Last night I saw an interesting PBS documentary titled “La Boda.” It focuses on a 22-year-old migrant worker who is getting married in 2 weeks. She and her family pick crops in California, then winter in Texas. After the wedding she will return to Nuevo Leon, her hometown and also the town of her soon-to-be husband. The film is a lovely, sensitive portrait of a girl, giddy and shy, and of what it means to be a part of the migrant culture.
You know how Americans think everyone in Third World countries live in huts? Well, in my ignorance I thought migrant workers lived in converted buses or low-rise apartment ghettoes or lean-to hovels. They don’t.
This family of 10 (eight children and mom and dad) live in a modest house, one not so different than mine. They had contemporary leather furniture, up-to-date appliances…microwave, coffee maker, and clothes steamer. The girl wore large thick gold earrings.
Then I realized that migrant workers and Yuppies have a symbiotic existence. One picks, the other eats.
Yuppies consist of two-income families. The husbands went off to work. The wives went off to work and now find everything that has anything to do with home and family is detestable. Instead of creating a happy home, less-stress life where the man and the woman each worked say 25 hours a week, they said let’s pray to the money god, let’s get lots and lots of money and pretend we are rich. We’ll buy stuff so everyone thinks we are rich. We’ll wear gold jewelry. We’ll get a bigger house. We’ll drive fancy-ass cars. We’ll have Mexicans pick our vegetables, and we will hire them to raise our children. We’ll welcome Mexicans, illegals to our country, to take care of those distasteful jobs that we don’t like. We need to act rich.
(Ironically, from what I saw in the film, migrant workers have the lifestyle that Yuppies would have if they didn't pray to the money god. Curious, isn't it?)
I think that is how we basically got to where we are now.
In the future, when historians try to figure out how this country became 80% Mexican and 20 % melting pot, why this country forged on a sense of family values, was simply given away, they will look to the mememememe values of the Yuppies, the people who disliked cooking, disliked having children, disliked raising children, and even worse, were totally neurotic when they were around their own children, the historians will point their fingers and say “Yuppies are the ones that dropped the ball. Sadly they saw nothing to value beyond their own little existence. And, unfortunately, they were one of the most unhappy segments of society we have ever profiled.”
This is how intense self-hate can destroy a country.
