Lingering Effects of Operation Wetback

(This essay was contributed to a national publication last year and was [since I didn’t hear from them] either not accepted or acceptable, your choice, too. Maybe you’ve heard it all before, but there are some things that just can’t be allowed to fade because of either laziness or indifference. I still stand behind it. I didn’t change a word.)

Being repeatedly forced as a boy to show credentials to the Border Patrol creates an uncertainty within a Mexican-American that’s hard to shed: the sense that he has become permanently suspect—an exile within his own country. The resentment that can’t help but grow finds root cause in society one year, the government the next, then illegal immigrants—and ultimately himself. Anomie, despite my people’s unremitting love of life, has not been invisible in the barrio, the migrant camp, the gathering place.

Institutions hardly broadened our perspective. The Church channeled our humanity into accepted fealties: endless toil, unquestioning obeisance toward authority (especially theirs), and crippling humility. In the schools. Mexicans were treated like visitors: brilliant children shunted into vocational courses, thus stifling their creativeness, and their interest; history taught as a dimension without Hispanics in it, except as villains. The drop-out rate was staggering. There still exist people who believe that coordinate bilingualism (that can of worms) is a symptom—if not the cause—of cultural tunnel vision, and maybe even simple-mindedness. The barrage of secular and religious dogma only served to make irrelevant a search for beauty in the arts and in great literature, in higher education. Think of a world without Bach, da Vinci, or Shakespeare—William Faulkner. Chicanos were Pavlov-ed into accepting that their only relationship in a progressive world was a racial one to a poor people from below the Rio Grande who did not possess the resourcefulness to put shoes on their own children.

Those with means, and who were more carefully groomed for a future—notably, a present mayor of Los Angeles (self-caricatured into a long held Latin stereotype) and an embattled U.S. Attorney General—headed for not dissimilar, even if loftier cul-de-sacs. Their brand of socialization and an intellect wrenched by the same demons of dual acculturation that the rest of us had to survive, led them to believe, in essence, that under all that polish they could afford pinpoint examinations of their folders without being subject to unforgiving denunciation for their public misjudgement and their failure, not just to their office, but to a people. It isn’t easy to believe that in the midst of all the current controversy over illegal immigration, the latter wasn’t put up for public spectacle as an example of what happens when a Mexican of any stripe aspires to a position beyond his traditional station as pariah. Painful enough, under the present atmosphere of panic induced jingoism, is seeing the bona fides of any citizen as a true American brought into question for finding fault with the administration’s policies.

If this were a lament (which it isn’t), it wouldn’t be for one person’s lost years, but for the millions’ whose lives were trivialized to the point of abnegation.

Yet, what Mexican-Americans have had to bear pales in comparison to what Mexican immigrants have endured. Eisenhower’s sweep through the Southwest in 1954—besides inspiring national condescension toward Chicanos—included American citizens, the children of illegal immigrants caught in the net. Two of my childhood friends died in Mexico, of a disease that either one of two countries should have treated. Which one were they most alien in?

Luck is a subjective quantity.

My mother was housekeeper, cook and nanny to a family from Indiana who themselves migrated to Southern Texas shortly after WWII and established a successful business. They made me part of the family, which was blessed with twin girls and two sons, the youngest, Jay, my age, and who was baptized on the same day as I was in his church, in which I became at twelve, only one of two Mexicans (the other, a girl) in a sizeable congregation. What I learned at their table—some of it delayed, unfortunately—is immeasureable. An undying love of books, and the germ of self-esteem were bonuses. Jay was my brother, but I pushed him away—because cultures at odds with each other demanded it of me, and of him, too. But It was not Jay’s courage that failed.

I’m too old to be afraid now.

Somewhere in the remoteness of the American Southwest, or the deserts of northern Mexico, maybe even this minute, at least one man is inching himself toward the north, into a land in which he will be alien. He’s not as afraid of fences, nor of men with guns, of humiliation, exploitation, even death—as he is of the threat that dispossession holds over his family. His private concept of Manifest Destiny is at least as valid as America’s was when both sides of the Rio Grande were Mexican soil. But he’s not coming to take away; he’s coming to add—to help. He’s coming to build houses, and harvest food for all of us, to raise dauntless children in the service of this country—to help shore up the crumbling infrastructure of a nation where once the work ethic of all men was as unflinching as his.

He is my brother. And like Jay, he has to forgive me for ever having entertained the notion that he wasn’t.

I have been called wetback, greaser, peppergut, pócho, chólo, téco, and not a few other names that are unprintable. It comes with the territory. It comes in cycles, and no one expects that this will end during my lifetime.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Noe.