The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,155
thing.” They were united, Janet Bryson and the woman with the dog, by their sympathy for Maureen Thompson and their contempt for illegal immigrants and lawbreakers of all stripes, but when she drove away Janet Bryson could only think about how lonely the woman seemed, and how unnatural it was to carry a dog that way. Next she drove her son’s Toyota C elica northward into the suburbs of central Orange County—her own Chevy Caprice having again failed to start this morning—and wondered about the meaning of the pink dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Was that a gang thing? This worrying possibility stayed with her as she advanced along Main Streets and First Streets lined with the rusting steel and broken glass tubes of the neon signs of their heyday. Once people drove their rumbling Ramblers and El Caminos down and across these overlapping grids, along Beach Boulevard and Katella Avenue, the thoroughfares that carried people of her father’s generation past malt shops and burger joints, to the tower marquees announcing double features at drive-in theaters. The drive-ins were all Swap Meets now frequented by the illegals and the Vietnamese. She remembered sitting in the backseat of her father’s Ford Falcon, unbuckled and unworried, behind his parted and moist hair, and feeling her bare legs sticking to the vinyl seats. Janet Bryson knew she could never make those old days come back. Instead, in this work of letter-gathering, this volunteer activism, she felt like a woman weather-stripping her windows and basement in September: it was something she did not so much with the hope of making things better, as much as to keep them from getting worse.
The letters Janet Bryson carried were filled with warnings of the impending criminal and budgetary doom wrought by the legions of illegal crossers; she was retrieving these missives personally for afternoon delivery to the Orange County Board of Supervisors. The One California group had emailed and faxed its members talking points to be included in the letters, and a separate list of individual crimes and crime-types attributable to illegals, including: the “epidemic” of identity theft; the murder of a sixteen-year-old boy outside a beach park the previous August by members of a Los Angeles street gang; a sudden spike in DUIs in Anaheim; and the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl in Fullerton. Each writer chose from this felonious buffet and plopped phrases into one of five different form letters written by One California. They wrote in the creaky cursive of a septuagenarian, or squeezed five hundred words of all capitals onto a single page of notebook paper, or typed on old IBMs and Olivettis. The writers had been encouraged to fill their letters with their own observations about the larger problems of illegal immigration, and at red lights Janet stopped to peruse these sections.
Araceli N. Ramirez should be arrested and deported no matter what the outcome of the criminal proceedings the County undertakes against her. Illegal Mexican labor lowers wages while demanding entitlements. Examples: Title One schools, WIC, Medical Care, Bilingual education. Not to mention they breed like there’s no tomorrow, regardless of whether they can support their children because they know the state will subsidize them.
The Latino movement backing this woman is AGGRESSIVE. The pressure and the outright numbers of people moving into this country, the outright force of the Spanish language is a clear statement of revolution. I am shocked by this Latino movement which is now supporting this woman despite her obvious crimes against two innocent American children.
To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants like Araceli N. Ramirez contribute to their society because they like their housekeeper and their gardener, and because they like paying less for tomatoes, spend some time looking at the real California around us. Look at our full prisons, our higher insurance rates, our lowering education standards, the new diseases spreading in our cities. For me, I’ll pay more for my tomatoes.
Janet Bryson’s journey took her next to a Garden Grove apartment block the color of overripe avocado flesh, where a too-thin woman of about forty with bony, sunburned shoulders handed her a letter through a security gate and said, “Don’t go yet, hon. Want some iced tea?” Janet climbed up briefly to the woman’s apartment and living room and sipped and listened to the woman describe “the unraveling of my life.” Her husband had succumbed to liver problems three years earlier, “and my mom died a year ago