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.