remaining an "Indian" in Mexico? The finest universities of Mexico do not scout out Indians from Oaxaca to redress historic imbalances in their enrollment; America's Ivy League does.
No, the immigrant senses that - whether out of altruism, guilt or coercion - the crazy gringos in America treat him better than his beloved amigos in Mexico. So it is harder than one expects to cut this new umbilical cord he has grown in America. Tricky also it is to forsake the mall, the summer blockbuster movie fare, or the free and modern emergency room. Mexican television in America broadcasts not dry notices of immigration reform or Mexican consulate seminars, but splashy Jerry Springer-like talk shows, where Chicanas with dyed blond hair, breast implants and bare navels wiggle in the audience and chatter in hot tubs, unlike anything that used to be aired in the village plaza in Mexico. America, it turns out, gets into one's blood. A Mexican once told me, "I'm Siamese twins - my Mexican and American heads so glued together I can't turn in either direction."
But just because the illegal alien visits Mexico without staying permanently does not necessarily mean he is happy in America. Within three years - five at most - a series of stark realizations about the United States begin to crystallize in the mind of the alien. Most of those under twenty-five that I encounter are perpetually smiling. They bounce, not shuffle, on the sidewalk. They laugh out loud. Not so their elders forty and above. I see the Great Awareness etched on their faces. These guys grimace and wave their hands in anger, exhibiting more frustration than can be attributed to the ambiguity of middle age. A Mexican male who may be fifty often looks sixty and walks as if he is seventy.
He begins to see that he is the beleaguered root, while a myriad of others are the fleshy stalk, leaves and fruit of the immigrant experience. He goes to bed at 9 P.M. so as to rise at 4 A.M. - unlike the others who profit far more and off him. In his immediate circle there are the contractors who take him to work and bring him home. For that easy effort, they make not $10 an hour, but $100. (Californians deplore the dismal safety record of farm labor vans.
Hundreds with crude wooden benches, no seat belts, bald tires and intoxicated drivers, overloaded with fifteen workers, overturn each month - prompting the California Highway Patrol to bring in new rules, inspections and education programs. We lament all that, but must remember that these mobile coffins are not "vans" so much as taxis, which can bring the unlicensed and unregulated owner-driver of a dilapidated $600 vehicle a profit of over $1,000 a week.)
The agricultural leeches are only the alpha, not the omega that surrounds the unskilled laborer. Beyond them is a virtual army of parasites. The coyote who smuggled him in makes tens of thousands of dollars. The forger who gives him the false identification earns hundreds. The landlord who rents him - and two others - the use of a bed, not a room, garners as much or more. The woman who provides him sex, the local market that cashes his check for a cut, the used-car salesman who has him sign twenty-two pages of guarantees for a car with a cracked engine block - all these and more profit from the arms and back of the illegal alien.
Soon he butts up against the bizarre and pricey world of white America - the strange country that sends things in the mail and on time like parking tickets, hospital bills and collection notices, and on occasion can haul away your car even as you sleep should you not pay the final $300. I have had dozens of aliens bring me all sorts of byzantme papers, from welfare applications to 1-9 forms; often they are bewildered and at times outraged that such mystic runes should apply to them and that I, with a Ph.D., cannot figure them out either. Better, they finally say after I have thrown up my hands, to ignore them - or in extremis hire a sharp Mexican abogado who knows the ropes.
Such lawyers, in fact, abound for taking care of things that finally can no longer be put off - everything from workman's compensation claims to personal injury suits. Remember, the alien legal industry is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that ultimately depends on the backs of those picking, pruning and cleaning. Mostly, lawyers are there to "help" you find papers, bring up your mother, avoid jury duty, buy a house, start the process of citizenship, evade deportation - all at $100 an hour, "special" for a fellow paisano. The Fresno Bee is full of their ads. On Spanish-speaking television they are every bit as obnoxious as English-speaking shysters. They are amusing to the white legal community - snobs and fools who have no idea that a good Spanish-speaking lawyer with a mail-order degree who specializes in immigration or civil law can make far more than a Boalt Hall graduate in Sacramento's top firm.
The alien realizes that even his nether world of undocumentation is still not so undocumented. Even if he sleeps in a southwest Fresno apartment building, paying $200 a month for ten hours' use of a bed; even if he catches a ride in a labor van for $10 round-trip; even if he
