PERSPECTIVE ON THE AMERICAN DREAM : Reality Is Nightmare for Migrants : Breaking the promise to migrant workers that everything is possible is an invitation to class violence.

The debate will rage for a very long time on who did exactly what during the Los Angeles riots. Despite these disturbances being the first of this sort to be subjected to live, store-by-store, fire-by-fire coverage, we may never really know. But behind the sometimes irritating and often simply falsely euphemistic and all-encompassing terms of Hispani c or Latino , lies a fact that many south of the Rio Grande would have preferred not to discover. A good share of the looting--not of the arson or violence inflicted on people as opposed to property--was carried out by nationals of Mexico and El Salvador, and to a lesser extent, of other Latin American countries.

It is worth repeating: Over the past 10 years, since war and economic crisis broke out in Central America and Mexico, respectively, migratory flows have increased exponentially. In recent times, new nuclei of Mexican and Peruvian migrants have sprung up in cities that had been well off the migratory beaten path. Large contingents of day workers now gather in the traditional havens, waiting beneath tunnels and along freeways for a meager wage. Peasants, urban youths, women and children dot the landscape of neighborhoods where, until recently, poorer whites, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans used to live.

From the universe of the new Latin migrants--depressed by their encounter with an American reality different from the one they imagined--came those who participated in the looting. Obviously most Latinos did not loot, but those who did were not just a small fraction. And although their motivations are multiple, an ideological reason stands out. For these workers just off the bus, the yawning gaps in income, wealth and opportunity that they perceive in the United States are nothing new. They come from countries whose injustice compares quite nicely, thank you, with the new American inequality: Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru. Daily contact with opulence and outrageous conspicuous consumption is commonplace: Indeed, many of them fled from the lacerating inequities that have plagued their own countries since time immemorial, and today more than ever. Mexico’s just-published census figures for 1990 show that more than 80% of the income-earning population (a minority to begin with) makes less than $300 per month, and only 3.2% of those older than 12 receive more than $500 per month.

But the ancestral injustice of their societies was always accompanied by an ideological message that made it tolerable: resignation and fatalism, the notion of the permanence of things and the need to accept the fate that was handed to every individual at birth.

In Mexico and in El Salvador, with the exception of the role played by the church in the latter country a few years ago, poverty and inequality did not outrage its victims, nor did it lead them to violence. There has been only one “Caracazo” (the name given to the February, 1990, riots in Caracas) in more than 10 years of crisis and half a decade of free-market shocks. The ideology of the lasting immutability of things has its effects.

But the same deprivation, with the same inequities, in a radically different context, produces different effects. Poverty and injustice were not supposed to be the same: The United States was the land of social mobility, well-paid work and unlimited opportunities. Not any more. A Latin-American migrant’s future is often the same as his current reality: $4.50 an hour for unskilled labor for the rest of his or her life, maybe with a raise to $6 or $7 an hour, eventually.

But the young Mexicans or Salvadorans who do housework in Beverly Hills, gardens in Bel-Air or park Jags and BMWs for restaurants on Melrose had no idea this is what awaited them when they left Usulutan or Guanajuato. And the ideological bombardment they are now subjected to no longer helps them accept matters as they are. On the contrary; it incites rejection, indignation and class hatred. Any spark can light the fire.

The American Dream only works in the United States, but the United States can’t work without it. Telling the migrant just over the border that everything is possible and it only depends on his own abilities, that there are no unmovable class or racial boundaries, and then breaking that promise, is an invitation to class violence. The American discourse doesn’t mix with acute poverty and inequality: The poor lose their bearings when they are suddenly (and falsely) told that their destiny lies in not remaining poor forever.

Maybe that’s why the Mexicans in Los Angeles did what their compatriots back home have not done. Perhaps this explains why Salvadorans up north behaved differently than in their own country, except when a force like the church or a myth like the revolution fires them up against resignation. Otherwise, by importing a labor force without the ideology that makes it work in its country of origin, and exploiting it without the social mobility that legitimizes its own ideology, the United States is asking for trouble. This is the contradictory conclusion of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s trials and tribulations in the barrios and tenements of God’s country.