THESE HIERARCHIES ARE SO IMPORTANT. It’s always about who you can bring in to do the work or who you gonna round up to take away from the table. Later when you have a booming economic engine of might, claim America was assembled in America and entirely by white pioneers who had a dream and simply worked hard to make it happen. That way, when things falter, you know who to blame. Others.
UNCLE SAM AND JOHN MCCAIN vs Lady Liberty and Mother Nature. Two with fences to protect and two made of vision, dreams, rivers, winds, and people moving all about and throughout. George W. Bush, who doesn’t possess the brain, patience, or interest in making his machinations artful, blurted out the Elitist’s Mantra when he talked about creating a guest worker force of Mexicans and others, a special niche carved out where the rest (that’s us) could all cozily, legally and thus pseudo-morally exploit them; where they could “come to do the work Americans aren’t doing, and then go home.” You know, like kitchen help in the master’s house. You can work here, but don’t you go sitting down or drinking out of these cups. And why do I think now of that woman on the bus in Denver who brushed off the feelings of the locals by pointing out how much money we were spending in their stores?
These hierarchies are so important! It’s always about who you can bring in to do the work or who you gonna round up to take away. Later when you have a booming economic engine of might, claim America was assembled in America and entirely by white pioneers who had a dream and simply worked hard to make it happen. But must not question the build itself when the pistons clog or collapse. Must simply round up a new labor force to rebuild the mighty. Or distract the workers from realizing they are all building, and through many decades, have built a place where the powerful too often invest energy in keeping the workers fighting amongst each other over food, breathing room, opportunity.
Oh! My mind is swirling with political and economic and punitive patterns repeating. I’m like Highlander, stoned on Pollatix. Lately there is all kinds of gross patterns repeating as this new day unfurls, and the terrain seems the same. Blaming the poor and the workers for the economic crash that the well-monied have brought about. Taking advantage of those citizens who can be inspired to protect the riches of the rich at their own expense with some cheap talk about our new Black Socialist Overlord approachin’ you betcha. You see the right wing’s pilehoardie fears blossoming crudely as the campaign clock begins winding down, and a sleazy patina of racist symbols, memes, and frenzied talk of wealth redistribution.
It’s actually quite mindblowing to watch McCain, this rich white man, working so hard to convince the poor to protect his money. As a blogmigo, Kai, said “that’s it right there, the fundamental point of racism, get non-rich whites to side with rich whites.”
“When politicians talk about taking your money and spreading it around, you’d better hold onto your wallet,” McCain told the boisterous Melbourne crowd.
The wedges are being aimed left and right. And as people chew on toxic memes about immigrants or poor people or blacks (”minority home owners”) being the cause of this economic karma that our corrupt system is reaping, I think of the California Apology Act of the 1930s, which was issued because during the (first?) Depression, Herbert Hoover and many other Americans (relatives of those now blaming Mexicans and blacks for the economy or just like-minded elitists?) thought the jobs those Mexican Americans were taking were being taken from real citizens. (Perhaps people living in Real Virginia, USA?)
Amid the economic desperation of the Depression, Latino families were viewed as taking jobs and government benefits from “real Americans.” In Los Angeles County, a Citizens Committee for Coordination for Unemployment Relief urgently warned of 400,000 “dep ortable aliens,” declaring: “We need their jobs for needy citizens.”
Up to 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were relocated to Mexico during the 1930s, even though as many as 1.2 million were born in the United States. In California, some 400,000 Latino United States citizens or legal residents were forced to leave.
It was in Los Angeles where 50,000 Mexican Americans were placed on trains and repatriated in five months in 1931, hundreds were rounded up in San Fernando and Pacoima on Ash Wednesday, a Catholic holy day, and many Latino barrios simply disappeared.
I wonder how many people on the Right (and sadly, some on the Left)—the ones who talk about deporting Mexican workers to solve our woes—even know we’ve been there and supposedly learned; who know about that Apology Act, or the Repatriation of Mexican Americans in the 1930s. Or that at least the forward-thinking state of Califas has apologized for that reactionary and xenophobic way of thinking. I wonder how many people blaming blacks and immigrants and the poor for the economy even realize how neatly they fit into these repeating patterns. Like the people who go to hate rallies and sneer and leer and call for some darkie to be strung up. Clinging to an old day with their scabrous fingers and fraying worldview, dancing with ghosts of the past.
Apparently ideologically, the US Government is still at odds with our oddball state, my birth state, that state that was once part of México itself, mined and worked by so many Mexicans and Chinese and Chileans back in the gold rush days—California. Or at least the Apology Act of the 1930s. For we still see no humanizing of those working so hard at the pyramid’s base. Big Business just wants a way to use la gente expediently. On a nationwide level, there are still wedges being driven, unions smashed, loathing escalated, xenophobia and racism stoked to serve the ends of the powermongers, CEOs, and media owners. ICE raids to deepen the othering, to feed the prison economy, breakdown and demonize our communities and pressure allies and advocates to sign on to whatever reform is finally offered, even if it still exploits that base of workers without whom this land would be unrecognizable to what it is today.
So las redadas go on. And the workers who insure that so much of our food is not only harvested, but prepared and served, are invisibled or demonized or arrested, while Mexico (and all things Mexican) continue to be vilified! Oh the richness of the system.
And…sometimes a ray of light pierces these flickering shadows.
The United States relied on Mexican laborers to bolster its workforce during World War II, but activists and lawyers claimed for years that many of those workers were never fully compensated. [...]
At least 250,000 braceros worked in the United States from 1942 to 1946, Piers said, and a stipulation of their contract with employers was that 10% of their wages would be withheld and paid to them when they returned to Mexico. This would provide the laborers with an incentive to return to Mexico and also prevent exploitation while the workers were in the United States, Piers said.
But Piers said this portion of the braceros’ wages was never fully paid. [...] More than six decades later and after a lengthy court battle, thousands of the bracero guest workers may finally get a chance to collect their full pay. [...]
Three years ago, the Mexican government set up a program that began paying back the money to ex-braceros living in Mexico, but that did not help those living in the United States, he said. [...]
Under a settlement announced this week, braceros living in the United States who worked from Jan. 1, 1942, through Dec. 31, 1946, will be able to file claims for about $3,500 in compensation from the Mexican government. [...]
Under last week’s settlement, which affects only ex-braceros living in the United States, the former laborers will be able to file for the money at any Mexican consulate in this country.
Part of the filing process is having the original documents that prove work status in the United States during World War II as well as Mexican nationality. Ex-braceros also have only two months to file their claims, from Oct. 23 to Dec. 23.
It’s not much, and I fear that a Mexican national who was a bracero may still be undocumented and if that’s the case, I doubt they’ll be traipsing off to tell anyone who works in an official US government capacity about that status…but it’s something. It’s a sign, a symbol, a statement. It matters.
Mostly, I hope it becomes painfully clear (to those blissfully ignorant that is, because it’s already painfully clear to the undocumented and those in contact with them) that if more and more and more communities are disrupted, families shattered and workers jailed and criminalized—it is all of our America that suffers and is being crippled, not some abstract land belonging to an Other.
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[...] in an Other America Read The Unapologetic Mexican’s latest post on human rights, immigration and politics: UNCLE SAM AND JOHN MCCAIN vs Lady Liberty and Mother Nature. Two with fences to protect and two [...]
And I like your those with freedom share it. How powerful is your freedom when you feel the need to hold on to it so tightly and have nothing to give away. the opposite, hopeful attitude is what has attracted the best immigrants to the US and without them this country will stagnate and die.
Time keeps changing, and so does the country.
If you really believe in what this country stands for you want people here that also stand for freedom. Those are the people that will make America a better country - no matter where they were born.
Doing work that no one else wants to do may be how someone gets their start - but no one with hope and drive to do more deserves to have to stay there permanatly, with all hope of advancement/citizenship/education denied to them. that’s not what this country should be about.
And looking at guest worker programs in other countries reinforces that it’s a bad idea. Did you read about the riots in Paris a few years ago? What should these people care about the country they are in if they are hated and the attitude is just “ur here to work and go home” I personally think immigrant disrespect is un-American. Yes we’ve made mistakes to point out, but to me they were made on the way to a better atttitude, and the apology to the braceros represents that.
And the song I’m listening to - “Give it away, give it away, give it away now…”
wasn’t there a case about the bracero program going and it was settled, folks in Cali were able to receive $?
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The money isn’t a lot, but it is acknowledgment by the Mexican government that in the rush to assist in “la guerra contra nazifascismo”, mistakes were made, and there was war profiteering.
The 1942-46 Bracero Program was an honorable effort, and not all the problems were intentional. Record keeping was a mess — farmers didn’t always know they had to keep the set-asides in a separate account, nor did rural bankers always understand the program (though many did just pocket the deposits and never sent them on)… on top of this, there were employers who couldn’t understand that Jose Garcia Lopez and Jose Lopez Garcia were two different people… or theft (in both the U.S. and Mexico).
And, of course, many employers were dicks.
What was less honorable, and still needs to be resolved are compensation for the post-war Braceros (1946-65). What had been meant as an emergency measure to keep farms, factories and railroads running became a handy-dandy way to exploit cheap labor and supress wages in the Southwest — one reason Cesar Chavez objected to Mexican farm labor. Labor guarantees (Mexican workers were supposed to have their own unions and representatives) were overlooked, payments were “lost” and complainers were deported.