Mexican nanny. Get ready.” There was a brief scramble, a hooking up of microphones, a positioning of cables and cameras, and when it had settled, the mayor began:
“Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the arrest, and now the prosecution, of Araceli Ramirez. It’s a case that has a lot of people concerned. And while it isn’t appropriate for me to comment on the facts of an ongoing criminal case, I’d like to make just one observation. One of the beautiful things about this country is that everyone, no matter if rich or poor, immigrant or citizen, is entitled to a fair trial. To be judged on the facts, and not on passions or prejudice. I’m concerned about the passions surrounding this case. I think everyone needs to take a step back, and allow the facts, and only the facts, to determine the outcome. We grant our prosecutors a lot of power to protect us—and that’s good. But we also trust them to use their power with discretion. I am confident that that will be the case here.”
Two hours later, Ian Goller sent a transcript of this statement via BlackBerry to his boss, who was traveling in Bakersfield that afternoon. The district attorney of Orange County sent back a one-word answer: “Surprising.” Goller’s feelings were stronger. It’s outrageous. This isn’t even in his jurisdiction. The assistant district attorney felt a few pangs of wounded local pride, until he stepped back to think about what would lead such an ambitious and savvy politico to comment on The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez. Clearly, the mayor believed that Los Angeles and the Laguna Rancho Estates rested atop the same shifting tectonic plates, and he spoke cautiously to keep his footing as the ground beneath him rumbled. Goller’s own Republican boss might soon feel the same political tremors and decide that pursuing a weak Ramirez case wasn’t worth the risk. In “serious” California political circles both the right and left feared ethnic earthquakes, which was one reason why the immigration problem lingered and deepened.
The longer Araceli Ramirez stuck around Orange County’s courtrooms and jail cells, Goller concluded, the bigger the political problems she presented. The mayor of Los Angeles had spoken, ostensibly, to temper a rush toward final judgment. But his brief remarks only strengthened Goller’s resolve to shuffle her off U.S. soil and on her way to Mexico as soon as possible.
22
Araceli’s back ached because she spent much of the waking day turning and twisting on a thin mattress, feeling it slide back and forth over the steel sheet her jailers called a bed frame. She waited for night to fall and day to come back again. When the thin rectangle of her cell window briefly glowed orange in the morning, she could imagine she was somewhere else. Back in colonia San Cosme in Mexico City, where her last chilango boyfriend lived, the sun warming their faces, rows of fault-shaken buildings leaning over the sidewalks; or on the subway train when it climbed up out of the ground and ran in the open air, the passengers squinting in the sudden pulses of light. What a mistake it had been to leave Mexico City. Her step north had brought her to a cell in Santa Ana, to become familiar with the angles in the walls, the sounds of the corridors, among inmates hypnotized by the collective need to sleep. The ritual dispensing of pills caused a powerful drift of inmate will toward the recreation room at the end of the corridor, where a television set filled the jail with a perpetual stream of canned laughter and commercial jingles and their tin echoes. Her fellow inmates stayed in this neutral, half-conscious state even at three in the afternoon, when the natural sun was bearing down on people in the world. They were all in a kind of frozen storage, these women in their blue jumpsuits, sitting on their beds, some with charcoal blankets thrown over them, a hundred grungy little dolls in their cells stacked up like toy blocks, reminding her of a Diego Rivera piece from his red-star Marxist didactic days, a painting depicting bodies filling a bank vault. Frozen Assets.
On his first day back at work, Scott was chased away from his office by too many “Are you okays?” and too many hugs, and by not getting a single IM from Charlotte, who turned her head away with a snap when he caught her studying him through the glass. At home