Hispanic Fanatic

The youngest of us, he came to America when he was two. I was twelve at the time, and I was in charge of holding his hand while he walked into the country. He threw a fit at the border station for some unknown reason, and I had to drag him into America kicking and screaming, quite literally.

He is the son of Aunt #2, and as such was orphaned before he could form concrete memories of his parents. My mother adopted him, so my cousin became my brother.

As a child, he fluctuated between precocious awareness of his high intelligence and traumatizing flashbacks of the harrowing start to his life.

A week after he arrived, he ran into my room screeching in fear. “Las bombas! Las bombas!” he screamed as he grabbed me. The problem, my mother explained to me, was that he had heard a plane go over our house. He associated that sound with the imminent dropping of bombs.

Cousin #7 soon adjusted to life in America, however, and his ability to conjure adventure out of the most mundane setting quickly became apparent. On his second day of kindergarten, he came home topless. When my mother asked him what happened to his shirt, he said he didn’t know. For reasons never explained or even grasped at, he had literally lost his shirt, and it never reappeared.

On the way to midnight mass one Christmas Eve, he broke away from us and climbed the snowplowed mountain in front of the church. He was already at the top of the hill and forming snowballs when my mother caught up to him.

“Malcriado!” she said. “Come down, now!”

He had created a formidable arsenal and was sizing up potential targets when she yelled at him, and with great hesitation, he slid down the hill and left his trove of snowballs behind.

As a teenager, he developed an almost psychotic work ethic. One summer, he worked an import-export tent at my hometown’s weeks-long festival. While virtually every adolescent showed up at the festival grounds to dance to cover bands and drink until throwing up, Cousin #7 was handling merchandise and lifting boxes and making change. His calm tone and laidback smile made people trust him, and they usually bought more than they had planned. Many innocent Midwesterners left the tent with a leather wallet from Bogotá or a stuffed lizard from Tegucigalpa or a set of maracas from Caracas. He is just that charming.

Years later, he did me the favor of becoming one of the groomsmen at my wedding. But unfortunately, I haven’t seen him in years.

This is because he is the only one of the cousins to return to El Salvador. The reasons that Cousin #7 lives there are too complex and outright baffling to cover in a single post.

Suffice to say that he has married a local girl and now has an adorable son and daughter. The girl, in particular, looks just like he did as a toddler. I don’t know if she or her brother are prone to the grand schemes and misadventures of their father, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are.

In any case, I hope to visit them soon. It will be good to see my brother again.

Hispanics are used to being insulted and denigrated. After all, there are a wide variety of colorful slurs and cultural putdowns from which the bigot can choose.

However, “lazy” has never seemed to stick. When it is applied to us, it seems to tumble out in an almost haphazard way. It’s as if the racist doesn’t really believe it, and is just hurling epithets that sound good. After all, how can Latinos be lazy if they’re working hard to invade America and then steal everybody’s job? That sounds like quite a strenuous chore to me.

The stereotype of the shiftless Latino pinnacled back in the days when welfare cheats were the biggest boogieman that white America had to face. Even then, it was scarier to paint African Americans as lazy. That imagery still resonates with true haters. After all, Hispanics don’t have a Stepin Fetchit as cultural shorthand.

In recent years, the claim that Hispanics are lazy has been further diminished. The cliché of the sweaty Latino knocking himself out to install your roof or finish your garden or clean your hotel room has come to the fore.

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When my wife and I relocated to the West Coast, the moving company that we hired sent a middle-aged white man to perform the estimate and sell us on his organization. He wore a tie and laughed a lot, even when nothing was particularly funny.

The actual movers were four Latinos. They did not wear ties.

The chief of the crew spoke perfect English, but his three assistants communicated with each other in a dialect so thick (deep Central America is my guess) that I barely recognized it as Spanish.

Although they had the far more important (and substantially more grueling, miserable, and labor-intensive) job, their take-home pay could not have approached that of the laughing man in the tie, despite our cash tip and the Coke Zeroes that we supplied to them.

At one point, they carried boxes piled high, Sherpa style, with the weight pressing on their spines. They seemed embarrassed to ask for water, and went about their jobs with a focus that I’ve rarely witnessed in the white-collar world.

Now, I certainly don’t want to get into the whole plight-of-the-proletariat aesthetic. Nor do I want to glamorize their hardscrabble existence in some kind of Steinbeckian ode to the nobility of the working class. For all I know, they’re assholes.

In truth, as movers, they kind of sucked. They were hours late both picking up our stuff and dropping it off at our new place. I can only presume that they are afflicted with Hispanic time (that’s the subject of a whole other post).

More disturbing, there was enough damage to our stuff that we had to file a claim for reimbursement. The scratches, dents, and outright destruction that they wrought upon our possessions were, I believe, direct consequences of the Latino work ethic (I’ll explain what I mean by that in yet another post later).

In any case, my original point is that in an ideal society, these exhausting and humbling jobs would be performed by teenagers of all social classes – kids who are at the height of their physical powers and can arguably be said to be “building character” (although I despise that term). Such jobs would not be done by tired guys just trying to eke by, with little hope of ever going further in life. These men are not going to take anything away from the experience except muscle aches.

Will their children follow in their footsteps and sign on for a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor? Or will they take advantage of their parents’ decision to come to America, and someday be the ones to sit back, negotiate with customers, and laugh and laugh?

In his bestselling book, Thomas Frank asked the immortal question, “What’s the matter with Kansas?”

As someone who has spent time there I can answer, “A lot.” (Just kidding, all my Kansas friends; go Jayhawks!).

In any case, this story about one Kansas county, and the Hispanics who live there, recently caught my attention. There are so many elements at play in this one tale that I’m devoting a whole post to hyperanalyzing it.

First, the story points out that Finney County (population: 40,998) has just turned majority-minority. This means that over half the residents of this fine heartland community are not white (there is also a large Asian population present). Finney County thus joins the ten percent of U.S. counties to have this distinction – and yes, the number is growing. The gist of the story is that this change is happening in (gasps all around) the middle of the country, and is not just contained to wacky California and big old rambling Texas.

I’ve written before about the changing demographics of America, and what this means for the future. Whole books have been, and no doubt will be, written about what the United States will look like in the future, when the name Rodriguez is considered just as all-American as O’Malley. But it’s worth noting this fresh proof out of Kansas that the process is underway and irreversible.

Also, the article casually mentions that Hispanics have lived in Finney County for “more than 100 years.” This gives some context to the vitriol that Latinos are suddenly swarming into America and undermining traditional values. Sorry, but it’s clear that Hispanics have, for decades now, helped build the country, and this process is only accelerating.

Speaking of that, the fabled Latino work ethic makes an appearance in the story. As I’ve stated before, it’s not always an intrinsically good thing that Hispanics often labor like demons.

In fact, we don’t have to read far into the article before encountering the words “massive meatpacking plants,” which is a phrase inherent in any story about growing Latino populations in small towns. Is it really such a great thing that the shit jobs go to Hispanics, who are only too willing to take them because of their strong drive to work, work, work?

This relates to another topic I’ve touched upon in these posts: the antipathy that too many Hispanics feel toward education. One reason for this is the intense focus placed upon work, especially of the manual type. In fact, one Hispanic resident says that many of his fellow Latinos “tell their kids they don’t need to go to college because this is a good life.” Let’s be blunt: Asian and Indian immigrants don’t say things like that to their kids, and it shows.

Finally, the article touches upon the changes that occur and the tensions that arise when the culture shifts. Or as the article breathlessly states, “This Midwest enclave, home to hamburgers and hot dogs, is giving way to… Mexican tacos.”

Let’s set aside the fact that plenty of Hispanics like hamburgers and hot dogs (I myself am partial to bratwurst, but that’s another story). How are some of the white inhabitants of Finney County adjusting? Well, one resident says, “There were always whispers. Out at Wal-Mart, you hear, ‘Oh, look at how they’re dressed… wonder where they’re from, what they’re doing here?’ Especially if they weren’t speaking English.”

What’s funny is that, apparently, some of the longtime residents of the county don’t appreciate the cliché of an exotically dressed person jabbering away in a crazy language. So their solution is to become an even bigger cliché by whispering, “What are they doing here?” in the Wal-Mart aisle. I can only hope that they spit out a wad of tobacco before adding, “Damn foreigners are taking over!”

But it’s not all angry glares in town, veiled animosity on the street, and awkward moments at the superstore. Another resident says that it’s “nice to have those different cultures.” Another advises to offer “open arms to people that come in your community because they might be the person that’s going to help you when you have times of struggle.”

That same resident says that everyone should “just try to be a good person” to others, regardless of their differences.

His comments amaze me. Who let that radical in?