An always-in-the-know woman that I know recently took the leap out of concrete and headed west to Los Angeles, which everyone who is anyone seems to be doing these days. Los Angeles: land of cars, beaches, smog, no-style style, relocated artists and mostly-homes, which often need help tending to. Los Angeles, the newly-anointed New York of living standard expenses. (Coherently so: the city is filled with transplant New Yorkers!) As with many places, L.A. people hire people to help them with the domestic tasks of manicuring their lawns. My friend, a then-L.A. homeowner, nonchalantly pointed out in our own mid-lawn care conversation:
"Everybody here just finds a Mexican to do it...
Whah-at? That's what people call them here..."
Me, on the other end of the line, cringe-cringe: "Oh..." It was the "a" and "Mexican" that made my lip curl up in embarrassment: she didn't mean that?
My friend's gaffe, an honest portrayal.
Certain folks in L.A. that are able to hire lawn help, want to do it cost-effectively, which is fine, and they hire a...Mexican innocently enough, as most - if not all - are "hate-free" without any urge of bigotry or malicious intent. And the literal term, Mexican is correct: a person of Mexico, but, it's the the implied "us" and "them" discrimination that just shows up without warning or invite that deserves scrutiny: we - US - pay them less and work them - THEM - more. Why? How?
Oh.
They are Mexican.
They could be anyone, but they must be less.
I remember in one of my all-time favorite movies, Giant, the main character, Bick Benedict (aka Rock Hudson) is up-in-arms and exasperated (!) by his modern-age, headstrong Yankee wife, Leslie (played by a still-beautiful Liz Taylor) who insists on fraternizing with the Mexican help on his sprawling Texas ranch; this movie was made in 1956.
Fast-forwarding through the movies, almost fifty years later, the attitude, shockingly similar. On a recent field trip to the movies with my kids, we saw Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Piper Perabo, so perfectly portraying the main character: a lazy, spoiled, vapid ingrate crowing ignorantly to the "gardener", a Hispanic hero/heartthrob character. You involuntarily kick your leg, or twitch-wince as you are forced to listen: "Oh-la! Oh-la! Can you like, get your dog...Ugh!" (She goes on with more of the same, as she struggles to speak valley girl Spanish.) Of course, she acquires an intellect and a soul, two-ish hours later and heartthrob turns out to be an educated architect/designer who has blue eyes, is light complected and looks like Entourage's Adrien Grenier: he ends up getting the date, after all. I doubt his fate would have been as gratuitous, a few skin shades darker and a few inches shorter and a few notches less on the good looks scale. Ode to Hollywood!
If you read the dismal reporting articles on migrant workers and their struggles to get here: living a cramped, exploitative existence, while evading all of the American workers who hate them for doing so, you get the sense of who these "Mexicans" are and how hellish and disgusting their struggle is to survive. Here. Whether you are for or against them being here, working jobs at wages most Americans would never consider doing, you have to feel something somewhere as a human with a heart. Let us dare to relate: it clearly sucks to be a migrant, or like worker; seen as a sub-person without a name, story, personality and without emotional well-being. It sucks being a person summed up in one sneer of an ethnic word - someone who is ignorant, happy and grateful to clean filthy toilets, pick up dead rats...used condoms off our streets...someone who walks blocks upon blocks in the rain to deliver a bagel for a coined tip, or someone whose professional glass ceiling is to clean or landscape a wealthier person's home. The rallied response: "Who cares? They don't belong here." The words, Illegal and Alien established this adopted consensus: Illegal is a crime and Alien is not human = criminals not a part of humanity...we treat them accordingly.
Our lives have become so efficient with such ease and at such an economical rate, that at some point, shouldn't we STOP to wonder,
"At what cost?"
