How has the faltering economy affected you?
I’m sure it has touched us all directly or indirectly.
Most of my immediate family members’ economic situation is unchanged, thank God, but it’s the cousins that followed the housing boom that are hurting. The folks in California, the Carolinas, Las Vegas, Atlanta and other previously booming cities, are out of house construction jobs. Some of them have returned to Mexico with teenage kids that were born in America. My cousin in California tells me that many businesses in her neighborhood have closed and some of them that had hired many illegal Mexicans first, anonymously, called ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement) to round up the workers and deport them so they wouldn’t have to pay them. Anyway, ICE has more time on their hands to do this nowadays because illegal border crossings are down. Usually when somebody crosses illegally they do so after having communicated with a relative and being assured of finding a job with them or close by.
Yes, most Mexican immigrants come to America from Mexican farming communities and take up jobs as farm hands, restaurant kitchen helpers, maids or construction workers. You can say I’m stereotyping, but stereotyping comes about from society seeing a pattern. The most common reason for like nationalities following in each other’s footsteps comes from the “each one teach one” mentality. Once, when I was teaching an ESL class (English as a Second Language) in Arlington I asked the Vietnamese girls what they wanted to do after graduating from high school. All of them said they were going to be nail technicians. I asked them why and they all said because they had a “cousin” or some other female relative who was a nail technician.
So, in our Mexican farming village, usually when boys come of age they join their fathers in “el otro lado” (the other side [of the Rio Grande]). The remaining people in the villages are mostly women and children.
My aunt hadn’t seen her son since he left to Las Vegas three and a half years ago when he was sixteen. He called her every Sunday and worked consistently with his cousins in constructing houses until the recession hit. Jobs got scarcer, he hadn’t sent money back to his mother in some time, then last month he found some work again and, while working atop of a ladder he fell off, hit his head and died. His father is my uncle, Humberto, who worked at Brandt’s Garden Center in Boise City for many years.
When a country becomes prosperous it will have the positive aspects of jobs, prosperity, luxuries and such but it will also have the downside of poorer foreigners trying to get in to get a piece of the pie (or any piece of food to keep from starving) and will do so illegally. Here in South Korea it’s usually the Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Chinese and Philippinos that are Korea’s “Mexicans”. In Europe it’s usually the North Africans (Algerians and others). The skin color of the demographics usually gets darker and the culture changes. The “original” America, Korea, France….is changed forever.
So, when America was booming, so was the Mexican influx. Now that the economy is dwindling, so are the immigrants. That’s the most effective fence to keep Mexicans out. Before, there were two virtual signs at the banks of the Rio Grande. One said, “Stay Out” and the other said, “help wanted, inquire within”, and that’s the one that many Mexicans followed because of their rumbling stomachs, rumbling for food and maybe desert (a piece of the pie). But now that second “sign” is fading. Some people got their wish for the Immigration to stop or slow down dramatically, too bad that the underlying cause had to be the economic recession. It reminds me of a line from the movie “The Power of One”. During Apartheid in South Africa a rich White woman tells her family during dinner, while the Black servants are around them serving their plates, “I wish they were here without being here”.
