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Title: Don Quijote de Califas y su mil Sanchos en Arizona
Source:
Newspaper Tree
URL Source: http://www.newspapertree.com/view_a ... e3753346f0&mc=892289fb219d4459
Published: Mar 30, 2005
Author: Emanuel Anthony Martinez
Post Date: 2005-04-01 10:54:37 by Mr Nuke Buzzcut
Keywords: Quijote, Califas, Sanchos
Views: 26
Comments: 1
Don Quijote de Califas y su mil Sanchos en Arizona by Emanuel Anthony Martinez The afternoons in Guanajuato are mild and warm, cool in the mountain mornings and cool in the rainy evenings. At dawn the campañas ring and the men carrying heavy rusted propane canisters shout ?Gas! Gas!? for any family needing a replacement. For a few months I worked at La Pieza, a bar the size of a closet, off of Cantarranas street. Claudia, the owner, paid me about fifteen pesos an hour. In a morning, that came out to about eight dollars minus tips. It was barely enough to stay afloat, so I needed another job. I took on extra work teaching English at one of the language institutes up the road, by the Presa de la Olla, with its tranquil garden and splashing waters. There, I earned about thirty pesos an hour, which converts to about three dollars per class. At two classes, I was earning about six dollars a day?hardly the windfall I was hoping for. After a few long weeks of opening up the bar in the mornings and teaching in the afternoons, I realized I needed to make a choice. Either teach and remain the poorest among the poor. Or serve more vampiros and micheladas to sun-baked tourists, earning enough to cover rent and food. I chose the latter. I?m not sure how the conversation started. It was one of my last days at the school. I was waiting for another class to clear out when we started talking. He was a student, in his late twenties, just a few years younger than myself. He wore blue jeans and a bright t-shirt. I remember being surprised when he spoke almost perfect English. ?Why are you in a beginners class if you already know English?? Rafael said he?d never taken an English class. What English he knew, he learned working construction in the Chicago area. I didn?t need to ask why. Most people interested in a career outside of tourism, farming, ranching, and handicraft production will have a hard time in Guanajuato. Those who have traveled Mexico know most of the country is ranches and farms. It could easily be Thomas Jefferson?s vision of the agricultural nation come true. A person could drive for hundreds of miles, pass hundreds of fields, and never travel through a city. As someone with a college education, working in the tourism/education sector of Guanajuato, I was earning a meager $280 month. A construction worker in Chicago makes $280 in twenty hours. ?Are you going to stay there?? I asked Rafael, pointing north. He said he went to the U.S. to earn money for a home he was building on his terreno in Guanajuato. He was building it with his own hands, one small section at a time, for himself and his family. And ?No,? he did not plan to stay in there. Guanajuato was his home. His family was there and they are the reason he worked. ?Why would I want to stay?? he said. Then I asked, ?How did you get there?? ?I crossed the desert,? he answered. I expected any other answer. Not that one. He was bright, kind, responsible?the sort of person anyone would want to know. How could someone like this not be eligible for an employment-based visa to the US? In light of an alternative, why would anyone risk his life crossing miles of desert for a job? What the heck was going on here? The visa process in Mexico borders on alchemy?at least for those outside the ?system.? It appears to be designed to vet out the poor and uneducated. Arguably, it excludes more. It is expensive and complicated. From Guanajuato, the first step is making an appointment with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. An applicant can only access the appointment system with a phone call, a costly one at that. The choices are a 1-900 number that must be dialed from a residence, a number that charges a credit card, or a 1-800 number accessible by purchasing a PIN from Banamex. Other countries allow appointments to be made over the mail or via the Internet. Not in Mexico. Since most Mexican nationals do not have phone service at home and fewer own a credit card (for reasons more attributable to the market than the consumer), more Mexican are likely using the newer Banamex method. Depending on whether the applicant is applying for an immigrant visa or a non-immigrant visa, whether the migration is work-related or family-based, different forms must be filled out, hundreds of dollars in fees must be paid, and for permanent residents, medical exams must be conducted. The process can take anywhere from a few days for a tourist visa, to years for a permanent resident visa. There are a number of reasons most Mexican applicants must wait years to enter the US. Part of the reason for the delay is the initial allocation of visas; the other is a backlog in administration. Only a certain number of family-based and employment-based visas are made available by the US government each year. And within those numbers, each country is allowed only seven percent of the entire allotment or 25,620 total visas annually?whether the country is Bhutan, Liechtenstein, or Mexico. The visa allocation system completely ignores demand, social networks, political history, geography, or any other relevant factor that might be included in a well-thought-out immigration policy. It is meant to be fair through a numerical equality, not equitable through human intelligence. Therefore, some countries do not use all of their allocation; and others?like Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines?are not allocated enough. A good example of the detriment is reflected in the family-based backlogs for Mexico. Mexicans who applied to be reunited with their families from March 15, 1992 to January 15, 1998 only now are being processed by the State Department. These applicants have waited from seven to thirteen years to be with their U.S. family members. For most other countries, the wait can be as little as four years. In the area of employment-based visas, most categories are current for Mexico; however the process is more complicated, usually involving the potential employer and frequently the Department of Labor. Unfortunately for Rafael, the Department of Labor?s ?Schedule B? bars common laborers and construction workers from work-based entry into the United States. Schedule B also bars kitchen workers, assemblers, caretakers, groundskeepers, janitors and, well, almost every job we regularly find undocumented immigrants working in every day. Rafael had two choices?only two. Stay home and remain poor; or cross the desert, work in Chicago, save his earnings, and build a home. He chose the latter. Companies hire undocumented workers despite the law. Today, it?s almost common knowledge. Millions of workers enter the United States illegally, not just from Mexico but from around the world, because they can always find a job. In 2001, Tyson Foods was indicted on charges that it conspired to hire illegal immigrants to work at its plants. A New York Times article (??Meatpackers? profile hinges on pool of immigrant labor,? December 21, 2001) reported: ?Industry experts said it has long been believed that American food companies recruit in Mexico and knowingly hire illegal workers. Some said the companies advertise on the radio in Mexico, distribute leaflets, show videos and hire immigrant smugglers, or ?coyotes.?? More recently, Wal-Mart paid an $11 million settlement with the United States government for hiring undocumented workers through a number of janitorial services. According to the BBC, Tom Mars, Wal-Mart?s general counsel, said in a statement, "Today we are acknowledging that our compliance program did not include all the procedures necessary to identify independent floor cleaning contractors who did not comply with federal immigration laws.? The benefits of hiring illegal workers should be apparent to any second-rate MBA. First, illegal workers are cheap. Anytime a company can pay below-market rate for a factor of production, it almost guarantees a competitive price for the product at the back end. With labor frequently being the highest cost of production, an opportunity to reduce that cost greatly benefits the bottom line. Also, any payroll taxes and other government expenses related to hiring legal workers can be saved by the company. Second, illegal workers are not likely to complain. A company can have an illegal immigrant work 90 hour weeks using toxic substances without protective gear in conditions no American would tolerate. And the immigrant would do it with appreciation. The company could refuse pay or garnish wages and the immigrant would nod and work harder, hoping to earn what was ?lost.? In today?s corporate word, the illegal immigrant has evolved into the perfect worker. With a wink and a nod, the government allows it. But without a government to govern us, where the government refuses to govern, the company becomes the government?and worst, a god and a devil with a thumb on each undocumented life. It?s hard to imagine what would drive Gilchrist to such extreme measures?after all, he is from Aliso Viejo. Aliso Viejo?which translates in Spanish to ?old alder tree??is a suburb of San Diego. Over 75 percent of the community earns over $50,000 a year and a formidable 30 percent of the community earns over $100,000 a year. Of the 10,824 families living there, only 248 live in poverty. Most residents work in manufacturing, finance, management, or education; not so many in construction and field work Most likely, the most egregious action an illegal immigrant has ever taken against these people is cutting the lawn too closely, feeding the baby off the feeding schedule, or not folding the laundry exactly the way it should be done. Are these the Americans really feeling the economic ?threat? of illegal immigration? I don?t think so. Further evidence of the non-economic motivations of the movement is the fact that it utterly ignores the employers, otherwise Gilchrist and his airplanes would be circling America?s commercial agricultural fields, meatpacking plants, and sweatshops. He would poll his neighbors to see who?s hired ?cheap labor? in the past few years. A year ago he would have waited for the clean-up crew at his neighborhood Wal-Mart. The last place he needs to go to find his illegal immigrants is such an exotic place as the Arizona desert. The websites point to the ?rule of law? as another possible motivation for their movement. We have already seen that our immigration laws are insufficient and impractical. Businesses and fiscal conservatives have been arguing for a rewriting of these laws for years. Yet, Gilchrist is not lobbying Congress for a demand-sensitive visa allocation system. He is not fighting for the prompt reunification of Mexican families. Not a word has been fired against the industries that systematically violate our labor laws by hiring and exploiting undocumented workers. No, the rule of law is not a factor. What, then, drives these vigilantes? Racism? The Minuteman website attempts to put a quick end to that assumption. It points out that eighteen volunteers are American-Mexicans, four are American-Armenians, twenty-one are Native-American Indians (Cherokee, Comanche, Sioux, and other tribes), one is American-Lebanese, and one is Russian. The movement is painted as a veritable Benetton commercial with guns. But in an age when a Native-American Nazi high school student murders his classmates in admiration of Adolph Hitler, it?s difficult to imagine how the ethnic heritage roll-call of the movement is relevant. What seems more relevant is its ideology. The Minuteman website lays it out: And there it is. Mexicans are an unassimilated, squabbling culture with no common bond. Mexicans will guarantee the death of this nation. Rather than couch the movement in rhetoric about preservation of the ?rule of law??a premise President Bush outright rejected last week in Crawford?they ought to just come out and say it. ?We hate Mexicans. We hate brown people. We hate Spanish.? If the threat is in fact the threat they describe above, this issue has nothing to do with how these people come to the United States. It has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The problem for the Minutemen is the Mexican people themselves. The Minutemen debase the people of Mexico for a deliberate and calculated reason, and they have an moral obligation to be transparent about their motivations. Similarly, the politicians who support his movement, Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, should be honest about theirs. They should say it: ?We hate Mexicans. We hate brown people. We hate Spanish.? CNN?s Lou Dobbs, the host ?Broken Borders? ought to turn to the camera one evening and say it: ??I hate Mexicans. I hate brown people. I hate Spanish.? Then we could all have a real dialogue. Then we could communicate. Then, perhaps, the government would silence its implied nod and wink to the Minutemen and place them where most fomenters of civil unrest are found?in prison. I finally left Guanajuato. A few months later I found work in El Paso. The first time I was paid in dollars instead of pesos, I held the money in my hand for a long time. It was strange. A different color, a different texture. It felt good. If I close my eyes, I can see Rafael in Guanajuato in his home in the mountains. I can feel the summer air and hear the patter of the rain. But when I turn to the newspaper or the broadcast news, I see Rafael walking, thirsty, alone. Sometimes he has his arms around his head, shielding himself from a rancher with a gun in his hands. Other times I see that he has arrived in Chicago and he is working and sending his pay-checks back to Mexico. The American Dream. I know many of us still believe in it. Many of us have no other choice. The irony, however, is that it is no longer the Americans who dream it?it is the Mexicans. Emanuel Anthony Martinez is the founder and former editor of Newspaper Tree. He is currently in law school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
If Rafael were ever going to upset anyone in the United States, I would have guessed it would have been the guy in Chicago competing for the same construction job as Rafael. I got it all wrong. It turns out, he and others like him have royally pissed off James Gilchrist, a retired accountant from Aliso Viejo, California. Gilchrist is the leader of the Minuteman Project, an effort to organize a civilian patrol of the U.S.-Mexico border throughout April. And he claims to have a group of 1,000 men and 30 private airplanes to do the job. The Minuteman website reads:
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#1. To: Mr Nuke Buzzcut (#0)
I just scanned this article, and caught a few of its ideas, including its touching tug at the old heart strings. (Poor Rafael!) At the moment, all I can say is, the Mexicans/Aztecs are not overly fond of the "hijo del Anglo-Sajon" themselves. "Somos Mas Americanos" ...quiero recordarle al gringo yo no cruce la frontera la frontera me cruzo, america nacio libre, el hombre, la dividio. (...nos compararon sin dinero las aguas del Rio Bravo quitaron Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, Arizona y Colorado voto California y Nevada con yuta (Utah) no se llenaron el estado de Uaiomi (Wyoming) tambien nos lo arrebataron soy la sangre del indio, soy latino, soy mestizo somos de todos colores y de todos los oficios, somoes mas americanos que todititos los gringos somos mas americanos! somos mas americanos! que el hijo de anglo-sajon! A rough translation: "We Are More American ...I want to remind the gringo I didn't cross the border--the border crossed me America was born free, it was man who divided her (They bought from us, without money, the waters of the Rio Bravo They took from us Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California and Nevada With Utah they were still not satisfied The state of Wyoming they also robbed us of I am of the blood of the Indian, I am Latin, I am mestizo We are of all colors and all offices We are more American than all the gringos We are more American! We are more American! Than the son of the Anglo-Saxon."
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