I sometimes think that only the vast contrast with Mexico keeps the illegal alien in America alive; only the memory of the former harshness of real hunger, dirt floors, untreated illnesses and outdoor privies in Mexico steels him for what he must face in America. I once asked two raisin-tray rollers how they felt after ten hours of labor on their knees in 110-degree weather - "Better than in Mexico," one said. I thought to myself, "Well, better than in hell too, I suppose." I paid them $100 each, but noticed that their car's starter was just about out, and figured they had rolled all day for the cost of getting home.
To talk with these young men is to hear of extravagant dreams - all culminating in a grand and permanent return to their village in central or southern Mexico: a ranchero, a new block house, two Chevy pickups, alligator boots, black felt hat, jewelry - all the Mexican signs of material success in America. Of course, the university activists who see themselves as illegals' advocates ridicule such notions of instant wealth as impossible to garner through unskilled labor. But they err in two ways: Much of the wages for yard work, cement, roofing and farming is paid on a cash basis, without the deductions for Social Security, Medicare, workman's compensation, state and federal taxes - the miasma of debits that easily can shrink an American's paycheck by a third to a half. Our young professors at California State University, Fresno, some with Ph.D.s from Berkeley and Stanford, will be lucky to take home $2,000 a month after deductions - appearing on the pay stub in some ten categories including state, federal, Social Security and Medicare taxes, health, dental and vision insurance fees, state retirement, parking and union dues. Some undocumented workers in construction can put in 200 hours of work per month, and at $10 cash per hour they match the English professor - without the tie, the decade's worth of degrees, the need to master the lingo of postmodernism, and the entire drain of life insurance, lawn care and braces for the kids.
Second, there is the much-remarked-upon gulf between the cost of living in California and the cost of surviving in rural Mexico. Everything from tortillas to changing a tire is a fraction of the price south of the border. If the campesino can go south with a van full of consumer goods unavailable cheaply in Mexico - stereos, cell phones, televisions, washers and dryers - the daily tab to eat, sleep and relax in his home pueblo is otherwise rather low. The dream of the young worker, then, is that he might earn money as a Mexican in America and then go home to live like an American in Mexico.
There is also a third mystical force in play that explains the alien's zeal to work so hard to acquire American dollars for a dream of retuning home. Mexico is a hierarchical society, where skin color, accent and ancestry determine one's social place, from the upper echelons of Mexico City to the governor's office in Yucatan. Not so in America, whose crass plutocracy has always valued money above breeding, diction, education, even hue and religion. In this connection, I think of Pepe Madrigal, who used to run crews of some six hundred men in Selma, drove a Mercedes, had two diamond rings, and lived in a beautiful home in nearby Sanger, not far from my farm. A millionaire here - before the IRS shut him down for failure to forward the FICA deductions of his workers - he claimed that he was a virtual billionaire in his Mexican hometown. There, in the eyes of his former compadres, he was apotheosized from a rural campesino into a nuevo rico who claimed he could buy the entire landscape of his birth, its petty aristocrats, snobs and bigwigs thrown in for good measure. ("Hell, I'll buy the church and the padre too if they will sell it," he once remarked to me.) For the rustic Mexican who occupies the bottom rung of a static society and has virtually no chance of upward mobility, America represents not just an escape from drudgery, but the phantasm of redemption - a way not so much of getting rich, but of getting even.
Yet most Mexicans in America never return home permanently, and the dream of Pepe Madrigal remains mostly a fantasy; Mexico, after all, is still a class-bound society where an Indian with ample capital can never quite make it. Oh, they may go back and forth yearly, but few choose to stay south. And here we collide again with the dilemma of illegal immigration. For all the brutality of America, the immigrant senses a weird sort of kindness here. Or at least he senses the presence of a select and liberal group of Americans in health care, law, education and government who feel it is their duty to help him, of all people - the lowly immigrant! And their efforts are not paltry. The well-intentioned Americans can deliver to the illegal immigrant housing, medicine and food at a level beyond almost anything found even among the well-off in Mexico City.
I often fly eastward via Phoenix with aliens from Fresno on their way to Guadalajara; the overhead compartments on the plane are stuffed with wrapped fishing rods, fax machines, and boxes of vitamins and medicine. But what follows from that? Is there an ophthalmologist in the town square back home to treat your glaucoma? Can you show
