There are only the two kinds who go to the bank - those to check on their money or those who go to get some. No m-betweens. $25,000 in cash a year isn't bad, but walk into a bank with that and try to get a loan, and they point you to the door. Mexicanos are the only people with cash stuffed in their pockets and still are worth no money.
Chewey Escobar, now thirty-eight, whom I met when he was looking for work at fifteen, at last has noticed that all the people in the American Southwest who do the least sought-after work are, like himself, Mexicans - whether washing windows, making beds at the hotel, hauling trash or picking lettuce. Why is this so? Chewey has a vague idea that the absence of education, degrees, contacts, perfect English and years (if not centuries) of family roots in America can mean that you blow leaves while some pink person in slippers and bathrobe sips coffee and watches you from a glass-enclosed solarium by the pool.
Someone like Chewey cannot help but think something like: "I work, she does not. I sweat and lift and pick, and they sit and talk." Envy, it turns out, is a powerful new force in the life of the alien - especially when so often he is not mixing with America's middling classes, but hired as a gardener, nanny or unskilled laborer by our more affluent. That I tell him there are millions of poor whites who far outnumber impoverished Mexican-Americans makes no impression; it is the contrast - Mexican help, white helped - that he is obsessed with.
Since the age of Cortes, Mexico has been a distorted medieval economy in which a few thousand manorial families own the entire country. But even this great disequilibrium of wealth in a feudal Mexico is not so psychologically injurious to the peasant as is the ubiquity of the American upper-middle class. In Mexico, real money is far distant, never sprinkled about the countryside in the form of luxurious haciendas or sparkling condos. The far fewer Mexican wealthy act differently; they live in castles, so to speak, and remind you that they are the patrones, and not the sort of folk that clientes can chat with between spraying shots of malathion and Miracle-Gro on their petunias, as they do in egalitarian America.
You can snip the roses of an orthodontist who is worth a cool ten million and yet stands a few feet away from you, talking on his cell phone. His garage, which you wheelbarrow weeds by, is filled with a Mercedes, a Lexus and a BMW. You can skim his pool with Jacuzzi and treat it for algae while he sits by its side. In fact, you may be at his estate - painting, spraying weeds, changing diapers - more than he, who after all must somehow pay for it all. In America the wealthy - often rising from the middle and lower classes - are ostentatious, familiar, accessible, and so a generous and constant reminder that while you may be royalty compared with those of your station still in Mexico, you, the service worker, are still a peon in the American plutocracy.
The alien's water is, of course, as clean as a millionaire's. He drives on the same freeway. His windbreaker from Wal-Mart looks no different from the Wall Street tycoon's informal wear. All that and more makes America the most superficially equal nation in the history of civilization, where skill and luck, not just birth and breeding, gain money. America is what Rome once was to hustling Jews, Greeks and Numidians, whose millions of sesterces allowed them to buy the privilege of wearing an ancestral toga with a purple stripe and a signet ring of onyx - to the exasperation of old Italian knights.
But again, envy - what the Greeks called phthonos - is not logical. Rather, it is inborn in man. You can have ten times what you had in Mexico, but still be miserable that you have one-tenth what others in America do. In Mexico a flush toilet, clean water and a warm bath make you a rural aristocrat; in America, access to such amenities is expected and considered only the beginning of the good life, not the summum bonum. How soon one metamorphoses from being a guest grateful for the privilege of having plentiful, clean food to being churlish because his house lacks central air conditioning cannot be calculated exactly; but the divide between appreciation and resentment is not wide.
Many Americans who live in suburban houses, drive SUVs and go to a fern bar for predinner drinks have forgotten this age-old elemental drive to surpass your neighbor in the most visible ways. True, Americans engage in cold war over the quality of a rye-grass lawn or the size of a stained glass window on an oak front door, but they rarely feel in their gut the angst over working hard and sweating, trapped in menial labor in proximity to others who are not - and who are quite oblivious to one's plight.
So the alien must deal with a strange new schizophrenia that begins to consume him. Success in America is too often a relative rather than an absolute concept - and felt as such by the alien most of all. We are, after all, notorious for our constantly rising expectations and appetites. Many Americans no sooner have satisfied their material dreams than they begin to feel either bored or furious that someone else - someone "undeserving" or "lazy" - has more.
As the illegal immigrant begins to learn about this strange new country,
