You want something done, you ask a Mexican.
I will now pause to let all my bourgeois wasp liberal readers mop up the vanilla skim latte they just spit all over the computer screen.
Done? OK. Just hear me out, after the flip.
You want the best plumber, electrician, cable guy, painter? Hire a Mexican.
You want the best damn food in the world? Ask a Mexican. Preferably a Mexican mom. Better yet, get yourself a Mexican girlfriend whose mom sends frozen tamales via UPS. To die for.
You want the best literature? Read some Mexicans. You don't get that in your intro to lit classes, do you? Mariano Azuela did for the Mexican Revolution what Hemingway did for World War I, only better. Carlos Fuentes' novels span three turbulent decades. Poet Octavio Paz brought home a Nobel Prize in 1990. And if you open it up to all Latinos, there's Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Columbia, maybe the best novelist ever, and the guy who Marquez called the best poet of all time in any language, 1971 Nobel winner Pablo Neruda of Chile.
You want some art? Diego Rivera, anyone? How about his bride Frida Kahlo?
Unfortunately, a lot of people have also discovered that if you want fruit picked for less than minimum wage, you can find a Mexican to do it. Same goes for getting your tobacco picked, your ditch dug or the floor of your big-box superstore swept.
And, it turns out, if you want corrupt, incompetent politicians held to account, you ask the Mexicans.
I can't begin to count how many times I've heard, "This is it! This is the tipping point! This will bring down the Bush Administration!" They let 9/11 happen. They lied us into a war. They leaked the name of a CIA agent for political revenge. Hell, the VP's chief of staff got indicted! The VP shot a guy in the face and then interfered with the police. Dozens of their Congresspeople took bribes and favors. They tapped our damn phones without warrants! They almost let Dubai run our ports!
And every time they stuck their foot in it, and every time we found proof that they'd stuck their foot in it, what did we white liberals do?
We blogged our butts off.
Oh, man, did we get mad. We got so mad that we listened to Air America. And then we read dailykos and americablog. Watch out! You do not want to mess with white people blogging.
But seriously folks. Nothing ever happened, no matter how hard we made fun of Bill O'Reilly. But even though we weren't really doing anything, in a way, we didn't really need to. The Bush administration was doing a good job of sinking itself, frankly, as Dubya's approval rating slipped to the mid-to-upper 30s. Herbert Hoover territory.
So, the NeoCons figured, when all else fails, go after the brown people. Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner pushed a bill through the House that would make immigrating without permission a felony, along with giving food or clothing to a poor person without a green card. And, as if an exponential increase in federal prison beds wasn't expensive enough, Sensenbrenner's bill would build a wall along the Mexican border.
To which almost every Mexican in the U.S. responded, "Oh, no, you DIH-unt."
Tens of thousands turned out in Milwaukee, Sensenbrenner's backyard. Tens of thousands more took to the streets in Phoenix and other cities. And then 500,000 - half a frickin' million - marched on Los Angeles.
That's how you express outrage, folks. That's how you effect change.
I don't intend to get into the specifics of one immigration proposal or another. Perhaps another day. But if the Mexican-American response to those proposals is any indication, the NeoCons won't be thwarted by Democrats, nor by progressives, nor by liberal talk radio nor censure resolutions nor filibusters nor even impeachment. If anyone runs the NeoCons out of town, it'll be the sleeping giant of immigrants, minorities, laborers and the people who love them.
Next Monday, April 10, is A Day Without Latinos. In cities nationwide, people of Latino heritage are going to take the day off and see how we like it. They're going to march on our state capitols and our town squares and they're going to show us how it's done.
And, with sincere apologies for my poor accent, I say, Viva la revolucion!
(Courtesy North Star Writers Group)