Who’s Picking My Fruit?
You leave your little bubble of pastoral paradise on the South End hoping to see some natural wonders OFF-island, you end up in the American hinterlands pretty quick. Over the mountains where trees thin out to sagebrush, poverty isn’t hidden any longer down fern-lined drives and a cedar forest. It isn’t covered over in blackberry vines the way it is at home. Personal junkyards are glaring in the implacable sun. And the rusty mobile homes lined up in graveled scars on the landscape sport corroded air conditioners stuck out aluminum windows, a small and rattly relief against the three digit heat of desert afternoons.
Welcome to the barrios del norte. I watched an Hispanic couple and their son sitting together in a park yesterday in the shade of one of the few trees, the father reading aloud to his boy while mom talked on her cellphone. These are the immigrants some folks want to round up and send ‘home’. Three of twelve million or so. I think — and don’t tell my Republican friends I said this — I think maybe they ARE home.
One of the GOP candidates says they bring drugs and they’re rapists, all of em. Up the road from me a couple of days ago we had a party of white kids call 911. A young woman had strayed off into the jungle of the nettled South End and hadn’t returned. The group of eight or so admitted to the deputy and the fire boyz who’d responded that they’d all been shooting heroin. They were worried she’d gotten hopelessly lost in our Amazon, but, miraculously, she stumbled into their cabin’s clearing just then, unhurt except for some nettle stings. The deputy departed, his job finished there and so did the fire crew.
If drugs are an ‘immigrant’ problem, I suspect we’re being a little selective if the rich white kids can party with syringes and smack and the police say ‘have a nice day.’ Out here in the sun-blistered boondocks, I guess reading to your kid might just be reason enough for deportation. Maybe the rich kids will kick their habit and want those orchard picking jobs, the ones the immigrants take away from white folks.
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