Very Hot. Oy! Very Very Hot! To hold a steel plate in one hand and hold it as long as it took to cut it in half with the acetylene torch you held in the other hand, was a real test of ability to stand pain.
Men would drop the plate with a loud clang and much cussing as it got too hot to hold. Then there were the guys who could hold it all the way through.
One guy pulled off his asbestos glove to reveal that the torch had cut right through his fingers and he had not given in.
This was in a welding shop in Waco, Texas probably around 1974. My housemate worked in this place and would come home and drink his bottle of beer, telling of the day's events.
The welding shop in question was one of those that hired undocumented illegals, at that time more colloquially referred to as "wetbacks." The reason was that if they started to organize a union or complain about working conditions, the company could call immigration on them and the problem would literally go away.
The company's owner was a devoted Christian.
He had the workers break off at noon one day a week and attend chapel, where a preacher would exhort them to become born again.
I cannot say how typical or untypical this situation was, only that it was eye opening for me.
I grew up in Texas. On the playground at school, whether in elementary or high school, white kids would taunt each other with a variety of insults like "taco bender" or "spic" and these were schools that didn't happen to have any Hispanics at the time.
Later on I learned about the migrant farmworkers of the Rio Grande Valley and the way the migrant community was connected to people who were fleeing from violence in places like El Salvador or Guatemala or Chile.
What still amazes me most about all this is really that few people seem to care that there are reasons that there are people who risk their lives in the first place to walk north and cross the US border. The debate is informed by an apparently agreed on common assumption that these people don't exist prior to setting foot across the border.
Read up on the history of the Guatemalan government takeover of 1953. A good accounting of this is in Chris Hedges' "Bitter Fruit" which looks at how the US came to put the CIA to work using psychological warfare to overthrow the democratically elected government and replace it with a military dictator who then initiated a war on the civilian population that is estimated to have taken over 40,000 lives.
It is really very simple. Indigenous farming communities have a connection to the land going back into the mists of time. They practiced subsistence farming. They grew enough to eat and maybe sell in the local marketplace. They didn't have mortgages or debt so they could afford to live sustainably on what they could grow in this way.
United Fruit is one of those agribusiness entities that entered the picture and, when they could not buy out the paisanos, they swayed the wealthy landowners who had the most influence with a lot of money and got the government to move paisanos off the land so they could create large plantations for growing bananas or other fruits for the American supermarkets.
Enough paisanos had been thrown off their land and out of work that they began to organize. That is how a government elected by them took office. The new President promised to give them their land back and to get a fair price when people wanted to sell.
For that, a public relations campaign was launched by none other than Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud's. He came to America and had the vision of using psychological science to promote business and make money. He in fact is credited with inventing public relations. He wrote many many letters and met with anyone who was anyone in order to sell the line that the paisanos were in fact communists. They did have a very communal way of life, but this predated the Inca Empire. He spread the concern that the paisanos were taking orders from Moscow.
This led eventually to Eisenhower getting the backing of Congress to overthrow the elected government and install a new one that was more favorable to what United Fruit wanted.
The paisanos still objected and tried to organize. However, the military dictator sent squads out into the countryside to locate organizers or those who spoke out most effectively, and arrested them. They were generally taken somewhere, perhaps tortured and then shot. This became a long and hard civil war that lasted up until the mid 1980s.
This model, of American multinationals moving against indigenous local people and then using the military and economic power of the US Government to back this efforts, through proxy local force was the real cause for a lot of migration north.
There are many variations on a theme. Each country has a different story and yet they have the same results. More displaced people walking north.
If we were really interested in immigration reform that reduced the number of people who would risk their lives to walk across the southwestern desert, we would do something to support local economic development on local terms so that people could find an economic alternative where they grew up and have family roots. We would use trade agreements to this end instead of supporting the oligarchy that creates this problem.
By now, this picture has been complicated in all sorts of ways with narco trafficking and economic inequality and just plain bad government.
But unwittingly, as US consumers and as citizens who prefer to be blind about all this, we have had a hand in creating the necessity for a lot of our brothers and sisters to try hard to join us in the struggle to achieve the American Dream.
Then, of course, there is the racism that prevents us from seeing these people as people just like us. The prejudice that keeps people from succeeding on their own terms and keeps them in an illegal status.
That racism dates back to the Indian Wars. It should occur to more people that the indigenous people of Central and South America are related to the indigenous people of North America by virtue of a common heritage that goes back into thousands of years before Columbus or Cortes. This prejudice is still active. I lived on the Navajo Nation for several years and I was amazed to see it very much alive in Arizona, especially in towns that bordered the reservation. It is prevalent in the midwest as well. It just does no good to deny it. It needs to be addressed.
We owe these people, these millions from South of the Border, a little helping hand and at least an improved awareness of their situation - after all We The People have had a hand in creating their plight, partly through our lack of consciousness.
If we are aware than we also have to have conscience.
Shall we take off the blinders or shall we buy a new spiffier pair?