, and for my mother who packed my father's lunch. In other words, it sucked for me.

At some point, Pablo realized that I was his competition. He'd stand outside my bedroom door and murmur some demonical verses in his own chicken language. I'd throw my shoes against the door to scare him off; I could hear my mother: "stop that!" and "you're gonna break that door!" and "don't make me come in there!" Fuckin Pablo. I'd get up at about 7 and get ready for school. Pablo would charge me and pick a fight. I'd rush right at him hoping he would't move so I could kick him in the face. But he would run and find my mother, who would tell me to sit the hell down and eat my breakfast. I'd get my backpack and walk out the door. Pablo would walk me to the stairs and watch me leave. We would stare at each other and wish each other ill.

My guess is that he was good company for my mother, who from lack of papers had to stay home and avoid dealing with the inevitable existential boredom which pervades all of Being. Pablo lived with us in the Gashouse for what now seems a good lifetime. One cold December morning it was the silence that woke everyone up. My mother walked to the porch to find Pablo frozen stiff in his luxury box. The cock was dead and I could't help but feel...exhuberant. My mother, I can only guess, was sad about the tragedy. My father, who had come home to pick up a jacket, grabbed him by the tail feathers on his way into the kitchen and put him in a pot of boiling water. By 7 a.m. he was defeathered and cut to pieaces, soaking in a pot with carrots and squash. When I got home from school I had chicken stew. Pablo was tough; his leg muscles strained my jaw muscles. The meat was dry. I asked my mother for his heart and ate it with a bit of salt. It was chewey and tasted like blood and vengance--or maybe life and ipseity. Fuckin Pablo.

*Thanks for the title, Jeremy W.

Illegals, Entrepreneurs, and the Free Market

I grew up in a town where 90% of the people were farm workers; another 3% were unemployed; and 7% owned the farms where the workers worked.* Nowhere was this division clearer than in school, where 60% of the students were the children of the 7%. When I graduated high school—because I did, after all, graduate—all my friends, who had not and could not graduate, were not allowed into the stadium were the graduation was held (because of their respective “affiliations” and their status as unwanteds). The stadium was filled with the 7%ers and their children, friends, and others; my friends, dozens of them, leaned against the chain link fence which kept the haves inside the stadium—they cheered when my name was called. My friends made up the 3%, above.


The 90% (mostly illegal aliens who immigrated from Mexico) were hard-working people who had been coming and going for decades, working the garlic and tomato harvests, paying taxes, supporting large families back in Mexico, all the while struggling to raise their children according to American customs which they didn’t really understand. Those that failed made up the 3%, who, confused and marginalized, took to gangs, drugs, and guns to assert their role in American culture, even if that role was the one reserved for those who justify police presence and prison funding.

Ultimately, the 90% kept that town alive.

I heard Rafael Anchia speak not too long ago. He’s an impressive politician from Texas—a Democrat from the 103rd district. Some have high hopes for him. He called illegal immigrants “entrepreneurs” who must raise “venture capital” (the money it takes to cross the border) in order to fund a “start up” (the journey to find a job) which they hope will thrive in a difficult and risky economic environment where death is very much a possibility. Speaking to a large group in the Silicon Valley, Anchia’s message resonated with everyone there. He asked: in these times, wouldn’t it be better to have more entrepreneurs rather than less?

Republicans, when they stop inhaling glue long enough, have begun to see the economic benefits of illegal entrepreneurs. They question the value of less illegal aliens on the very foundations of our free market system. I hope this kind of thinking continues. But there’s a lot of glue!

On the Road

I'm taking this show on the road! I'll be presenting a paper on all of this nonsense (the theme of the Blog, that is) in Oregon (Society for Philosophy and the Contemporary World) in two weeks. Here's the "Outline"--the paper itself is long and more nuanced, with arguments and such.

"Philosophy and the Post-Immigrant Fear"

Introduction

• The specific purpose of this paper is to explore and then expand on Jorge Gracia’s reasons for the apparent lack of Hispanics in US philosophy (i.e., in his 1999 book: Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective). I will narrow my focus to a specific sub-group of the philosophical Hispanics Gracia considers, namely, “homegrown” US Hispanics. This group, Gracia says, are entirely missing from the “established” ranks (Gracia mentions 6 established Hispanic philosopher in the US, all foreign born). Introducing a first-person phenomenological perspective, I propose an explanation which I think captures my experience as a homegrown US Hispanic, one which has given rise to a sense of identity which I can only describe as “post-immigrant”; those who share in this identity, I suggest, desire but hesitate engaging philosophically with their own experience as post-immigrants, particularly when the post-immigrant is one who is also a degree-bearing member of the philosophical profession. The reason for the absence of homegrown Hispanic philosphers who are also willing to engage issues related to their circumstance as Hispanics boils down to what I call, “the post-immigrant fear.”

Section 1: From Marginalization to Avoidance: Gracia on Hispanics in US Philosophy

• Of 316 philosophy programs surveyed in 1992, the number of Hispanics who are either full or part-time faculty members is 55; in 1995, there are 68 full time and part time Hispanics in those programs. Generalizing to the number of programs represented in the American Philosophical Association, this means that in the mid-1990’s, 2.2% of all philosophers teaching in the US are Hispanics; the Hispanic population in the US at that time is roughly 10%.

• Gracia: “First, why is it that there are so very few Hispanics who have become established in the profession in the United States? Second, why is it that those few who have become established are foreign born? Third, why are there so very few Hipsanic Americans in the profession at all? Fourth, why is Hispanic philosophy ignored in the philosophy curriculum? And fifth, why is it that Hipsanics-American philosophers are not attracted by, and perhaps even avoid, areas that have to do with their identity as Hispanics, whereas African Americans and women do not?”

• For ease, I call the first question the establishment question; the second question is the foreign vs. homegrown question; the third is the numbers question; the fourth is the curriculum question; and the fifth is avoidance question.

• Gracia: “My suggestion is that one reason behind all these facts is that Hispanics in general are perceived as foreigners; we are not thought to be “Americans.”..[Moreover] Hispanic philosophers are marginalized in the profession, and Hispanic issues and philosophy are regarded as alien to the interest of American philosophers.”

Section 2: Homegrown Hispanics and the Post-Immigrant Experience

• The concept of “post-immigrant” refers to individuals who are not themselves immigrants but for whom the immigrant experience itself is a historical, epistemological, cultural, or in any way existential reality. That is, a post-immigrant is the son, granddaughter, niece, or brother of immigrants who were born in Latin America, suffered the migration North, and settled as immigrants in the US. Thus, post-immigrants will usually be the children of immigrants, and not immigrants themselves who have somehow overcome their situation—thus, a post-immigrant is not a person who was once an immigrant and has left that label behind through the proper legal procedures, and is now a citizen or resident.

Section 3: The Post-Immigrant Fear

• The post-immigrant fear is the fear which keeps homegrown Hispanics in the profession, especially those who have come north and have crossed the socio-economic lines which define our immigrant experience, from writing, speaking, and teaching about Hispanic issues or Hispanic philosophy—it is what justifies our “renunciation” of the possibilities of such engagement. It is the fear of disenfranchisement, of exclusion, of arrest. It might be unconscious, or not something of which we are always aware, but it structures our very experience. Some of us will not admit the fear, since the admission says that we lack the intellectual courage which philosophers require in order to pursue truth to the bitter end.

Section 4: Conclusions

• The situation which Jorge Gracia described in 1999 has not changed much over the past 10 years. According to the National Science Foundation, 103 Hispanics received a doctorate in some field of the Humanities in 1988; this number doubled in 2008 to 206. These numbers are slightly higher when compared to Asians, African-Americans, and Native Americans. However, they are dismal when compared to Whites, who received 2564 PhDs in 1988 and 3009 in 2008. This means that just a couple of years ago, in 2008, Hispanics made up only 6.8% of all PhD recipients in the Humanities. The numbers of Hispanics who received a doctorate in philosophy are much lower. According to the same data, out of the 401 philosophy doctorates awarded in 2008, 10 went to Hispanics—that’s 2.5% as opposed to 2.2% almost 20 years ago! So, 10 years after Gracia published those alarming numbers, Hispanics in philosophy are still largely underrepresented in proportion to the numbers in the overall population.

Diet

Menu—September 3, 1987


Breakfast: 3 white-powder doughnuts; tall glass of milk.

Lunch: Cafeteria food, Santa Lucia Elementary School (Chocolate milk was surely involved)

After school snack: hot-dog franks with ketchup, cooked over the stove flame, burned, and cut into pieces for dipping in ketchup.

Dinner: beans and tortillas with Tapatio sauce while watching tv in the living-room, waiting for my dad to come inside the house; he’ll be out until the beer runs out or he gets hungry.

I was thinking about this last night because I’ve come to the conclusion that I have horrible eating habits. I blame my chilldhood. But I would’ve starved without this menu. It’s not that my mom was neglectful; we were just poor. We had nothing. The powdered-doughnuts were a luxury, but they were still cheaper than cereal. I was lucky I went to school—at least there I would get to eat a stale hamburger with soggy fries and green jell-o. My mother would try to make with what she had, but she only had what we could afford, and hot-dog franks were cheap and, if I ate a bunch of them, very filling. Sometimes, when we had eggs, she’d mix them in to the franks—delicious! Other times, she'd mix them in with nopales (which is a slimy green cactus plant), which I hated and never ate. On these occassions, I coocked my own and drowned them in ketchup and had a feast.

I’m trying to eat better these days, but everything is harder and less tasty than hot-dog franks with ketchup.

Finally!

This is awesome! http://www.takeourjobs.org/

Story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100624/ap_on_en_tv/us_immigration_take_our_jobs

Just a thought.

Cauliflower!

Cauliflower is beautiful to look at. It tastes great, too. If you boil it, cut it to pieces and put some salt, lemon, and chili powder all over it, you have a great snack—tons of fiber and absolutely delicious! You can also eat it raw. My father taught us how to eat the stem raw. Just peel off the thick, green, skin and sink your teeth into a sweet tasting vitamin bomb. He said that if we only ate the stem, everyday, we’d live to be 200. And we had a lot of it. Our house, the Gashouse, sat in the middle of a hundred acres of cauliflower fields. My dad was the guy who watered it. It greened up the world. I saw nothing but green from my window. And on windy days, all you smelled was green—it even ate the gas leaking from our stove.


Before the “flower” blossoms, the bugs are killed off. My father would drive around the fields putting up signs with a skull and cross bones that said: Peligro! This meant that we were not allowed to go into the field. A helicopter would wake us before sunrise: I could see the guy’s goatee from my window. He would spray the Peligro over the green. The Peligro was a white mist that smelled like….it smelled like meth! After a few days, my father would take down the skeletons and we were free to roam the fields and cut stems.

As soon as the white head of the plant grows bigger than a fist, it is wrapped up in its own leaves. A rubber band keeps the head inside its leafy cocoon. Illegals do that part of nature’s work. Bees are overly qualified. Days later, another crew of unwanteds comes and cuts the head off, wraps it in a plastic bag, and sends it to your kitchen. After all the heads are gone, a tractor comes and razes whatever is left. The next day the sun cooks whatever is laying on the ground. The air smells like rotting flesh. But it is not overbearing. It is a comfortable smell of death. It became familiar to us, like the Peligro and the green.

Those fields are our killing fields. I’ll tell you how later, even though it matters little to question the methodologies of death.

Landmines?

Fences. Rivers. Minutemen. Deserts. Guns. Deceit. Arizona. And now Landmines. I don’t know what to say about this. A patriotic American in New Mexico wants to put landmines on the border to keep "illegals" out and American greatness in. Obviously, this guy lacks the imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurship of those he's trying to blow up. I'm sure there's a guy in Tlazazalca, Michoacan, right now working on a teletransporter.

Anchor Babies?

So now Arizona is aiming to pass a law against “anchor babies.” These are the children born to undocumented aliens in US soil. They are called anchor babies because they are used by the undocumented alien as an “anchor” which ties her to the US—it is also argued that those with anchors “have hijacked the 14th amendment.” Anchor babies would—if this law passes, which I’m confident it will—inherit their parents crimes, and as illegal, would be born felons.

It is a matter of time before Meg Whitman, Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and the rest start the propaganda mill about anchor babies. If life begins at conception, as some believe, then these same people should call for the immediate forced abortion of all anchor embryos; immigrant illegals should be kicked in the stomach if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they’re carrying along anchors. They should put something stronger in the pesticides that are already killing and deforming children of immigrants—the hijackers should be gassed.

The logic of subjectivity is tricky. How do I navigate this new designation? I am one of these “anchors,” but I’ve always thought I was a citizen, and I tried to behave as such. How do we define ourselves when we have no “place” of birth? Or when our birth-place is no place at all, but a prohibited zone? What if we are born while our mother’s are trespassing? Don’t we belong to the master of the plantation at that point? Are we not “his” property? A strange anonymity shows up as a possibility of self-definition. Without a place of birth, things are not born. Are we, then, unborn? Yeah, it’s best to gas these vampires before they contribute to the prison population or the educated elite.

Dialectics

I was pretty upset about the whole anti-immigrant sentiment going around these days. Until I talked to my father about it. He reminded me that things like this happen all the time; that once in a while, history repeats itself, and immigrants are the first targets of hate and discrimination because they are non-citizents, which means, he said, they are “como perros”—like dogs. But, I said angrily, dogs in the US have rights; immigrants don’t. But, he insisted, maybe this is a good thing. Hate has a tendency to wake people up. Maybe something will come of this. My father’s a Hegelian.
I don’t know if I agree with my father-the-immigrant. But maybe he has a point. Maybe racists and xenophobes give us an opportunity to grow. In one of his earliest pieces, Karl Marx, speaking of the complacency of his own people, says:

“The point is not to allow the Germans a moment of self-deceit or resignation. We must make the actual oppression even more oppressive by making them conscious of it, and the insult even more insulting by publicizing it…So as to give them courage, we must teach the people to be shocked by themselves.”

Maybe it was time, again.

Dignity and Other Requirements

My father’s life as a mojado was negated by the persistent migra who kept on sending him back. Once in Nuevo Leon, Guanajuato, he was just another Michoacano who had gotten caught. He wasn’t a mojado when he drove into town at 3 a.m., drunk and full of life, singing and yelling for my grandmother from the other end town. He was just her son, who’d come home. The migra’s negations had their limits. It would’ve been another matter completely had they kept him here, in prison, without a phone call, a Sunday visit, or his dignity.

He was caught for the last time in Greenfield, CA., in the fall of 1971. He was stuffed in a green van, with other luckless mojados who couldn’t outrun the dogs, and bused to Oakland. There, he was searched and stripped of all his belonging, except the $100 that they all carried in their wallet for just this occasion. The $100 was their ticket home—the migra allowed it, out of human kindness. He was thrown into a cargo plane with the rest, and they were flown to Nuevo Leon. They were escorted out of the airport and told to go home…wherever that was. He had to make the money go a long way, so he only bought what was necessary: a new pair of boots, a sombrero, a new shirt, a belt, a bottle of tequila, and a ride back to Acuitzeramo, some hours away. If he’d been beaten by the gringos, he wasn’t going to show it—and besides, he wasn’t beaten at all. He still got to make his elegant entrance back into town like a returning World Cup champion. Sure, there would be no parades and no banners, but his mother would know he was back and if anyone would be awakened by his singing at 3 in the morning, they would be impressed by his shiny new boots and the proud and elegant catrin wearing them. The next day, he'd start thinking about the trip back up North…in 6 to 8 months.

The Skunk

My father made arrangements whenever he could. These arrangements guaranteed a roof over our heads, food, and work. The arrangements often involved a roof and food in exchange for work. It was clear that we would not be moving on up.

The trailer was located under a giant tree on the banks of the Salinas River in San Lucas, CA. It was old and had holes on the roof and on its sides—the fiberglass insulation stuck out of the holes, and often my mother would yank it out so as to patch up the holes with duct tape; often fur-less baby mice would fall to the floor and squirm and make a high pitch squeak before Mother-the-Hun would crush them with her heel. One of these holes was so big that they had to wrap a large piece of tarp onto it, and glue it on or tape it with the duct tape. It is through this hole that the skunk got it.

My father was outside with his friends drinking beer and tequila and listening to music when I went to bed. My mother stayed in the living-room/kitchen/hallway watching the 13-inch black and white tv and waiting for my father to come in and eat whenever he felt like it. The smell of burned tortillas woke me up later that night—my bed was right by the stove. I got up to go to the bathroom and saw my father standing still by the door with a shovel over his head. My mother was behind him on top of the couch covering her face with a sheet. Before I put things together, my father hammered the ground with the shovel and hit the skunk right on the head. The skunk lay motionless by the garbage door and my father hit it again. It sprayed me right in the face. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. My skin burned. My lungs filled with skunk fumes and I could taste the diesel-rotten onion stench on the top of my palette. It went into my brain and stayed there for years.

Once my father took the animal outside and buried it, he came back in and I was given a quick shower. The smell wouldn’t come off, but my mother said it was only because we were immersed in it; that once we went outside, in the morning, the smell would come off. She was wrong. In the morning she woke me up and said I was going to be late for school (I was in the 3rd grade). She put my clothes out and made my breakfast. I protested, saying that I stunk and I didn’t want to go to school, since everyone would make fun of me. She said that we didn’t come to this country for me to stay home and do nothing just because of a little skunk. She insisted, forcefully and with the broom, that a better life wasn’t going to be given to me…that I had to earn it--and you earn things by going to school. I said that I was in the 3rd grade and that I didn’t want a better life; I just wanted to stay home, ‘cause I smelled. We had a starring contest and she swung the broom at my head, told me to get out and go to school—“and you better learn something” she warned. The bus-stop was a few miles away, so I got on my bike and slowly began to pedal. I stopped a hundred feet from the trailer. She stood there with the broom and swung her hands about, telling me to get going, pointing at her wrist and yelling that I was late. I wanted to be late. But I wasn’t. On the bus, the driver sat me in the back and moved all the kids to the front. All the windows were opened. When I got to class, they told me to sit outside the entire day. I told the teacher that I had to learn something or else my mother would be upset. She told me to practice my handwriting. So I did. I took it home and showed it to my mother. She didn’t look at it, but told me she was glad I’d gone. We didn’t come to this country to be sitting around doing nothing. Later I took a bath in tomato juice and some of the smell came off. It lingered in the trailer until we moved…8 months later.

Oh, Arizona!

So two different Bills will hit the Arizona Governor’s desk any day now--both are staggeringly stupid and both are expressions of a White Supremacist will to power that is alive and well in our America.

Bill 1 encourages racial profiling and outright racism—it is not even moderately disguised. The gist of it is that if you're brown, speak with an accent, or look the least bit "Mexican" (i.e., any brown-skinned accented person) then you might be detained, arrested, and sentenced with a "state crime" if you do not have the proper documentation at the time of the arrest.

Bill 2 allows the good people of Arizona to carry guns without permits, training, or background checks. This means that any fool that is not a "Mexican" will be allowed to carry a gun and, since this fool will more than likely be a fool,  he will consider it his Constitutional right to uphold the the Law of Bill 1 by shooting "Mexicans."

Of course, "Mexicans" will now find it necessary to carry guns themselves, since they know that the fool has his and is willing to shoot him...on the other hand, if the "Mexican" is illegal, he knows that carrying a gun is one more charge on top of the State crime of being an "illegal", so he'll carry a gun to protect himself against the fool...my guess is that there will be a lot of "self-defense" murders in Arizona, or outright massacres.

The thing

with the post-immigrant experience is that our possibilities of mobility are determined by the conceptual world of our immigrant parents. In order to break free, to overcome, those determinations, there must be a rapture—an event which breaks us free and hurls us into the unknown. But once hurled into the unknown, there is no roadmap, no memory to help us along. Our parents can do so much. Mine could only encourage me and doubt me. They encouraged me to do what I needed to do; but doubted that I was doing anything productive. They had no eyes to see ahead of me, so they assumed I wasn’t going anywhere. When I moved away to college, my father entertained the idea that I was living as a pimp in the “big city.” A pimp! Since no one in the clan had gone away to college, no one could imagine what I could possibly be doing so far away from the farm. So rumors started circulating that I had been spotted in San Francisco selling dope on California Street by the Red Light District. This rumor turned into a more robust conception of my travels: I was not selling, but collecting! The news got to my father, who had a violent reaction to the idea. It didn’t help matters that I had a scholarship and didn’t have to work. My mother called and asked for reassurance that I was, in fact, reading books somewhere and not sinning against all she believed in. I was irritated that my father had actually believed it. But what did I expect? This thing I was doing was not something that was done. I had to deal with it: I eventually brought my dad to see the University, to walk around it, to smell the grass. I don’t think he forgot about my pimping until I graduated for a second time. By then, he was satisfied to know that at the very least I knew my way around the darkness.