4-24-05 The Mexican's Hands

My former neighbors, Robert and Mary, habitually called me over to their apartment to look at computer problems. Having spent the majority of my days staring at computer screens either at work or home, I was a moderately well qualified resource for minor problems, and could usually offer practical advice.
Before he moved out, Robert promised me a repayment. Knowing of my fondness for multi-cultural experiences, he told me "We'll have you over to my parent's house, and have my mom cook her tacos."
"You'll love it" he said. "They're real Mexicans."
Months later, my wife informed me the night had been set. We were directed to a single story house in the city of Orange.
My wife, daughter, and I arrived at the appointed time, and met Robert's parents. They were introduced to us a "Larry" and "Mary", no doubt Americanized versions of their names.
Larry was a portrait of hospitality. We were complete strangers in his house. He didn't mind. He invited us in to sit in their living room. Larry asked my name, and shook my hand with large square hand. I could feel the callouses of a lifetime labor. But, his grip was soft and friendly.He had trouble remembering my name, and asked me three times until he could say it.
Our daughter ran off to play with Robert's children. My wife, Jenn, expressed concern for her getting into things.
"Will she be OK running around?" Jenn asked.
"Oh." Mary told us. "She's not the only little child who runs around here. How many grandchildren do you have now, papa?"
"Twenty one." he answered, in his slow and calm voice.
Larry and his wife, Mary, had been in the house in Orange, CA for over fifty years, having purchased it as a new home in the early 1950s. He told me that when they bought the house Disneyland was under construction and there were only a handful of small housing developments in the area of Anaheim and Orange. "This whole area", he said motioning with his slow and steady big right hand, "was all orange groves. I used to walk over the way to get oranges."
Bits of Larry's story came out over the course of the evening. He had migrated to the US as a young man from Mexico, probably during or just after the Second World War. He spoke of working for a time in a tuna packing house in San Diego on the harbor. "He was the can man" Robert joked. Larry said he was responsible for making sure that the girls who packed tuna had cans. He did a job for the union, as a construction worker in Oceanside. "In those days, when the job was done, you had to find more work." His did a stint operating a tractor in LA county. "They said that they had work for me and a house." "No down payment" he told me. "It was $11,000, and now it's worth $600,000." He was one of the first home owners in the newly developed area. He drove the tractor for four years, then quit. "It jars your body so badly" he said. By then, he was married. Larry was invited to join a construction union. Larry had worked union construction for the next 25 years. He listed jobs that he worked on: Camp Pendleton, UC Irvine, and a handful of buildings and developments that I hadn't heard of. He retired in the late 1980s, probably with a union pension.
But, as his family chided, Larry was an unstoppable worker, even in retirement. "I've done all the work on this house." he told me, as he gave me a tour of the place, pointing out with squared tough fingers all the pieces of work that he had done. A backyard sunning patio was enclosed, roofed, with two windows and a ceiling. "Acoustic tiles." he said proudly, pointing a cupped hand at the ceiling. He explained how he had improvised the installation, lacking the traditional hangers that would hold such tiles in an industrial building. Most recently, he had built a self standing "tool shed" in the backyard. Robert told us how the family expressed concern when Larry took on the task of roofing it by himself. "I was out here one day." Robert told me. "He was up there and I was throwing two by fours up to him!"
Larry's brick and landscape work was impeccable. The whole house was surrounded by immaculate brick and stucco planters and walkways. There were concrete areas in-lain with brick, brick steps and porches, yellow stucco planter walls and fences with brick tops. He had done all the masonry by hand. He told me that the planter walls were concrete block, covered in stucco. The back yard had a patio cover, and a brick built up barbecue with racks for a grate a solid steel grilling surface. "When we have the family here." He told me. "We bring out more tables and chairs, and can cook everything on this: the tortillas, the meat, everything."
Most of the trees bore fruit. There was a peach tree, a pear tree, and an avocado tree. He pointed to the tiny avocado buds forming. In a month, he told me, the tree would produce several hundred avocado. "I have some friends in Mexico, and I take them boxes of avocados, or I give them away around here." He explained how the avocado plant didn't need watering, explaining the process with slow deliberate hand gestures. "You just dig a dyke around it, and rake all the fallen leaves into it. Then when it rains, the leaves become the fertilizer for the tree in the next season." In the planter with the avocado tree were a string of tomato plants. "I stopped growing the peppers" he told me. "Every kid that we've ever had here plays with the peppers and gets burned in the eyes." He laughed. He told a few stories about children, running into the house after having played with the peppers and touched their eyes. As we walked towards the back porch of the house, he pointed excitedly to a potted cactus plant, gently touching a small flower. "Bet you never seen one of those." He said. The cactus had bloomed a flower: a small but thick, perfectly shaped, five pointed star. "They stink really bad, too."
When dinner was served, Larry's wife never sat. She stood at the stove, moving tortilla after tortilla over into a lightly greased pan. She had a routine that had been practiced for years. She placed a tortilla into the pan, flipped it, added meat, folded it, flipped it one more time, and placed it on a plate. Every motion was timed perfectly, a timing that only comes with practice. She wouldn't eat until everyone was finished. Even then, she never sat down.
At the table, Larry instructed us on how to create the tacos: add lettuce, some cheese, and salsa. The salsa was homemade red salsa, medium spicy. In a separate container there was green salsa, a bit hotter. "My son made that batch." Larry told us. "He makes it here and brings it to the workers in San Diego." The tacos were large with crisp shells. Robert told us that his mother had been making tacos the same way since he was a boy. The men at the table kept count of how many they ate, almost as a competition. I tried to stop after three, but Larry nodded towards the taco plate, urging me into my fourth and fifth.
After dinner, we sat on the front porch and watched Robert's daughters play with ours in the slowly setting sun. A baseball game had begun at Angles stadium several blocks away, a structure fifteen years younger than the house we were in.
In the city of Orange, by the end of the decade this house was built, there were 8,500 housing units. Over the next twenty years, the number more than tripled. By 1980, there were 30,700. Today, the area is practically developed to maximum capacity. There are 41,800 living units, 40% of which are rented. The demand for housing has pushed the average price of single family homes up over a half million dollars. Based on a ten percent down payment, and a mortgage which is less than 35% of family gross income, only about 30% of the area households could afford to make such a purchase.
Larry's life seems impossible in the modern economic era. Thirty years of free market deregulation, breaking of unions, consistent devaluation of minimum wages, and the rise of the low wage unskilled worker have made the prosperity of laborers a fading segment of the population, soon to be but a memory. Today's labor contractors hire at the lowest possible levels of wages and benefits to increase labor dollar efficiencies and compete with global market economies. Only public sector construction religiously utilizes union labor for a majority of trades.
When Jennifer and I left, I got the feeling that I had seen a glimpse into something very different from that which I have known in my life. I had been raised to go to college, and taught that success came from education, capital investment, smart savings, and entrepreneurship. Larry was a man with a different understanding of American opportunity. Aided by a very different time, and a largely regulated economy with an emphasis on fairness and the value of labor, Larry had prospered. He had come to the country with nothing, learned English by immersion, and taken advantage of union jobs and opportunities for workers. His life and his family were built not with capital investment and entrepreneurship, but with his big strong and gentle hands.

-Travis 4/27/05

-------------------------------------------
Notes:
While there's only really one paragraph of hard data here, I'll go ahead and give you my sources.
1. For demographic information on the city of Orange, I used the census data from 2000, compiled here. This is a very good website, that I use a lot.
2. Disneyland was started in 1955, and Angel stadium was completed in 1966. For another article I did on these, see this blog.
3. My housing price information is based on the ongoing coverage of home prices in the Orange County Register See, "Cheaper loans little relief - O.C. mortgage rates dip from a week ago, but home prices continue to rise amid low supply." Orange County Register, The (Santa Ana, CA) April 22, 2005 Author: HANG NGUYEN. Unfortunately, the register wants you to pay to see the articles on their website. But, if you have a library card, you should be able to use this engine. Ask your public library for access. It rocks.
4. My numbers for the mortgage calculation in the last line of the third to last paragraph are as follows: Let's say you are going to buy a house for $500,000. You drop $50,000 as a down payment (good for you for saving that up), and wind up with a mortgage payment of $450,000. At today's 5.53% interest rate (which I'm sure you qualify for), your payment would be $2563.63 according to these guys. So, working backwards, for that to be 35% of your gross, you would need an annual gross family income of $87,895. Based on the population data (see note # 1), 63% of the households in Orange, CA make less than $75,000 and 78% make less than $100,000. So, I'm guessing that, conservatively, 70% of the people make less than $88,000, leaving 30% that could afford this "average" house.
5. In the second to last paragraph, I mention some general trends of the last 30 years, which are more difficult to back up in quick sources. But there's a whole ton of reading that can be done on things like union membership, minimum wage, overall decline in wages , and of course, immigrant workers.