We Are Family

By Richard Reeves

Just about 30 years ago, I wrote a “Reporter at Large” article for The New Yorker magazine about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living, illegally and legally, in Southern California. The Mexican and Chicano population of Los Angeles was the second-largest Mexican city in the world, behind only Mexico City itself.

For a New Yorker, a stranger in a strange land, the reporting launched fireworks of new ideas and revelations. The first and most astounding thing to me was that white Angelenos were the only middle-class Americans I had seen who had servants–maids, nannies, gardeners, nurses and handymen–all Mexicans, some naturalized or second- and third-generation American citizens.

Whatever their immigration status, they were great workers and good people, usually raising their children as English-speaking, Americanized young people. Spanish accents were fading then. Now, most of my Mexican-American students at the University of Southern California sound just like any boys and girls from the San Fernando Valley and other points Angeleno. I haven’t seen their papers or documents, but they are as American as me or you.

Obviously, the people hiring for about half-price compared with other American workers loved them, even if they grumbled now and then about “foreigners” and “wetbacks,” a word used back then. The other thing that I learned, and something that has enormous political importance now, is that the “legals” and the “illegals,” the “documented” and the “undocumented” were related. They were family.

Mexican-Americans did not vote much then, but they were extremely sensitive to any political or governmental moves that denied American rights to the undocumented, their parents, uncles, brothers and sisters. They do vote now, as Republican candidates learned last year. Despite socially conservative views about everything from marriage to work, they are voting Democratic by large margins. And that is one reason Barack Obama won a second term as president and Antonio Villaraigosa has been the mayor of Los Angeles for the past eight years. They think Republicans hate them and hate any liberal governance aimed at helping working people or poor people. Perhaps this will change when there are Chicano hedge funds.

In sifting through the election returns of last year, some of the clueless Republicans and conservatives did get some clues.

This article originally appeared on : TruthDig