Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (11 page)

We currently have three dogs and six cats - all strays that were found half-starved in the orchard and vineyard, most likely left there by aliens. (Where is PETA when one really needs it?) My wife saved one of our present cats after it was thrown out into the nectarine orchard; its siblings were quickly eaten by coyotes. After $200 of veterinarian care for shots, congestive heart failure and pneumonia, the poor creature is not only at home with the other adopted strays in our yard, but almost fat. Years earlier I nearly caught one woman who left a box of kittens - three dead, the other two hours away from it - by the mailbox. And speaking of this rural mailbox that I suppose has been standing by the side of our road for nearly a century, we no longer put our outgoing mad in it - having learned that the red flag is simply an invitation for someone to steal the envelopes before the postal carrier arrives. Sadly we are giving thought to ceasing rural postal service altogether, inasmuch as thieves often hit the mail as soon as it is delivered. They take parcels even without monetary value - I have had two entire book manuscripts disappear yards from our front door, including an edited draft of this book!

All the endangered fauna on our farm - red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, kit foxes - have at one time or another been shot, their carcasses left to rot as food for the coyotes, those ubiquitous survivors which intruders seem to regard almost as kin and so never shoot. On my nightly walks around our farm, I politely ask Mexican trespassers not to drink and leave their bottles on the alleyway, not to shoot their 22s at quail, turtles, owls and ducks, and not to leave their refuse in the orchards. It is sickening to see the remains of a barn owl or a Cooper's hawk rotting on the alleyway, machine-gunned for target practice. But increasingly, keeping illegal aliens and Mexican gang members off the property is a hopeless task; in the banter that follows my requests, some trespassers seem piqued that anyone in
California
should dare to insist on the archaic notion of property rights. One especially smart teenager told me in broken English, "Hey, it's our land anyway
-
 
not
yours."

My strangest find one morning was a whole trailer in front of our house - not a two-wheeler, but an enormous old cotton model of 1950s vintage with no license plate or identification. Maybe it had once served as a makeshift neighborhood dumpster; maybe five or six families had used it for their own solid waste disposal. In any case, three or four tons of trash - furniture, garbage, wood, tree limbs, clothes, Mexican newspapers and magazines
-
 
had
been collecting in it for perhaps a year. The tires were nearly rotten; one was almost flat. How it was towed there in the middle of the night remains a mystery. The monstrosity was impossible to remove. Garbage was stacked in it ten feet high. Finally, after three weeks, the county came out with a dump trunk and skip-loader and piecemeal hauled the rotting carcass away.

I couldn't help but speculate about the mentality behind the trailer. Apparently, after it reached critical mass, some people finally realized that such a stinking, noxious mess was unpleasant in their own environs - and so they decided simply to tow it out to the premises of a gringo farmer who would probably take care of it.

Three hundred yards away from our home, at the road intersection, there is a memorial to a fatal drunk-driving accident. A white cross, dry flowers and a small shrine - the Greeks call them iconostases - all commemorate the life of an alien who ran the stop sign and broadsided a truck. In fact, if one looks for such little shrines, they are as commonplace now in rural
California
as they are on the roads of Mexico, wherever there is a blind intersection of two rural roads. Thousands of aliens who rarely drove an automobile in Mexico are now the inheritors of America's cast-off behemoths - smoky SUVs with 200,000 miles, club-cab trucks with bad transmissions, old
Rivieras
that get ten miles to the gallon, or minivans with bald tires and no seat belts. Forget, as environmentalists have, about the matrix of problems with smog control, gas mileage, licensing, registration and insurance - all the protocols that cost an environmentally conscious Californian thousands of dollars each year - and simply consider that our least trained drivers are now behind the wheels of our most lethal automobiles.

Frequently right next to this impromptu immaculate holy place is a sofa, rotting and full of vermin. It would seem that if one alien can find the time and the means to erect a neat white cross at the side of a vineyard and from time to time refurbish the memorial with hand-lettered cards in Spanish, surely another can forgo dumping a sofa on the consecrated roadside. And if the keeper of the deceased's memory periodically brings candles and fresh flowers to grace the site of his lost one's death, why does he not at least remove the abandoned sofa that mars the sanctity of his memorial?

There are now calls to supply illegal aliens with
California
driver's licenses - a last-ditch response to the growing number of immigrants who do not always drive well and rarely do so under legal conditions, but are nevertheless on our freeways in enormous clunkers that sometimes engage in an ethnic version of demolition derby. The problem with such a statute is not its logic - ease and safety of transportation for workers is never to be casually discounted - but its effect on the mentality of legal
California
citizens. When
California
children turn sixteen, they go through a well-known ritual of presenting a birth certificate to the Department of Motor Vehicles to authenticate their age. If you doubt the regularity of this drama, go to any DMV office and listen to irate moms at the counter on their cell phones, calling home for someone to go through the kitchen drawers and bring down junior's long-lost birth certificate so that he might at least have a crack at getting his driving permit.

But if no such documentation is required of aliens, will we then allow all Californians to obtain licenses, the foundation of our security and identification, without proof of their birth and age? Or shall we insist on birth certificates only for legal
California
residents, and not for illegal aliens? Shall we make life easier for illegals who pose the greater danger on our roads, and more difficult for our own citizens who do not? One of the most fascinating aspects of the entire immigration fiasco is the unspoken logic of creating an alternate universe for the illegal alien, in which our long-honored rules and statutes do not apply - a separate code of frontier jurisprudence for millions who, ipso facto, have broken the old law by their unlawful entry into America.

We are entering a cynical time, when politicians deal with the flood of immigrants simply by envisioning them all as future voters and enacting bizarre legislation to win their gratitude. Or is the case more benign? Are we simply so flooded with aliens that any of the consistency or respect for past principle that is vital for the long-term health of the state is unfeasible in the short term?

The
University
of
California
and the
California
State
University
system are inexpensive for resident
California
taxpayers, but not for out-of-staters. We have always tried to gouge nonresident citizens to subsidize the ridiculously low tuition we charge our own residents. Yet recently, this age-old two-tier system of payment was determined to be "prejudicial" to resident illegal aliens, whose families purportedly "paid taxes" to our state coffers. Forget about issues of legal status and the questionable degree to which undocumented workers are compensated through legal payroll systems rather than cash. And for a moment ignore also the understandable long-term and constructive strategies of giving reduced tuition to encourage greater use of the universities by Hispanic residents.

Consider instead once more the precedent set. American citizens from
Arizona
and
Nevada
who enroll in
California
schools now pay more than double what illegal aliens from Mexico pay for tuition. We are rigorous in determining an Oregonian's resident status for the purpose of charging him more for tuition, but lax in confirming the illegality of Mexican aliens in our haste to provide them with discount rates not available to most U.S. citizens. One out-of-state student at
California
State
University
, Fresno, bitterly asked me, "If I renounce my American citizenship and reenter
California
illegally from Mexico, can I save $3,000 this year on fees?" I simply shrugged, unable to tell him that he was wrong.

Our local hospital emergency room serves almost exclusively His-panics. Among them are all sorts of patients with questionable legal status who turn up at the oddest hours to receive excellent medical care for everything from a twisted knee to leukemia. Not long ago, I took my son in for emergency stitches for an athletic injury and saw a drama involving the aftermath of street warfare that taught me something. I learned that the Mexican gang member may shoot and stab with abandon, but in the agony of his last hours he demands without appreciation or knowledge the technology of the twentieth-century American emergency room to rebuild his liver and stitch up his shredded kidneys.

The wounded vatos I saw that night might not know a pancreas from a lung, but they were secure in the assumption that the doctor - a four-eyed wimp of the type they habitually stare down on the street - knew both nephrology and pneumonology. In a sobbing aria of need, one of these gang-bangers shrieked, "Mom, mommy, main, main, they stabbed me!" His mother was herself screaming in Spanish for nurses, doctors and support staff for "mijo" as they peeled off his bloody gang shirt and his soiled, feces-stained baggy trousers - on his way into the antiseptic emergency room. The doctor worked with one eye on his patient and another on two antagonistic groups of rival gang family members in the waiting room - worried that a renewal of hostilities would break out in his hospital before the
night's
wounded were stitched up and sent back out to battle.

Equally bizarre is the American policy of granting instant citizenship at our hospitals to infants of illegal aliens. We see pregnant women with no cash, no husband, no English and no papers who rush to the local hospital at the last minute to bring forth a United States citizen. The birth is a miraculous event indeed, for in theory the infant instantaneously can anchor a new American existence for a full array of parents and assorted relatives of illegal status. How surreal! If an American executive and his upscale pregnant wife deliver a son at a corporate retreat in Cabo San Lucas, they are headed for mountains of paperwork and expenses. The Mexican government, of course, does not consider Joshua Evans III a Mexican citizen by virtue of the fact that he entered the world under Mexican skies. But even the American government presence in Mexico is suspicious and niggardly with its gifts of citizenship to the offspring of its own temporary expatriates, often demanding that lawyers present all sorts of documentation at the local consulate to prove the bona fides of the young American who had the misfortune of being delivered outside U.S. borders.

Like most Californians, I am confused by second-generation gang members even when they aren't getting ready to rumble in the emergency room. This is a growing phenomenon resulting in part from the fact that, according to some studies, almost 40 percent of both Hispanic aliens and Hispanic citizens of immigrant background do not graduate from our state's high schools within the normal four years, while over 90 percent of Mexicans of all statuses have no B.A. degree. Hundreds of gang-bangers venture out into the rural counties to fornicate, shoot drugs, steal, rape and murder. I pick up their needles and condoms, brandy bottles and tampons nightly near our farm pond. Some have tried to break into my house. At least a dozen have brazenly carted away farm equipment, stolen fruit in front of my home, or simply beached their cars and walked away. I confront them monthly - scowls, threats, bad looks and all - and usually reason with foolish logic as in the following propositions: "How would you like it if I drove onto your front lawn and stripped your orange tree?" "Would you like me to drive my tractor to your front door and park it there?" "Can I go over to your house and take what I find lying around the yard?"

Sometimes the Chicano studies lore has filtered down to the gang member: I have had block-lettered gang graffiti painted on our irrigation standpipes demanding, "Help the helpless." Once I caught a thief red-handed with over a hundred pounds of pilfered Elberta peaches. This young proto-Marxist replied to orders to put the boxes down or face the sheriff this way: "Hey, stupido, how you gonna eat all that fruit now before it rots? So just give it to people who really need it."

These roving criminals offer a stark contrast to their hardworking fathers and mothers - and make us wonder what is wrong with Mexico or America, or both. How can some men and women who venture north with nothing and work twenty years to near decrepitude rear children who not only will not labor, but instead fight and maim? All sorts of cheap answers are proposed from the left and the right: racism, the brutality of American capitalism, the emptiness of our popular entertainment, the pathology of Mexican culture, or the laxity of our own welfare state. Yet in the meantime, the social costs of having so many who turn so criminal, remain uneducated, and need highly trained doctors and professionals to clean up their mess has become exasperating. Consider a random litany of recent experiences in my hometown: