I know this in my own bones. At twenty-six I could sulfur 120 acres of vines in a day, racing the tractor in sixth gear to cover ten acres an hour, oblivious to a sea of chemical and vineyard dust, careless as to the effects of pounding on the ears and the shaking seat on the kidneys. I liked the fact that I was not behind a desk. At dusk I could hop off the tractor and shower, then forget that I had ever spent twelve hours on the same seat, losing money for the effort. Not so at forty-eight - two hours on the Massey-Ferguson are misery. Grime in the nose triggers allergies; ears ring for days from the blast of the machine. The body can take two decades of such daily punishment, but not four. With increasing debts and obligations, I am now very bothered by the thought that I lose money sweating on the tractor, and make money only when cool and rested and sitting at a desk.
All these contradictions the immigrant also slowly senses as he looks at the weak picker in a crew of ten who at age fifty can scarcely scale the ladder. He doesn't like hombres with gray hair on a four-man gondola team. They are too slow and don't carry their weight in getting the cut grapes into the pan. They shuffle rather than trot down the rows. They represent his bleak future rather than his optimistic present. There is a reason why el jefe, the contractor, has a belly, ridiculous snake-skin boots, three golden teeth and a stiff cowboy hat that would blow off in a minute of real work: he is fifty-five, not twenty, a veteran of the fields, not an amateur, and often ailing and wizened rather than fresh and naive.
But the aging of the unskilled worker is not merely degenerative in the physical sense. It encompasses what one described to me as "the whole thing" - which I take to mean wife, kids, dog and house. A man alone may be wealthy even at $10 an hour; he is an utter pauper at the same wage with a pregnant wife, two children in diapers, and a three-bedroom apartment with a clunky car in the stall and one in worse condition on blocks.
If you chain-saw firewood or clean bedpans at the rest home, as a single person you can still go to the movies, eat out now and then, and put a down payment on a nice car. That freedom is nonexistent when there are six of you who depend on the wages of house-painting and brick-laying. The greatest hazard to the illegal immigrant is a large family - the truth that is never mentioned, much less discussed. Everything that he was born into - parents, priest, reigning mores - tells him to have five boys, better six or seven, to carry on the family name, ensure help in the fields, give more souls to God, provide visible proof of virility, and create a captive audience at the dinner table.
In contrast, everything America values - money, free time, individual growth, secular pleasure - advises the opposite. Quite often for the unskilled laborer, five children instead of two is the difference between death and life. I must mention here the even surer form of suicide: the presence of not one family, but two. A common-law woman and kids in Huron and a simultaneous wife with eight more in Jalisco prescribe a heart attack at forty. A tile setter I know tells me that he works every evening to pay for the wife and three dependents in Monterey, Mexico - and every morning and afternoon for the wife and twins in Madera, California.
Just as his body slows down, the alien's obligations mount. Such a physical metamorphosis is as apparent to him as a darting tadpole's change into a tired old frog. Quite simply, the last thing America wants is a Spanish-speaking man fifty years old with dependents but no skills and a bad back. He has a tendency to stay home more than he works; he is bitter rather than upbeat; his romance with America is now more like a nightmare. He can become a baleful influence on his numerous kids, who hear of doubt and anger, not of retirement accounts and a vacation home in the mountains. If we wonder why the hardest-working alien in California sires sons who will not do the same kind of labor, who have tattoos, shaved heads and prison records rather than diplomas, we need look no further than the bitterness of the exhausted, poor and discontented father. His back and knees, after all, won him no victory at fifty, but in his mind they won a four-car garage for someone else.
When the alien can no longer stucco a house or plaster a pool, most contractors must turn him loose - falsely confident that all those years of expensive deductions and bothersome paperwork should at least pay for workman's compensation, state disability, Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, unemployment or some other government dole that will keep a tired Manuel or an ill Ramon alive. Most aliens in their
