It’s that time again, Dear Reader! Dan Abbott here with the Bobby Joe Ebola Song of the Week, along with sometimes-tangential commentary about how the song got written, what was going through our heads, and where the song fits into the larger lyrical world of Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits. If you’re just joining us, that’s the name of a band Corbett Redford and I started way back in 1995, which thrilled the nation (or might have, if they’d known about us) with our songs of nightmarish apocalyptic terror, social satire, and poop jokes. As we approach our 25th Anniversary we’re pointing our lasers at one song a week from our catalog, giving a little more context for that extremely selective demographic that wants to know more about all things Ebola. Except for last week. No good reason, but… Thanksgiving? Yes, we’ll say it was that.
Today we’re talking about “Jornaderos”off our 2010 album F. This is one that I brought to the Bobby Joe Ebola fold pretty much written, but once Corbett and I started working out the vocals there were some new possibilities for harmonies that made the song a lot more interesting. I’d originally been hoping to use some wood or clay flutes and arrange it along the lines of Central or South American folk music, for reasons that will become clear. Though I fully admit I’m no expert on the subject; our old backup singer John had, for a long time, kept a cassette tape of Chilean revolutionary anthems in circulation on the floor of his old hatchback, and those had a big impact on me. But to be perfectly honest, I think that when I was writing Jornaderos I was probably unconsciously influenced by the theme from The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a strange Japanese-French cartoon about South America I used to watch as a kid.
But in any case, we were on a schedule to record the album, and I didn’t feel like I had the arranging skills or knowledge to pull off what I’d had in mind.
I wanna say right off that the name of the song itself comes from either my terrible Spanish, or someone else’s, or neither. When I lived in Oakland I used to bike down San Leandro Street in East Oakland quite often, and I would often pass a particular corner in that weird industrial no-man’s land where Latin American day laborers would congregate to be picked for work, queuing up like it was a bus stop. There was a sign attached to the chain-link fence behind them. The sign said
Jornaderos
Zona de Trabajo
Or, at least I think that’s what it said. I was pretty confident “jornaderos” was a term for the sort of under-the-table immigrant labor that gathered under the sign, which I took to mean “Day Laborers — Hiring Area”. Years later, a bilingual friend of mine asked me if I hadn’t meant jornaleros instead.
“Jornaderos with a d, that means, I dunno… like, “horny guys,” she said, laughing.
So either the sign person got it wrong, or more likely, I read the sign wrong when I was whizzing past the spot in a hurry. Or it’s an acceptable derivation of the right word and my friend hadn’t heard it. Or she was wrong. I really don’t know. But by the time this came up, the song was recorded and the name was printed on a couple thousand record sleeves. Here’s what it sounded like:
What’s with all these Mexicans standing on the streets in San Rafael?
Doesn’t it make you feel weird to see them eating food at Taco Bell?
Crammed like clowns into the king cab of the Chevy
And the gringo contractor thinks they all speak Spanish
But it’s more complicated than that
What’s with all these Mexicans standing on the streets of San Rafael?
Was it some TV show that made them think that they should leave their home?
The corn is cheap; it’s no way to make a living
All roads point north, with lots of hiding out and swimming
So folks they’ll never meet can make a killing
Jornaderos, Jornaderos
We’re really sorry about the talking perros
Jornaderos, Jornaderos
If they pay you, will it be in Ameros?
What’s with all these Mexicans standing on the streets of San Rafael?
Doesn’t it make you feel weird to see them eating food at Taco Bell?
A border works just like a coffee filter
that you’ve filled too much now there’s chunks in the espresso
And the mess you’ve made wouldn’t fit in a sombrero
That would give shade to every jornadero
You may notice that when we actually recorded the song we sang “Why are all these Mexicans” instead of “What’s with all these Mexicans”, which didn’t roll off the tongue quite as well. But the “what’s with” preserves the tone I wanted from that voice, that sarcastic and not really curious question to which you already know the answer. When you hear it you know it’s not an honest question so much as a dismissive complaint, like a nightclub comedian’s opening line. That kind of disingenuous inquiry is something we’ve seen a lot of on the news and social media recently.
This song a little bit of a weird one, and has gotten mixed reactions from people. Some people are not sure where we’re coming from, and I think partly that has to do with the shifting perspectives within the lyrics themselves. It’s a conversation, between the surface impressions many Americans have about immigrants, and a response from, well, I guess from us. I don’t know that the distinction was always caught, especially live.
We’d be playing in some small town and the local rednecks would hear the opening lines why are all these mexicans and begin chuckling and clapping. And, if they continued listening, you’d see the drunken grins of these same guys turn uncomfortable, and then progressively more sour as the song went on. But sometimes they didn’t listen any further. In which case what the fuck were they clapping at? It bugged us a little. In some of those towns, it probably worked out for us better when people weren’t listening. I must be getting old, but these days I think I’d rather have absentminded applause than a volley of bottles or a back alley beatdown.
Though to be fair, I can only recall one time we were ever physically threatened over our lyrics, and they weren’t even our lyrics. We’d were in LA somewhere, and had just played “Jesus is My Asswipe” an old favorite from John’s high school band Slide. We were just poking some fun at a very public figure, but the bouncer, a hulking figure with muscles bursting through his staff t-shirt, had a personal relationship with the Holy Gentleman and wanted to defend His good name.
“Jesus isn’t here to defend himself,” he warned us, being held back, just barely, by the bar staff. “But I am.” Which raised all sorts of theological questions for me, but we had other places to be suddenly. There were a lot of times where being an acoustic band with no gear made it feasible to make a hasty exit from cops or overzealous servants of the Lord.
I took three years of Spanish in high school. I liked it but never felt like I was getting good at it, but it may have been partly that none of those classes had less than 35 students. The only time I ever used it was at Round Table Pizza, where I worked a couple of nights a week bussing tables and washing dishes. And when I was called upon to use it, it just felt awkward and embarrassing, since the latinas, by and large, knew English better than I knew Spanish. So they’d have to wait while me, a gangly white teen, mangled their language to ask haltingly for another bucket of thousand Island please because I spilled the first one and people are falling down.
When what would become the S.P.A.M. Records collective first all moved in together at the Hermosa Street house in Pinole, five of the six residents worked at Round Table Pizza. Later on after a hilarious firing at Round Table (we’ll save that tale for when we talk about “I’ve Got A Bomb” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KaTJExwwJ8), I wound up getting a job at Jack in the Box, nestled near the freeway about a ten minute walk from the house. As the only person there for whom English was my first language, they put me on the headset pretty much always. Usually I worked the night shift 8pm-4am, or 10 to 6. During the slow hours, I would sometimes put dining-room chairs together into a rough couch and catch what sleep I could until the drive-through’s motion detectors automatically turned on my headset and suddenly there would be a Honda Civic full of stoners arguing in my ear.
Sometimes (OK a lot) I would drink a ton of soda and write lyrics on the back of receipt paper. If a bit of doggerel got stuck in my head I would press the “Feed” button, tear off a strip and jot notes down. I would sort through what I’d written when I got home later, like a bartender counting tips at the end of the night. But the only people who ever worked the night shift with me were women from Guatemala or Mexico who spoke almost no English, and so it was there that conversational Spanish started to stick with me at all. I owe those back kitchen ladies a debt of gratitude for their patience and enthusiasm as I stammered through those late night conversations with a lot of como se dice’s and atrocious conjugation.
The last hour of my shift was usually when the tradesfolk were getting up, and during the late 90s tech boom there was a lot of that kind of work around. Every morning there would be a few big white trucks growling in my headset, trucks with chipped paint and workboxes on the side and tools jutting from every crevice.
The order was typically something like:
A jumbo jack with cheese
A large coffee
An extra large Coke
5 monster tacos
30 regular tacos
And when they came around to the window, it was always a slightly grizzled-looking white guy in his 40s or 50s, with half a dozen day laborers jammed uncomfortably in there.
One thing to understand about Jack in the Box was that its business model has always seemed to opt for variety over quality. The tacos were a case in point. They were two for 99 cents, and the monster tacos were 99 cents, but it was all the same. It was a grotesque mockery of a taco, designed not so much for taste or appeal but for ease of manufacture. Frozen tacos came out of the bag and were placed in deep-fry torture racks. After a minute or so, the tacos would be pulled out and cracked open like shellfish, revealing the dubious grayish meat huddled for forgiveness within. A half-slice of American cheese, a sprinkle of iceberg lettuce, and a squirt of hot sauce later, the tacos were closed up and shoved into paper envelopes emblazoned with a logo warning that this here is clown meat.
After an e. Coli outbreak had been traced to Jack in the Box in 1993, there were a few extra health precautions taken. One of them was these taco timers. In theory, you’d put fresh tacos on the warmer and set the timer. At the end of 15 minutes, if they hadn’t been sold, you’d throw them out. In theory.
Not gonna name any names, but assistant managers are frequently under a lot of pressure to reduce inefficiencies like loss & spoilage. When it was slow, my assistant manager would go reset the timer again and again, sometimes for hours, until some sucker came along and took those wilting, greasy half moons off our hands.
I always felt embarrassed when I would see those contractor trucks with all the day-laborers in them. The contractor would dig through the bag for his coffee, soda and burger, and then hand the remaining tacos absentmindedly over his shoulder. And I realized with a bit of revulsion that the guy probably thought he was doing his workers a solid. Hey, tacos. You guys like tacos, right? Maybe he just doesn’t know the difference. Never mind the mental math he was doing, feeding a truck full of laborers for $20, which made tacos what he probably would have gotten them no matter where he thought they were from.
Still, I cringed a little bit every time, like when someone unknowingly says something really racist. I knew that wherever those guys had come from, local fare probably did not look anything like Jack in the Box tacos. But there wasn’t much I could do. I couldn’t make the tacos any better than they were. I thought about trying to do a whole day of roofing or drywall with nothing but those tacos in my stomach. Better than nothing, I guess.
I did a lot of menial construction labor myself in the years after that, as the Bobby Joe Ebola tour schedule made looking for a steady job pointless. A lot of those jobs were in San Rafael, an affluent enclave north of Richmond in Marin County where a lot of rich people from LA had built second homes. And, just as in Oakland, there were parts of town where the day laborers would congregate, waiting to be picked up by some random dude in a truck. Where did they all live? I wondered. There was no place around there with affordable rent, not that I could see. It was a place where New Age health nut divorcees casually left $3000 road bikes unlocked outside Starbucks.
There was a tendency in the trades to refer to Latin American workers (and especially day laborers) broadly as “Mexican”, as in “Dave went to Fruitvale and picked up a couple of Mexicans for today’s job.” I knew what it meant. White America’s understanding of the differences between Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico would not fill a single index card. The average non-Spanish speaking Jack in the Box patron would assume that if you speak Spanish, you’re from Mexico.
When I finally had the chance to go to college, I ended up majoring in anthropology at SF State, and had the privilege to take several classes with Dr. Thor Anderson. Dr. Anderson had spent seven years in Chiapas, arriving there at first to study the soil management techniques of the indigenous farmers of the highlands, but getting drawn by the principles of community based participatory research into helping the local people create knowledge about something they found more interesting; their Carnival traditions. Dr. Anderson spoke fluent Tsotzil, the language of the Maya-descended people he’d lived with in Chiapas. He spent a couple of days talking about the language and gave us students a feel for it. Not enough to speak or understand it, but enough to recognize its unique cadences.
Years later, I was really putting that anthropology degree to use by painting my uncle’s house in Alameda. Or rather, managing the job. Strangely enough, it turned out to be one of the first times my anthropology studies had actually helped me in a vocational setting. He went down to Fruitvale to pick up some “Mexicans” (“You speak Spanish, right?” he asked me. I responded with a weak grin and a wobbly hand) to help with the job. He came back with three young, quiet men in flannel shirts and paint-stained jeans. I tried to give them simple instructions in Spanish, but I got very little response, and ended up having better luck with body language. I was a little embarrassed with myself; maybe my Spanish had gotten really rusty. I felt like an idiot until lunch time, when I heard them talking to each other in low tones… but it wasn’t Spanish. Realization swept over me.
“Perdoname…” I asked tentatively. “Tu estas hablando Tzotzil?”
Their eyes widened. “Como tu sabes?” one said, haltingly. They opened up to me and started asking me questions, and I began to realize they didn’t speak much more Spanish than I did, and had muddled their way through the underside of the U.S. economy without even knowing the common language of Latin America. I thought about the centuries-old layers of domination from multiple global empires that lays over us like a heavy & invisible fog at all times, and which they must have had to navigate to get from Chiapas to that old Victorian at the edge of the Western sea. I thought about those workers a lot in the years after that, and I wish my Spanish and theirs had both been better so that we could have talked more about where they came from, and how they’d gotten here, and what drove them to undertake something like that.
I’ve never been to Mexico, not even for dental work (though that would probably be a good idea soon). Neither has Corbett, though his grandmother is Mexican and as a very small child he spoke Spanish. The Mexican side of his family, now here for a couple of generations, have done what many immigrant communities have done once they get settled in; rail against all the foreigners. Many of them embrace the conservative, nativist attitude you see on Fox News, spouting racist stereotypes about “Mexicans” coming over here to steal our jobs and health care and not learning English. It seems incongruous and perhaps hypocritical for recent arrivals to harden their hearts and embrace a barely-unspoken white supremacy that ultimately would reject them too, but it’s a story as old as immigration itself.
And when someone asks in that complainy rhetorical question way what all these Mexicans are doing here, there are specific answers, a lot of which come back to United States foreign policy. I don’t need to tell you that Uncle Sam has had his greasy fists in a lot of puppets throughout Latin American history, from the Monroe Doctrine to today. The legendary soldier-activist Major General Smedley Butler, who blew the whistle on the so-called Business Plot, an alleged fascist coup plot against Franklin Roosevelt, had a lot to say even in 1933 about the long history of US involvement in Latin America and elsewhere:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Obviously that sort of colonialism-by-a-different-name intervention continued well into the Cold War and continues today, by military and other means. When NAFTA took effect in the mid 90s, it meant, among other things, that US corporations could flood Mexico with cheap subsidized imports, driving down the price of corn and pork and forcing millions of subsistence farmers out of business.
As American corporations hoovered up every reputable source of revenue, drug cartels preyed upon people with few options, and with the rerouting of the cocaine trade through Mexico, exploded in power into paramilitary narco-states who today pose an existential danger to regional governments.
Several waves of northward immigration have come to America, following the money and relative safety. And who could blame them?
Well, lots of people, apparently. In a global economy where wealth flows fluidly across borders at the speed of the electron, borders exist to keep people from chasing it, making national governments into population brokers for those who can’t afford to uproot their lives. The United States has facilitated this extractive process as the diplomatic and military boot on local necks. Much of the blood shed in Latin America is done for the benefit of us here in America. Consider all those severed heads and ruined lives “externalities” for the privileges of empire.
Even so, there were plenty of critics who have long worried that even a bit of prosperity might be leached back from the centers of power. There are always conspiracy theories about foreign elements, of course. In a hypernationalist country like the U.S., the thought of a truly democratic global community has scared the bejesus out of a lot of people. The creation of NAFTA, followed a few years later by the formation of the European Union, was suspected to be part of a grand political consolidation that would end with a totalitarian One World government. A proposed North American currency, the Amero, would turn god-fearing American patriots into the slaves of their socialist Canadian and Mexican overlords. Or something.
There’s always a reason to hate the outsider. And of course a flood of voiceless immigrants, tired, poor and yearning to breathe free, can be painted as the culprits for any number of unrelated social ills. Nobody likes to be reminded that they are part of a brutal chain of exploitation and terror that girds the globe. When you see immigrants living rough in this country, it’s dangerous to start thinking Good god, how bad were things at home that risking everything for THIS is a step up? And how did it get that way? It’s easier to nod your head to the drumbeats of the news-as-propaganda, clucking your tongue at the miseries outside our walls as though they didn’t benefit you, as though those miseries weren’t just part of the cost of having all the cheap coffee and chocolate and bananas and cocaine and heroin available at your fingertips. And then you’re not so far from suspecting that maybe “these people” kinda brought it on themselves, and why must they bring their bad fortune to our shores.
And so you don’t ask too many questions when you hear about a restaurant getting raided by ICE, you nod distantly when you see red-faced white guys in white shirts warn on TV that privileges like education and health care are for citizens, and that they are stealing from us. And if they’re caught they should be put in cages, because a law is a law, and that goes double if you’re brown. And when you hear about for-profit “detention” [your brain won’t let you say concentration] camps being built, it’s easy enough to change the channel, or block the weirdo who won’t shut up about it. And when Trump floats ideas like designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and bringing the Drug War and the War on Terror together at our doorstep, like he did not long ago, it only seems like a minor escalation. You don’t want to see Mexican kids crying for their mothers on a concrete floor any more than you wanted to see naked Iraqis stacked in a pyramid on another concrete floor, in a different desert on the other edge of the imperial map. They’re called “externalities” for a reason.
But one thing the modern paradigm of instant communication has done away with is our cries of ignorance as a plausible alibi. We may be misguided or misdirected about causes and effects, but we can no longer pretend that the hidden costs of our lopsided opulence do not exist, simply because they are far away; they are both far and near. We know that many of the good things in life we enjoy in America are taken from the peoples of the world in our name at point of sword, and that the wars we’ve fought before and since World War II have been to open markets, or preserve advantageous political leverage, for the benefit of US companies. We see the devastation of the Pax Americana all over the world from screens assembled by slaves out of elements mined by child slaves, and we do nothing because our very national identity hinges on gorging ourselves on its fruits from dawn till dusk.
But what can you do, short of throwing yourselves on the gears of the machine? Has it really come to that? It’s such a big machine, and we’re just a couple of guys from kind of backward suburbs. And despite how cynical we both are, we’ve both voted, and marched, and made phone calls, played benefit shows, and even a bit of what you might call misdemeanor terrorism from time to time, trying to nudge history in the right direction in the tiniest of ways.
Well, as a somewhat obscure comedy duo from the early 2000s, we have a limited but real platform. And a pile of old merchandise that we were going to put on sale for Christmas.
So let us announce the 2019 Bobby Joe Ebola “Last Christmas On Earth” HOLIDAY SALE, ongoing until December 18!
Until the sale ends on December 18, 25% of all proceeds from this holiday sale will be donated to RAICES, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees. This is the organization that’s been navigating the government’s red tape to get immigrants and refugees out of the concentration camps on the border and reunited with their families. Even if you don’t pick up any of our merchandise, go contribute to RAICES if you can.
But if you want to also get some swag that will either get you high fives or head scratches, visit https://bobbyjoeebola.bigcartel.com/ and use the discount code SWEETSWEETDEATH for 40% off all merch in the online store! LPs, 7" records, CDs, cassettes, stickers, patches, posters, hats, buttons, tote bags and more!
If any of that stuff can help get a kid out of a cage, it’ll have a lot more meaning than anything we can emblazon on a button.
We hope you’re enjoying this weekly writing project of ours. We get something out of it. As you may be able to tell by now, these songs bring up a lot of memories and thoughts about the world, and the economy of words necessary for songwriting probably saved a lot of our fans from having to get through a bunch of pamphlets at the merch table. Thanks for indulging us, and we hope you’ll come back to see what we write next week, If you like what you see, share what we’re doing and bring a friend along.
-Dan and Corbett
