Frontiers
The day was hot and the sun was high in the cerulean sky of Western Colorado. I was grabbing my lunch after spending the morning “heeling-in” trees at an open lot nursery. The work consisted of taking balled-and-burlaped trees from a trailer — often by wheeled cart — and placing those Spruce and Aspens in neat lines on the ground. The next step was shoveling a mix of mulch and detritus around the base of the trees to support them and provide a moisture barrier between them and the scalding sun at high-noon.
Around me were what I came to adore as my “Mexican tios,” my adoptive cousins and uncles that mainly hailed from the central states of Mexico. Every day these men would rise before dawn, put on their boots, grab their lunches, and join their compatriots driving to work. Often five or six men would ride in one truck, some in the cab, and others in the bed of the pickup. It was already hot by eight in the morning and the rest of the day would carry the smells of rich mulch and hummus, sweat, and pine needles.
Leo, the eldest man in the group, had been the key to most of the other workers being there. He would make recommendations as to who was the best and hardest working in the group, and often enough, you could hear him yelling at someone that he thought wasn’t holding up his weight of the work. “Pinche huevón,” Leo would say as he upbraided the work performance of the other guy. It’s a strong charge in English, but it carries a more pejorative meaning in Spanish.
I quickly learned that standing idle as others worked around you, was a quick sentence of never returning to the work crew. Basically, if you were put on the mark by Leo, you wouldn’t come back. Leo had a reputation to uphold, and if you were put out by the fact, you were put out of work. This is something I remember as a cultural signifier in Latin culture and Mexican men; you work hard, keep your head down, and stay under the radar. This is in direct retaliation for the very fact that most of these laborers — as undocumented or unauthorized — stood to lose everything if they put their heads up and were noticed. Their second job was to remain invisible.
Everything stopped two times a day at the nursery, once at 10 am, and the other at 12 noon. Leo would whistle at the crew at noon, and a couple of men would wander off toward their trucks. Each man would put his shovel down, and begin to walk toward the shade of the tree canopy lining the creek adjacent to the nursery lot. The few that wandered off to their trucks picked up small coolers, a small propane stove, bottles of Jarritos, or similar soft drinks, and water.
We would all gather in one shady spot as Leo and the others would encircle a place on the ground and begin warming their lunch on the propane stove. The food was delicious. I was pitied when I showed them my bologna and mayo sandwiches. Leo would scoff and hand me large chunks of carne, or carnitas, braised in spices and onions, a fresh tortilla and pickled chilies, carrots, and cauliflower. It was always something of competition to see how spicy of a pepper the guero (me) could eat. Leo would point to his buddy, nod and tell him to give me a habanero, or serrano chili to see how long I would hold out until chugging a mango-flavored Jarritos soda.
I loved these lunchtime conversations. I learned Spanish a half hour at a time, and to this day, I owe it to my tios that I can converse in a foreign tongue.
Leo would often break out in song during these discursive lunches. He was rightfully proud of his voice and he would sing in honey-filled melodies fractured by shrill high notes and guttural rolls of vibrante erres. His Mariachi inspired country ballads would blend with the summer heat and the smell of freshly warmed Mexican food. It helped me to understand that there is a place for extremely hard work. When that work is laid down, there is place for community, art, song, and a rich cultural heritage that defines the Mexican identity.
Just as soon as the work had ended, it began again. Without saying anything, the makeshift lunch camp was meticulously disassembled and put away. The stove, the fresh fruits, the bottles of water, and the coolers all went back into the bed of the pickup. Everyone put back on their hats (under which were draped old tee shirts to shade the neck from the sun) and we would get back to work. Leo wouldn’t stop singing completely, however, and he would trail off in love songs for a few minutes before it faded back into the mechanical labor of shovel and pickax.
I was inducted into a family of Mexican immigrants during those summer months, and I learned a great deal about myself: hard work, Mexican culture, and just what happens when a culture so rich and diverse in its art and being is kept invisible. I learned what it meant to be kept outside the main culture behind the veil of a functioning labor industry.
At any moment one of the men could be arrested for driving without a license or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a common diatribe that I would hear within the white community I grew up in that if, “you scream lah meegrah out loud,” you would see half of those Mexicans go running. In the same breath, those who saw the Mexican men I worked with as alien, would undoubtedly say something about how “Mexicans were stealing the jobs of white Americans,” and if they would only leave, “white folks would have more jobs”.
The thing is, I never saw a white man breaking down the door to get a day-labor job for $7.00/hour in the blistering heat of an August day in Colorado.
In fact, I don’t think I have ever worked beside another white man except my brother and dad in those conditions.
If it is the Mexican laborer that is keeping white America from realizing their dream of luxury and the good life, I would be interested in defining luxury as I saw it: living in a trailer park with two or more families in a two bedroom without decent medical service, dentistry, social capital, or the assurance of a better day.
All of this can be (and is) boiled down to a reductionist point of view in most political games. One side argues that there are systemic and structural injustices willingly and overtly placed upon all immigrants. The other side argues that these unauthorized immigrants are just that, unauthorized, and therefore nothing beyond the fact that they are “illegal” matters.
The truth is always somewhere in the middle.
A recent conversation I was having with a Yale Law professor became pointed when I remarked, “I am not sure what the current administration is looking to do with these immigration policies. Who does President Trump think built Colorado?” This is a loaded question, and again, there is an implicit assumption that President Trump actually has unilateral decision making prerogative, and can, by the swipe of a pen enact immigration policy outside of the judiciary’s approval. It would certainly seem this way by his recent actions taken.
It is a great failure in the age of information to uncritically accept information. Furthermore, it is a moral failing of our faith communities, social organizations, and civic groups to simply speak to a problem. We have witnessed a polarization of both camps toward the fringes of their constituent policy beliefs, yet we have not had substantive honest conversations around the core of the issues.
Demonizing and weaponizing language may work for a time, yet as we allow the rhetoric to settle out, I fear that the remnant of these vitriolic debates will leave behind a vacuous center. As we have witnessed in recent decades, sectarian violence seldom yields a favorable leader in its wake. If we continue to push our discourse toward reductionist idealism, both sides of the coin will be left wanting when something wholly different steps in, indeed, we may be witness to this occurrence now.
The recent exposure of a deeply despondent “Middle-America” has brought about a shift toward a nationalist identity and the uprising of a polarized Commander in Chief. As witnessed in recent executive decisions, and cabinet appointments, there are very real and present consequences to the election.
I also argue that those who voted en masse for the ascendency of President Trump may come to be disillusioned at the general lack of benefit to them as domestic policy around entitlements, healthcare, immigration, and national security take hold. In fact, I would argue that there will be a large contingent that come to dislike some of those political decisions.
Colorado’s vote was won by Clinton at a narrow margin of ~2.8%. This was not a screaming victory for either candidate, but the divergence of the votes was more nuanced and subtle. More rural counties went to Trump, and the majority of the more populous to Clinton. However, the distinction is well beyond this rural/city divide often given as a parry of both sides.
It speaks to a divided public, a disenfranchised and polarized public, and a national phenomenon that resulted in a swing toward a far-more-right candidate being inaugurated. The resulting affect of a nation at odds with itself is increasingly tense.
What becomes of the moderate left and right as they continue to be stretched toward the poles of each camp and each discerns their way forward?
The dust surrounding the election may not be afforded the chance to settle.
The resulting lack of honest discussion may prove to modify each party such that what remains may look entirely different than it did heading into this moment.
I remember the lessons taught to me by my tios while growing up: I was taught the value of labor, I was instructed in the ways by which esteem and public opinion is garnished in a community, and I was taught that life at the fringes is often a lot like life at the top, and that living at the fringe often comes with a lack of a vote and voice.
The Middle-America that raised me put me in the helm of a ship bound for distant shores. I have been given the opportunity to attend the highest reaches of education in the halls of Yale, and each day I sit down to eat lunch, I remember Leo’s singing that helped me assuage the weary back and hands of a day-laborer in the summer dust and heat of Colorado’s summer.
Refusing to allow those seeking a better life, seeking refuge from their conditions of poverty, and an opportunity to become productive citizens within the U.S., is contrary to my lived experiences and values of my youth. The men and women that built Colorado’s infrastructure, homes, and industry bring their best to work each day. It seems that Trump can’t even muster a complete sentence to refute their aspirations. Nuance and complexity surround the issues facing North and Central America’s immigration policies, and any reduction to an answer is necessarily complicated. But those love songs that my tios sang, lament desires which transcend easy answers.
