In terms of opportunity to travel, yes. He rarely ventures out of FresnoCounty. He eats out at Denny's, not an upscale restaurant in Fresno. He gulps down Snickers and Korn-Nuts, not Odwalla fruit drinks and celery sticks. Even at forty he is heavy, and not always well. His chances to find lucrative and steady employment are dwindling as his belly enlarges, his knees weaken and his English remains poor. Yet if one were to judge only by his clothes, the superficial appearance of his cars and appurtenances, or those of his wife and children - not to mention their consumer habits, their choice of entertainment and general tastes - the Gamas are not much different from the family of a third-generation California suburbanite who works for a software company for $100,000 a year.
Federal and state largess without stern audit, access to cheap consumer products imported from abroad, and a vast social network of friends and relatives have ensured that Humberto is royalty compared with his relatives back in Mexico. And there is, of course, the tax code. Humberto pays no tax on his off-the-books earnings, and almost no levies on his reported income. When I was growing up in Selma, we all paid income taxes; now those like Humberto who make below $30,000 pay almost none. In 1955 the military got 62 percent of all federal dollars, entitlements 21 percent; now this is reversed: individuals receive 61 percent of federal dollars and the military 17 percent. And this revolutionary notion that government is to rectify what individuals cannot has had dramatic effects in Selma. Welfare, disability, workman's compensation, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, supplemental assistance - all that largess (and the availability of cheap Chinese-produced goods) has created a real consumer class from the immigrant community, the unemployed and the half-employed - while this newfound affluence has made them, in a way, angrier that they are still not as wealthy as others.
In short, Humberto Gama is outwardly indistinguishable from many of the professors I work with. His car on its daily trek into Selma looks not much different from those of soccer moms on their way to upscale white suburban schools. Humberto's is a Potemkin middle-class existence to be sure, but even its facade simply did not exist a mere two decades ago, when I could easily spot the clothes, cars, habits and general look of the illegal alien in a matter of seconds. Now these distinguishing marks have been dissolved by the advent of a globalized look, a veneer of sameness and fraternity, an equal access to the electronic world of imagery and message and the means to pay for it - with little regard for actual earned income or racial identification.
This instant American satisfaction of the baser cravings has enraged our European friends, who among their own youth see Big Macs displacing haute cuisine, rap eclipsing more sophisticated music, and Star Wars trouncing grim Swedish melodrama. Our liberal professors and journalists at home might enjoy the nuance and minutes-long still shots of French film, but young whites from Montana and Chicanos from East Los Angeles, if they watch foreign movies at all, alike prefer Jackie Chan. Immigrants from Mexico tend to agree with the latter, not the former. They understand that American mores and tastes in the culture at large set few requirements for full participation - not money, education, breeding, parentage, race, accent or religion. The Mexican immigrants I know who listen to English-speaking radio are more likely to turn to the loud and sometimes grating voices of Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage than to the subdued and often nasal tones of NPR.
Almost anyone can understand the plot of an American movie and sit transfixed by the human and technological pyrotechnics - car chases, explosions, murderous heroes on a mission of revenge, bodies littered about, nudity, obscenity, sex scenes, syrupy endings. Video games, unlike books, plays or board games, are universally hypnotic precisely because they demand little literacy, provide explosions of color and imagery, and require only a type of eye-hand-brain synergy that is not culturally specific. Fast food offends few since it is neither spicy nor sour, and thus calls for no acquired taste. Instead it grows increasingly bland, ample and cheap - and packaged in such a way that it is as easily edible in a car as at a table.
Americans are criticized for preferring quicker, cheaper Taco Bell to more conventional and tastier real Mexican dishes; but then, illegal aliens too - especially young males - increasingly buy such American take-out rather than traditionally prepared tortillas. Their girlfriends agree, and - costs being about equal - likewise choose to eat in the car en route to the mall, rather than stay home in a hot kitchen rolling corn-flour dough. Mass communication through darting images on television, pictures on computer screens and photos in printed matter are more easily digested than written texts.
If such schlock is sweeping the globe - and along with it American English, American business protocols, American sports, American advertising, American media and American casual behavior - one can imagine the net effect of it all at its place of birth in America, of which California remains the epicenter. At a time when illegal immigration is at an all-time high, and formal efforts at forging a common culture and encouraging assimilation are at an all-time low, the habits, tastes, appetites and expressions of everyday people have offered a rescue of sorts - perhaps deleterious to the long-term moral health of the United States, but in the short term about the only tool we possess to prevent racial separation and ethnic tribalism. Informality in dress, slang speech, movies, videos, television - all this makes
