Me-xican
Yesterday, a young girl I teach piano to came to her lesson ready to perform “The Mexican Hat Dance”, which I had assigned the week before. Next to the title at the top of the page she had drawn a picture of a Mexican wearing a sombrero, which I have skillfully recreated in this jpeg. The best part of her drawing was how she wrote out Mexican. I assume she drew the bubble first and then realized that there was not enough room for the whole word so she settled on the hyphenated version. Genius. I’m sure nothing was meant other than to doodle next to the new piece, but in the process she humanized a word that has so many negative connotations in the U.S. I don’t mean to be cheesy (put the ME back in Mexican) or want to make some kind of hallmark card out of it, but I was entertained by the unintentional connection she made.
Through working in a few different restaurants, I’ve become friends with various Mexican dishwashers and cooks who are living a clandestine life here in the States. I’ve realized how the U.S. economy heavily relies on their presence but refuses to accept them or offer them any rights. Friends have told me stories of being stopped by police based on their race and illegally searched and sent to jail. The cops would claim they ran a stop sign or something and search them hoping to find some illegal substance or weapons. All they would find was a completely innocent Mexican struggling to survive in a country that hated his very existence.
One of my closest Mexican friends introduced me to the music of José Alfredo Jiménez, an incredible singer of the Ranchera style, who was born in 1926. His passionate songs are all about drunkenness, lost love, and his bohemian life style that led to an early death at the age of 47. Below is an audio clip of one of his melancholy songs which I translated into English. Although it’s presumably about a romantic relationship, you could view it as an illegal immigrant’s melancholy love song to an unwelcoming country.
Also, below is a NY Times article from today’s opinion page that my brother sent me. It expresses all of this much better than I can.
“YO”
Ando borracho ando tomando porque el destino cambió mi suerte
Ya tu cariño nada me importa mi corazón te olvidó pa siempre
Fuiste en mi vida un sentimiento que destrozó toditica mi alma
Quise matarme por tu cariño pero volvi a recobrar la calma
Yo yo que tanto lloré por tus besos
Yo yo que siempre te hable sin mentiras
Hoy solo puedo brindarte desprecios
Yo yo que tanto te quise en la vida
Una gitana leyo mi mano que con el tiempo me adorarías
Esa gitana ha adivinado pero tu vida ya no es la mía
Hoy mi destino lleva otro rumbo tu corazón se quedó muy lejos
Si ahora me quieres si ahora me extrañas
yo te abandono pa estar parejo
Translation:
I go drunk and still drinking because fate changed my destiny.
I don’t care about your affection any more,
my heart has forgotten you forever.
The way I felt when you left me, destroyed my soul.
I wanted to kill myself for your affection but I was able to regain calm
Refrain:
I cried so much for your kisses
I always spoke to you without lies
Today I can only offer you disdain
I wanted you in my life
A fortune teller read my hand and said,
that with time you would adore me.
That fortune teller foretold it, but still you’re not mine.
Today my destiny takes another route,
while your heart stays far away.
If you want me now, if you miss me now,
I’ll abandon you and stay as I am.
Refrain
NY Times Article
June 3, 2008
The Great Immigration Panic
“Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.
A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.
An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. After the largest raid ever last month — at a meatpacking plant in Iowa — hundreds were swiftly force-fed through the legal system and sent to prison. Civil-rights lawyers complained, futilely, that workers had been steamrolled into giving up their rights, treated more as a presumptive criminal gang than as potentially exploited workers who deserved a fair hearing. The company that harnessed their desperation, like so many others, has faced no charges.
Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.
This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.
There are few national figures standing firm against restrictionism. Senator Edward Kennedy has bravely done so for four decades, but his Senate colleagues who are running for president seem by comparison to be in hiding. John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so. The American public’s moderation on immigration reform, confirmed in poll after poll, begs the candidates to confront the issue with courage and a plan. But they have been vague and discreet when they should be forceful and unflinching.
The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.
Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.”
