Scapegoating a Success Story

                                                                                 

Children of Immigrants, A Success Story

     As I watch the evening news and see the violence against immigrants and peaceful protesters, a post I wrote for La Bloga years ago comes to mind. I thought this might be an appropriate time to resurrect it.

     It started with a cartoon I once saw. It was a drawing of a large U.S. Navy vessel off the coast of California, stopped alongside a rowboat filled with Mexicans. One of the American sailors called down. “What are you doing out here?”

     A voice called back, “We’re coming to start a revolution.”

     The American sailors laughed. One called down, “Just you?”

     A man answered, “No. The rest of us are already here.”

     I had a good laugh. I mean, there are many ways to interpret the piece, right, depending on where you might live in the U.S.? I might see it differently from Americans in the rest of the country. Coming from Los Angeles, home to the largest Mexican population outside of Mexico City, I figured the idea of a “revolution” meant a cultural revolution, not an armed rebellion.

     My bet is if Mexican, African, Asian, or Arab Americans had charged towards the capital in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021 to stop or disrupt a presidential transiton of power, they would have been mowed down before they reached the first steps of the capital.

     In California since 1918, five generations on both my maternal and paternal sides, I've lived in the same general area, L.A.'s Westside, my life a mixture of Mexican and American cultures, burritos and hamburgers, mariachis and rock ‘n roll, Spanish and English, depending on whether I was visiting my grandparents or out hanging with my friends.

     Our roots and culture in this land go deep. When my grandparents first arrived here, right about the end of WWI, Mexican families had already been living in Los Angeles for generations.     Historically, exploration and migration from Mexico into what we know todays as the U.S. has been continuous since Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures in 1526, surviving among Indians, from Florida to into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, or what we know as the Southwest.

     In subsequent years, important events caused migration from to south to north to soar. As far back as 1600s, Spanish-Mexican explorers settled New Mexico and Texas. In California, in 1779, the explorers brought expeditions of settlers, the first Californios, founding settlements and missions from San Diego to San Francisco. Many of my friends trace their roots to the first ranchos in the area.

     In later years, after the U.S. coerced Mexico into signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, creating a physical border, or what Carlos Fuentes referred to as a "scar," dividing Mexico, two major cataclysmic events brought Mexicans north, one the Mexican revolution (1910-1925), and the second, the Cristero War (1926-1929). It's well documented that U.S. business and industry encouraged the migrants north, whether legal or not, welcoming the cheap labor with open arms.

     Mexicans settled in cities and towns from the Pacific, across the Southwest, and into the Midwest, as far away as Kansas and Michigan, where they labored in mining, in agriculture, the stockyards, in manufacturing, and the railroads, and during WWI helping the U.S. with the war effort as many young Americans abandoned their jobs for the killing fields in Europe. Mexicans even volunteered to serve and shipped out to fight the Kaiser's troops.

     When the Great Depression crushed the American economy, politicians couldn't tell unemployed Americans the truth about the Gilded Age's runaway spending and out-of-control inflation leading to the failing banks, so they blamed it on immigrants, mainly Mexican immigrants, the most vulnerable to propaganda, and the mass deportations started, displacing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, many citizens and legal residents, loading them into cattle cars and sending them to the border. More than one train dropped them off in the middle of the desert where many died of dehydration.

     When the U.S. found itself again without enough manual labor during WWII, it turned to Mexico and the two countries cooperated in a bracero program that, once again, brought thousands of Mexicans and their families north. The program lasted into the 1950s. At end of the bracero program, some workers returned home to Mexico but many stayed, receiving permanent residency or citizenship and integrated into U.S. society. They filled the need for the kind of labor many Americans detested.  

     For the next thirty years, the border was fluid, both Mexicans and Americans crossed at will, contributing to a multi-million-dollar-a-year border economy, enriching major corporations and small businesses on both sides of the border. Then, something changed. Even after the lessons of Vietnam, some U.S. politicians and businessmen began seeing communists behind every Latin American election, or maybe, as some historians say, just an excuse to scapegoat Latin American governments, open the countries to foreign investment, and take more land.

     In the 1970s and ‘80’s, the U.S. policy towards Latin America created turmoil by sending in the CIA to instigate civil wars in Central and South America, most prominently, the overthrow of democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile. Powerful American business interests didn’t agree with Allende’s social policies, too much like “Socialism,” so when covert CIA actions couldn’t manipulate the election in favor of Allende's opponent, it simply forced him out in a coup, leading to his death. Kissinger, at the time, saw Latinos as inferior, anyway, and snubbed his nose at Latin America, even as many American diplomats and government officials opposed the interference in another country's election. They thought it would lead to instability in the region, which it did.

     Since the coup worked in Chile, other U.S. administrations, urged on by U.S. business interests, covertly, tried coups in other counties, but they backfired and started civil wars, which created an avalanche of migrants north, from countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. For years, some U.S. industries in Latin America, with the support of corrupt governments, sucked up resources, like petroleum, mining, and agriculture, which displaced thousands. After the destruction of their homes, farms, and lands, the displaced migrants travelled north. Once here, most of the refugees found work, settled in, and began the process of acculturation.

     The point is many U.S. policies towards Latin America have caused much of the problem. With all the political machinations in Latin America, and now in Venezuela, Colombia, and the so-called "war on drugs," the same old trap, is it any wonder why Latinos in California are more than 15 million, 35 percent of the population, and some estimate it will reach fifty-percent by 2040? Yet, the Golden State continues to be one of the more prosperous in the nation, in nearly all categories of industry, particularly agriculture and construction. In the U.S., Latinos are almost 20 percent of the U.S. population, the largest minority group in the country. So, in the cartoon, when the Mexican in the boat said, “The rest of us are already here,” he wasn’t lying.

     As I walk my Mar Vista neighborhood on L.A.’s, quite expensive, westside, I see the cultural revolution in full swing. In the 1950s, there were, maybe, three or four Mexican restaurants in town. Today, they’re everywhere I look, I see Mexican, Salvadoran and Oaxacan, restaurants, bakeries, and markets, and Latino sections at, even, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Anglos are pulling corn and flour tortillas off the shelf with the same gusto they go after bread.

     Around the corner from my house, on Venice boulevard, the Cuban market, El Camaguey, caters to not only the Mexican and Central American populations but the growing Haitian, Dominican, and Arab populations. I stand at the counter, and I see Argentinian “mate” cups on a shelf, alongside, bottles of various Mexican and Latin American concoctions of – who knows what? I think my grandfather used to call them “boticas,” translation, could be a pharmacy or a bottle of medicine.

     Then there’s the old school hair tonic, Tres Flores, which comes in wax or liquid, and I can’t forget, the Mexican favorite, displayed at the counter, Corn Nuts, in the original designed package, or what my Spanish-speaking uncle would call, “Maiz como puerco.”

     The butcher is at the back of the store. One day, I watched a young Anglo converse with him, asking about the best cut of meat for carne asada. The butcher, with a heavy accent, asked, “Marinated or plain.”

     The guy said, “Which tastes better?”

     The butcher recommended the thinly cut slices of marinated meat. “Easy to cook, and tender. Just needs salsa on it.”

     So, that’s what the guy bought, the marinated cut. I also saw a lot of meat in the case I didn’t recognize, some of it looking back at me. I didn’t even ask. At the counter, two women talk in Spanish, like they’re meeting for the first time, one who says she’s from Argentina, the other from Guatemala, both have light skin, are fairly tall, and slim, more Caucasian-looking than Latinas, another dashed stereotype.

     A few stores down from Camaguey, on the other side of a video game store and a hipster bar, where tequila shots go for $14.00, is the homey Venice bakery, which serves a fusion of Mexican-Caribbean cuisine, bolillos, pan dulce, blueberry muffins, cakes, and only the finest tres leche cakes. The place is always crowded, with young college kids, workers, families, and, obvious, out-of-towners, lines to get in on weekends. In the air, the soft sounds of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, waft through air (can music waft?). Tomorrow, it might be Los Tigres del Norte, Bad Bunny, or Kendrick Lamar.

     Close to the curb, la tamalera, has set up shop, under an umbrella, a large container on a table filled with this morning’s freshly cooked steaming tamales, pork, beef, chicken, green chile, and cheese. Her husband drives by every few hours to resupply her cache. She sits there eight-to-ten hours a day, almost every day, in her spot for well over two years, now, and a steady stream of customers. That’s not counting the paleta guy who rings his bell at the nearby park, or the taco stands that set up shop each day in front of Vons and CVS at the busy corners of National and Sepulveda, still solidly “White” middle-class enclaves.

     It all reminds me of the song Los Illegales, by Los Tucanes de Tijuana, where they sing, “Why do they want to kill us/ Be careful, we are many and over there come millions more.” Los Tucanes don’t want to scare people, just sing about what’s real, like when they belt out, “Terrorists have passports/ They don’t come in through land but by plane/ That’s why you shouldn’t bother with us/ But recognize we are only here to work.” This is like most families forced to migrate, including my own, to survive, to work and seek a better life, not to be scapegoated or hunted down for the tone of our skin.

     So, I guess it’s true, culture changes, and, it appears, to me, for the better, not just in food and music but in all aspects of our daily lives, and it doesn’t just go one way. Culture affects everyone, like the kids of immigrants, who not only listen to Mexican rock and the hip, new ranchera sound, but tap into rap, classic rock, and Metal, sometimes even preferring a cheeseburger over a taco.

     Yup, I guess that’s the way it is, exactly, when the cartoon character in the boat called to the Americans, “The rest of us are already there.” (Source material: The CIA: An Imperial History; Hugh Wilford. Drug War Capitalism, Dawn Paley.)