the minnesota review n.s. 43-44 (1995)

Stephen D. Gutierrez

White Pigs¹

My mother started crying on the phone this afternoon. We were going from one topic to another until she came to one that shook her up so badly I had to tell her to calm down, that everybody's going to be all right after all.² But they're not, the white pigs are going to go on with their brutal ways to the end of time. Revolt. Come over the border in waves. Is the only answer. Civilize them. Part of me wanted to say; the other part wanted to agree with my mom that there are too many immigrants-wetbacks, in her own words when she gets particularly uncharitable-crowding the byways of L.A., the state, the country. "Hey, Brokaw's giving a special tonight on the immigration problem," she had said. "I heard on the news that it's gotten so bad... "

"Um-hmm." I've heard all this before. It's her pet peeve lately turned into her obsession. There are too many illegals in L.A., she says. They are changing the quality of life. You can't go on the bus anymore without being afraid of them-their offspring, actually, the gang-members who she insists are the product of illegal immigrant parents and not second or third generation Mexican Americans like us.

I don't know. I don't know whether that's true or not. Whether all our problems, our complete failure to infiltrate, assimilate, whatever you want to call it, become part of the system in productive ways³ is due to the illegal immigrants or our own lack of initiative⁴ and failure rooted in a sense of inferiority so astounding it's impossible to fathom unless you've been there. I don't know whose fault it is that the school systems that are predominantly Hispanic in L.A. are shitty now. Even the outlying suburbs where second or third generation Mexican Americans live experience the same harrassing dilemmas: gangs, violence, drugs, despair, hopelessness. Can it all be attributed to the illegal immigrants in our midst? I don't know.

She insists⁵ it can be. "It's those damn immigrants," she says. "They won't stop. There's just too many of them."

I look down at the floor. I'm a college professor in Hayward, California, protecting my own ass as best I can: double preparing my classes so that I don't get thrown out on my brown ass for incompetence, etc. I'm scared of the system. I don't think it's very charitable to me despite the protestations of the anti-affirmative action, anti-minority (not necessarily the same) contingents.

I'm paranoid of the white man's ways. I don't trust him. I don't know where I picked up this hate and paranoia from exactly, but I have it, just like any other honest minority member in America will tell you, if you ask him.

I have it. And yet I work in good faith, hope for the best, try not to blame everything on minorities, immigrants, even though I know there's a lot to be said on the side of those who would oppose further immigration by drastic means. Put up a wall!

Why not? There's no sense of order in the country anymore, at least this part of it, and this de facto open borders between two countries with dissimilar ways of life, of looking at the world,⁶ has to stop until some political boundaries have been set up: what is government supposed to do exactly for people who prove no allegiance to the country they find themselves in but just want to work there?

The schools are in chaos. The gang situation is crazy. Many of the gang members are the children of illegal immigrants, tormented and confused. The Third World has not done well in the New World, which is to say the Old World. New World be damned. There is nothing primitive about America anymore except its emotions.

I realize I'm sounding like a half-baked sociologist here, and so I am. I'm concerned about the illegal immigrants in America, here in California particularly. And if I unjustifiably labeled a whole people,⁷ a whole class of people, less than loyal American citizens,⁸ I think there's some basis in my description. Hispanic illegals maintain real ties to the old country, political and metaphysical, spiritual and psychological. Even the Chicano kids of Mexican immigrants at Hayward State profess no real loyalty⁹ toward this country,¹⁰ feeling alienated, angry towards its denizens and institutions, and emotional, romantic towards the old country. I suppose they get it from their parents who will never consider themselves Americans in their lifetimes, but just want to work here and survive.

There are exceptions. It takes about three generations to make a Hispanic American shed the Hispanic in favor of a complete identification with America, the United States of America. In my case, a second and a half or third generation American of Mexican descent, I didn't realize I wasn't Mexican until about in my twenties. Then I realized all that romantic identification with the old country in my youth was hogwash and more the product of the radical sixties and those Brown Berets marching around chanting slogans than any reality in my life.

We were not Mexicans,¹¹ my family. At all. My mother¹² emphatically denied¹³ my brother the right to sport a Mexican flag on the back windshield of our family car when that was the style in revolutionary East L.A. in the seventies. "No," she said, "never," sticking up her nose. "People are going to think we're TJ's."

The posters of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa in my teenage bedroom were as close as I ever got to Mexico¹⁴ and as close as I want to get¹⁵: I can't stand it, the thought of those teeming, ugly cities like Tijuana and Mexicali overflowing into our borders. The people are poor, ignorant, lost, and need help.¹⁶ We should help them by supplying them money, food, medicine, anything within our means that can lessen their suffering; we should help Mexico set up a humane birth control system. We should help Mexico set up an equitable agriculture system so that it can employ its own peasants and educate them in the traditions of its grand past. We should help Mexicans in every way we can to be self sufficient and proud, not begging at the door of its neighbor who hates them, fundamentally hates them.

We should help Mexico stand up on its feet. Instead, we use Mexico. We use Mexicans in the fields, in the factories, and then we hate them; we hate them and hate them and hate them, and then we ask them why do they come around? And Mexicans feel justified in having no mercy towards us who have never shown mercy towards them. They want their country back, and they will get it; and I am of two minds about it, myself. On the one hand, I don't want my country to turn into the third world. And that is what's happening right now. That is what my mother's complaining about: "Our city's turned into the third world." Commerce used to be a place of working class Mexican Americans pursuing their own fucked up lives in their own fucked up limbo ways without too much Mexican influence in the sense that they didn't live in Mexico. Now the denizens of Commerce feel that they are living in Mexico, or closer to it, than they want to.¹⁷

It's a proud community that had yellow ribbons on every porch during the Gulf war. The kids who grow up there hate, or at least learn a disdain for Mexicans that is everlasting: look at me. I'm still nervous around TJ's, not because I think they might rob me, but because I think their presence proves to me some sense of the Mexican's inferiority, which is my inferiority, foisted on me from somewhere.

I'd rather not see him.

I want well educated, middle-class Mexicans in our country, or none at all.¹⁸ Or I want well-controlled, regulated borders that let in a certain number of people each year to work the fields, and I want decent, tolerable conditions for those people out there in the fields; nay, I want more than that. I want us as a government to bend our backs for the field workers out there and put a stop to the abuses and tyranny of the growers exploiting our brothers and sisters, I want farm labor subsidied by the government so that these people never have to pack up a family of kids into a car and move them to another state to pick the next harvest and disrupt their educations. I want adequate educations, pay, sanitary facilities for everybody working in those modern day hell-holes, plantations. I want huge fines levied against farm owners who abuse field workers, human beings, in any way. I want a well-ordered system of field labor in this country that is equitable and just.

I want a sense of what country these people belong to, and if they are just temporary laborers, I want them paid WELL. If they are permanent laborers, I want their kids taught English by teachers who give a damn for them and their parents given benefits and rights that give them a decent sense of dignity and being. I want them to become Americans in time, through that painful process called acculturation; if they don't want to become Americans, then I want them out.¹⁹ If they just want to work here, fine, but work here, under our rules, respect our laws, and then leave, well paid, well fed, well taken care of, until the next batch comes and we treat them handily, too.

While we're at it, I want the factories looked into. I want owners and foremen to quit hiring illegal aliens at illegal wages and cheating our people, the American people, of a livelihood. It is all our fault that illegal aliens are here in this country, factory owners, Zoe Baird, whoever hires them. I want Mexicans to be given a chance to take some dignity home with them, which is impossible now under current conditions, and the only way to do that is to stop the currently condoned exploitation of our brothers and sisters in the farms and factories²⁰ of America. Set up a guest worker program; guest work them, and get them out, or keep them in, but somehow put a rein to this free border between us; it's not working. It's turning our country into the third world.

I want order. I am an American.

I want justice. I am a Chicano.

My mother says, "Tonight Brokaw is going to talk about the-" and I realize now what an awful thing I said in saying that I don't blame all our problems on minorities, immigrants. I realize how sick I am, how brainwashed I am.

I retch at the computer. I take a time out to barf into a bag at the side of my desk labelled, "America." It is a bag of hate and greed and racism, pure and simple. It wants to use Mexicans for the jobs we don't do anymore, then when Mexicans have the gall, the effrontery, to take the jobs we still do, we cry. They take our factory jobs and our construction jobs, and we cry.

Well, hang the owner of the factory and construction outfit, not the Mexican doing what any red-blooded man would do to stay alive: work. And yet they come here in droves, and some of them don't work; they hang around parks looking for jobs, they splash water on your windshield and ask for pay. They turn our country into the third world slowly but surely. What is one to do?

"And back East there's a lot of backlash against them," she says.

"Not worse than out here," I say.

"Yes," she says. "That's true." Then she tells me a story. By the end of it she's crying.

The other day, last week, her nephew went to a pizza joint in Temple City, California. Temple City is white, affluent, upper middle class or above. It is snobbish and snooty, a blight on the map of California. It should be eradicated, blown up, thrown to the dogs of hell to chomp if they'll take it.

She was crying at the way they made him walk the gauntlet in the restaurant.²¹ He walked in with a friend of his, an Italian boy from San Gabriel, and his parents, the Italian boy's. They play baseball on the same team. They're pals. They're good kids, my mother assures me. I don't know about the Italian boy (I'm sure he is), but my cousin is. He wants to be a cop. He's already riding around in the back of police cars around L.A. in the pre-cop training program for high school kids like him. He's a big-eared, big-footed kid, goofy and naive, who is growing up; he plays basketball and is pretty good at it, baseball and is even better. He's varsity this year, starting left field. He's got a glove and an arm, but not much of a stick, but the coach likes his spirit and stick-to-it-ness and gave him the spot in left field because he's the best man for it, all around.

He's a good kid, my cousin. And the sons of bitches, pigs in Temple City, made him walk the gauntlet, made fun of him and his friend, mean, racist remarks as soon as he walked into the pizza joint. I don't know where the other kid's parents were, but these two kids were alone with racist, white, upper middle class kids hearing shit, the same shit I've heard all my life here and there.

"Hey Pancho."

"What are you doing here, spic?"

"Who let the wetbacks in?"

"Border's that way."

My cousin wanted to cry, but he couldn't do anything. He went up to the counter and ordered his pizza and sat back down again. I don't know how his Italian friend reacted, whether he's used to that, being mistaken for a Mexican in white pig atmospheres or not, but my cousin was pretty well shaken up. He came home and told his mom, my Aunt Didi, about it.

She told my mom. My mom is the radical in the family. She said, "Well, what did he do about it?"

"Nothing," my aunt said. "What could he do?"

My mom was crying on the phone when she repeated those words. All the pain of her background in Montebello, California, under the white pig's hand, came back to her. She was crying and snuffling on the phone, "What could he do about it, Stephen?"

"Nothing," I say. "Nothing." Let the Mexicans come back and take back their country. Let the land be filled with brown faces. Let decency and humaneness flow in this land, which the white man will never give us, never ever ever, as long as we live on this earth side by side with him. This is the most bitter and radical piece of prose I've ever written in my life. I feel that way.²²

I wanted to get the way my mom was feeling down perfectly,²³ but that doesn't matter now. She was hurting with all that pain gushing up from the past, the pain of Montebello, California, and those bigoted, racist white pigs putting Mexicans down constantly and fearfully. She was awful and angry.

"What could he do?" she asked.

"What?" I say, but hope for a better world however that comes about.

1. Or, "Sick."
2. Actually I didn't tell her that, but waited out her silence in that awful pause that followed her revelations that her nephew had been the victim of vile, obscene bigotry in Temple City, California, over the weekend. Silence, pause, and her gasping, choking voice the next moment: "What could he do?"
3. I can't believe I just said that: or around the time I wrote the essay. I just can't believe I wrote that, that I'm that sick, sick with the brainwashing...
4. Ditto. Or am I right the first time? Did I hit it right the first time and is this just a guilty attempt to whitewash, brownwash our common failures in more finger pointing at the man, who has not broken our fingers, but our wills? Have we allowed him to break our wills? Have we degenerated to that point that we are worms under his racism, and not men, women, ready to stand up sturdy and strong and laugh at it all and EDUCATE ourselves to the point of no return: no more ignorance, no more gangs, no more violence, no more drugs, no more wife-beating (that's American!), no more shit in our barrios and neighborhoods that makes us the laughingstock of the state and of ourselves: why do we treat ourselves this way, why why why why why?
5. Like a good mother, who has taught me to hate myself, my soul, too . . . We are the minority group that most hates itself: now there's a distinction. She cried on the phone when she told the news, and I felt with her, truly, deeply, poor woman of the forties who had put up with enough shit from the pigs in her lifetime: "They just... wouldn't let him go... wouldn't stop. What could he do?"
6. ?
7. See the Mexicans. See the WHITES...
8. I think whites are more loyal to whites before they're loyal to America, the concept of America... I'm dying...
9. Serio. Two or three or four or five of them I know real well...
10. The Great Patria that has nurtured them and succored them with a sense of well being from the beginning... Ha ha ha ha ha... from their humble births to their current status as cholos in Haytown, "Hey prof?"
    "Yeah, fuck it, do whatever you want, I'm tired. The white kids come first."
    I'm sick, sick sick sick sick sick, I like them all, and yet I'm sick, sick sick sick sick sick. Are you? Are you well? Then step right up and give us an example of a healthy man before there ain't one left:
11. Most confusedly not.
12. Shrew.
13. I'm glad.
14. And yet I retain a certain sentimental connection to them, Villa turning a corner on a horse, hat ready to fly off his head, Zapata with his famous declaration that he'd rather die on his feet than live on his knees. . . . They used to bring tears to my eyes; now they can only bring a smile of fond remembrance, but maybe that's enough . . .
15. Not true. I want to visit the cities of Mexico and be a good tourist. Only I don't want the third worldness of Mexico here...
16. Do you deny that? Poor souls without a penny; let's help them . . .
17. Mercados have sprung up and . . .
18. Did I really say that? Am I really that sick? I guess I am. And yet I take it back. I want people with a stake in this country in this country permanently, or none at all . . . That includes WHITE people, by the way, who better get their asses beyond whiteness to a sense of America as . . .
19. If not out, then I want them to realize the rules of the game. You can't claim American benefits unless you give something to the country in return, care fundamentally about its welfare as an American before, say, you care about the welfare of Mexico or some other country. This is a fundamental lesson that too many Chicanos have to learn, especially those starry-eyed radicals from the sixties who should know better now. Either your country is America or is not. If you're not big enough to claim it, despite the racism, despite the poverty, despite the hate, then you're not entitled to anything by its laws or prerogatives. Period.
20. This begs the question of whether they're not being exploited and making wages they never dreamed of, but I'll side-step the question for a while. I want the stoppage of illegal labor in this country.
21. Her heart burst open on the phone and she gasped, "They . . . they . . ."
22. I let it hang for a while; then she started crying, terribly and gaspingly, "What could he do? They . . . they . . ." made him run the gauntlet, learned well from their fathers, who she knows so well from her days at a snooty suburban high school in the forties (she lived in the arroyo and walked to school); from her pain and remembrance came that awful choking: "They did that to him . . ."
    There was silence on either end of the phone for a while. Then I spoke up. I said, "and leave it up to you to decide."
    
    And that seems a cop out, too. I was angry, I was mad, I leave it up to the victims, not to the perpetrators to decide this fate of the state, ours to love or ours to hate, ours to overcome or ours to succumb, Martin's old song, gone out of fashion in recent years, seems apt. It seems apt for all those involved in this terrible dilemma called race, culture, hate, "We shall overcome," with love or perish in hate, simple as that, same old story, same old solution, nothing going to change that scenario till the end of time.
23. I tried. Above is my attempt to do that.