in the park said that they hadn’t seen him. I never saw him again, either. His property was studded with bottles of water on sticks as a protection against witchcraft.
Another Mexican-American taxi driver, the son of an illegal field worker who’d died amnestied, had once tried his hand as a salesman in Mecca. He explained to me: Sometimes they tell you come and they don’t show. They hide. They’re humble people. Once they open the door to you, they’re very happy to make a friend, once they trust you.
I guess they don’t trust me.
Mecca, Mecca, he sighed. Mostly farm people. People who work the fields. Sometimes they get to fighting. I heard somebody got killed . . .
He was a first-generation immigrant, still Mexican, and so he defined himself in relation to the Mexican-Americans, saying: We care about our families and the place where we come from. We don’t forget what made us. 18 And we care about our religion. The Chicanos, the people who’ve been here more, they lose it. Some of them are cholos, you know, gangsters, low riders. They like to call us wetbacks . . .
The Mecca people of whom he had spoken were first generation like him. And yet a difference as sharp as the wicker-points of a fan-palm’s skin had already arisen between himself and them, those “humble people,” most of whom were living on unemployment right now, waiting for grape-pruning to begin the following month. He was not a humble person. He drove a cab. Perhaps he looked down on them a little. What then must they have thought about successes like him? A first-generation man in Calexico once remarked about three brothers whom we both knew: They’re the kind of guys in Mexico you know we call strawberries, since they think they don’t stink. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Fairskinned guys, not too dark . . .
Many of the Mecca people came from Michoacán, which of course lies far to the southeast of Imperial’s lowest bound, the Sea of Cortés. In one palm orchard in Thermal, the other laborers pointed out to me a fullblooded Indian from there who could not speak either Spanish or English; they said that he was a very good worker, but I don’t know how they told him what tasks to do; nobody spoke his language except other Indians from Michoacán. There were also Spanish-tongued immigrants and pollos from that place who said that they were Mexicans, not Indians. Others came from Guanajuato, that arid “mummy capital” made famous by one cemetery’s practice of digging up and exhibiting to admission-paying ghouls certain dead people whose relatives have defaulted in grave-rent. On the west side of Highway 111, in a dirt-paved Mecca cul-de-sac called Saint Anthony Trailer Park, where trailers and raised, graffiti’d houses lurked among the palm trees, some properties with fences around them and laundry on the fences, some fences made of metal and others of salvaged boards, I met an unmarried old couple from Guanajuato who agreed to speak with me only because my interpreter of that day also hailed from there. It was morning, the sandy ground just commencing to grow warm to the touch. I’d thought it better to try then than at the Mecca sunset, when Mexicans and Mexican-Americans leaned in the shade, and beside their small houses the people were sitting in their shaded yards; for sometimes a person might not wish to talk when the eyes of his neighbors are on him. I’m still not sure whether in this case it would have mattered. Openheartedly the couple gave me their names and even obligingly, pitifully presented their identity cards, I suppose in case I were some Immigration spy sent to entrap illegals. Both had come to Northside as pollos before they met. She came alone in 1980, “jumping onto a bus” as she casually told it, and eventually got amnestied. He paid a coyote two hundred and fifty dollars in Mexicali. That was back in 1972. He, too, was legal now. (Telling me this, he slowly interlocked his hands as if he
Another Mexican-American taxi driver, the son of an illegal field worker who’d died amnestied, had once tried his hand as a salesman in Mecca. He explained to me: Sometimes they tell you come and they don’t show. They hide. They’re humble people. Once they open the door to you, they’re very happy to make a friend, once they trust you.
I guess they don’t trust me.
Mecca, Mecca, he sighed. Mostly farm people. People who work the fields. Sometimes they get to fighting. I heard somebody got killed . . .
He was a first-generation immigrant, still Mexican, and so he defined himself in relation to the Mexican-Americans, saying: We care about our families and the place where we come from. We don’t forget what made us. 18 And we care about our religion. The Chicanos, the people who’ve been here more, they lose it. Some of them are cholos, you know, gangsters, low riders. They like to call us wetbacks . . .
The Mecca people of whom he had spoken were first generation like him. And yet a difference as sharp as the wicker-points of a fan-palm’s skin had already arisen between himself and them, those “humble people,” most of whom were living on unemployment right now, waiting for grape-pruning to begin the following month. He was not a humble person. He drove a cab. Perhaps he looked down on them a little. What then must they have thought about successes like him? A first-generation man in Calexico once remarked about three brothers whom we both knew: They’re the kind of guys in Mexico you know we call strawberries, since they think they don’t stink. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Fairskinned guys, not too dark . . .
Many of the Mecca people came from Michoacán, which of course lies far to the southeast of Imperial’s lowest bound, the Sea of Cortés. In one palm orchard in Thermal, the other laborers pointed out to me a fullblooded Indian from there who could not speak either Spanish or English; they said that he was a very good worker, but I don’t know how they told him what tasks to do; nobody spoke his language except other Indians from Michoacán. There were also Spanish-tongued immigrants and pollos from that place who said that they were Mexicans, not Indians. Others came from Guanajuato, that arid “mummy capital” made famous by one cemetery’s practice of digging up and exhibiting to admission-paying ghouls certain dead people whose relatives have defaulted in grave-rent. On the west side of Highway 111, in a dirt-paved Mecca cul-de-sac called Saint Anthony Trailer Park, where trailers and raised, graffiti’d houses lurked among the palm trees, some properties with fences around them and laundry on the fences, some fences made of metal and others of salvaged boards, I met an unmarried old couple from Guanajuato who agreed to speak with me only because my interpreter of that day also hailed from there. It was morning, the sandy ground just commencing to grow warm to the touch. I’d thought it better to try then than at the Mecca sunset, when Mexicans and Mexican-Americans leaned in the shade, and beside their small houses the people were sitting in their shaded yards; for sometimes a person might not wish to talk when the eyes of his neighbors are on him. I’m still not sure whether in this case it would have mattered. Openheartedly the couple gave me their names and even obligingly, pitifully presented their identity cards, I suppose in case I were some Immigration spy sent to entrap illegals. Both had come to Northside as pollos before they met. She came alone in 1980, “jumping onto a bus” as she casually told it, and eventually got amnestied. He paid a coyote two hundred and fifty dollars in Mexicali. That was back in 1972. He, too, was legal now. (Telling me this, he slowly interlocked his hands as if he
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