A Welter of Inchoate Feeling: Our Immigration Q&A, G-Rated Version

We started our day last Wednesday by driving past a walkout of Hispanic students from a nearby high school. It was early in the morning, just after classes had gotten under way, and the Children’s Crusade was already marching into the headwind: By that time, the walkouts were old news, and there were no media around to chart the trickle of this out-of-the-way tributary.

The protest consisted of maybe 15 or 20 students, many of them holding or waving the now-predictable Mexican flag. They were accompanied by four school district cops, with two supremely bored-looking HPD officers standing by as back-up. For some reason, the entire desultory procession had come to a halt in the parking lot of a CVS. It was way too far to ankle it all the way downtown, so there would be no dipping into the City Hall Reflecting Pool for this bunch.

The only visible camera was wielded by a student who was videotaping his buddies. Everyone appeared to be having a good time, mugging for the camera. Several of the girls had rolled up their shirts to show off their navels, which they’re not allowed to bare in school, and a couple of the guys seemed to be throwing gang signs at passing motorists, although we’re pretty sure they weren’t real gang signs---just the cocking of the wrists and outward gliding hand motions from the chest that are as meaningless to us as the illegible graffiti that now seems to be covering every accessible public space in southwest Houston. Pre-packaged, paint-by-numbers attitude. Nothing but blare. We could barely raise a sneer as we wheeled onward, and even felt a pang of sympathy: Yes, we too took every opportunity to miss class back when we were in high school.

Eight hours later our daughter climbed into our car in fit of high-pitched indignation as we picked her up from her school: “Do you know what (so-and-so) Bush wants to do now?” she asked. “No, what?” we replied. “He wants to send all the illegal immigrants back to Mexico!” Her friend C----, a fellow 6th grader, had been crying most of the day. C----‘s parents are illegal, and C---- feared that her family would soon be sent packing.

Naturally, this story struck a deeper chord with us than the sight of the navel-flaunting truants.

Seizing the Teachable Moment, we explained to the 12 year old that it was unlikely that C----’s parents will be forced back to their home country, as we just can’t see Americans having the stomach to sanction the round-up and deportation of 11 million or so people (much less be willing to pay for it), although it was remotely possible they might have to return to Mexico at some point and wait in line to get back in legally.

Then we tried to point out that there was a lot more than Bush driving the movement to tighten immigration laws, and that Bush, in fact, was considered a liberal on the issue by many in his own party.

“There’s probably gonna be some way that C----’s parents can stay in the country, whether it’s called amnesty or not, and hopefully C----'s family will take advantage of that, even if it costs them,” we said. “And they better do it, ’cause after whatever laws are passed it’s probably gonna be a lot more difficult to get across the border, and not so easy for businesses to hire people who aren’t here legally.” She nodded.

We went to explain that many, many people wait in line in Mexico and elsewhere for the opportunity to become U.S. citizens, and it would be fundamentally unfair to those who pursue the legal path if everyone in this country illegally were deemed automatically eligible for citizenship, with no attendant cost.

She nodded again. Fairness is a concept that 12 year olds instinctively grasp.

“So why do people come here illegally?” she asked. “Well, you know that. Think about it---who mows the lawns in our neighborhood (besides our lawn)? Who builds the houses and surfaces the roads? Works in the kitchens, sweeps out the offices … etc.” We talked of the father of her two friends who used to live down the street, a Mexican-American who ran a crew that did foundation repair, tree-trimming and whatever other hard work was available, and had his guys gather every morning in his front yard before they left for the day’s job. “Those little guys” ---none of them seemed to be over 5’4”---“were all illegal. They’re typical: They came here to work, to do the jobs that Americans won’t do, supposedly … "

But, we continued, stretching the Teachable Moment into the Teachable 15 Minutes, the reason Americans won’t do lots of those jobs is that employers can get away with paying illegal workers less, much less, and don’t have to provide them with benefits, and that dynamic drives down wages for lower-skilled workers, especially African-Americans, and … there’s more to civic life, to the culture (or “culture,” as our daily newspaper has put it) and the soul of a place or country, than cheap labor (and by the way, slavery was the ultimate in cheap labor, and look how much it did for the South---not just for African-Americans, but the 90 percent of whites [and their descendants nigh unto the generations] who never owned a slave … )

(We did not explain that what we mean by culture has nothing to do with skin tone, religion, taste in food or music or the number of cars you park in your front yard, or any other factors aside from an understanding of [no matter how unschooled] and adherence to the Constitution---what sets our nation apart from almost all others, including Mexico.)

“It’s a complex issue, but it’s good you’re paying attention to it,” we said as we turned into our neighborhood, figuring the Teachable Moment had expired.

But she had one more question: “Was your grandfather an illegal immigrant?”

Well, we replied, he might have been: Several years ago we went on a genealogical-research bender that we understand is common to some people our age, and, while chasing down the many rabbit trails our Gran’pa had strewn in the available public record (otherwise known as untruths, or lies), we never were able to determine whether he in fact was naturalized. It appears he wasn’t.

We did finally manage to document his point of origin---in a picturesque little village in the high mountains of a land across the sea---although he told county and parish authorities, Census takers, and the Social Security Administration that he had been born in New Orleans. It turns out he had boarded a ship by himself when he was 14, five years after his schoolteacher father had died, and made his way to New Orleans to join an older sister. He bounced around and somehow wound up in East Texas---we remember hearing stories about work in a circus, a stint in semi-pro baseball, a glass eye he supposedly acquired when struck by a line drive---and spent most of his life doing ass-busting labor.

But there was no free public schooling for him, no bilingual education or English as a Second Language to ease his transition. Nor was there any lingual infrastructure in his native tongue to ensure he’d never have to learn English: no newspapers, no TV or radio, no fellow native speakers with whom to shoot the shit. There was no church of his faith within 90 or so miles of where he lived. In those days the Ku Klux Klan frequently marched through the small downtowns of East Texas. He found it prudent to adopt a more “American-sounding” surname, again without going through the legal niceties.

But beyond his Social Security, we doubt that he felt entitled to much of anything from his adopted country, simply because he worked hard, and it’s impossible for us to imagine him walking down the street waving the flag of the place he had voluntarily left. He became an American, with a thick Old World accent, and, from what he remember, as an old man he was content with watching the Game of the Week with Ol’ Diz and Pee Wee on Saturday afternoons and reading the Dallas Morning News from cover-to-cover, both of which he did while chain-smoking non-filter cigarettes with an intensity that scared our little-kid self.

Really? said our daughter, sounding relieved that the ride home, and the accompanying windy lecture, was at an end.

“So, um, you see what we’re saying about all this, right?”

“Yeah!” she replied as she fled the car.

If so, we were satisfied: We had made a 12 year old as confused and ambivalent about the issue as we are.

Prof Ramos Strokes His Goatee, Shows His Flag

We see the Houston Chronicle (and perhaps other local news media) finally noticed all the Mexican flags those heroic teen truants have been waving about during their class-cutting “walkouts” from the free public education a good number of them persist in squandering.

“Opinions split over read, white and green: Mexican flags divisive topic as principal shows his support for student protests,” read the headline over the page one Chronicle story, referring to the clueless Reagan High principal who ran the Mexican standard up the school flagpole after being asked to do so by students (why not just turn the entire asylum over to the inmates?).

Standing up in opposition to the Mexican flag-flaunting was one Bruce R. Wing, identified by the Chronicle only as a “52-year-old Missouri City resident.” Mr. Wing, bless ’im, was no doubt offered up as a representative of the Angry White Man, Potential Minuteman Recruit Division (although being from Missouri City he could easily be an Angry Black Man), who either e-mailed or called the newspaper (our guess) with the following observation: "The whole thing just makes my blood boil. I want them all out of here." Mr. Wing went to say the Reagan High principal should be fired, then was quickly dispatched to the Dustbin of History, where he’ll be forever immortalized as a 52-year-old Missouri City resident.

Trotted out to defend the flag displays was Raul Ramos, the professor of Texas history at the University of Houston whose op-ed piece in the Chronicle galvanized opposition---let’s give blame or credit where it’s due---to naming the city’s new Major League Soccer Franchise “Houston 1836.” In addition to teaching history, the professor apparently dabbles in cultural psychoanalysis:

Calling HISD's decision [ordering the flag removed at Reagan High] a reaction to cultural anxiety, he said, "it's important for the school to make efforts to identify with the student body," not vice versa. "The school, after all, reflects the ethnic identity of the students sitting in its classrooms."

Well, that’s the first we’ve heard of that---that schools should reflect the ethnic identity of their students. We thought this was still America---E pluribus unum and so forth---where the schools traditionally have served as an assimilating agent for all comers. That’s all that’s part of our culture hereabouts (or “culture,” as the Chronicle once put it, in quotation marks as if such didn't exist, in an editorial previous to this fanciful bullshit.)

We’ll turn the tables on Prof Ramos and offer this armchair analysis: He’s consumed by self-loathing because he’s drawing his taxpayer-funded check from a university named after a city named after the villain of 1836 …

Teen Martyr Jesse Quintero Shows His Flag

The local news coverage of the student walkouts from Houston high schools to protest stricter immigration law has been almost uniformly celebratory, sappy and unquestioning.

Not that we expected more.

As for as we can tell, none of the local media outlets has bothered to ask the protestors why, when the supposed aim of the walkouts is to protest federal legislation that might make it harder for the students and their parents to stay in the United States (in addition to being a good excuse to miss Algebra II), they persist in waving the Mexican flag. Hell, we haven’t even seen or read one report that bothers to point out the presence of the Mexican standard, even though the pictures the media are broadcasting (or, in the case of Tuesday’s daily newspaper, printing on the top of the first and last pages of the A section) clearly show the flag being front and center in the protests.

News consumers all over town (Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, whoever) are sitting at home wondering, “Why the hell are they waving the Mexican flag if they want to stay in this country?” But the sorry-ass local media is to P.C.-constricted, too incurious, to ask even the obvious (might offend someone).

(We’ll ask, though. We overhead a lad we know, a 14-year-old whom we’ll call Jose [’cause that’s his real name], telling his friends about how he planned to attend the big rally in downtown Houston wearing a Mexican-flag headband and a Mexican-flag T-shirt. He only glared when we inquired whether he had some Mexican-flag underwear, too. But when we turned serious and asked him why he wouldn’t be waving a U.S. flag, he looked at us like we were crazy. “Why?” he said. “That’s not my country.” Jose, who’s open about his illegal status, is sharp and has a fair command of English, but one of the things he and many of his cohorts don't like about the United States is that pesky law that ensures he’ll have to stay in school until he’s 16 … and improve his English, learn a little bit about this [not his] country’s history, etc.)

The Houston Chronicle found the initial walkout from Eisenhower High School to be of such interest that it devoted two stories to the protest, one a profile of the protest organizer, 18-year-old Jesse Quintero. For some reason both stories quoted Maria Jiminez, the super-strident “immigration rights activist” who named her two kids after Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong (you’d think the newspaper, with all its resources, could scare up another "immigration rights activist" who hadn’t named her or his children after two of history’s most prolific mass murderers).

If you bothered to read it, you may have noticed there was a bloody, gaping hole in the profile of the protest organizer: Nowhere in the story was it clearly revealed whether young Jesse Quintero himself is in the country illegally … or not. You are told that his father “came to the United States … more than two decades ago … to find a better life,” but whether he came legally or illegally, or has since been legalized, is a question left to the reader’s imagination. The student’s mother, meanwhile, is described as having been born in the Rio Grande Valley, meaning, we’d presume, that she’s a natural-born citizen in good standing. So the protest organizer has a U.S.-born mother and a father who came to this country before he was born … we’d say the chances are about 100 percent that Jesse Quintero is a pure-dee fully legal citizen of this country. We’re guessing, but we shouldn’t have to. It’s not an inconsequential point, at least within the context of the story.

The Chronicle also reports that Jesse’s mother sees a “bleak future where ‘I’m going to have to show my I.D. to prove my nationality’ ….” We can’t tell whether “bleak future” is the reporter’s phrase or was employed by Margie Quintero (we presume it’s the former’s), but either way it’s a rank distortion of the language. Having terminal cancer portends a bleak future; having to show an I.D. card to prove your citizenship status (which ain’t gonna come to pass anyway), would be a mere annoyance or inconvenience.

But wait: the Chronicle suggests that life has already turned bleak for Jesse Quintero:

Young Hispanics with immigrant parents, many born in the United States and citizens, "will remember [stiffened immigration law] as a personal attack on their families. They will vote," Jimenez said.

Quintero has already felt the attack personally. As he and about 150 other students marched toward an immigration office nine miles away on Monday, a passer-by in an automobile yelled out to the group, "Go back to where you came from," Quintero said. He retorted by saying Hispanics "were here first."

Whoa, Jesse. Actually, Spaniards---European colonialists--- were “here first,” not “Hispanics,” although to get technical about it, Native Americans were “here first,” the six tribes and whatnot that Jesse might have learned about in the 4th or 7th grades---if he had been paying attention, which would’ve enabled him to retort intelligently when being personally “attacked” by a loudmouth passer-by in an auto. (The whole “we were here first, you stole our land and now we’re going to get it back” attitude is widespread among immigrant youth, not that you’d ever know it from reading or watching the local media.)

We think Jesse Quintero and his marching buddies need to get their butts back to class. As for the local media … they’re in dire need of schooling, too.

Moonlighting with Carol Alvarado

The Houston Chronicle’s Lori Rodriguez, in a profile of under-siege Council member Carol Alvarado, drolly noted that

Alvarado has taken well to the more rewarding side of public service. Beyond her $50,000-plus annual council salary, she supplements her income with consulting fees primarily for advising out-of-town Hispanic-owned businesses on the how-tos of seeking public contracts.

Hmmm. An elected public official counseling private businesses on how to snare public contracts. The beckoning vista for potential conflicts would seem to be broad and wide. Should we just presume that Alvarado is not taking fees for advising these firms on how to do business with the city of Houston (which we guess would be like Pete Rose NOT betting on baseball)? And that she does not conduct this sideline business out of her council office(s)? Here’s hoping one of the daily newspapers in town will fill us in on Alvarado’s extracurricular endeavors.

Rodriguez also quotes the apostate Hispanic politico Gabe Vasquez, formerly of the Houston school board and the city council, offering a jaundiced view of both Alvarado and the political milieu in which she operates. He calls it the "Chicago ward-boss model" of politics and adds: “It's about power, authority and control.”

Yep. That, at bottom, is the root of Alvarado’s problem (except for the authority and control she didn’t exercise over her bonus-taking employees at the mayor pro tem’s office, if that indeed is the beginning, middle and end of that story, and we’ll stand by until the tale is fully told). Vasquez forgot to mention the perks---the travel opportunities, the free food you get to shovel in at all those luncheons and evening functions, the deference and kowtowing to which you’re routinely subjected, etc., even for holding a wholly meaningless and redundant office such as mayor pro tem. But we suppose that falls in the “power” category.

Meanwhile, on an unrelated subject, Slate blogger Mickey Kaus, not trusting his local newspaper’s reporting, took in the big anti-immigration legislation rally in Los Angeles and determined (with his own eyes) that the number of protestors waving Mexican flags was about equal to those carrying U.S. flags (which he says organizers had instructed marchers to bring). We noticed that the kids who walked out of Eisenhower High School in Houston’s Aldine school district on Monday were also into the Mexican flag thing.

This sort of display used to puzzle us. But now we recognize the flag-waving as a manifestation of the aggressive sense of entitlement/resentment harbored by a growing number of illegal immigrants. You see the same sort of attitude from 16 year olds who walk around in those Yo Soy Mexicano T-shirts with the pictures of Zapata or whoever (they don’t say Yo Soy Mexicano-Americano). When we see one we’re always tempted to ask the wearer, Well, why don’t you roll on back there, although we fear such a show of insensitivity might earn us the censure of the Upper West Siders on the Chronicle editorial board.

As we’ve written, we’re of two (or possibly three of four) minds on illegal immigration, but we do think that as long as you’re in this country you ought to make an effort to be a part of this country (including buying car insurance, learning English, ensuring your kids don’t mar the entire town with graffiti, losing the nostalgie de la boue, etc. ).

Kaus suggests the Mexican flag-waving only serves to harden anti-immigrant sentiment and will result in even tougher legal measures ... perhaps even a wall. We think he’s right.

… And All He Had to Do Was Act Naturally

We feel comfortable in predicting that Hollywood will never make an Oscar-nominated biopic of Texas native Buck Owens. An astute businessman, never publicly addled by drink or drugs, Owens sorely lacked the mystery and unknowability that made Johnny Cash a posthumously hot box-office property. While Cash dressed in black, gobbled speed and imbibed Dylan on those jingle-jangle mornings, Owens wore his electric Nudie suit to the London Palladium, cut harshly beautiful duets with the immortal Rose Maddox* and albums entitled Live in Scandinavia, and had the genius to sing of having the “hongries” for a woman’s love and profess his abject willingness to stand waitin’ in [her] welfare line for a mere handout. Cash brought Dylan and other hipsters on the summer replacement show he hosted for the Smothers Brothers (the first time we saw Dylan perform); Owens spent eons self-consciously stroking his hambone with Roy Clark and Grandpa Jones on Hee-Haw, and growing hugely rich in the process.

Yet Owens’ talent and way with a song was at least equal to if not greater than Cash’s: There were few country singers outside of Hank Williams and George Jones with a more expressive voice, and no one did more to rock country music, to return it to the wild environs from whence it sprang, than Alvis Edgar Owens and his great fiddler-guitarist Don Rich. Owens was a true crossover phenomenon: most of his big country hits in the ’60s made their way to the top of the Top 40 charts, where they sounded right at home among the Stax-Volt, Motown and British rockers that were played one after another during that brief, glorious flowering. Mostly, we liked Buck Owens ’cause he always made us smile.


This is a pretty good appreciation from Salon (even though they got his first name wrong), while Rhino’s The Buck Owens Collection (1959-1990) has all the Buck you need plus a handsome booklet with much background and many fine photos (including a classic of Buck and the Buckaroos at the Astrodome not long after it opened).

* The duo’s Mental Cruelty from the early '60s was a hilariously deadpan, noir-ish slice-of-life in which Rose asked a judge to grant her a divorce on grounds of men-tal cru-el-ty, while Buck, pleading ignorance to the charges, suggests it’s all a loaf of bullshit the plaintiff has baked in an attempt to slip the bonds of matrimony. Words cannot describe its sublimity.

A Fairly Astounding Figure Discovered Deep in Our Zoned Section of the Daily Newspaper

Newspapers report the darndest things.

Take this fer instance we stumbled across in the weekly Alief/Southwest section of Thursday’s Houston Chronicle, in a story on the latest get-together of the Alief school board. The story opened with the “news” that the district trustees had voted to nominate their superintendent for the “Superintendent of the Year” award given by the Texas Association of School Boards. The board deemed the super to be deserving of the honor partly because of the district’s acclaimed welcoming response to the flood of Katrina evacuee students into its schools.

The story ambled on in this vein until the 17th or so paragraph, when it allowed that one “concern” of the Alief Community Coalition, an area support organization for the school district, is Alief’s “burgeoning homeless population.”

That one pulled us up short, but we hit the wall at the next paragraph:

According to [an Alief ISD administrator], the influx of hurricane evacuees elevated Alief’s homeless population from 435 in 2005 to more than 4,000 in 2006.

Jumpin’ Jesus, stop the presses! If that were true---and we’re skeptical---shouldn’t that be all over the front page of the daily paper, rather than buried inside a story in a zoned section that no one but us and 12 or 13 other damned souls will bother to read?

It was just last Sunday that an advocate for the homeless was warning on the paper’s op-ed page that the city’s homeless population could rise from 14,000 to 18-20,000 after the FEMA rent subsidies for evacuees run out, but elsewhere in the paper a few days later it’s suggested that Alief is already crawling with the un-homed (and wouldn’t such an explosive increase of street wanderers in a rather small block of the city be noticeable to the naked eye?)

(This kind of reminds us of the classic on-deadline story/review in the Ye Long Gone Houston Post of a Rolling Stones concert at the Astrodome, which mentioned in the last paragraph that the crowd had been peaceful and full of good vibes, except for the two homicides on the premises that police were investigating at press time.)

Of course, we’ve never believed any purported census of the homeless could be very reliable (we’re even suspicious of the official government census of those with fixed addresses), but, for discussion’s sake, let’s say that even half or a third of the increase reported by the Alief ISD administrator is accurate (and where’d she get her figure?).

We think the daily newspaper still missed the lede.

Everything’s Covered by a Fine Gold Dust

You leave
You return

To a dead car battery
That won’t hold a charge
And oak pollen everywhere
Blown into piles in every corner
And coating the car with the
dead battery.

For a year or so in the latter stages of his Alzheimer’s
my father was confined
to a bed with railings on the sides.
Bed-rid,
and my mother and the woman who helped her
couldn’t get him to the pot.
So they strapped him into huge highly absorbent adult diapers
A final indignity (or maybe the second-to-last)
But they did the job for which they were intended.

He had grown up in labor camps
with Mexican kids
as his father moved
from coal mine to coal mine
in East Texas.

“A very unsettled life,” my mother observed.

He feared poverty (a lot, I think)
but was uneasy with affluence
and quietly contemptuous of
ostentatious display
of all kinds.

Madness was not something he considered (I’m guessing).

After he died there was a big box of adult diapers left,
and my mother asked me to get rid of them.
Understandably.

But I didn’t, thinking I could make use of them or
give them away, except these diapers were huge.
You could wrap six babies in them, at least.
And how do you “donate” adult diapers?
So I kept them, and occasionally
they’ve come in handy.

Like today, when I went into my trunk
and took out the last one
and used it wipe the fine gold dusting
off of the car with the dead battery.

It’s what my father would’ve wanted.

And hell, I wrung it out and might use it again.
Because it’s highly absorbent.

You leave.
You return.

Catching up on ... A very pointed (and it’s about time!) takedown of Sherron Watkins, the Enron “whistleblower” whose lips never wet a whistle … while Jim Kunstler puts the “Mommy” and “Daddy” parties on the couch (so true, so true).