The Immigrant’s Daughter by Howard Fast

clothes, furniture, drugs, household appliances and whatever else was needed to save the residents of the area any need to cross the path of the less rich. But beyond this inner island, there were rows and rows of tract houses, most of them bare and naked of fancy shrubbery or shade trees, young people fighting desperately to meet monthly payments, lots of kids and a good many unsmiling mothers. One still needed sixty or seventy thousand dollars to buy such a tract house, and as upwardly mobile as the owners might be, they still had huge mortgage payments and children to feed and clothe and wives who either worked to meet the bills or chewed an eternal cud of discontent.
    And then, beyond the tract houses but still in the district, a barrio to house the servants, the cooks and gardeners, the brown-skinned men and women who worked the fields, driving out of the district in trucks that took them to the orchards and vineyards and then brought them back, and their children and the mini-gangs, imitative of the larger urban areas. And on the edge of the barrio, the houses of the black community, small cottages, some of them neat and well cared for, others with paint peeling, surrounded by dead shrubbery, kids playing in the unpaved streets, the men gone to jobs in Oakland or Berkeley or some other Bay area or to the fields. It was not simple; it was very puzzling and complex indeed, and this was only one of a number of small communities in the district. As day after day passed, Barbara parking her car in one part or another of the district, trudging on by foot, a tall lady with a leather pouch slung over her shoulder, the problem of the Forty-eighth Congressional District became even more puzzling and troubling.
    Obviously, the poor, the working people and the young professionals in the district outnumbered the rich, yet the district was solidly, unshakably Republican — except that she had shaken it a good deal six years ago. Apparently most of the Chicanos and blacks did not vote, and apparently they were positioned to provide a threat to the rest of the district. There were hardly enough of them to make her win, yet possibly enough to swing the margin if she could do what she had done six years ago. But could she, she wondered? Six years ago, she took on the Republican Party at a most peculiar historical moment. Nixon was in the White House, an affront to any person of decent sensibilities. The country was bleeding from the horror of Vietnam, and her opponent was sleazy, dishonest and on the verge of being indicted. Now, it was a presidential year; Jerry Ford was at least an upstanding and photogenic citizen, and her own opponent was an attorney of distinction, a man of experience, and handsome enough to be a middle-aged star in a soap opera. Barbara felt demeaned by brooding over the question of good looks, but the media had turned that into one of the prime requisites for office. It was hard for her to tell herself that she was as attractive as Alexander Holt — or to believe it.
    Well, be that as it may, she still had a race to run, and if Alexander Holt were Paul Newman himself, he nevertheless could be beaten. She had studied his record carefully, and it asked for such care, since it was an uncommonly careful record. He was one of those Republicans who early on had recognized the awful stupidity and hopelessness of the war with Vietnam, and during his four years in the House, his record on that score was near perfect — according to Barbara’s point of view. He balanced this opposition to the war with a firm stand against abortion — to a point where he was the first representative to ask that foreign aid be withdrawn from nations that permitted legal abortion. It was an untenable and idiotic position, but it put him firmly in the conservative ranks. He was for the strictest of immigration laws, thereby writing off the whole Mexican community, and he was a close old friend of Ronald Reagan and had served