My office is located on Waughtown Street in the south part of Winston-Salem, a zone that’s slowly become a barrio and now has a mix of Mexican and American (both white and African American) beggars.
I usually don’t carry much cash in my pocket – not out of caution but because my days normally start like those of George Jetson, who in the classic cartoon gives his wallet over to his wife every day.
I avoid beggars by using my bilingual skills. When I tell the American beggar, in Spanish, que yo no entiendo porque no hablo inglés, he yells back something along the lines of, “You’re goddam American alright, you don’t fool me.” And when I tell the Mexican — usually a fat lady with a weird “While Crossing the Border I Lost Everything” story — that I don’t speak Spanish, she tells me I’m full of bull and a liar, because it’s pretty obvious I understand her sob story. Anyway, I’m not going to give money to people hustling in the streets, regardless of race, creed or country of origin.
You see, I’m neither American nor Mexican to the uneducated eye. I’m a person just trying to get ahead in the one society that’s powerful enough (at least economically) to support a bunch of labor, from Asians to Latin Americans to others who immigrate to this country for new opportunities.
Professionals like me are coming to North Carolina by the hundreds, and unskilled workers are coming by the thousands, all in pursuit of the so-called American Dream. For the unskilled, that “dream” is a better life through hard work.
Those of us who are skilled were more attracted to the glamour and riches of an America that your media sold us via television. We don’t want to get our hands dirty or limit ourselves to dreaded jobs such as selling used cars. No way! We want to buy cheap stock and sell it when it’s high; we want to get that 60k a year with full benefits, even if it means having to wear a matching suit and tie (we’ll just call that collateral damage).
In all seriousness, we arrived in this country legally, with no horror stories to share, other than the few bad minutes we had to endure an immigration officer’s evil eye and extended Q&A. We initially came here because there was a need for us — jobs created because of economic factors that you want to control but that have grown beyond your reach. So now you have the professional Hispanic helping the American reach the lower end of the Hispanic market. Isn’t it ironic?
We are not interested in taking anybody else’s job, as some paranoid labor union leaders and politicians will have you believe. Most of us can’t take your job anyway, due to factors way too complicated to mention in this small space.
We’re not a bunch of “goddam beaners,” as some tobacco-chewers claim. We’re actually more prepared to assimilate into your culture (or whatever passes as your culture nowadays), given our mostly Mestizo backgrounds and gene pools. And we’re prepared to integrate into your society, but not without sharing our opinions on various subjects, which is what I plan to do in this bi-weekly column.
And I’m willing to give you the opportunity to disagree. So drop us a line.
Hernan Mena, a native of Mexico, is the associate editor of the regional Hispanic weekly newspaper, Que Pasa.
This article appears in Oct 5-11, 2005.
