We Called them Essential Workers

Tzotzil Mayans, most have worked in the U.S.

I was fifteen years old when “they” killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Like most Americans, I grieved, more because he was an Irish Catholic, and the Irish nuns and brothers who educated me talked about him in damn-near saintly language, same as my Mexican-Democrat working-class family, my dad a “union man,” who said he’d have no healthcare, pension, or vacation days without the AFL-CIO. 

 The son of Mexican immigrants, my dad was the fourth natural born U.S. citizen in his family, two of three boys Army veterans during WWII. My guess is none of them really understood the politics of the day; although, not much has changed. Republicans promote small government and states’ rights, cut personal taxes and funding for social programs, while Democrats promote a strong federal government, raise personal taxes, and start social programs. Not much has changed. What the people want doesn’t seem to matter. What do you expect when you only have a two-party system -- or, I stand corrected, we used to have a “two” party system? Now, the progressive party has morphed into a “big-tent” party straddling the “middle,” while, according to pundits, the conservative party has been hijacked by a “cult-like” figure who refuses to go along with the “program” because he says the election he lost was stolen, and the diehards of his party follow him wherever he leads them, his main gripe: immigrants, murderers and rapists are running rampant and destroying our country. 

In fact, he said he saw on television, so it must be true, where Springfield, Ohio immigrants “are eating the family dogs and cats.” Okay, now, I, and many Americans, can deal with an immigrant-bashing political campaign strategy. It’s been going on for years, and there is an argument to be made, but objective scholarly statistics show immigrants, illegal or otherwise, commit fewer crimes than most citizens. American employers recruit them. They work hard, earn less than U.S. citizens, and they can’t collect tax refunds at the end of the year. 

 It wasn’t until 1966, when I served in the military with Americans of every stripe and color, I realized America, culturally, was, much more unique than I was led to believe in my sheltered corner of Los Angeles, a neighborhood sandwiched between Santa Monica and Westwood. When I arrived in Vietnam, that’s when I realized how many different types of people called the U.S. home. I made friends with guys from everywhere, places I’d never heard of, like the Ronny La Beet, a black Virgin Islander, with a French accent, Jerry Lugo, a Puerto Rican New Yorker from the Bronx, Jack Brun, a homespun Arkansan, who played the Gomer Pyle role, and Bobby Simmons, a bible-reading black kid from Alabaman. I met a very blonde haired, blued eyed, Joe Bel-Air, a cool Californian from Sante Fe Springs, Jonathan Bolan, a hippie always with a book in hand from Indio, California, and Bobby Elliot who scolded us guys from Southern California for calling San Francisco “Frisco.” 

I had friends, like Alex Mayo, a reservation Indian from Utah, and a Montana cowboys, Big Tom Waylon, and West Virginia and Pennsylvania coal miners’ kids, like Wayne Podleski and Nick Samuels. Of course, there were many Mexicans, a bunch from L.A. and from Texas Rio Grande Valley, a few who spoke better Spanish than English, both citizens and permanent legal residents. The Army didn’t care. We were fodder, anyway. Talk about a multi-cultural America, just turn to the modern 1960s U.S. Army. 

 Nobody questioned the legal status of kids from Mexico who came across the border to volunteer. Hell, Puerto Rico wasn’t even a state, and some kids from the island spoke no English. No problem. The government lowered the language requirement to draft them, and they died, in large numbers. Filipinos filled the ranks, especially NCO’s who’d fought in WWII. Guys who came from Guam and the Dominican Republic shed their blood when many Americans refused to go, claiming all sorts of deferments, like Donald Trump’s bone spurs and Dick Cheney’s many deferments because he was a married man, and Bill Clinton's college deferment. 

Hollywood gave us the impression the U.S. was a “White,” Christian country, since it created the myth of the perfect leading man and lady, even though Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Indians, Confusions, agnostics, and atheists made their home here and served in the military going back to the Revolutionary War. In 1700, in Boston Harbor and in New York, ships brought in sailors and traders from around the world, including Russians, Syrians, Africans, and Chinese. In Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, the ship, the “Pequod” carried whaling sailors from around the world, like Queequeg, the Southsea native islander who befriended the protagonist, Ishmael. 

This multi-ethnic, multi-religious representation of the real America isn’t an anomaly. When I talked to my dad about it, kind of jokingly, about all the characters I met in the army, he said it was the same during his time in the military in 1944. He said he met guys from everywhere, and of all colors and ethnicities, a polyglot of languages. Today, I assume, its ditto for the men and women serving around the world. It’s no secret the CIA has always recruited from university anthropology, foreign language, and literature departments, seeking agents with an appreciation and understanding of other cultures. How can we spy on other countries if our agents can’t speak the languages or know the culture? 

This is the real America, but you’d never know it listening to politicians who rail about the “browning of American” and the poisoning of our culture by foreigners. We’re not “browning.” We’ve always been brown, blacks, red, yellow, and white, from the time Dutch and English pilgrims meandered about the shores of Plymouth, trading with the native people, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if you consider from ocean to ocean. If not for the Iroquois Confederacy, the white strangers from faraway shores would not have lasted a winter here. 

In an essay scholars have titled, “Savages, We Call Them,” Benjamin Franklin describes how Americans requested the Indians send them their young men to attend universities to study. When the braves returned to their people, the chiefs said, “They were good for nothing.” They’d lost all their customs and forgotten how to live off the land. In fact, the chiefs said it would be better if the Americans sent their sons to be schooled by the Indians. At least they’d learn how to survive in nature.

If you’ve never left your home or travelled the country, you wouldn’t really understand what Woody Gutherie meant in his song, “This land is Your Land.” I’m not sure there are many homogenous locations in the country, anymore, “all one color.” Even an in Ohio Amish country, the locals mix with immigrants who have moved in to neighboring towns to do the work the locals won’t do. Drive down through the Rio Grande Valley and, though it's dominated by Mexicans, there are plenty of Whites, Syrians, and Chinese who have been there for generations. 

Maybe in places like Pine Ridge, South Dakota, it’s all Lakota, but in towns across the South, from the Carolinas through Georgia, Kentucky, and into Texas, Arizona and California, places like Orange County, and Monterrey Park, so many people from so many places who call themselves “Americans.” They work hard, pay their taxes, and, yes, their sons and daughters also die in our wars. Maybe that’s why New York, L.A., Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco are such strange places to many outsiders when they first migrate to these cities, where the “browning of America” happens, in the financial and cultural hubs of the nation, where the newest ideas bloom, from exotic cuisines and music to technology. 

Who would think of putting African percussion to American jazz but a Cuban conquero sitting in with Tommy Dorsey or Louis Armstrong? Combine a German accordion, Spanish guitars, electrified by Les Paul and Leo Fender, and toss in a few country voices, and you’ve got the Texas Tornadoes, but our communities are often so segregated, many Americans don’t view the U.S. at its core, a country of immigrants, making it easy for politicians, of both parties, to spread propaganda about how immigrants are “staining” our country, pitting people against each other. 

For me, the more I read and the more I travelled, the more I see it. America was never all “White,” like many would have us believe, which brings me back to JFK. I recall, after his assassination, Malcolm X said, “The chickens have come home to roost.” If Malcolm wasn’t an outcast before the statement, he sure was after it, in many circles, but I was intrigued. What did he mean? Some might interpret it as “You reap what you sew.” That’s like saying JFK deserved what he got. How could that be? Is that what Malcolm meant, or was his comment more nuanced, open to interpretation? Maybe it wasn’t really about JFK, at all. Maybe it was more about what JFK represented, as president, not as the man. He represented a nation, just like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and all the other presidents? 

Was Malcolm saying something deeper about the U.S., and not even talking about a man? Was he talking in symbols? I thought back to Smedley Butler’s statement, “War is a racket.” Butler, a Marine general, earned two medals of honor, wrote a memoir pretty much stating that, as a Marine, he was a “hitman” for U.S. business interests around the world, participating in the invasions of weaker nations, terrorizing and killing innocent people, all for the purpose of stealing their resources for the bankers and cooked politicians who run our country, not unlike other powerful nations. 

Starting in Cuba, in 1892, across to the Philippines, to China, and back to Mexico, around 1914, where he led the invasion of Veracruz. Why? Because after releasing seven sailors from prison, the Mexicans would not salute the American flag. Since Mexico didn’t have much of an army, Butler's Marines slaughtered hundreds of innocent Mexicans, old men, women, and children who took up whatever made a good weapon to help fight off Butler’s Marines. The invasion was justified under the banner of the U.S. national security, a threat to keep Mexico’s ports open to American trade. 

Butler, and other Marines who earned the congressional medal of honor for the battle of Veracruz believed it was one medal they didn’t’ deserve. My point isn’t that military conquest is right or wrong. Countries have been invading and conquering each other since civilizations began, and after any conquest, the decimated country is left with hungry people, often without homes and livelihoods. What do they do? Where do they go? 

Most, get on boats or take to the road and migrate as refugees to the countries that conquered them. It happened to England and France, brutal colonizers throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, their displaced subjects crowding into cities and the countryside. Since the late 1800s and into the 1900s, even, today, in the 21st century, whether through direct invasion or proxy wars, General Butler’s arguments still seem to be true, “War is a racket.” 

During the 1910 Mexican Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans left their homes and settled in the U.S. Even though, the U.S. didn’t fight in the revolution, directly, its policies helped fuel the war. On one side, American mining interests poured money into the federalist government led by Porfirio Diaz. On the other side, American bankers supported the rebel forces of Francisco Madero. Without U.S. intervention and subsequent upheaval, maybe migrants, like my grandparents, would have stayed home on their ranches where they said they were always happiest. 

After our conflict in Santo Domingo, Dominicans headed to the U.S. in droves. I heard one sportswriter explain to his American readers: the reason so many Dominicans, Cubans, and other Latin Americans fill the ranks of major league baseball today is because they picked up the bats, balls, and gloves the U.S. Marines left behind after they invaded and occupied those countries. Our support of wars and coups to stop the spread of communism in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala destroyed economies and people’s livelihoods but was it really about communism or about clearing the way for American companies, like United Fruit? 

Where do the people who lose their land go for relief? They come here. Today, many Central Americans cross the treacherous Darien Straight to reach our borders. After our wars in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese and Hmong came here as “boat people,” refugees. Iranians arrived here by the thousands after we assisted in overthrowing the Shah in Iran, which gave us the Ayatollahs. In 1990’s Mexico, Clinton pushed through his NAFTA plan, which helped U.S. corporations more than it helped Mexican farmers. A steady stream of Mexicans began heading north to the U.S. border once their farms couldn’t complete with U.S. agriculture. They’re still coming. Now that Gaza and the West Bank are decimated, where will the Palestinian refugees flee? If history holds true, most will come here to join their relatives who fled, years earlier, during the 1980s Israeli, Arab wars. 

Unlike General Butler who claims wars are fought for profit, my point isn’t to say these wars are right or wrong. I will keep that to myself, but I am saying, our wars have consequences, and they leave behind refugees who need to survive. Track the route of refugees and where they migrate during and after our wars abroad, you’ll find many came to the U.S. After WWII, German and Italian refugees came to our shores. It’s always been that way. If the migrants have no connections, they spend their lives working in the worst, most dangerous, low-paying jobs. 

Americans demonize them or use them as political pawns. Who knows how many we buried after the covid pandemic, giving them a sense of dignity by hailing them “Essential Workers” when we needed them then placing them in ICE’s hands when we didn’t. So, I wonder, when Malcolm X claimed, after JFK’s death, that the “chickens have come home to roost,” did he blame the president’s death on our country’s political machinations, sinister plans that go way beyond what any of us could ever imagine?