Pete Hamill - Piecework

But it’s said that at any given time, one third of the people in Tijuana are transients, waiting to cross to el otro lado. A whole subculture that feeds off this traffic can be seen around the Tijuana bus station: coyotes (guides) who for a fee will bring them across; enganchadores (labor contractors) who promise jobs; roominghouse operators; hustlers; crooked cops prepared to extort money from the non-Mexicans. The prospective migrants are not simply field hands, making the hazardous passage to the valleys of California to do work that even the most poverty-ravaged Americans will not do. Mexico is also experiencing a “skill drain.” As soon as a young Mexican acquires a skill or craft — carpentry, wood finishing, auto repair — he has the option of departing for the north. The bags held by some of the young men with Jeronimo Vasquez contained tools. And since the economic collapse of 1982 hammered every citizen of Mexico, millions have exercised the option. The destinations of these young skilled Mexicans aren’t limited to the sweatshops of Los Angeles or the broiling fields of the Imperial Valley; increasingly the migrants settle in the cities of the North and East. In New York, I’ve met Mexicans from as far away as Chiapas, the impoverished state that borders Guatemala.

Such men are more likely to stay permanently in the United States than are the migrant agricultural laborers like Jeronimo Vasquez. The skilled workers and craftsmen buy documents that make them seem legal. They establish families. They learn English. They pay taxes and use services. Many of them applied for amnesty under the terms of the Simpson-Rodino Act; the new arrivals are not eligible, but they are still coming.

I’m one of those who believe this is a good thing. The energy of the Mexican immigrant, his capacity for work, has become essential to this country. While Mexicans, legal and illegal, work in fields, wash dishes, grind away in sweatshops, clean bedpans, and mow lawns (and fix transmissions, polish wood, build bookcases), millions of American citizens would rather sit on stoops and wait for welfare checks. If every Mexican in this country went home next week, Americans would starve. The lettuce on your plate in that restaurant got there because a Mexican bent low in the sun and pulled it from the earth. Nothing, in fact, is more bizarre than the stereotype of the “lazy” Mexican, leaning against the wall with his sombrero pulled over his face. I’ve been traveling to Mexico for more than thirty years; the only such Mexicans I’ve ever seen turned out to be suffering from malnutrition.

But the great migration from Mexico is certainly altering the United States, just as the migration of Eastern European Jews and southern Italians changed the nation at the beginning of the century and the arrival of Irish Catholics changed it a half century earlier. Every immigrant brings with him an entire culture, a dense mixture of beliefs, assumptions, and nostalgias about family, manhood, sex, laughter, music, food, religion. His myths are not American myths. In this respect, the Mexican immigrant is no different from the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Jews. The ideological descendants of the Know-Nothings and other “nativist” types are, of course, alarmed. They worry about the Browning of America. They talk about the high birthrate of the Latino arrivals, their supposed refusal to learn English, their divided loyalties.

Much of this is racist nonsense, based on the assumption that Mexicans are inherently “inferior” to people who look like Michael J. Fox. But it also ignores the wider context. The Mexican migration to the United States is another part of the vast demographic tide that has swept most of the world in this century: the journey from the countryside to the city, from field to factory, from south to north — and from illiteracy to the book. But there is one huge irony attached to the Mexican migration. These people are moving in the largest numbers into precisely those states that the United States took at gunpoint in the Mexican War of 1846-48: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, and Utah, along with parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma. In a way, those young men crossing into San Ysidro and Chula Vista each night are entering the lost provinces of Old Mexico, and some Mexican intellectuals even refer sardonically to this great movement as La Reconquista — the Reconquest. It certainly is a wonderful turn on the old doctrine of manifest destiny, which John L. O’Sullivan, the New York journalist who coined the phrase in 1845, said was ourright “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

The yearly multiplying millions of Mexico will continue moving north unless one of two things happens: the U.S. economy totally collapses, or the Mexican economy expands dramatically. Since neither is likely to happen, the United States of the twenty-first century is certain to be browner, and speak more Spanish, and continue to see its own culture transformed. The Know-Nothings are, of course, enraged at this great demographic shift and are demanding that Washington seal the borders. As always with fanatics and paranoids, they have no sense of irony. They were probably among those flag-waving patriots who were filled with a sense of triumph when free men danced on the moral ruins of the Berlin Wall last November; they see no inconsistency in the demand for a new Great Wall, between us and Mexico.

The addled talk goes on, and in the hills of Tijuana, young men like Jeronimo Vasquez continue to wait for the chance to sprint across the midnight scrub in pursuit of the golden promise of the other side. Corre, hombre, corre. …

ESQUIRE,

February 1990

The work, and my own curiosity, carried me to many places. I’ve paid rent in Rome and Barcelona and Dublin. I’ve written pieces from hotel rooms in Paris and Belfast, Brussels and Managua, Helsinki and Havana and East Berlin. I’ve been to Saigon and Panama, to Vienna and Tangier. Over the years, pages of my passports grew lacy with the rubber-stamped graffiti of visas and departures. I wanted it that way; the world was out there and I wanted to see it. In 1967, on a long, comical diplomatic journey with Lyndon Baines Johnson to Asia, we stopped for fuel in the middle of the Pacific and I wrote a story in twenty minutes just to get the dateline into my resume: Pago Pago. It was a long way from Brooklyn.

For almost ten years, Vietnam was the foreign place above all others for most Americans. I spent very little time there, but the presence of the war informed almost everything I wrote. After 1973 -the ominous year of Watergate and OPEC and the beginning of the steady decline of the American economy — the war was lost. It should have been the task of statesmen to arrange its conclusion with some dignity. They could not bring it off.

There were other wars too: a long, grieving drizzle of a war in Northern Ireland; a dirty little war in Nicaragua; the horrendous civil war in Lebanon. In Belfast and Beirut, the killing was entangled with the dark certainties of religion. In Nicaragua, a similar impulse was in play: adepts of the Marxist faith fought against the hired acolytes of the anti-Communist faith, Sandinista against Contra, sometimes brother against brother. The warring creeds were everywhere in those places, each driven by visions of Utopia, each prepared to kill or die to bring them into existence. In all three parts of the world, the common result was more human misery. On my visits, I tried to understand the aims of the various players, but most often I found myself in agreement with E. M. Forster’s famous remark: “I do not believe in belief.”