An All-New Poem, "Luisa"

Since posting that old poem, I've wanted to write a new poem for this blog, so I did it tonight. It's about a girl whose father crosses the border from Mexico into the US, and this will conclude the blog for now. Here's a draft:

Luisa

Her father was crying in the photograph
Luisa had framed on her bare wall.
In the monochrome, dark, and faded print,
Two dots shone on his smiling cheeks.
His tears came not from pain but joy
On the day his darling Luisa was born.

Luisa never wanted to cut her hair;
The shiny braid swung across her back
In the mornings in misty Mexico
When she followed her father in the tall grass.

"You can help milk the goats," he told his precious,
When she was old enough to understand.
Then he smiled as she closed her fist and pulled
And pulled until the stream steamed in her pail.
She gasped and pulled again.

On the day she asked why they took the milk
The goat could use for its kids,
He told her that goats produce too much.
The tiny girl understood.

For eight years, Luisa drank the goat's milk
And gave the goat nothing in return.
It died on a morning in the middle of June,
Looking Luisa in the eye.
She turned and called her father
Who wasn't surprised.
The ranch was too small,
The ground too dry,
The crops too thirsty,
And the family too hungry.
He told his daughter to pray;
She was eight, and he left her at home.
Alone, he crossed the border under cover of night.
Her mother read his letters with tears in her eyes
Aloud, twice a month, for seven years.

__________________________________________________

The August sun is blazing on the girl's bare shoulders,
And her short, black hair is fire to the touch.
She holds her huge stomach, standing, legs apart,
On the brand-new land her father bought.
For seven years, his letters have addressed a child,
Not the girl expecting her own infant son.

When Luisa sees her father again, she won't recognize him.
"Seven years in a kitchen changes a man,"
He'll say and stroke her chopped, black hair.
She'll search his face, his wrinkled hands,
The dull green eyes, and sob, "I don't know you."

What They Taught Me

The 30 or so beautiful coworkers of mine and the countless others I met at parties or our other restaurant locations weren't and aren't just my friends; I love these people because of what they taught me. The silly eighteen-year-old I was when I applied for the job changed drastically as I was immersed in the Hispanic culture. I didn't know a word of Spanish past hola when I started, and after a few months, I was taking orders and having elementary-level conversations with people who didn't speak a word of English. I didn't know what hard work really was until I was seated 5 tables at once for the first time or until I worked on Cinco de Mayo.
Before I worked in a Mexican restaurant, I thought knowing how to make good guacamole meant I knew Mexican food. Now, when I know what "pineapple water" means and how you can feel the taste buds when you eat cow tongue, I can say I've had Mexican food.
I used to think college parties were great. Playing drinking games and shooting vodka in someone's living room all night sounded like Heaven until I started going to my coworkers' parties. Hispanics know how to throw a party. Instead of a picking up a case of beer, they actually cook for their guests. We usually had a full table of soups, carnitas, ceviche, homemade salsas--now that is Heaven. They made real drinks, too--margaritas, not hunch punch (good, though I hate tequila), and then there was dancing. A huge part of almost every Hispanic party I've been to was dancing. I was shocked the first time I saw some of my friends pair up and salsa dance like professionals. I thought maybe they'd had lessons, but no, they just grew up around it.

I learned a lot from the people I worked with. I learned both about individuals and about a group. When I was there, I felt like my life was divided between two countries. For half the week, I went to school with mostly white English-speakers. For the other half, I was the only white, native-English speaker at my job, and even though my coworkers lived in the US, their music, their language, their food, holidays, traditions were still what they'd grown up with.

In a way, my position and theirs were reversed. Inside the restaurant, they weren't the ones in a foreign country, I was.
I was the one--the only one--who celebrated Christmas on the 25th instead of staying drunk all night on the 24th.
I was the one who didn't know who the band Mana was and didn't fight to get off the night of their concert.
I was the one who got laughs from the cooks at my explanations in Spanish that a customer wanted their chicken unmarinated or their fajitas with only a little grease.
I was the odd one out, and you know what? I loved it that way. Every other job I've had has made me somewhat socially nervous because when you work with people from your own culture, you are expected to be able to relate to them.
On the other hand, when you work with people from another culture, you are expected to stand out. In my job where I was the foreigner, I didn't have any cultural norm to fit into. I was weird, but I was expected to be weird, and that's why I stayed. Thank god I did.

If you plan to hop the border, read this first.

A few months ago, I read the story on a news site about "Pedro the dishwasher," a Guatemalan guy who tried the old hop-the-border-make-money-and-leave trick but failed. The guys from the ranches/poorer areas do it--they sneak into the US, leaving behind wives, children, and friends with the intention of staying a few years, making their fortunes, and sneaking back out. I've known a bunch of guys who did it. They work 90+ hours a week, save every penny, and disappear as soon as they have enough to buy some land back home. Then they tell their friends back home how easy it was and make them want to try. That's one reason why there are so many immigrants who don't speak English (why learn a language if you don't plan to stay?). Pedro was a guy who messed up the system. He ended up making a stir.
He had been here for 11 years washing dishes in a restaurant. I think I've said before that there are few shittier jobs than dishwashing (they are up to their elbows in disgusting water, they work longer hours than anyone else, they are in the back of the restaurant with the worst heating and ac, the water causes extreme skin dryness, there are health hazards from handling sharp objects that people have eaten off of). He made $59,000 in 11 years--a lot of money but not for 11 years of work. Then he put it in a duffel and went to get on a plane.
Bam.
If somebody has that much cash on an airplane, they assume it's drug money.
He lost every penny. And it gets worse.
Watch it.
I saw this story when it first came out, and it's stayed with me because shit, I know guys just like this one. I really feel for the guy--not just because the media was on his side, but he just wasted 11 years of his life in the shittiest conditions and away from everyone he knows for nothing. Despite the risk he knowingly took, it's hard to think about the guy and not want to make everything right again for him. This is a person's life here.
Illegal immigration is an easy thing to condemn when it's just about a group of anonymous law-breakers. When it's real individuals, it's different. When I know it's somebody's daughter or husband or friend who is trying to escape a life of eating rice every day, sleeping on a dirt floor, paying bribes to see a doctor...well, I cannot condemn that. I don't want this country to be overrun, but what gives me the right to eat out twice a week in air-conditioned restaurants while people no better than me are facing limits on how much rice they can buy? Am I more worthy just because I was born here? I've done nothing to deserve my American citizenship except show up, and others are giving up family and familiarity just for a taste of this place.
It makes me crazy.

Africa and Vietnam...it's everywhere

I took my friend Grace out to lunch the other day. She spent about a month and a half in Africa a couple years ago (teaching AIDS prevention), and in another month, she's going back for the rest of the summer. We spent 2 hours in the restaurant (even though I hated it when customers did that to me) and another hour in the parking lot talking about Africa, Europe, god, other exciting things, etc.. And we eventually got to immigration.

Turns out I'm not the only one with pals who are dying to get into the US.

Grace is the most sympathetic person I've ever met, and if my heart aches for those living in poverty, hers shatters. She made some good friends on her trip--people she still talks to and who want to come visit, but there is no way they could get over here because they aren't rich enough to prove they have something in Africa worth going back to.

Now I suppose that most people who have nothing tempting them to return home would probably stay in the US if they got in; the abundance of Hispanics proves that. The logical solution is to keep almost everyone out--or spend a lot of time and money keeping track of every person who enters for a visit.

No right answers.

Most of the people Grace met believed America to be a place where no one works hard (doesn't have to), and everyone is rich. By their standards, almost everyone here may be rich, but the part about not working hard is certainly not true. She tried to tell them this, but no one believed her.

I, too, believe most Americans (including myself) to be lazy. But I also know from traveling and studying that our culture is far less laid-back than others. In the US, people seem to be forever on edge, and as Grace will confirm, the African culture is anything but on edge.
"It's not the way you think it is," she told her students.
"You don't know what you're talking about," they replied.


This problem of only letting the rich into the country affects my friend, Charles, as well. Charles was and still is a regular customer at my restaurant. For the past 8 years, he has spent 5 nights a week consuming top-shelf margarita after margarita while he reads at the bar after work. He's over fifty, VP of a big company, and quite shy. We never had a real conversation until about a month before I quit; now I go back just to sit at the bar with him.

Charles is unmarried. Never married. He's had a few girlfriends but not for the past twenty years. Then a couple years ago, his sister-in-law introduced him (online) to her cousin in Vietnam. They started emailing. Then they started emailing constantly. Then instant messaging. Then phoning. He calls her when he's going to bed and she's getting up in the morning. She's young, pretty, and sweet. She's also incredibly poor and lives in a one-room apartment with both her parents. Last year, he got to meet her in person when he went to Vietnam for a couple weeks, but that's the only time they've ever seen each other.

He was showing me all the pictures at the bar one night, and I asked when she was going to come here to visit (A dumb question? I blame those 32 ounces of beer). He said there is no way she can come visit. She has no money and no way to prove that as soon as she sets foot in the US, she'll disappear. The only way she could possibly come is when/if she comes to marry him. So unless they are sure that they're hitching up, they've got a very, very long-distance relationship.


One more scenario:
There's a girl Grace knows who works on campus and is an international student. This girl came from Africa on a student visa several years ago, and the visa has since expired, but the girl is still hanging around until she gets caught.
They are pretty lax about checking those things.
She's hanging around and apparently she wants to stay in the US as long as she can, and she wants to renew her visa if she can. Her family is still in Africa, and she hasn't seen her mom in 6 years, but she can't go to visit her; she won't get back in.
6 years. I can't imagine. People give up some huge things to come here.

No right answers. That's why I'm an English major.

A Poem--"Fernando"

This post's got some explaining along with it. It's a poem I wrote for Dr. Watson's poetry class last semester, and therefore, I don't expect credit for it in the blog; it's just an extra little piece to add to the whole issue I'm writing about.

"Fernando"

Fernando is rolling

Half-drunk, half-awake,

Off his mattress on the floor.

It's seven on a Friday

And the morning is bare:

No stars, no sun.

The mattress is bare.

The floor is bare

Except beer cans stacked

And spilled and empty

And letters sent

With Mexican stamps

Lying opened and stained

With tears and beer.

Fernando stumbles out the door.

It's only a Friday

To everyone else.

Fernando's days are nameless

And changeless and long.

He takes ten minutes to fall

Into khakis and non-slip shoes.

He takes half an hour to bike,

Shivering through intersections

Decorated with Christmas wreaths

And signs flashing greetings.

Fernando doesn't notice a thing.

The back of the restaurant is already churning

When he comes staggering through the back door.

Home is alive here: the music, the language,

The smells. Fernando closes his eyes.

Then the dishwasher's slap on the arm wakes him up

To the horns on the radio and grease on the floor.

Fernando grabs an apron and heads to the ovens.

He is here to cook.

Ten hours later and four Nescafés,

He stands with his band between gas stoves and counters

In fiery heat, chopping cilantro.

The aroma is sharp and fills the tight space

With the smell of home and his mother's kitchen.

But Fernando's thoughts are not home, they're here

With the girl whose pretty mouth demands cilantro.

He smiles and puts the bowl in her hand.

All night Fernando pours sweat and runs

From flipping steaks and grilling shrimp

To squeezing limes and shredding cheese.

He hands over cups of sour cream

To waiters who scream and pound the counter.

All night he answers to angry tongues

That curse in Spanish and disappear

With his work to the roaring, laughing restaurant.

Later he goes to guzzle water

And lingers near the dining room door.

The mariachis are surrounding a table

Covered in margaritas and the tacos he rolled.

The people are up and dancing and singing

Along with songs Fernando doesn't know.

The customers think they are old Spanish tunes.

At the bar he watches girls down tequila.

The bartender who yelled at him all night is leaning

And winking and pouring out bullshit with a smile.

The girls can't stop laughing and drink some more

While Fernando stands with blank face and thinks,

The bartender is scum.

As he watches the crowd the pretty girl rushes

Through the kitchen door with arms full of plates.

They collide; the plates crash and the pretty girl screams.

She points her small finger and hurls insults

At Fernando who's stunned and slowly apologizing.

“You scum,” she says. “What are you doing?

You're staring and wishing that you were outside,

But you're not, you trash.

Get back in the kitchen; my order's not ready.”

She leaves, but Fernando can't go. He's stuck.

He goes back to the kitchen and continues his work,

Chops some cilantro, and watches the knife.

He can stare out all night,

But he's locked up inside.

Fernando is never getting out.

Maria Full of Grace

A few months after I quit, I went out for drinks with the bartender and his wife. The conversation quickly turned to Calida...

We are a few beers in and bonding, and the bartender and his wife just told me all about what happened with Calida and what they knew of her. We talk about her wedding with Alejandro, and I wonder out loud whether or not I might be able to stay with them if I go to Colombia for the wedding. Both the bartender (I'll call him Gringo) and his wife immediately say there is no way I'd be able to stay with her--they are kind of appalled that I thought of it. See, the area where she lives is not so great; no one has a lot of money, the whole family lives together, and they wouldn't have space for guests anyway. I should have known that; I forgot because when Calida and Alejandro were here, they each drove a decent car and had their own place for just the two of them. I forgot that even though they were well-off here, Colombia is Colombia. Things are different.
To drive the point in, Gringo and his wife tell me about this movie they recently saw, Maria Full of Grace
Aquí.
In the movie, a young Colombian girl, pregnant and tired of working hard labor on a flower plantation, quits her job when she finds out she can get a better one--as a drug mule. What does that mean? It means she carries drugs from Colombia to the US...inside her body. Someone stuffs condoms with heroine, wraps them into perfect little balls, and she swallows them (62 of them), and gets on a plane. She makes more money for one trip than she could make anywhere else, but it's dangerous. If she is x-rayed, she can be caught. If just one of the heroin balls breaks open in her stomach, she dies and her body will be destroyed by the traffickers. But she goes through with it because there are no other options in the small town where she lives.

Gringo and wife tell me all about this movie, the uncertainty and fear and brutality of it...how the women are treated like animals, and then they say what the worst part of the movie was: They knew that Calida was from the very same area as the girls in the movie. As they watched it, they knew that girls who live near her and even people she knows work as mules. Calida herself has probably been offered the job. It's scary to watch a movie and know that the terrible things in it are real; it's much worse to personally know someone who lives close to it.

Thinking about what people like Calida go through in their everyday lives helps me understand why immigration is such a huge problem. If I lived in a place where it didn't matter how smart or hardworking I was in trying to escape poverty and danger, I would be mighty tempted to get the hell out. They know that it's fairly easy to get to the US and fairly easy to get a job without a social security number. They know how numerous Hispanics are and that they can live here for only a few years if they want and then return--they don't even need to learn English. They probably know people who have done it and come back safely, so what's the worry? Sneaking across the border is a lot less scary than staying in their current situation for a lot of people. If I lived right on the edge of the most powerful country in the world, wouldn't I want to sneak over for a bit?

Calida

As this semester goes on and as I'm writing in this blog, I seem to be discovering more and more that everyone, EVERYONE has a story. Everyone has had something wonderful or horrible happen to them, and everyone could fill a book with the strange people, events, and memories of their lives. Each person in this blog has a fascinating story. Whether the way I tell those stories is fascinating or not, each of them has had experiences that have entertained, inspired, and grieved me, and I know that their stories, in this country at least, will probably be ignored.
All of the people in this blog gave up something very important in a gamble for a better life. Most of them gave up family, home, comfort, culture, legality...things that I would not be able to sacrifice so easily. A lot of them are winning the risk, but tonight's blog is about someone who didn't.
Calida was a small, curvy, gorgeous 24-year-old girl from Colombia. She was just a hostess because of her poor English, but she was smart as hell. She had apparently gone to law school in Colombia, and she came to the US with her family and boyfriend, Alejandro, to find decent jobs and decent life. Hostessing was a temporary job to help her learn English, and her boyfriend was the bartender at another restaurant in our chain. They really were an amazing couple: charismatic, mature, super-intelligent, gorgeous. At parties, her boyfriend showed off his bartending skills when he made drinks for everyone. When the bartender at my restaurant did something cool or tried out a trick like making the drinks for customers at the bar stronger than for those at tables, he usually followed it with "Alejandro taught me to do that." Basically, they were good, respectable people. It sucks when bad things happen to good people.
I think the problems began when Calida missed several days of work, then showed up and said she was quitting. I don't know the details, but her family had to return to Colombia, and she had two choices: she could return with her family and perhaps never return, or she could stay in the US with her boyfriend and a be banned from Colombia for two years. I thought she would leave, but she decided to stay and kept working at the restaurant. We were friends, and on my last day on the job at the end of last summer, she gave me a wooden Colombian bracelet that I absolutely love and still wear often. After I quit, I didn't talk to her for a few weeks until she sent me a text message that sounded like something was wrong. I asked her if she was OK, and I was a little freaked out when she sent back, "Something bad happened. I can't talk about it now." I had to wait a couple weeks before she told me that she had to leave the US, but she couldn't tell me why. Before I had the chance to see her again, she was gone.
A couple months after Calida disappeared, I went out with the restaurant's bartender and his wife who were close to her, and then I heard the whole story. Calida and Alejandro had friends over to their house one night. They stayed up drinking and talking until 5 in the morning. Then the friends went home, and the couple got ready for bed. As soon as they turned off the lights, INS knocked on the front door, asked for Alejandro, and arrested him. They told her absolutely nothing. Calida didn't know what was going on for days and stayed at the bartender's house because she was afraid to go home. Then they shipped her boyfriend back to Colombia, and Calida spent the three weeks or so before she followed him packing and selling all of their stuff--she had to sell all the stuff that was supposed to be their new and permanent life in America. Now they are back in the shitty little town in which they started. They probably won't come back, but I have been invited to their wedding when they have it.
When Calida and Alejandro came to the US, they weren't illegal. They had visas, but they expired, and renewal was difficult. It's upsetting for me to see them go even though I know they were outside the law. Immigration is a real problem for this country, but life in general is a real problem in other countries. Those who come here do so in order to escape a cycle of poverty and lack of opportunities in their home countries. The solution does not involve escaping to the US; it has to start in Latin America, but until real changes begin, what can we or they do?

Alba

Alba is about the coolest chick I worked with. On my first day on the job, about the time I was beginning to think I was the only employee with a solid grip on the English language, this girl with really striking, crazy-looking gray contact lenses said, "You're new? ...Man, you're gonna learn Spanish." It was kind of encouraging I guess, and I did learn a good bit of Spanish since I knew barely a word past "hola" back then.
But my story is about Alba.
She is a lesbian who is pretending to be straight for a family and culture that won't necessarily accept her otherwise. In fact, the first time she told me about her preference was about a month after I quit because she heard I might be of the same orientation.
No one knows that Alba is gay except for her sister and her most liberal friends. She thinks that anyone who finds out will shun her, though she's had the same girlfriend for five straight years. She also lives in the basement apartment of her parents' house--with her girlfriend. As far as her parents go, the girl is just a close friend, but they have their suspicions.
As long as I worked with Alba, she was the most ambitious of my coworkers. I got pissed off sometimes because it seemed all she talked about was making money, investments, and success. I told her I just wanted to live my life and I didn't care about money (of course this was when I was making descent money, and I'd forgotten what it's like to scrape by), but she always talked about all the things she wanted to do that involved getting rich. One day she finally told me there was a reason she cared so much about money and that she would tell it to me one day.
That day was the night she came out to me in an Applebee's. It turns out she wants to become successful so bad because she is gay. Right now, she's in college, working, and paying for a car. She's also relying some on her parents because the rent she pays to live in their basement is cheap, but she is terrified of coming out to them. She and her girlfriend have separate beds, they won't hold hands in public, and they are careful about how they talk and act around each other. Over the years, several incidents have made her parents question her sexuality like when a cop found the girls sitting in a parked car together one night, but they believe what they want to believe. She is waiting until she knows she can fully support herself--and her girlfriend, I guess--to come out to everyone without worrying about whether they will disown her or not.

What I don't understand so well is why Alba feels she won't be accepted for loving a woman. It isn't just her family; she told me our coworkers would reject her too. She said it's the Hispanic culture that doesn't accept homosexuals, and she wanted to get away from the culture before she stopped hiding. She's already unattached anyway--her family moved from Mexico before she was born, and she speaks English and Spanish equally fluently. I'm confused about the Hispanic culture rejecting her more than any other for one main reason: most of the transvestites I've seen in Georgia have been Hispanics. I'm not sure about the difference, but I'll take her word for it.

Two Kinds

Something I want to talk about is the vast difference between the social classes of the Hispanics I know. I think it's fascinating and worth talking about, so on the pain of whatever, here I go.
I guess it used to be weird for me to imagine illegal immigrants outside of construction workers or the eight guys in one pickup truck at the gas station or the pregnant women with 6 kids in the mall food court. Well, all of those people are real, but they are only one part of this thing. About half of my coworkers at my Mexican restaurant were the people who ride bicycles to work and never go anywhere without their five closest friends, but those guys were busboys, cooks, and dishwashers. The other half of my coworkers--servers, hosts, and management--were a very different sort. They were upper-class immigrants, and they acted like it. I know it's ridiculous to think all Hispanic immigrants should be exactly the same, but that's not what I'm getting at. The thing here that I think is interesting is the two kinds. Two. There were not a bunch of small cliques at my restaurant, nor at the other restaurants in the chain. There was the upper-class and the lower-class, and the two did not mix.
Let me give some background on this.
The inequality of wealth is higher in Latin America than anyplace else in the world. There are the rich and then there are the destitute, and in most areas, that's just the way it is. If someone is born in poverty, there is a more-than-good chance he or she will die in poverty. That's why they come here--a few years in the US(even as a busboy) can completely turn around somebody's life. When they cross the border, though, that inequality remains, and there are huge differences between the classes.
The lower-class guys in the kitchen of my restaurant almost all came from rural areas/farms/la rancha. Most of those guys never went to school or dropped out really young--some of them can't read. A lot of them left behind a wife and children at home, and they send all the money they can live without back to them. Three or four kitchen guys usually share an apartment, shop at Hispanic grocery stores, and never have to learn a word of English. They usually stay just a few years and then return home with the money they earned and buy some land or a house. It works out great for them if they can pull it off.
That's one kind.
The story was totally different with the waiters I knew. Busboys, cooks, and dishwashers rarely assimilated into US culture at all; waiters usually tried to assimilate as much as possible. While none of the cooks at my restaurant cared whether they showered between shifts or not, the waiters were some of the most body-conscious people I've ever met. Maybe this dichotomy exists in all kinds of restaurants, but in my case, it was mainly a class thing. I've never met people who cared as much about brand names and pampering as my fellow servers, and then I found out that my fellow servers came from the richer areas of Latin America, and shit did they care about money. None of the waiters planned to return home after they'd earned their money. Half of them were illegal, but they'd made the US their home, and waiting tables in a Mexican restaurant was their life career.
I didn't realize that my coworkers were segregated during my first weeks on the job. I kept asking questions that I know were idiotic in hindsight like "Why doesn't Aléjandro(the busboy) become a server since he knows the menu so well?" It took going to parties to which only servers, hosts, and managers were invited for me to see that one side of my coworkers did not mix with the other side. Just like most US citizens shun the Hispanics who don't speak English and live below the poverty level, most wealthier Hispanics I knew wouldn't have much to do with them. In my restaurant, they even made up a name for lower-class guys, "cacheguilos." When most of the people I know complain about illegal immigrants, they target the first group. My family and friends were surprised that most of the waiters in a large chain restaurant were in the same illegal category as the custodians at the mall, but it's true. The second group escapes discrimination because they do not fit the stereotype, and they try damn hard to keep it that way.

Mariana

I have this friend named Mariana who always has a new story to tell about the men she's fucking.
The 6 foot Argentinian beauty started working at my restaurant when she was 18, but she acted quite a bit older. Before I actually worked with her, I heard about her from the other waiters.
"Leah, have you worked with this new girl yet? Ohhhh, she is nice."
Yeah, she was nice. Super thick curly dark hair that hung all the way down her long back. Eyelashes like fringe on a chenille blanket...or something. Amazing anyway. Yes, I am a little taken with her too. But I wasn't at first.
The first time I met Mariana, she did all the talking...actually, she still does, but I was a little less receptive on that first conversation. She spoke English so well, and she was so mature, and she kept talking about all these jobs she'd had and all these men she'd had, and I thought she was a bitch.
My opinion changed. A few weeks of working with the girl showed me that what seemed like coldness was a cultural thing, and Mariana was just as warm and loving as anyone else I worked with once you got to know her. I got to know her pretty fast because of the nature of our job. Working in close quarters, smearing sweat on others, swearing over customers, running through the kitchen into each other, and venting during the lulls was how everyone in the restaurant got to know each other intimately, and Mariana and I kind of flocked to each other. Maybe it was because we were close in age, or maybe it was our shared raging hormones, but we usually found each other by the computers or the bar and de-stressed by unloading our most vulgar thoughts into each other's ears.
Mariana always wanted to tell a story.
"OH MY GOD Leah," was how it always began and how I knew I was about to vicariously relive her latest escapade. I had no complaints.
She started with our boss: assistant manager, Pelon, who gave the girls rides on his motorcycle after work and whose wife was a frequent customer at the restaurant. Mariana caught his eye, conjured some spell, and days later was squeezing the blood out of my hand and telling me about how he'd taken her to his house when his wife was out of town and what he'd done to her there.
Oh man.
Then for the next month, I got to listen to Pelon's store meetings with a smirk on my face imagining him in the position Mariana had just described to me from the night before. One day they spent their break at the hotel across the street, and later that week, they were at it in the manager's office while the shift was still going on. I got to hear about everything, and it did make the shift more interesting even if I couldn't look Pelon's wife in the eye when she greeted me.
Mariana worked through the restaurant staff like the plague--as soon as she finished off one body, she was on another, and very few employees escaped her mark. She went for both single and married men, customers and coworkers, men and women, fellow waiters and the president of the company, and her stories never left out a single detail.
Back then it was all in fun; she still gets around, but it's no longer just fun. I've kept talking to Mariana about once a week, and the stories are worse every time. First she was in a hit-and-run accident that totaled her car. Then she lost her restaurant job. She doesn't have a driver's license, and she's not a citizen. It's hard for her and her parents to find jobs, and her family of 6 lives in a tiny two bedroom apartment. Right now they are counting down the days until they will have to retreat back to Argentina and are trying to find any way out of it they can.
For months, all of Mariana's powers of seduction have been put toward one purpose: finding a husband with citizenship so she can stay in the US. Even her parents are pushing her to marriage. I know a lot of people who tried/are trying to do this and few who succeeded, but even the marriage route is a complicated and uncertain route to citizenship. Every time I talk to her now, there is still a story, but it always has a business motive. She found one guy 12 years her senior and 12 inches shorter whom she had not a hint of attraction to but seduced nonetheless. He fell for her, and she led him on and never told him a thing about her ulterior motive. He did propose, and she was sick at the thought of living with him but willing to do anything to stay here. Then about a month ago, he found out her secret and left her, and now she is getting desperate.
Last I heard, she and her family are trying to go to Canada. It's easier to get in there; you just have to lie about your reasons.

Everybody's Talking About It!

I'm still refining what I want to do with this blog. Here is what I'm thinking: It should not be just a memoir, though the last post was very memoir-esque. What I want to do is take the stories of what I saw happen and still see happening with the Hispanic immigrants I know and use those stories to explore the (perhaps) unknown aspects of immigration. For example, I want to tell about the guys whose kids grew up without a father present because he was working in a kitchen in the US. Then I want to use that story to explore the psychology, consequences, and risk involved with illegal immigrants. Basically I don't want to just talk; I want to make a point.
And then I want to also talk about the differences and adjustments involved with immigrating--both legally and illegally. So for example, why it is more complicated for my lesbian friend to come out to her Mexican family and friends than to her American friends? Culture differences.
OK now that I'm organized, next post!

Everybody's talking about it.
I know a songwriter/producer named Jayne who used to frequent my restaurant and wrote a song called "Crossing the Border" that tells the story of a guy who...well, the title gives it away. It's a beautiful song, and it shows, as she says, "a sympathetic look at the other side of America's internal conflict over immigration." The lyrics go like this:

...Four days in the desert, seven survived.
He carried a woman barely alive.
Coyotes would take your money...and your life.
Crossing the line so far from home,
looking behind me, I'm all alone
six more miles to Arizona, push on.

And et cetera. Jayne has gotten to know some of these people like I have, and for many of them, they have a choice between extreme poverty with no opportunity to move up, or...the US. I was born into this country where I can do whatever I want if I work hard enough--I didn't have to earn the right to be here. These people came from places where no matter how hard they worked, they would probably remain painfully poor their whole lives. If people had to earn their citizenship instead of being born with it, I'm sure I would fast be changing places with most of my illegal buddies.(Of course that could bring up the question: Are they as hard-working and dedicated as they are for the very reason that they lived in such hopeless poverty?)
So Jayne is thinking about this, I am thinking about it, and something changes when you get to really know the individuals behind the issue. When my 33-year-old friend Monica was counseling me on relationships using the wisdom of her far more difficult life, or when 20-year-old Carmen got on to me for letting worries keep me from doing things, I realized that aside from being poor and illegal, they were wiser, kinder, and stronger than most of the people who look down on them.
So music is talking about it.
Then when I went to see Juno, I saw two previews back-to-back that really caught my attention. Both were films about huge issues in the US--one about the war in Iraq(Stop Loss) and one about...illegal immigration, Under the Same Moon. Both movies are shown from the perspective opposite the government, and both are fairly bold.
Mira!
Under the Same Moon looks great. It also looks very familiar. A mother leaves her son with his grandmother in Mexico while she goes to do grunt work in a kitchen in the US. Then the grandma dies, and "Carlitos" crosses the border to find his mom. The thing that sounds best about it to me is the truth of the story. America offers so much that people often leave their families to come work temporarily and return moderately wealthy. The story is also about how this little boy finds community with strangers, and that too is very culturally accurate. At my restaurant, the strong bond of all the employees was amazing, and it was not in circles but encompassed all of the waiters and hosts. Now the cooks and bus boys are a different story and a different bond, but that will have to come up in another post.
So movies are talking about it.
Everybody is talking about it.
I'm tired.

Chaparro

By the way, all names in this blog are changed!
Chaparro was the first person my boss introduced me to on the day I started working at the restaurant. It went along the lines of: "Chaparro, this is Guerra. Teach her what to do." I looked down and shook the tiny hand of a man easily under 5 feet and followed his rapid footsteps to our station: the host area. My lessons started with learning how to most effectively wipe down the menus, when to wash the glass doors, and how to charm the customers. I noticed that Chaparro used his tiny frame to his full advantage by overdoing the cute poses, childlike smiles, and "But of course, Señorita"s to every female who demanded a table. He ended up having the effect of an adorable, less fortunate child on the stuffy, upper-class customers who frequented the restaurant partially just to be seated by the overly-animated little host. Even I was shocked when, washing the glass front doors after the lunch rush, I asked Chaparro how old he was, and he said 29.
I think customers loved Chaparro because he embodied the novelty of a simple, innocent, untainted-by-complicated-American-life foreigner. Our boss, Jefé, loved him because the customers loved him, but it didn't take long working next to him to notice that though he was very happy, there was nothing innocent about Chaparro.
He was born in Mexico City, a very big, very dangerous place where he lived with his mom and sister until he came to America. He never told me directly that he came illegally, but I figured it out. He did tell me that he learned English "on the streets," and apparently the streets were good teachers; after 3 years in America, his English was damn near perfect, and he could work entertaining restaurant guests 70+ hours a week. Even at a host's pay of $7.50/hour, he made enough to survive in America and send money back to his mom and sister in Mexico City. That's because money is worth 10x in Mexico what it is here, meaning the tattoos across Chaparro's fingers that he paid a guy 50 pesos to do cost about $5, but 50 pesos is a lot harder to come by than $5 is here.
Thus, my little host friend was obsessed with money, and he kissed ass as much as he needed to with a grin if it made him more money. That statement makes him sound a little miserly, but he wasn't. Chaparro was a very happy, energetic, and resourceful man(he always found a way, though everything was against him), and he was the best trainer and coworker I've ever had.
When he had been a host for about 8 months, Chaparro decided he wanted to try waiting(where the real money lies), but he needed a liquor license to wait tables at my restaurant, and liquor licences require social security numbers, so he went to a restaurant in an area where he didn't have to have one.
As far as I know, he's still working his way up and screwing the system, but he was a damn good man.

Te Quiero Puta (Introduction)

So that anyone who looks at this blog will know what the hell I'm writing about without going back to entry # 1, I am copying part of this introduction into the "About Me" section. This will also save me from the painful task of filling up that box with information about myself.

In the Spring before my Sophmore year in college, I applied for a job at the chain Mexican restaurant in my hometown in Georgia. This was the restaurant where my highschool friend Lori and I had spent most of our time after class and colorguard practice taking up the same booth for hours, eating cheesedip, and laughing at our cute favorite waiter, José, who just happened to be working every single time we were there. When I became the restaurant's newest recruit two years later, I found that out of about 30 employees, almost all were illegal immigrants, that José's name was made up, and that the reason he was always there was that he worked 60 - 70 hours a week...they all did, and I did too.

For a year and a half, I worked there alongside people whom many Americans hate with passion. Most of the time, I was the only token white employee(the gringa, the guera, etc.), and one of few legal employees. It was there that I first learned what real work is, what real community is. Some of the best people I've ever known are buying fake social security numbers, making up names, and screwing our system for all they can. This blog is about the people I knew, what happened to them, and what is still happening with immigrants in America.