Racism, Inequality, and Social Change Theme Analysis

When she crosses over into the United States, Makina immediately recognizes a profound contradiction in the status of Mexican immigrants: they are essential to the functioning of United States society, yet treated as unwanted intruders. People who leave Mexico for the United States are signing up to join the bottom echelons of society, to suffer racism and work in exploitative conditions that guarantee them few economic rights. By portraying the discrimination and arduous conditions that immigrants face, Herrera suggests that the United States’ fundamental values—independence, freedom, and equality—are often not awarded to the very groups who need them the most. However, by coming to understand these conditions and learn from social movements that have improved the status of other groups in the United States, Makina learns to see that Mexicans’ oppression in the United States is changeable and worth fighting against.

Makina sees people like her everywhere in the United States, but quickly realizes that Mexican immigrants are doing the worst jobs in society and treated as invisible non-entities by white people. Most of the Mexican people Makina meets north of the border work as low-paid physical laborers, such as the boy who harasses her on the bus and whom she later sees taking the trash out from a restaurant in the early morning. When she first arrives, she learns to recognize “her compatriots,” the people who work outdoors, in the city’s public space, but are “just there to take orders.” Although low-paid Mexican laborers are the most visible workers in the United States, they are invisible and powerless in a political sense. The most powerful story is Makina’s brother’s: a white family recruits him to join the Army in place of their terrified son, who signed up on a rebellious whim. This is both an egregious example of the way Mexican immigrants are often forced to take on undesirable positions laboring to support the white people who refuse to take them. Makina points out Mexican immigrants’ position as an underclass in the letter she gives the “patriotic” policeman, describing them facetiously as “We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours.” Makina’s description both references the actual economic desperation that drives people to migrate and highlights many white Americans’ racist, contradictory, and profoundly distorted picture of Mexicans.

Indeed, the racism Makina experiences brings this contradiction to the fore: it is immediately and powerfully clear to her that white people do not want her (or people who look like her) in the United States. The policeman’s rant about the (mostly homegrown) Mexicans he forces to kneel before him reveals his belief that Mexicans exist to “fall in [line] and ask permission [from white people].” He uses his belief in the supremacy of white culture—which he calls “civilized” in contrast to Mexican culture—to justify his violence. Makina goes on to dream about a white man calling her “scum,” which shows how she internalizes a sense of racial injury from watching so many people treat her with suspicion and hostility. After being attacked so frequently, she now expects it, and this internalized sense of inferiority is what converts Mexicans from being an assailed minority (in some situations) into a permanent underclass (who expect to be seen as inferior in all situations). And Makina’s outsider perspective of the United States adds further depth to Herrera’s critical view of the contradiction between the United States’ values and its treatment of Mexican immigrants, showing how it celebrates itself as freer than any other country, yet turns people with minoritized identities into an underclass of laborers who are poor by design.

Yet, as Makina observes how other marginalized groups react to discrimination, she sees that migrants can challenge their status and mistreatment through political resistance. This first happens when she learns about the existence of African Americans—initially, she does not understand who they are or how they live in a nation usually imagined as white, but she soon sees that their status is comparable to Mexicans. Later, she knocks on the door of a house that she hopes is her brother’s, and a black man opens the door. She is confused, and the man is initially offended, before he realizes they both see what is transgressive—and therefore progressive—about his owning a house in a white neighborhood. They laugh it off and Makina realizes that African Americans are “the key to her quest,” which points to the way African American struggles for civil rights serve as an influence, template, and source of solidarity for those of other groups like Latinx immigrants. Makina also sees possibilities for change when she encounters a large crowd of same-gender couples waving rainbow flags outside a government building (a clear reference to same-sex marriage). Makina grows conflicted: she is “dazzled by the beauty” of this public spectacle of pride but cannot understand why queer people imitate the straight people who oppress them—just like Mexican immigrants want to live the same lives as the middle-class white people who exploit, underpay, and insult them. By conforming to a certain extent, she realizes, immigrants and other oppressed groups can subtly gain greater social standing within an oppressive society, but they must not lose sight of their own political goals in the process.

Herrera ultimately shows how discrimination is embedded in the everyday politics of race in the United States: Latinx people, like those of many other backgrounds, are deemed eternal outsiders and thought of as unable to be gainfully assimilated into the United States. Especially when they lack documentation, Mexican immigrants are treated as unredeemable and disposable by the same people whose comfortable lives largely depend on Mexican immigrant labor. And yet Makina also clearly sees paths forward toward equality, both through solidarity with other movements and through her efforts to help narrate the experiences of Mexican immigrants to the white American citizens who discount them.