Meanwhile, America needs replacements for these undecorated veterans. Thus an entire new cohort comes north to renew this strange, unspoken cycle in the traffic of humankind. In almost every city in California, there is a familiar street, park or lumber yard parking lot where dozens of healthy Mexican men, fifteen to thirty years of age, congregate to hire themselves out for a day as laborers - hoping that a contractor will bid well for ten hours' use of their backs. Because we are an instinctual, rather than an explicitly expressive, society, we have no placards on the border - something like the entryway admonishment of Dante's Inferno - to warn the newcomer.
Beware all you who would enter. Here are the rules: You are welcome to work hard between twenty and forty. But then please retire at fifty and return home. Stay young, healthy, single, sterile and lawful - and we want you; get old or injured, marry, procreate or break the law - and we don't.
The alien soon realizes that there is also an eerie disruption of his culture going on in the United States, or at least a complete reversal of what passes for normal in Mexico. America really is a revolutionary place. The shocking thing about the United States is not its burdensome traditions and stereotypes, but rather its sheer absence of shame and protocol - and of much continuity with anything past. To the alien that means muscles and manhood can mean far less than diction and looks. So far we have talked about the universe of the male laborer and the drudgery of the maid or nanny. But another strange phenomenon is also affecting the Mexican immigrant, one of radical gender reversal. Women in America seem to do better than men. They stay in school at twice the rate of boys. To establishment America, an attractive Latina with good English is much less threatening and more easily assimilated than a sunburned and calloused hombre who has not learned to say much more than "thank you."
A wife, sister or daughter is less likely to listen to men while residing in America, more likely to make more cash - and far more prone to become an American quickly. If our culture prefers looks, money and the office over muscle, handwork and the fields, then a young Mexican girl of twenty in tight slacks who speaks English well can outperform her twin brother who toils on his knees.
Quite simply, the lifeline to America for most immigrants is often found in their womenfolk who follow the men in a few years, and who inevitably soon feel no need to defer to a male who makes less and has more trouble with the language. I drive from rural Selma to Fresno each morning on a congested freeway, fighting traffic with thousands of young Hispanic girls in new Hondas, on their way from rural towns like Fowler, Parlier and Woodlake to jobs in health care, law, government and education in Fresno. More often than not their boyfriends and husbands are back at home, looking for work or laboring for cash five rather than nine hours a day.
A final note on the turbulent mental landscape of the immigrant: The university pundits who insist that aliens suffer from the plague of material impoverishment once again have it wrong. Immigration is more complex and frustrating a problem than mere poverty. I live in one of the poorest sections of the poorest counties in California, and people of all sorts are just not starving. Wal-Mart is packed. The local Blockbuster video store is teeming. Obesity, not emaciation, kills aliens. I can go into town and hear no English spoken at all, even as I see women with carts full of food, clothes and electronic goods. New Kias, Ford pickups and space-age baby strollers dot the shopping-center parking lot. The new China seems to be supplying us all with the cheapest consumer goods in history, as everything from tennis shoes to television sets costs a fraction in real dollars of what it did three decades ago.
There has never been a more affluent society in the history of civilization than is America of the early twenty-first century. I would wager that an illegal alien in America may have more buying power in his pocket than a subsidized university student in Athens or Oslo. Our own new American robber barons may live on islands, rig the stock market and represent greed incarnate, but something is definitely trickling down from their malfeasance. In Selma I see vast new housing developments for newly arrived Mexicans; they cram the fast food outlets and carry computers out from Office Max.
In global terms - compared with life in the Congo, Cambodia, Yemen or Bolivia - illegal aliens in California are not materially poor. They may not have HMOs, but they are treated at emergency rooms. Their houses may not yet be three-bedroom, two-bath, but their apartments have carpeting, air conditioners, heaters and appliances.
Aliens are also consummate and generous buyers, not overly cost-conscious, and far more affable in the store than affluent white or Korean shoppers. For years I peddled my
