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Published: December 30th 2018
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Anthony Bourdain wrote:
"Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.” But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.
We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go
to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films. So, why don’t we love Mexico?"
Anthony Bourdain's prescient words showed up in my inbox the same day I imagined myself (a Canadian!) sending a letter to the United States President. Here's how I figured it might go:
Mr. Trump, you couldn't have got it more wrong.
Those ne'er-do-well thugs, those diseased low-lives, those rapist, those murderers, the ones that are poised to over-run your precious America, steal the jobs and change your way of life, the fearsome group you accuse of concealing terrorists, the gangs for whom you have spent millions of dollars to send 5,000 troops to the border equipped with ammunition and body armour... do you know who they really are?
Here's what I saw last month after feeding a group of 80 or so migrants at a safe house in Celaya, Mexico. I saw some sweet-faced children, some women... and a lot of skinny, young men, patiently waiting in line for refried beans and rice, an orange and a hard-boiled egg. Water. They were tired but not grumpy.
They were timid but not furtive. They were grateful but not greedy. More dusty than dirty. Dejected. Determined. Their faces were not hard but you could see the hardship in their faces. They looked like young men with nowhere else to go.
Some of them had just showered, probably their first opportunity to get clean in a while. Others were hanging their t-shirts and blue jeans on a sagging line. A few were waiting to see the doctor, suffering from stomachaches and foot injuries. A one-legged teenager was leaning on crutches by the back door. Did he lose his leg falling from the top of the migrant train, the one called la Bestia (the Beast) that carries human cargo from Guatemala to the north of Mexico? I couldn't help but wonder. A preacher was waving a ragged bible. One man offered himself up for a blessing. They weren't interested in heeding the warnings of hopelessness awaiting them at the US border where, at best, they could face a prolonged legal process while their case makes its way through the courts. They all held the same unwavering faith that god was on their side.
Obviously, the god of the
migrants is not the same god that blesses America.
Mr. Trump, I could say that I hate to disappoint you. But I won’t. I would love to disappoint you, to disabuse you of your contrived notions, your xenophobia and your racism. While I travel for fun, these people are travelling out of desperation. They are fleeing poverty and, in some cases, violence and persecution. Consider this: no mother puts her children on a boat if it's safer on land. That morning in Celaya, these men told stories of great suffering which, in my mind, qualifies this ill-planned migration as a humanitarianism crisis, at the very least. Their mothers weren’t given nutritional advice or prenatal vitamins. Their fathers didn't read to them at bedtime. Who had the money for books, anyway? Or the time to read them? They were raised by grandmothers, or taken to their mother’s workplace to putter away their days, or simply left at home to fend for themselves. Without money for uniforms, some may not have gone to school. Sadly, they didn’t get love notes in their lunch bags and their nannies didn’t wait for them by the school door. They were born to squalor, grew
up in squalor, and didn’t aspire to much. A pair of Levis, maybe. Cool sneakers. And of course, a dream, constantly reinforced, that life is better in America.
It’s sad to admit that they would be better off in your troubled country, with your mass shootings and your deranged leadership, than in their own. And it's even sadder to admit that many of them won't qualify for asylum claiming "only" poverty as justification. People can't just decide to cross a border; it doesn't work that way.
The minute the last bean was dished up, the migrants were gone. Their next major stop on the road was Guanajuato. From there, Mexico City. Ultimately, there will be the soul-sucking and mostly futile wait at the border. And then we will be waiting for this surge of humanity on the rebound. There are sandwiches in the freezer, rolls of toilet paper on the shelves.
To be continued, unfortunately.
(Update: Often, I wake up before dawn, listening to the train rumble down the tracks, past the town where I live. A lot has been written about the sound a train makes, its melancholy whistle.
If in a melancholy mood, I picture la Bestia heading north with its men, women and children on top, and I am destroyed by the desperation this implies. It's a complicated issue globally, with no solution in sight. Meanwhile, who could have predicted a humanitarian crisis of this proportion - whole migrant cities hunkered down on the Mexican border, frantic children separated from their parents, an American government shutdown over a border wall - as the world heads into 2019?)
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cabochick
Andrea
The Tangerine nightmare
I just spent the last two months in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and your blog struck a deep chord within me. What I learned about the people of Central America is, they may not have much, but what they do have, makes them richer than any American in Trumps screwed up world, period.