Pulling for the Underdog

                                                                                     

An old man in Jalos

      I’m partial to “labor.” I always have been. Oh, I don’t mean I enjoy picking up a pick and shovel and digging up the hard earth, but if I had to, I would, and I have, many times. What I mean is I am partial to “labor,” as in labor - management, of which I’ve worked on both sides.

     I come from “working” people, hard workers, nearly all my relatives -- laborers. They taught me to work. I don’t fear work, not like many people I’ve met throughout my various careers, from blue to white-collar jobs. That’s why I was always confused, as a kid, when I heard the term, coined by Hollywood’s Anglo cowboys, “Lazy Mexicans.

     I remember listening to my parents rise, five days a week, all year long, sometimes as early as 5:30 A.M., depending on what part of the city my dad had to drive to the construction site. My mom rose each morning with him to make his breakfast, pack his lunch and get us all off to school before starting her own day’s work. On Saturdays, by the time I was eight or nine, I’d be out front with my dad, raking leaves from the lawn, cutting it, turning over the dirt in the flower garden, pulling weeds, and watering, according to the way my dad wanted it, the “right way. If you can’t do it right,” he'd bark, “don’t’ do it at all,” as if I had a choice. Our house was one of the nicest on our suburban block. Lazy Mexicans?

     By the time I was twelve, summertime, my uncles and cousins would pick me up to help them with their gardening routes up in Westwood, Beverly Hills, and Bel-Air. In those days, only rich people had gardeners. If my dad had “side jobs,” he might take me along. His work was a “heavy lift,” mixing cement, carrying it on his back up, who knows how many flights of stairs, to plaster it onto the walls. His famous lines to me, “Stay in school. I never want to see you do this kind of work.” All his friends and relatives, mostly in the skilled trades, put their noses to the grindstone, so to speak. Lazy Mexicans, nothing!

     In my teens, he taught me about the labor union, even took me to the hall not far from our house, where he’d go if he needed work, which wasn’t often since he had contractors calling the house, asking if he was free to work. I can’t forget him telling me how if it wasn’t for the union, he wouldn’t have a five-day work week, health insurance, decent working conditions, and a retirement plan. On the other side of it, he had no patience for laborers who didn’t pull their weight.

     My dad was a reader, not just newspapers but novels, his favorite writer, Steinbeck, another proponent of “labor.” My dad was a sports fanatic, mostly college football and basketball. Sometimes I’d catch him watching a game on television where he had no favorite team on the field or court. “Who are you rooting for,” I’d ask? “He’d answer, “The underdog. I always pull for the underdog.”

     So, sure, I have a special place in my heart for people who work hard, whom we now call, “essential workers,” which in California, and in many states across the country, are immigrants. It's true. There are plenty of jobs Americans just won't do. Somebody's got to do them.

     No one will ever tell us the truth about how many thousands died during the worst of the pandemic, like those locked in corporate meatpacking and production plants, without protective equipment, while the rest of us were under quarantine, or those who worked in the fields, picking our food, or in homes caring for the elderly. It is they, unfortunately, who crossed the border, with and without papers, to work here, who have been demonized by the U.S. political machine.

     Scholars, as well as those few who enlighten themselves, understand the real politics of migratory labor. Partially, it’s a scam cloaked in government policies. The U.S. passes international policies that enrich corporations but hurt laborers and small businesses in Mexico and Latin America, for example. U.S. companies open up abroad, like in Aguascalientes, MX, and lift some Mexican workers into something resembling a middle-class. It isn’t long before the workers realize they are producing much, working more, and earning peanuts, forgive my use of the vernacular.

     Silently, and without much media attention in the States, Mexican agriculture, both large and small, can’t compete with U.S. industries. Mexican companies, from manufacturing to agriculture, and offshoot industries, shut down, and hundreds of thousands of people lose their only source of income. What do they do? They head north to face antiquated U.S. immigration policies, and suffer, who knows what indignities, character assassination, and worse, are separated from their children.

     And agriculture is just one industry and one policy. There are many more, like the so-called U.S. financed drug wars, fueled by Americans need to get “high,” the worst offenders, those in high-powered jobs, like Wall Street and the entertainment industry. Yet, who goes to jail? Those who live in the poorest communities and can't afford hotshot attorneys. Sure, I'm generalizing, but plenty of research has been done, like Michelle Alexander's book the New Jim Crow, documenting the issues.

     We know the vast quantity of illegal drugs come into the States in commercial ships, cruise liners, airliners, and sixteen wheelers, but the drug czars and media focus on the border, the most difficult locations to smuggle large caches of drugs. The faux war has turned hundreds of thousands hardworking Mexicans and Central Americans into migrants, fleeing for their lives. Our politicians take advantage of the situation, blame it on the countries, their policies, and their people. It plays on average American sensibility, infuses, anger and resentment, and it gets opportunistic politicians elected.

     What we often don’t see is American industry, the real benefactors, from agriculture to hospitality, opening its arms to welcome the desperate, low-wage workers. It is a system between Mexico and the U.S. whose roots go back to the late 1800s, in various manifestations, a system that has even transcended border walls, literally, and nearly all states benefit. 

     Underneath, in the real world, little has changed. Mexico and the U.S., especially the border region, share much more than what separates them. Maybe that's why HR 1603, the Farm Work Force and Modernization Act of 2021, a bipartisan effort to ease legal immigration and citizenship status for farmworkers and their families, revise their status, address employer concerns, and improve employment verification is making its way through the legislature. It can definitely help the American farmer who depends on migrant labor to bring in each year's crop.

                                                                                  

The new, cross-cultural generation, visiting Tepatitlan

     The reality, Pedro, an old man I met as I walked the streets of Canadas de Obregon, a small town in Jalisco's highlands, between Jalostotitlan and el Valle de Guadalupe. He was short, light skin, and hobbling up a steep cobble stone street, pushing his walker. I greeted him, as I greeted everyone I passed, a gesture expected in rural Mexico. Pedro knew I was a stranger in town. He reached out to shake my hand. He wouldn’t let go, hungry to talk, I guess.

     He said he was 86 and had lived in Canadas since the early 60s. He was originally from Tepatitlan. He pointed to his bum leg and said he was tired of everyone telling him how to cure it, and any of his illnesses, “Curanderos and home remedies, blah,” he said and told me he was going to see a doctor. “Isn’t that what you do when you have a problem? You go to experts? Soon, I’ll be using just a cane.”

     Pedro told me he worked in North, years ago, Oregon for a few years, and in Chicago for fifteen years. He said it was at the beginning of the war in Vietnam. He worked in a factory making barrels for 105 howitzers, though he used the word “canons.”

     He listened patiently as I told him about my time in Vietnam. I trained on those howitzers.

     He said that about 1980, he was ready to return to Mexico. As he prepared to leave Chicago, someone from the main office where he worked said he needed to sign his termination papers. He said it was a very kind black woman. “Morena” was the word he used. She told him he hadn’t worked there long enough to receive social security, even though he’d paid into it since he started working there. Then, she asked if he had worked any place else. “Yes,” he answered, three years in Oregon. He said she made some clicks on the typewriter, and she told him, happily, “Good! I added that to your years of service here.”

     So, Pedro receives his monthly social security check from the U.S. If he weren’t for that woman, and his work in the states, he said, his life would be very difficult. He said he also fixed his immigration papers. Since his children were born in the U.S., where they were raised and now work, they can travel back and forth to Mexico whenever they want. One of his daughters even got a job in a Mexican bank. He said that nearly everyone he knows from the entire region of Los Altos has been to the U.S. to work. Many stayed and many returned.

     I could see he was tiring. He’d stood a long time. We shook hands, and he continued his way up the street, taking it very slowly.

     I ran into Pedro again a few days later. He greeted me with a big smile. He said he had an appointment with a doctor in Tepa, and he commenced to lecturing me on Mexican history, going back to Plutarco Calles, the Cristero War, Mexico’s nationalization of oil, today’s politics, and education.

     “There is the problem,” he said, “the lack of education. The government puts nothing into educating children in the countryside. You know the 43 students who were killed? Their parents should have taken better care of them.”

     I wasn’t sure what he meant. I knew about the 43 students who had disappeared on buses as they made their way to a demonstration to protest for better education. I hadn’t heard they’d been killed. “Is that what you mean,” I asked, “the students from Iguala, the ones who disappeared?”

     “Yes,” he answered, “they should have been studying.”

     As we spoke, I couldn’t help but feel a close connection to the man, not only as a Mexican but as an American, and a fellow laborer.