Aliso & Wood Canyons 2

Posted on September 10, 2003 in Photos Social Justice

Huffing and puffing up the steps of the Valido Trail on Labor Day, it occurred to me that someone built this trail. Arms cut the logs to length, drilled holes, and hammered them into the decaying sandstone. Deer might have pioneered the original path, but human beings took machetes and shovels to widen it.

The work looks like more than an Eagle Scout project. I suspect that the county contracted the job and the contractor hired braceros to cut away the brush and install the steps as he looked over blueprints and drank a bottle of Arrowhead Springs water.

Not far from the trailhead, the City of Laguna Beach has built a lot where anyone can drive up to grab a handful of day laborers. If you want to level your garden, clear out brush, clean your garage, or paint a room, you can find who you need here, no green card required. I suspect the INS sweeps through from time to time, picking up illegals and that the city, on behalf of those who hire from here, complains.

It’s the old California story: we tremble as the number of Latinos increases and talk remedies such as banning their access to hospitals and schools, but we depend on them to create and maintain our floating worlds. As long as they allow us to think of them only as braceros — a pair of arms without chests, legs, and heads that need feeding, educating, and, sometimes, bandaging — we’re perfectly happy having them around. Serve us those French Fries. Bring us another glass of water. Clear our tables. Sweep our sidewalks. Be there when we want to move earth, manure, stones. Pick our food. But please — please don’t stay.

I see the sun-bronzed, Mayan-nosed men working in the gardens and I think “There’s my grandfather, come to America for the first time.” When Anglos get to talking about these men as if they were Mexican sewer rats flooding through the chain link fence, I think “You would take a knife and slash out everything in me that you don’t think is American enough.”*

The Quaker abolitionist John Woolman thought that slavery degraded owners by making them dependent on a servant class. It weakened their bodies, their minds, and their hearts. (Slaves could run plantations without their owners, Union generals discovered during the civil war, but masters without slaves were nothing.) Has this happened to us here in California? The braceros do seem to do many jobs that white people will not do. They often hold down two or three full or nearly full time positions. By keeping them as noncitizen sets of arms, I think, we have effectively built a system of slavery, an exposed underground where human beings become illegal and thus never able to sit on the decks that they have helped build or walk trails overlooking the sea without fear of being captured by the INS. We deny them what they build for us.

Who built the pyramids? one of Stud Terkel’s subjects in Working asks. To my fellow Californians, when you sit down to dinner in a fancy chain restaurant, ask who cooked your meal? Who washed the dishes? When you go home to your gated residential community, ask who planted the trees and the grass? Who mowed the lawn? Who swept the walks? When you go out hiking, ask Who made the Valido Trail?

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* I’ve been told that because I have recent immigrants in my background that I don’t have as deep an appreciation of American institutions as I should — as if such an appreciation were something that you picked up by some kind of Lamarckian inheritance — ancestors who stretched and stretched their necks until they were democratic and then gave the trait to their children. The context in which I was told that I didn’t understand, incidentally, was the matter of slavery. Because I had immigrant ancestors, I just didn’t get the necessity of slavery in the American system.